Chapter Text
It’s surprising, what information people leave behind online without even realising it.
If he really wanted to, he could get her passwords, log in to her accounts. He finds where she lives ridiculously easily. If he really wanted to, he thinks dangerously, he could even show up at her door.
For now, he contents himself with just looking. He’s always been good at that.
Before he knows it, he’s balls-deep in her digital footprint, prowling as far back as high school pictures, traversing rabbit-holes of extra accounts connected to her by email. A breadcrumb trail to nourish him.
You can deduce a lot about a person from their online presence.
On the surface, she’s achingly normal. But if he digs a little deeper, he finds little scattered pieces that she must have naïvely thought would stay hidden to the general populace. Cute. Unfortunately for her, Edward was not the general populace.
He uncovers accounts for various things under fake names… fan-pages, old blogs; even a nameless and faceless twitter account where she is very much still active and politically vocal. It's not hard for him to make connections, despite her poor efforts to hide them. She’s careless, he critiques – she uses the same handful of emails for most things, reuses false names, and she types in a very distinct way that is easily recognisable.
It's 4AM, and his eyes burn from staring at the monitor, the veins in them prominent and reddened. She’s probably asleep right now, he’d imagine. Poring over her pictures, he is unabashedly palming himself till he’s rock-hard and leaking through his pants. His posture is hunched, neck extended towards the screen.
She’s a distraction. Just a pretty distraction. The newspaper clippings plastered around him call his name; chiding him for his vacancy from what really matters, here. Oh, but he’d devoted half his day to the cause. He deserves a break. Just for a little while. There’s an itch to scratch and he’s fast caving to its incessant niggling.
He shifts his hips just-so in his office chair, and with feverish hands he unbuckles his belt, tugs down the zipper. The teasing tremors of his palm and the protrusion stretching against the fabric of his slacks is becoming frustrating, uncomfortable. When he is at last free of them, the fabric gathered carelessly round his ankles, he breathes a shuddering breath of relief.
His eyes trail down to observe his spread thighs, the dark mess of curls from which his cock springs into bloom. Would she think his dick was small? He’d always been self-conscious about that. He wraps his fist around his turgid length; peels back the hood, running a thumb across the indented tip; squeezing, gathering the oozing pre to swathe his cock.
Scroll. A picture of her at a birthday party. She’s smiling at the camera - at him, he likes to pretend. Scroll. In this one, she wears a strappy summer dress, her legs bare, shoulders bathed in sun, shadows seeping into her collarbone, the dip of her chest. If he looks close enough, he swears he can see the suggestion of her nipples peaking beneath summer-thin, breathable fabric. He pauses a little longer on this one, pumping his fist around his cock with more vigour.
Perhaps watching porn would be more practical, but there was an emptiness to it, an untruth. Not that he had much for comparison. He’d never fucked like the porn stars (never fucked ever, if he was to begrudgingly admit so), and the majority of his knowledge of sexual matters came from porn, sticky magazines under the mattress, and sexting randoms online (he always hacked their webcam to make sure the person on the other end wasn’t a fifty-year-old man).
That wasn’t to say he didn’t enjoy pornography. He liked porn – loved it, even (alright, perhaps he had what some might call an addiction to it) – though his tastes were sometimes niche; and yes, he prefers amateur, for the added realism – but this new discovery of you is hitting all his spots in a way he hadn’t realised was possible.
To him, this was far more fulfilling. A stream of innocent, pretty images - her words, herself; the parts of her that she never intended for him to see.
He wants to fuck her. He’d come to terms with this early on. When he’d first seen her in the diner, he thought she was pretty. She possessed the kind of face and pair of legs he could content himself with staring at for hours on end. He had a terrible habit for doing that – staring at people, quietly fabricating scenarios and fantasies in his head involving them.
On the news – watching the politicians – his thoughts would wind a violent road. Hot, sticky blood – leather gloves and the latex scent of his mask. His collection of fantasies covered a wide spectrum – from the innocent to the brutal, and finally, to the vulgar.
He’d stare and think and imagine taking her over the diner counter, pounding into her sweet cunt like a drill-hammer. Under the light, he’d catch the swan-like curve of her neck; imagine brushing the pads of his fingers against the soft, downy hair there, and then envision himself winding a thick spool of tape around it, like a collar. Around them an orchestra of broken glass, shattered coffee cups, shards of plates, smeared microwaved pumpkin pie. Her moans, melding with his.
Oh, he’d kill to hear her moan.
(And all the while he dreamed up this filth she smiled at him, totally oblivious, discussing something arbitrary like the weather or what she’s been watching on television lately. She’s so fucking normal that it hurts. He’s not always so self-aware of his own behaviour, but shit, if it doesn’t make him feel just a little bit ashamed - like even more of a freak in comparison.)
Maybe he’s just pent up and horny tonight - but he is overcome with the insatiable, virile desire to have her, to feel her. Scroll. His soul just about leaves his body, and he almost busts right then and there. God is real, he thinks, when he sees the bikini photograph – she’s on a beach in this one.
The floppy sunhat hides her features, but that’s alright. He can make do with her body; all those delectable inches of bare flesh. He longs to touch, to caress, to latch his teeth onto. There’s some sort of white fluid balming sections of her skin that he knows is sunscreen, but his filthy train of thought takes something so seemingly innocent in a whole different direction.
Sticky with his cum. She’d be so plush and hot around him, so tight. Made for him - and she doesn’t even know it. His cock throbs and pulses. At this rate, he’s not going to last long.
He wanted to draw this out a little longer. Time to pleasure himself was sacred, holy. To not take full advantage of it would be a waste. That’s what he tells himself whenever he grabs a spare moment, anyway. When he’s not balancing work, along with the intricacies and planning that his Riddler persona demands, he spends the majority of his free time whacking one off.
What else was there to do? With no social life to speak of, he settles for the hit of dopamine that stroking himself to orgasm gives – and hey, it’s great stress relief. He’s good at it, he thinks. When it comes to masturbation, he’s tried it all. Homemade flesh-lights, dry-humping – you name it, he’s done it. He knows how to get himself off quick – and on the flip side, he knows how to prolong it.
Carefully, he reigns himself in from the precipice of his orgasm. He slows his strokes, the lewd, frantic slapping of his skin growing quieter. His cockhead hits the soft swell of his stomach, smearing oozing liquid across his shirt.
For a moment, he breaks out of the lust-hazed frenzy he’s in and looks around him - the dingy apartment and its newspaper clippings, the old, empty cans of energy drinks and crusty coffee cups, and he wants to scream, to cry. Oh, he’s so fucking lonely.
Scroll.
He admires her profile; the slope of her nose, her lashes, the way her plush lips curl into a precious smile. His hips buck wantonly into his hand. Twist and gripping, coaxing wave after wave of undulating pleasure, from his head to the tips of his toes - and he hates it, because his hands are too large, too familiar - nothing like hers.
Regarding her - he hadn’t really been interested beyond looking till she’d mentioned her support for his cause. It was a little begrudging, sure - but she seemed honest, real. He clicks on the extra tab, tearing his eyes away from her pictures. His slick fist gives very measured, slow strokes. Whenever he reaches a moment of near fulfilment, he retracts, leaving his swollen length throbbing and aching for release.
One of her most recent tweets garner his attention. It’s a reply to someone. The OP, he gathers, has posted something condemning Riddler.
Ed feels a swell of pleasure to see his own face – albeit masked – staring back at him. That’s the real him. The part of him with strength, with followers, with an ideal that could be realized. The unbridled man, without the shackles of his perceived normalcy.
>> The so-called RIDDLER is a jack-ass and a murderer, the OP rants. GCPD NEEDS to stop him NOW. He will kill again; our politicians are in danger.
Your reply makes his head spin. He runs his thumb across the underside of his cock, and shudders, smiling uncontrollably, because fuck – you’re actually defending him.
the sooner Riddler gets to them, the better.
>> What, you’re saying you support this piece of shit, you troll?
- i’m saying he’s doing more for Gotham’s working people than you are, or any of the liars sitting in office now. open your eyes. the only piece of shit here is you and them.
>> From your page I see you are a woman. Riddler’s bitch. Go and fuck him then if you love him so much, slut.
- is that supposed 2 be an insult? i’d rather fuck him than you any day. oh, and some advice. if I were you, I’d take that profile picture of yours down. it’s really not flattering.
The glee from witnessing your public defence of him is a joyous discovery, but oh – that’s on the backburner, because he keeps re-reading that sentence, over and over, as he finally gives in, and jerks his cock harder, faster. I’d rather fuck him than you. He’s doing more for Gotham’s working people than you are.
That does it for him; sends him head-first right off the ledge.
His mouth trembles into an ‘O’ shape, a silent, shuddering scream. With a low and earthy groan, his orgasm hits with the force of a freight train – crashing waves of heat and fire. He comes hard, intensely. The plush, reddened cock tip releases spurts of semen that seem almost unending; ropes of it, dampening his shirt, his curled fist. He jerks and shakes, panting loud and pathetic as a dog, spent, and satisfied from your praise.
His head lulls back on the cushioned office-chair, glasses crooked, and he catches his breath, basking in the afterglow; hips still rocking from the force of the wave that had just assaulted him. The ebbing pleasure, however, is temporary.
The clarity of real life after the lust-haze clears seems to seep into his bones as he comes-to. It’s cold in here – the heater is temperamental, at the best of times – and he is sticky, tired, and alone – with a headache to top it all off. His cock softens gradually as he comes to terms with reality: he’d just fucked his hand and not you. It infuriates him.
Then again, things weren’t all bad. He finds himself smiling, even as he fumbles with tissues and scoops up the gooey mess of his orgasm from his lap. Where he took his losses, little victories were borne.
You’d still rather fuck the Riddler than OP.