Work Text:
The Riddler’s Hot Chocolate Guy
By Indiana
Characters: Edward Nygma, Wilson (OC)
Synopsis: It was both the easiest job and the hardest.
Wilson, for reasons he had been unable to figure out, had somehow been designated the Riddler’s hot chocolate guy.
He had a lot of practise doing it. It was the only way to get his little brother to sleep sometimes. What he didn’t know was how Riddler seemed to know that. Or maybe he didn’t, and Wilson just happened to look like a person who knew how to make hot chocolate from scratch. It didn’t matter that much, really. What did matter was that being Riddler’s hot chocolate guy paid a lot more than being part of his construction crew – which, to be fair, paid pretty well – and it was the easiest money he’d ever made. It was a good gig, all things considered.
Which was why he was so anxious to look at his phone one afternoon and read the message, He wants to see you.
Most of the people who worked for Riddler only saw him once: when they were hired. Wilson, though, saw him about five times a week. His instructions were to make the hot chocolate at the same time every evening, put it on the desk in his office, and then leave. Riddler rarely ever looked at him or even acknowledged his existence; sometimes he wasn’t even there when Wilson came to drop it off. It was common knowledge that he did not care about his employees and definitely did not want to see them, so when someone got a message saying that he did, well, it was more than likely they were about to be fired. And that was the last thing Wilson needed right now.
Wilson lived with his little brother in one of the more rundown parts of town in a small apartment that didn’t contain very much and needed more work than he could afford to put into it. That was his own fault entirely: he’d run up a long string of gambling debts over the course of a year or so and it was all he could do to keep on top of them. So he knew that his best effort at looking presentable was not going to be up to Riddler’s exacting standards. But it was all he could do right now and he was just going to have to hope it was enough.
Riddler’s office was on the upper floors of what Wilson was pretty sure was one of the pricier office buildings in Gotham; he had no idea how a wanted criminal was able to rent, let alone waltz in and out of, such a place, but he did know there were different rules for men like him and did his best not to think about it too much. He was right now, though, after being let into the building by the snooty concierge who, as usual, had looked at his worn-out dress pants and rumpled jacket up and down disapprovingly and directed him towards the elevator. Riddler was super smart, wealthy, and attractive. Wilson had no doubts at all that he’d been born into a life of luxury and had turned to supervillainy for some stupid reason like his father refusing to buy him his third yacht. He couldn’t think of any other explanation for why a man who could have had anything he wanted chose the life he had. He hated having to work for him, but in a weird twist of irony it was a lot safer than bagging groceries at the local supermarket. Riddler’s construction projects never got held up or used to stage some sort of outrageous scheme. Everyone found him so crazy they left him alone, so annoying they couldn’t stand to be near him, or so profitable that they looked the other way. It was a strange sort of power to think about and even more difficult to understand.
Riddler’s office, strangely enough, was not as eccentric as he’d thought it was going to be the first time he’d come here. There was of course the expected shades of green and smattering of question-mark-shaped… things… but for the most part it just looked like the kind of office you would see on TV, aside from the drafting table. Wilson had seen him there a few times, but today he was sitting behind his desk in his very expensive looking green leather chair. Wilson couldn’t see what he was doing because he was sitting at the half that had three monitors, the one on his right mounted vertically, but once he’d stopped in front of the desk Riddler glanced over at him and moved the chair over so he could look at him directly. Wilson had hated that during his original interview and he hated it right now. There was something wrong with his eyes. Not physically. Physically they were perfect, just like everything else about him. But they saw things they weren’t supposed to see. They told Riddler things about people they didn’t even know. Their being contained behind glasses made with rectangular purple frames did not dull them even a little bit.
“Wilson,” Riddler said without preamble. “You have a acquired a new job.”
“Yes, sir,” said Wilson, hands worrying the insides of his pockets. “I thought you – “
“I don’t care about the job,” said Riddler, leaning back in his chair. “I care about the unacceptable lapse in your performance.”
He swallowed. He’d hoped it hadn’t been that bad, and maybe it hadn’t been, but Riddler’s standards were so high that –
“I’d appreciate an explanation for that,” Riddler said, interrupting his thoughts. “You’ve gotten my hot chocolate wrong five days in a row, which defeats the purpose of you providing it to me in the first place.”
“Two-Face… his jobs are only at night,” Wilson tried to explain. “And during the day I go to see my little brother in the hospital, so –“
“I see,” Riddler said. “You’re dismissed.”
He stood there with his mouth slightly open for a moment. “Please, Mr Nygma,” he began, his hands spread imploringly, “I’ll do better, I – “
“Are you arguing with me?” Riddler asked, one eyebrow raised and eyes fixed directly on Wilson’s, and he shook his head in order to break his line of sight.
“No, sir.”
“Good.” And he moved back to the other side of the desk as though Wilson had already left. After a minute, he did.
He went back to his apartment, kicked the saucepan back under the leak in the ceiling from where a pile of laundry had displaced it, and removed his clothes, rolling them back up carefully and putting them into his top drawer. Then he sat down on the beat-up mattress on top of the creaking bedframe and rubbed his face with both hands.
That was it. It was over. He was really screwed now. Riddler was ridiculously exacting, but in absolute fairness he paid accordingly. And he didn’t even need to do anything particularly dangerous. Working for Two-Face meant waving a gun around, which he really hated doing, but the riskiest thing he’d had to do for Riddler was crawl around in an badly shored tunnel, which had had less to do with him and more with the guy who had made the tunnel trying to save ten minutes. Which Riddler had gone ballistic over, now he was thinking about it.
He cleaned himself up and walked the forty-five minutes to the hospital his brother was in. When he got there he was asleep. Wilson didn’t mind that as much as he probably should have. When his brother had been well and going to school and hanging out with his friends, he’d had lots to talk about, which was good. Wilson did not exactly want to tell him what his job was. He usually just said it was construction, which his brother accepted and then went on to talk about something else, but now that his brother was in here he had no stories to tell. So that left Wilson to come up with things to say, which he had never had a lot of even long before he’d gotten in so deep. Besides. Sleeping would be better for him than listening to Wilson try to talk about his job without mentioning who he was working for or what he was doing for him.
“Don’t you have to work?” his brother said when he woke up, voice still far too small, and Wilson looked away from him.
“Yeah,” he answered. “Don’t worry about it.”
There was not much to say after that, so they just watched TV until Wilson had to leave. He was sort of relieved and sort of wasn’t, because his brother had been looking at him as though he were thinking about asking after Wilson’s job again but deciding not to, but he also really didn’t like leaving him here by himself. Wilson didn’t really like being home by himself, either, but that was what he was stuck with for now.
The next few days he spent at the hospital with his brother, and the nights he went to work for Two-Face and hoped the coin decided he got paid. After five nights of this, two of which were not in his favour, Wilson reluctantly opened the portal through which he paid the hospital, using their wifi accessed via his beat-up phone to check how far behind he was falling. To his complete shock, the amount owed was… nothing. According to the website, it had been completely covered by insurance.
Wilson did not have insurance.
He called the appropriate number to be sure it wasn’t a mistake, but the bored-sounding woman on the other end confirmed it. His account with the hospital was being covered by insurance. That didn’t make any sense, so next he checked his bank account to see if that had somehow been mistaken for insurance. Not only hadn’t it, but there was too much in there. The transactions list stated that he had been paid by Riddler, but that didn’t make any sense either! It couldn’t be a mistake, because Riddler didn’t make those kinds of mistakes! So it meant… something else. Something that was probably bad. He stood up.
“Where are you going?” asked his brother.
“Back… to work,” he stammered, shoving the phone into his pocket and hurrying out the door. He needed to correct this before he started owing Riddler money too. That was a debt he wasn’t sure he could ever pay back, even after he had.
He’d been waiting for twenty minutes.
He didn’t know if Riddler was doing this on purpose or if he really was just busy, but he was so anxious he was starting to feel sick. He should probably just leave. It was probably better not to know what Riddler was doing. It wasn’t as though he could stop him. This was a stupid idea. But he’d been waiting this long, so he did his best to keep his leg from bouncing up and down and kept waiting.
Finally, the door opened and behind it stood Riddler. Wilson looked up at him. He was frowning around the stick of a lollipop. “Oh, it’s you,” he said, removing it with his left hand. It was a green one, of course. “Come in.”
Wilson followed him into the office, and waited until Riddler had seated himself behind the desk, an action which included crossing his legs and propping them up on the desktop. “What are you here for?” Riddler said around the lollipop, glancing at one of the monitors behind him.
“I don’t have insurance,” Wilson blurted, which was absolutely not what he had meant to say. Riddler eyed him for a moment, which was very uncomfortable.
“I do offer benefits,” he said, considering the lollipop as though it held some secret only he were aware of, “but they are offered at my discretion.”
“And you’re still paying me,” said Wilson. Riddler rolled his eyes.
“Do you not understand what ‘benefits’ are?”
Wilson shook his head.
“Then this conversation is going to go nowhere,” Riddler said. “Goodbye.”
Wilson could not find anything else to say. All the words that had been whirling through his mind before this had vanished entirely. Before he’d gotten to the door, however, Riddler called from behind him, “Hey.”
He turned around to find Riddler throwing something at him, underhanded, and when he opened his hands to see what it was he found two green lollipops. He stared at them.
“Don’t worry,” Riddler said, leaning back in his chair seemingly as far as it could go. “They’re the apple ones. Not whatever noxious flavour those other ones are supposed to be.”
He hadn’t been worried, but he nodded and left.
When he went to see his brother the next afternoon he gave him both of the lollipops. He had wanted to keep one, but his brother looked so delighted he was glad he hadn’t. “They’re the apple ones,” Wilson said. “My boss gave them to me.”
“Your boss must be nice,” his brother said, attempting to pull one of them out of the wrapper. When he couldn’t, Wilson took it and opened it for him. He fell asleep with most of it still in his mouth, which Wilson carefully replaced inside the plastic and put on the bedside table next to the other one. He went home trying to figure out if ‘Riddler’ and ‘nice’ could both be used in the same sentence and failed completely. Riddler did have a reason for what he was doing, but Wilson was sure it wasn’t to be nice. Riddler was the kind of man who held people accountable for their actions, whether they were truly their fault or not. The only thing he could come up with was that he wanted Wilson to return to making his hot chocolate, which was… weird. Why didn’t he just find someone else to do it? Surely Wilson wasn’t the only one he’d ever hired who knew how. In fact, why didn’t he just make it himself? He had so many employees he surely had enough free time to do it. Wilson had no idea what a supervillain did all day long. Probably nothing. They were probably too good to work for a living like everybody else.
Well… someone like Penguin, maybe. Riddler did have that drafting table, which Wilson had seen him using more than once. And when he came to inspect the construction projects he did know exactly what he was looking at and for. Wilson had even heard that he sometimes fixed grievous errors personally, though he’d never worked on a site that had any. Okay, he was wrong. Riddler did work hard. It was unfair to pretend he didn’t. And maybe… maybe he’d been wrong about where he’d come from, too. Spoiled trust-fund socialites didn’t usually go from the high life to halving two-by-fours with a circular saw in a dark tunnel. They’d probably never even seen a circular saw.
Then who had Riddler been, before there had been a Riddler? All Wilson knew about him was that he liked hot chocolate made from scratch. Had his mother made it for him? His father? Did he have a big brother, or perhaps a little brother he’d once made it for? What was so important about it that he’d kept Wilson on his payroll and paid for his brother’s hospital bills without saying a word about what he’d done?
In the end, it didn’t really matter. Wilson would never know. He was not Riddler’s friend, nor his colleague, nor anyone he particularly cared about. He was one step above most of his other employees, being the hot chocolate guy, but that was it. So wondering what the man behind the Riddler was like was… pointless. He just needed to appreciate that he was there. He was all that was keeping Wilson from having to work for truly dangerous people like Two-Face and Scarecrow and Harley Quinn.
His brother would probably be okay to come back home in a few days. Wilson would stay with him for a week and use what he was still being paid to fix the apartment up a little better, and then he would go back to work. He didn’t know what Riddler was doing this for, or why, but the second he thought Wilson was trying to take advantage of it was the second he would lose his only chance at climbing out of the hole he’d fallen into. He got up from where he’d been sitting on the bed and crossed the room to make a start on the pile of dishes in the sink. It would be nice if he’d cleaned everything up before his brother got back. He’d like that. He’d be able to have friends over if Wilson figured out how to fix the hole in the ceiling. He would do that next. It was time he started doing that kind of stuff. It was hard to care when nobody else did, but that had to start somewhere. Maybe it could start with him for once.
He was sure it was perfect this time.
There was a staff room down the hall from Riddler’s office, and every evening he came here Wilson would bring his portable induction burner and plug it into the wall, placing on top of it a saucepan he kept in one of the cupboards and used only for this. Then he carefully made exactly one serving of hot chocolate and cleaned the dishes in the sink while he waited for it to cool down. Riddler liked to be able to drink it as soon as he got it so Wilson never brought it to him right away. Once he was finished that he waited a few minutes more in the hopes his anxiety would fade a little, but it didn’t and so once he had put exactly five marshmallows into the cup he picked it up and concentrated extra hard on not spilling it everywhere. He’d only done it once, but that had been one time too many.
This time Riddler did look up at him when he set it down on the designated coaster, and he actually looked… happy. Like a normal person. He picked it up immediately and took a drink. “Much better,” he said, his smile also disconcertingly ordinary, and Wilson nodded. The other thing he had brought sat heavy in his back pocket. He wasn’t sure whether giving it to Riddler was a good idea, but he had promised. He removed the envelope, which contained only a thank-you card his brother had insisted on making, and held it out. He realised belatedly it looked rather tattered, having been crushed into the back of his jeans the entire shift. Riddler eyed it suspiciously.
“It’s from my brother,” Wilson managed through his half-closed throat. “He asked how we were able to afford his medication and I told him my boss – “
Riddler held out two fingers, which Wilson confusedly moved the envelope towards, and he took it between them and flipped up the flap with his thumb, using his other hand to pull out the card. When he read the inside Wilson saw, for one moment, that there really was a man behind the Riddler after all. A regular, average man, who had regular, average thoughts and feelings and worries that had nothing to do with grandiose schemes or deathtraps that could have spanned the length of an Olympic swimming pool. A man who had been there before the Riddler had existed, and who would be what was left when he was gone. There was a real person in there, somewhere, behind the eyes that knew too much and inside of the mind he couldn’t begin to understand. He knew for sure now that Riddler did not care about him or his brother or even the hot chocolate. No, Riddler didn’t.
But Edward did.
The moment ended when Riddler looked up at him and said, “There will be consequences, should you heed the temptation to tell anyone about any of this.”
“I know, sir,” Wilson said. Riddler nodded, picked up the drink, and rolled himself over to the drafting table.
Leaving felt a bit awkward, considering they never usually talked during this time, but Wilson felt the need to say something all the way over to the door. He looked back at Riddler, who was taking a drink of the hot chocolate. He put it down with a satisfied nod, as though everything were now right with the world. It wasn’t, of course, but things were definitely better than they had been yesterday. And sometimes that was enough.
“Goodnight, Mr Nygma,” said Wilson.
“Goodnight,” Riddler said absently, and Wilson didn’t know if he’d meant to answer but there was no way he’d stood the card up on his desk by accident.