Pictures In Darkness
By Ang D.

A/N: Thanks and blame go to Alicia, who encouraged me to write this little gem after I saw a tiny hint of a fic in yet more Oingo Boingo lyrics. .... You gotta check this damn song out, it kicks it, seriously. .... And yeah, I do enjoy torturing Norman, why do you ask? .... Norman's past with the darkness was influenced EXTREMELY heavily by Roger Stern, Howard Mackie, and Paul Jenckins' work writing in Revenge of the Green Goblin ... some of it is almost verbatim, since I was looking at the comic while writing that part. Enjoy ... I'm rather proud of this craptastic masterpiece.

Why do pictures of you
Come to me when I dream
In darkness...
~ Oingo Boingo, "Pictures of You"

Wake up, Norman.

I jolted to my senses, hastening to obey the Goblin's voice, my heart pounding in my chest. The small bed that I'd always kept beside my desk seemed larger in the darkness, as I lay there, staring up at the dark wood paneling of the ceiling. Oh well. Not that it had been a peaceful sleep, anyway.

"What do you want ..." I whispered, my throat dry and my voice cracking.

Look outside, look out the window. What you can see of it.

I obeyed, passing a shaking, weary hand over my eyes. Droplets of rain and a film of mist had formed on the panes of the window, and I reached up, wiping the condensation away with the corner of a black bedsheet. Clearer now, I could see a full-scale storm raging outside, wind blowing and buffeting at the trees, far down below in the garden.

Isn't that just beautiful? Don't you just want to be OUT in it ...

For a moment, I did. Wanted to feel the rain pelting down my body, across my skin and matting my hair to my head, stripping me clean of everything, everything but that pure, unfettered sensation of water. In my mind's eye, I saw myself standing out in the garden, my silk pajama pants clinging to wet skin as the rain took me over. Better than a shower.

Then a fork of lightning split across the sky, sudden and violent. But, no - it was more than just a fork, it was long, wide, delicate, with several fingers stretching across the comforting dark and lancing through the rain, each spindle converging in on the others in ... oh, in a horrid, terrible web.

"No. I want to stay here." Here where it's warm, dry, safe, away from the spiders. Away from everything but me, and him, and the darkness. And whatever shadows I please.

Fine, then. Stay here, miss out.

"I can always watch." It occured to me, in that moment, that I did want to watch. But there were much better places in this place to watch a storm. The best, I reminded myself, was ... no, I didn't want to go there. I hadn't gone there in twenty years.

What's stopping you? Ghosts? You've got nothing to fear but me, Norman.

Right as always. I stood slowly, suppressing a chill before grabbing a sheet to wrap around my shoulders. One corner was still moist from where I had wiped the window clean, and I clutched it in my hand, lifting it to my nose and breathing in the smell of the rain. It took a moment, but eventually my feet began to lead me where I wanted to go. Out of the office, padding down the hall, my toes digging slightly into the coarse Oriental carpeting. In the middle of the night, during these bouts of insomnia, the formula always seemed to course through my veins on overdrive, every sense heightened, every whisper of cloth a shout, and as my bare feet moved across the floor, I found myself savoring every touch of the carpet on my soles. I'd found solace in the night long before the Goblin's arrival, in truth. But it had not always been that way.

I remember clearly, every old bogeyman in the closet that wanted me to come and play, and every time I had run to my father, pleading for him to make them all go away so that I could sleep. And I was too young to realize that I had more to fear from his hands than from the ghouls in my bedroom. Every night, he grew more and more abrasive towards my cowardice, challenging me to grow up and be a man, be an Osborn. Finally, one night, he dragged me outside - in a night exactly like the one that hung over the mansion presently. Driving, pouring rain, rain so hard that it bounced off my clothing, off my hair and my face as my father pulled me up the cobbled walkway, toward this very house.

It had been dark and empty, then, of course, my father having squandered the family fortunes on drink and games, and other luxuries - but mostly, drink.

I can almost hear his voice now as I pad through my empty house, echoing in my mind. But it had been long ago. I had only been a child ... and I had been afraid. Of the house, of the darkness. But on that night, the epiphany finally had come: that it was my father that I had to fear above all else.

Standing on the steps, he informed me that I had nothing to be afraid of, that I was to spend the night in this monstrous, looming, dark edifice with its soulless windows for eyes and that gaping maw of a door, open to the wind and rain. He assured me that one day, I would thank him - that "a little darkness never hurrt anyone".

I could have believed anything else at that moment, when I was forced inside, the door slammed and locked behind me.

For the longest time, I only knelt on the floor of the foyer, afraid to sob for the terror fluttering in my ribs. But a metamorphosis occured over that long, sleepless night. The darkness did, indeed, become my friend, my companion. My confidante and my solace.

My toe caught on the stub of the carpet as I reached the corner of one hallway, bringing me back to my senses, and I found myself looking out over the railing, down on the foyer, straining my eyes in the dark as if I hoped to see myself more than thirty years past below me on the tiles, sobbing in the dark... hoped to see myself so that I could swoop down, take myself in my arms, and tell myself that it would be alright, to trust in the precious dark.

As the thought came to me, my breath latched in my throat, and I gasped... a realization.

How had I known the Goblin was right when he told me there were no ghosts in the house?

Simply put ... he was the only thing I had heard, that night.

No ghosts in the house.

He had been there as long as the darkness had, and I had been taken into the arms of an angel of the darkness, comforted and soothed.

But childhood memories fade, as do childhood friends and companions, into the light, between orders to grow up and be ...

Though, there will always come a day when even the most self-proclaimed adult returns to his childhood.

So good to see you again, little Normy. My how you've grown, and what a fine boy you've turned out to be.

Why, thank you.

The comfort of the darkness seemed even stronger now, as I made my way down the hallway. Good thing, for the double doors that stood before me had been unopened for years ...

No ghosts. Just me. Go on in, watch the storm and settle in for the night.

I nodded, my hand shaking ever so slightly as I extended it from beneath the sheet and pushed it open. To my amazement, it made not even the slightest creak, just a whisper in the air. A whisper in my ear, like that of the woman who had once lived within the shelter of the doors ... slept by my side. A whisper in the dark.

"Emily."

In darkness, I could almost see her lying there, as I had countless nights after returning late from the office, her form defined perfectly by the slope of the pale moonlit sheets around her body. Her short raven hair spilling out around her face on the pillow ... even if it was only in my mind, the vision made my heart ache. Harry had taken her from me with his life ... I admitted, perhaps for the first time, perhaps not, that this was part of the reason I had distanced him from me - out of anger and jealousy. He had her last.

Standing in that empty room, empty of all but memory and the whisper of stale air, I felt one small tear, thin and pure as a raindrop, sliding down my cheek. Then it stung, bitterly. Be an Osborn, stung like a slap across the cheek, and I wiped it away angrily, the black sheet falling to the floor in the doorway. I made my way over to the enormous paned picture windows beside the bed, glass from floor to ceiling, inviting the storm into the room.

I leant my forehead against the cool of the glass, staring the rain in the eyes, watching it endlessly stream from the sky. Droplets on the panes blurred in my vision as the rain in the distance became clear, and I switched the focus of my eyes back and forth repeatedly, relishing the way it gave me such a slight and pleasant change of scenery. Sinking into her old armchair at the window, I let my fingers run across the soft, worn courderoy, remembering how in our early days in this house, when it rained, we would play chase-the-raindrop, taking bets on which droplet would make it to the edge of a pane first, cheering them on like thoroughbred mares.

Racing raindrops isn't quite as much fun when you have no one to race them with. So I resigned myself to merely watching them fall and slide, slip, grab onto other droplets for support, only to inevitably crash against the frames of the panes. Eventually the sound of the rain and the slip of the water lulled me into sleep, surely as being rocked in someone's arms.

"Norman."

A voice through the rain, soft and tender and warm.

"Norman."

More plaintively now, troubled. I knew that tone, I feared it, it had always made my heart skip. I opened my eyes, breathless. "Emily?"

".... Norman... oh, darling. I don't see why I keep insisting that I go back to those horrible cocktail functions, they always ... they always upset me so."

I stood and wrapped her in my arms. Her hair smelled as it always did, of that soft herbal shampoo, of summer ozone, her skin soft and warm beneath the white cocktail dress. I felt her press against me, tilting her face into the crook of my neck, tears wet on her cheeks. I slipped a hand back and forth across her back, comfortingly, lacing the fingers of my other hand in her hair. "What did they say tonight, and who are their husbands? I'll have them demoted, fired, ruined ... "

"They said... oh, Norman, they said the usual awful things, I should be used to hearing them by now ... that I haven't come from money like the rest of them, that I'm just a little girl pretending that I can fit in with them all because I married you, because you scraped up what little your father left for you and managed to make it work ... "

"They're just all jealous of us because we earned what we have.... bunch of damned stuck-nosed socialites," I hissed, taking the hand from her hair and using my thumb to brush away her tears.

"I know, Norman, but it still hurts to hear it. ... They're all so cold. I ..." Her voice trailed off and she set her eyes deep into mine.

I nodded slightly, cupping her cheek in my hand and guiding her face to mine for a kiss. "Let me take the chill away," I whispered.

She smiled, just lightly, then, her hands moving to the collar of my pajamas as mine circled her waist, guiding her towards the bed. Her fingernails picked gently at the buttons, and she slipped a hand underneath the cloth to slide it away from my body.

Yet, as her palm touched my chest, I flinched, gasping.

"Mm! ... S'cold...." I shivered, reaching up and taking her hand in mine. Cold ... Emily was never cold. She was always so warm, so full of ...

.... life ....

"No."

I began to realize, then, that it wasn't just the moonlight. Emily was paper-pale, her skin like thin vellum, and I could nearly see the veins in her cheeks, suddenly.

"Norman," a faint smile, then, yes, "what's wrong? .... You're so tense. You need to relax. Come on, just for a little while, then I swear, you'll sleep like the dead."

"Like the dead?" I stammered, backing away. "The dead?"

"Well, yes." She laughed, and the laugh that had been so musical suddenly distorted, keening, up around my ears and whirling through the room, like a scream...

No, it was a scream ...

My scream, as I sat bolt upright in the courderoy chair, a web of lightning illuminating the bedroom covered in cobwebs, covered in dust, antiquated.

The scream died down then, to the cousin of a sob and a wail, thin and stuttering from my lips as I dropped my face into my hands. Around me, the rain came down, and the lightning receeded, the darkness soft and warm like a blanket around my skin, close and comfortable.

You've still got me.

Yes ... yes, and I do still have her, too... if only the pictures in the darkness, for as long as I can stand them.