Work Text:
He and Charles had been poking about in a library, newly friends and not yet detectives, when he had come across the anatomy book.
It didn't sicken him, back then, not when he had still half-expected every corner to reveal an endless maze of green-lit, blood-spattered hallways, but it had frozen him in place with that odd, unemotional terror, and the taste of blood had risen in his mouth.
It had also, strangely, comforted him.
Something about the book's matter-of-fact detailing, the way it so cleanly laid out each and every body part that he was so intimately, painfully familiar with, had calmed him – and not in the way of a fear too worn-out to be felt.
Edwin knows a lot about his body. His lungs are different shapes, he knows, and there's a dent in one of the bits of his knee. When his heart beats now, within his dead and disembodied chest, he recognises the pattern from when it was wrenched from him. Sometimes, his hands still feel his innards sliding over them, slippery and sticky at once, and he's too desensitised to the disgust to do more than wipe his hands against his trousers and move on.
The book, however, didn't care about the numb horror he feels when he stares into his own dead eyes, only about the structure of those eyes, and how that lets a person see.
Edwin had stolen the book, when he and Charles left the library.
Now, he can say with confidence that it is his left lung which is slightly malformed, rather than his right, and that the dent in his patella was likely the result of an injury (he thinks, vaguely, that he remembers being startled out of his hiding spot in a tree, and suspects, even more uncertainly, that he may have twisted to protect the book he was holding, and landed wrong as a result. He isn't certain.). He knows the rate his heart beats at as it is torn out of his chest, and now he can say which muscles it uses to beat. He knows the colour and texture of all his internal organs, and now he can name them, too.
It makes it easier to think about, he reckons, this clinical, analytical view. It certainly makes it easier to talk about, to let it seem like he knows how a wound was formed or a blood spatter was made because of his academic inclinations, and not extensive, intimate, personal experience.
Charles knows better, of course, but Charles is so very rarely who Edwin is trying to fool – and even then, he seems to forget sometimes.
Edwin thinks maybe he forgets sometimes, too, but maybe that's just wishful thinking.