[Oswald watches him struggle. His eye wide, gleaming-wet.
Ed's hand is empty. No bobby pin or bent paper clip reveals itself. No clever escape plan tucked in his palm. This is all there is.
One day, they'd look back on this nightmare of Strange’s making with grim smiles, knowing nothing could destroy them - nothing. Not after surviving the worst Strange has put them through, and the ugliest of ways they have hurt each other in the name of revenge. But the misery in Ed's haggard, sweaty face tells him: not today. Not in three days, or a week.
They're small and scared, becoming shells of the names they’ve made for themselves. With every passing hour, Oswald feels his sense of what life beyond these walls had been like slipping further away from him. This is his world now - and what matters most is what’s in front of him, what little is still familiar and safe: Ed's hand straining for his. Ed needing him more than Oswald has ever been needed in his life.
Sinking his teeth into his lip, he fights every sluggish muscle in his own body to drag himself over to the bars, the concrete rasping the skin of his forearm, his hip. He stretches his arm past the iron, slowly. Reaching for his best friend. The last man alive he can count on.
Their fingers never touch.
But he tries anyway.
As if the love swelling inside him really can conquer all.]
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Ed's hand is empty. No bobby pin or bent paper clip reveals itself. No clever escape plan tucked in his palm. This is all there is.
One day, they'd look back on this nightmare of Strange’s making with grim smiles, knowing nothing could destroy them - nothing. Not after surviving the worst Strange has put them through, and the ugliest of ways they have hurt each other in the name of revenge. But the misery in Ed's haggard, sweaty face tells him: not today. Not in three days, or a week.
They're small and scared, becoming shells of the names they’ve made for themselves. With every passing hour, Oswald feels his sense of what life beyond these walls had been like slipping further away from him. This is his world now - and what matters most is what’s in front of him, what little is still familiar and safe: Ed's hand straining for his. Ed needing him more than Oswald has ever been needed in his life.
Sinking his teeth into his lip, he fights every sluggish muscle in his own body to drag himself over to the bars, the concrete rasping the skin of his forearm, his hip. He stretches his arm past the iron, slowly. Reaching for his best friend. The last man alive he can count on.
Their fingers never touch.
But he tries anyway.
As if the love swelling inside him really can conquer all.]