Chapter Text
It’s early Wednesday morning, and Oswald is still dozing in his bunk when he’s woken by an unholy noise—quite standard for Blackgate, but he always finds himself gritting his teeth with anger each and every time he’s disturbed, already frowning before he’s opened his eyes.
His cell bars rattle as CO Smitty runs his baton along them. “Mail call,” the man barks.
Oswald pointedly ignores the ruckus.
He’s aware that there will be no letter for him today. He conducts business and maintains the Iceberg Lounge through proxies, and he never allows any suspicious mail to be delivered directly to him. In regard to social contact, he receives precisely one letter every fortnight from Edward. That’s the extent of his communication with the outside world.
Ed, being Ed, follows a schedule with his correspondences, never having been early or late with a response. Except for the rare occasions where he gets fixated on something, spirals hopelessly, and gets thrown in solitary—like the incident in which the Arkham cafeteria started adding onions to their meals, so Edward somehow managed to sneak bleach into the staff’s lunches as some kind of revenge. (That had admittedly not been a good week for him.) But there are never any extra letters, in any case. Early in Oswald’s incarceration, Victor Fries had sent the odd piece of mail on weird blue paper that still somehow felt cold, but their conversations had petered out before even six months had passed.
“Inmate 714,” Smitty says, prompting Oswald with his identification number.
Oswald scoffs and shuts his eyes, throwing an arm over his face to block out Smitty even further.
“Cobblepot. Mail call,” Smitty says gruffly, his voice taking on an impatient edge.
“Very funny,” Oswald says. “Hysterical, actually.”
There’s a noise of shuffling paper, like Smitty is actually taking an envelope from the cart. “Do you want your goddamn letter or not?”
All right. Oswald will play along with the bit. He drops his arm from his face, hauls himself into a sitting position, and holds out an expectant hand in an over-exaggerated gesture.
He is not expecting Smitty to pass him an actual letter through the bars.
He halts for a good few seconds before abruptly snatching the envelope from Smitty’s grasp, clutching it in his hands and staring down at the thing. It’s clearly addressed to him, with his name and inmate number written in cramped black ink on the cheap paper. He doesn’t recognise the handwriting.
He turns the letter over in his hands, tuning out the sound of Smitty’s baton rattling the bars as he moves along to the next cell, where Knuckles is pining for his own mail.
Transfixed, Oswald rises from his bunk with a wince and starts to pace the cell as he tears at the envelope’s paper. He theorises on what it might contain... A threat. A simpering request for a favour. Anthrax.
The letter itself looks pretty safe once he unfolds it and skims his eyes over it. No strange powder tucked between the pages, and no death threats scrawled in blood, like he’d received on one isolated incident.
The first line of the letter simply reads, ‘Hello Oswald’. There is an awkward drawing of a penguin in the margin, not quite fitting between the ruled lines of the page. Oswald squints, his eyes narrowing skeptically.
‘I spent about three days thinking about how to write this letter,’ it carries on. ‘Please bear with me. I don’t know if you’ll remember, but you spent some time with me when I was young, after my parents died. I was nine.’
Oswald’s hands go so tight on the page that he almost crumples it.
‘I’m aware it’s been six years, but I do still think about you sometimes. You were the first person who really saw me, and I don’t know if I’ve felt seen again since. I wanted to contact you a lot sooner, but I’ve only just been able to find a way around the protection order. I’m not totally sure what the point of this letter is, but I do know that I’ve been thinking of writing it ever since I left Gotham.’
An odd feeling tugs at Oswald’s chest. Something he can’t name.
‘If nothing else,’ the letter continues, ‘I wanted to tell you that I missed you after we were separated. And I still do a little bit, as stupid as it is.
Yours, Martin.’
Feeling dazed, Oswald sinks down onto his bunk.
Martin is fifteen years old. Martin is apparently smart enough to circumvent a strict protection order. Martin remembers him. Martin remembers him.
After Sofia Falcone’s devastating affront, Oswald had thought that he’d never see Martin again. He had resigned himself to that. Zsasz, in a move that was equal parts compassionate and cruel, had set up a protection order for Martin. It kept the boy safe from Sofia’s efforts by cutting him off from contact with Oswald and all of his associates.
Of course, it also had the drawback of the exact same thing.
Oswald had been determined to go along with it at first, as much as he resented it. But he’d snapped after six months without Martin, and at that point he‘d done his damned best to get around the protection order. Regrettably, Zsasz was incredibly smart, and effective, and pissed at Oswald, and it seemed like contacting Martin again would remain impossible.
Yet here is a letter from the boy himself. And here Oswald stands, staring down at it with awe, as if it’s a detailed escape plan and not a note scribbled by a teenager with a terrible doodle of a penguin in the corner.
Oswald takes all of two minutes to savour the rare experience of getting a letter before his keenness gets the better of him, and he finds himself demanding writing supplies, making threats to the empty hallway until the attending CO, Luce, grows sick of his noise and caves.
He copies off the return address painstakingly, determined to ensure that the letter reaches its recipient. But his actual reply is hasty, and in his daze he’s sure he must come off as awkward—too emotional or too impersonal, probably one or the other—but he hardly cares. He doesn’t even proofread it before he’s requesting that CO Luce send it immediately. Fortunately, Luce is not stupid, and knows better than to make a fuss if Oswald’s whims are harmless and legitimate for once, instead of being centred around inter-block gang wars, or audacious requests for contraband wine (vintage Bordeaux, no less).
Luce takes the letter, and off it goes.
Oswald is on tenterhooks for the next five days, so preoccupied that he doesn’t even bother to engage when Knuckles insults his gait in the yard, though he usually considers it protocol to make an example of anyone who does so. He sits straight up in bed every time Smitty comes by with the mail, eyeing the guard acutely and hoping that there will be something there with his ID number on it. He’s so distracted that when Edward’s letter comes through per the schedule, he’s irritated that it is not from Martin instead... though he warms to Ed’s letter shamefully quickly as soon as he lays eyes on the man’s looped green scrawl, and as usual, he finds himself cradling the paper long after he’s finished reading.
Now, objectively, five days is not long to wait. Oswald has endured more than five damn years in Blackgate, and thought nothing of it, surprised if anything else by the fact that he’s already halfway through his controversially short sentence.
But he’s restless now. He can’t remember what he wrote in his own reply, and he’s beginning to worry that perhaps it was too clumsy and that Martin will not bother to reach out again. And this is something that actually matters for once. Not a feud with B-block about the dinner rotation that he’ll have forgotten within a couple of months. Not a petty insult to his already contentious reputation. This is Martin.
On Monday, Smitty passes over a letter stamped with Martin’s handwriting, and Oswald forgets every second of his fretting. He sits down to read, and even as Knuckles screams at the CO from the cell next to his, he finds himself feeling light.