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canadian-riddler · 7 years

Text

Like Father Like Son

by Indiana

Characters: Edward Nygma, Alan

Synopsis: A return to Quebec dredges up a lot of things Edward spent so many years trying to forget.

Note: For those of you just joining us, Edward is Canadian across my fics. His father is Quebecois and his mother is Acadienne from New Brunswick and they met while attending the University of Toronto. Edward was only spoken to in French at home, but cannot speak Cajun French because after his mother left his father made sure to overwrite those habits with Quebecois French.

AO3 en français

He hated having to come back here.

He hadn't been to Quebec since he was a boy. Some excursion his father used to drag him along for. When he had made the discovery one of his best informants was based in Trois-Rivières, he had considered ending their relationship then and there, despite the man's extreme usefulness. But he couldn't. As much as he despised it, removing that part of his network would be a mistake he would find difficulty recouping from.

Edward had received word of a very important package that had been acquired for him, which the informant insisted he retrieve personally, and though he had initially decided against going he had changed his mind. It was his accursed need to know rearing its demanding head again. And so he had made the arrangements to get himself back to Canada for the first time in twenty years. It had been a lot harder to get back than it had been to leave in the first place. He'd kept all his citizenship documentation up to date, but his... notoriety required a false identity regardless.

So here she was. La belle province. It was nice, he admitted to himself rather grudgingly. He didn't want to like it here, but as something of an architect himself he could appreciate the old-world flavour of the city. That was about all, however. He could still speak French like a native, of course, but while grinding his teeth between sentences. Of all the places in a country this size his man had to be...

The location of his informant was a relatively distinguished nightclub. This was nothing new to him. A great deal of his persons worked in such places. Many a shady deal had been cemented in a smoky VIP room. What was a little unusual was the man leaning against the storefront outside, ostensibly using an electronic cigarette. In the minute or so it had taken Edward to close the space between them he had seen no sign of it being used.

"Good afternoon," he said when he had reached the other. "I wonder if I might speak to the owner. He's expecting me."

The man looked over at him, and his eyes widened in surprise as he dropped his cigarette. "I'm sorry," he said, bending over to retrieve it. "You look familiar."

Damn. If he recognised Edward, Edward was going to have to find a way to kill him. It could not be known he had come here. If it got back to the GCPD that he had international dealings, he would be placed under a great deal more scrutiny than even he would be able to duck out from underneath. "I don't believe we've met," Edward told him politely, sliding his hands into his pockets. There was a toonie in the left one, change from the taxi he had taken from the airport. His thumb sought out the grooves. "Is the owner here?"

The man snapped his fingers, shoving the e-cigarette into his back pocket. "I do remember you! Nashton, isn't it?"

Oh dear God.

Edward held his politely oblique expression with more effort than before. "Excuse me?"

"Yeah! You used to work down there." He waved an arm at a bar down the street that had seen its heyday quite a while ago, by the looks of its facade. "Biggest barkeep they ever had. Place took a dive after they fired you. Sure, you punched a guy out. But he probably deserved it." The man gestured with his head towards the door of the club. "Trust me. I know what you went through."

There was something hot seething in Edward's chest and it took conscious effort to stay outwardly calm. This was the worst possible thing that could have happened. Not only had he been mistaken for his father, but it confirmed that he had not ducked the arm of genetics after all. He had spent these past decades doing his best to distort the memory of his father's face, to convince himself his father's eyes were a different shade of blue and he didn't have that man's damned French nose. But here the reality was, a blow to the face every bit as harsh as the ones he was once physically dealt. He more than vaguely resembled his father. He in fact passed for him completely.

He swallowed around the constriction in his throat. "I'm afraid you have me mistaken for someone else."

"No," the man said incredulously. "Edwin Nashton! It has to be you."

"I am not Edwin and I have no connection to him," Edward told him, his tone too harsh. He bit his tongue momentarily. God, he had never wanted to hear that name again. "I have a meeting with your boss and you are impeding me, not to mention wasting my time."

"Oh." The man was toying with the cigarette, confusing creasing his face. "I'm sorry. If I didn't know better..."

He walked over to the door and pulled it open, but Edward was frozen to the ground despite it being one of the six months out of the year no such thing was possible. "If you didn't know better what," Edward said.

The man shrugged. "I'd say you were the spitting image. But he didn't have any kids. Said after his bitch left, he had nobody."

He didn't know why it was so hard to breathe all of a sudden. It wasn't as though he actually cared. "No children at all?"

The man shook his head. "What was your name again?"

It's me! He wanted to scream at the damned fool. Edward Nygma! The Riddler! The Prince of Puzzlers! The Curator of Conundrums! How did he not know? How could he not see it?

Because this man looked at him and saw his father. Just as Edward would be doing for weeks onward because this encounter was already solidly encased in the forefront of his brain. He should never have come here, nor would he ever again. Yet another thing his father had destroyed long before Edward had ever had a chance to touch it.

"Wynne," was what he said. "Arthur Wynne."

He didn't open the envelope he had received from the owner of the club until he had been on the plane back to Gotham for an hour or so. He had a bad feeling about it. There was nothing about this trip that was going to go well. That was already quite obvious.

It was a clasp envelope in an unassuming orange-brown, and he slowly pinched the ends of the clasp together and lifted the flap. His hand met plastic, and withdrew from the envelope a collection of photographs contained in album sheets. There were two to each side of the pages. The first two photos were of a young woman with flowing auburn curls. He frowned. He had no idea who this was. This was what he'd gone all the way to Quebec for? Photographs of some woman for whom he had a face but no name? What was he supposed to do with them? Was she supposed to be important? He turned the page over, more out of exasperation than because he had any desire to see what was on the other side. More pictures of this woman, at some institution or other. Her with someone who looked vaguely like her; a sister, probably. Her again in a hospital with a baby. He sighed in annoyance. What a waste of his time. He didn't know who this was and had no real way of finding out. The only thing he could think of was that the owner of the club wanted him to find information on her - a bad relationship he wanted vengeance for, in all likelihood - but he hadn't given Edward anything else to move forward with. Edward was extremely good at these kinds of things, of course, but even he would have difficulty trying to locate someone based on their facial features alone.

There were a final two photographs on the back page, and he was loathe to admit it to himself but seeing them caused his breath to catch in the back of his throat. He knew who that man was. Knew far too well, though here he was a great deal slimmer and much more... content.

Edward could remember every day of his life, every minute of his life, from sometime after he had turned eight years old. Very few people believed him when he told them this, but they weren't the ones who found themselves unintentionally comparing all the lunch periods he'd had in grade eight, or pinpointing the exact parts of his life he'd realised he'd gone up a pant size, or agonising over all the days he'd left the house with his hair uncombed. The people who did believe him were very jealous, for some reason. They seemed to think he only remembered the things he wanted to, but just as any other person that was not so. The bad memories came to light far more often, and the ones he was going through just then were all bad indeed.

His father was in the first photograph, underneath an engraved sign indicating the location as the University of Toronto, his arm around the woman's waist. He was also with her in the second, which was the prerequisite photo of the tourist alongside the only Canadian landmark worth mentioning. In both of those photos they looked quite happy with their places in life. These two photographs were the only proof Edward's father had ever smiled. Edward had never seen him do such a thing, and quite honestly he could have gone without knowing he ever had. The pictures presented a window into a world where Edward did not exist and all parties were more than happy about it.

Wait. 'All parties'? Why had that come to mind? He turned back through the previous pages and found himself stopping on the one with...

He looked to his left but found nothing particularly distracting. He had the row to himself - expensive but necessary, considering the risk of being recognised by anyone who had the opportunity to stare at him for several hours - and without leaning forward all he could see of the man on the other side of the row was a pair of crossed legs. He did, however, realise his mouth had gone dry and set himself to retrieving a water bottle from his valise. He tried not to think about why that had happened, or why he was suddenly very aware that it seemed difficult to breathe all of a sudden, or why his stomach seemed to have turned to dry ice, but as always he did.

He was the baby in the photograph.

The woman was not a random stranger he was supposed to track down. She was not a nobody, or the unsuspecting subject of a photoseries. She was his mother.

He regretted not asking after the circumstances under which the envelope had been obtained. He had been so preoccupied with getting out of the province he had barely accepted it at all. The informant had come across these photos - from a discarded album, perhaps - and had either recognised his father or had believed it was Edward himself in those last two pictures. It could have been, he bitterly acknowledged with a violent twist of the lid on the water bottle. It could have been. He stuffed the album pages into the valise and closed it. He could do without ever seeing them again, and he would dispose of them as soon as possible. He didn't know why his informant had seen fit to pass them along, but he was going to do his best to forget he'd ever had them. He looked at his watch and then out the window. As soon as he got back to Gotham, he would do it.

He'd had that thought in his mind for the hours it had taken to return to the United States and deplane and all the way back to the Orphanage, but he hadn't done it. In fact, here he was, with the photographs laid out neatly on his desk in front of him. He had already memorised them but was sitting back in his chair anyway, arms folded and eyes fixed on those two people at the University. No, they weren't just those two people. They were his parents.

Something about that thought didn't feel right. It most likely had to do with the overall lack of parenting they'd ever done. His gaze drifted to the picture with... himself in it. He knew that was who the baby was, and yet he could not quite reconcile it as such. The more he looked at it, the more he wondered just why the photograph existed in the first place. He had been well aware for many years now that he had been unwanted, the result of a regretful night of irresponsibility. His father had never made a secret of that. So who had taken this picture? Had his mother asked someone to? Had she been... happy to have him, originally? She didn't look particularly pleased, but he didn't know how arduous the labour had been. Had her nurse insisted? He could imagine one doing so.

Oh, it didn't matter. None of these mattered. This was a life they had closed the door on when they had conceived him, the consequence of their actions, and he needed to know no more than he already did. Only bitterness could be found in the history of his parents. In a life he had not been allowed to have.

I didn't know you came back, Alan said, and he had to catch himself before he jumped out of surprise. For a robot, Alan was incredibly quiet.

"Only a brief time ago," he told him, putting hands on the desk to gather the photographs, but Alan put a hand on his arm and looked at them.

Who are they?

"Nobody," Edward answered, piling the ones on his left since Alan did not have possession of that hand. "They're nobody."

That man looks like you, almost.

"Don't you say that!" Edward snapped, snatching his arm back and crushing the offending photos into his fist. Alan took a step back, folding his hands in front of him pensively.

Is that your dad?

"Yes, it is my father," he ground out, pushing the photographs into the back of a desk drawer. He would deal with them later. Damn. There was nowhere pleasant this conversation could possibly go.

Who's the woman?

"My mother."

What's a mother?

He leaned back in the chair. He was exhausted all of a sudden. Planes were the only place he'd found sleep to be impossible. "A female parent."

You don't like your mother either?

He took off his glasses. He should have known Alan would come upon him and start asking questions. "I never knew her. She left my father when I was young and I have no memory of her."

Well, not having a mother isn't so bad. I didn't even know I was supposed to have one.

He directed what must have been a quite displeased look at Alan, because he almost put his hands up. I meant... there's no need to wish you had one.

"I don't." He really did not at all feel like explaining parents and parenting to Alan right now. "There are things I'm better off not knowing." He stood up with full intentions of walking off and leaving Alan hanging, pushing the chair back and moving away from him.

Like why she left?

He bit his tongue hard before he said something he really would regret. Rage had tightened his throat and hands and it took him a good thirty seconds before he thought he could speak without snapping too much. "Yes."

It doesn't matter at all, Alan said, and that surprised him enough that he turned around.

"Why would you say that?"

Alan shrugged. I don't think she deserved you anyway.

Edward was taken aback. This was not the sort of talk he usually heard out of Alan. "Is... that so."

She didn't take you with her, Alan said. She didn't want to be your mother anymore so she doesn't deserve to be.

Edward picked up his glasses, partially as a distraction and partially because he didn't know where he was going after this conversation, but he would probably need them. "As far as I'm concerned, I have neither mother nor father. I just came into those photographs quite by mistake, I assure you." And he started leaving the room then, except Alan of course began to follow him. He badly needed a cigarette but he liked smoking in front of Alan less and less, not because of anything in particular Alan did. It was solely that he knew his son did not like it, and even though he knew Alan was not judging him for it he still felt as though he was.

He did end up sitting outside and lighting one, and it did a lot towards improving his mood. He knew full well that quitting altogether would also help all the time, not only when he was stressed, but that could wait a little longer.

Do you like being a dad?

Edward considered the cigarette. Alan was kneeling on his left, as usual, so he didn't want to look in that direction. "Hm?"

You said you wanted to be one, but do you like it?

He sighed, which unfortunately led to a lot more coughing than he would have preferred while Alan was around. After his breathing had settled he said, "Sometimes."

Sometimes?

He hoped this didn't lead too far into things he didn't want to talk about right now. Or ever, really. "Being a parent is... difficult."

That doesn't excuse what he did to you.

He'd heard that before, but never from someone whose opinion he valued. He didn't feel particularly validated, more... ashamed, almost. If his father had no excuse, then what did it mean that Edward had been leaning on those actions his entire life? If one was null, so then was the other.

Edward did look at him now, but Alan's posture held nothing and his tone had been matter-of-fact. It was times like these Edward wished he was more reactive. What was Alan expecting him to say to that? Alan didn't even know what had actually happened. He'd been given vague hints, nothing more. "It doesn't excuse anything I do, either," he found himself saying. It felt wrong to do so, given that he did indeed use it as a crutch when the opportunity arose.

How did Alan do it? Before him, this would only have made Edward angry and indignant. But no. No, he couldn't be that right now. He had to suddenly deal with the creeping suspicion that perhaps he had been directing all of his efforts in the name of the wrong people this entire time. Over twenty years of trying to prove himself bigger than the shadow of people who never would have given him a second thought if he did not keep demanding from them things they had already decided never to give. He didn't want to think about this anymore. He threw his cigarette into the yard and stood up.

I think it's okay if you're only a little bit better than your father, Alan said, walking through the door Edward held open for him. It's not a contest, anyway.

Edward closed the door a little too carefully. 'A little bit' wasn't good enough. 'A little bit' was never good enough. He might as well have failed entirely. He turned around and was suddenly struck with some strange sense of... dissociation. As though he didn't know where he was or how he had gotten there, while also being able to remember it in perfect detail. It was like knowing a stranger's life intimately while existing as an intangible entity within it, and for the first time he looked at Alan and thought, My son is a robot.

There wasn't anything inherently wrong with that, but it had never struck him before just how bizarre it was. How... disconnected. He had two hundred robots in his basement and he thought of them as his children.

He had the horrible sinking feeling that his entire life had slipped away from him at a point he could not identify, even now when he was being forced to look at things far more objectively than he'd ever wanted to, and he wanted terribly return to his ignorance. He hated that he'd even contemplated such a thing with a burning passion, but he didn't want to know. He didn't know what or why he'd been doing any of this and he really, really did not want to.

Dad?

Again everything made sense, suddenly, and his moments of confusion seemed to have been imagined. He was going to chalk that up to having been imagined, anyway. "What."

Alan had removed the photographs from the desk drawer and was looking through them. Why did she leave you?

He took a long breath and crossed the distance between them. "I don't know."

Alan faced the photograph of the hospital somewhat in his direction. What is that?

"What is what."

Alan pointed at... Christ. Alan didn't know what babies were? Then again, he didn't particularly need to know such a thing. That.

"That's... me. As a baby. One of the... primary stages of human development."

Alan looked from the photograph to Edward and back again. Are you sure?

He almost laughed. "Yes."

Alan shrugged and put the photographs back in the desk. I know it wasn't good for you, but I like it better that she left.

He folded his arms. "Why is that?"

I know you'll never do anything your parents did.

He found himself frowning a little but this statement had the potential to mean something he did not like. "You thought I was going to leave you behind someday?"

Not exactly, Alan said, and he sat himself on the desktop in exactly the manner Edward himself would have done. I just know there are some things you won't even think of doing, that's all.

So Alan knew Edward would neither leave nor hurt him. He felt as though that meant he'd done something right. Maybe not everything, or most things, but something. "I have time to play a game, if you want," he told Alan. He tilted his head curiously.

Don't you have work to do?

"I said I had time, didn't I?" he said, a little too harshly. Alan's only reaction to this was to climb off the desk.

Just making sure. You were gone for a while.

Edward was about to protest that he'd only been gone for one day when he remembered Alan's sense of time was far more attuned than his. They went up to his room and Alan set up the board while Edward ensured he had no important messages he needed to attend to immediately. He did, but the more he thought about answering them the less he wanted to. He put the phone in the bedside table drawer on top of his pile of handkerchiefs so he wouldn't hear it go off and put his attention to the game. It was not overlong but after that Ada insisted he read to her - he still had not figured out why she wanted him to do that, seeing as she could probably read better and faster than he could - and by then he was so tired he did not have any inclinations to do any work. He just went back down the hallway to his room and sat down on the bed.

He wasn't just tired, period, he was tired of... something. Not knowing what was frustrating. How could he solve a problem he had no knowledge of? Physical fatigue he knew how to put up with extremely well. This other, new kind... it was worse, and he didn't know what to do about it.

Quit, something whispered in his ear. Walk away from all this. You've given all your best years to this and come up short every time. When is enough enough?

When I say it's enough, he answered angrily.

You don't know when to quit. You never have and you never will. One day you're going to go too far and you'll be lucky if you have anything left.

He didn't believe in luck. It was mere superstition and -

You believe in superstition.

Only because I have to!

Are you going to bed, Dad?

At least it served as an interruption. "Yes."

Alan nodded and seemed to have the initial intention of leaving the room, but he hesitated. "Yes?"

Alan pressed his hands together. Where we're going after you finish this... is it nice?

He didn't know where they were going. He didn't know anything beyond the places in this city Edward had sent him. It suddenly struck Edward just how much trust his son must have had in him. He also realised that, though Alan was far more capable than Edward would ever be, that Alan was almost entirely dependent on him. He didn't actually know that much about parenting, it was true, but wasn't he supposed to have prepared Alan to go out on his own by now, if that was what he wanted?

"Yes," he said, remembering suddenly he was having a conversation. "Yes, it's nice." As an afterthought, he added, "But if you wanted to remain here you are free to do so."

Why would I want to do that? Alan asked in confusion. Edward neither knew himself nor particularly wanted him to. He only said evenly,

"You have a choice. That's all."

Alan looked away from him for a moment. Finally he said, I'm unsure whether you're aware or not that I really don't. But even if I did, it wouldn't matter. I'd do the same either way.

Edward bit his tongue. Even when he was actively trying he still didn't manage to succeed. It had momentarily slipped his mind that his son was more intelligent than he himself was. Alan had probably thought this through many, many times. Perhaps even debated with himself over it. This tightened his throat.

If Alan ever left, it meant Edward had well and truly failed. Just as his own father had done.

Dad? Alan asked. Edward raised his head tiredly.

"What."

What's the purpose of a mother?

"A mother does what a father can't," Edward said. He folded his hands together. More to himself he added, "Or won't."

Ah, Alan said. Now I understand why I don't have one. And he left Edward there to process that.

He rubbed his thumbs together. He couldn't deny his pulse had risen a smidge upon hearing that. Alan was intelligent and tactful, but he wasn't a liar. He'd meant that. Edward could accept that as completely heartfelt and genuine. Alan had just said it. Something to temporarily waylay all of his concerns. He was enough. He was good enough. He didn't recall a time he'd ever been able to believe such a concept before. But there it was.

Perhaps he wasn't really doing that badly after all.

#Riddler #Programmer Dad #fanfic from Indy #the English of the fic I posted yesterday #Riddlerbots #it's such a queuetiful queuetiful life

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