#Cobb: sure *shakes Danny like a can of salted nuts*

[faeriekit]

SO. The thing was. Danny couldn’t die, because he had already done that. 

What he could do was think OW, there’s something in my fucking NECK?? because that was true, and there was a hand buried up to its wrist in his neck and windpipe.

…Okay, so he was intangible; that didn’t make it not painful. And maybe it distracted him from breathing a little and freaked his heart out until it stopped responding, and now he was pretending to be a little dead. And maybe his attacker wouldn’t notice the. Uh. The lack of blood. 

Speaking of which, what the fuck?? Who was so entitled to attack him out of the blue like this for no reason?? He didn’t even have any enemies?? 

...Well. OKay. There was that Bat dude, whatever he was up to…but but Valerie had stopped being his enemy in like junior year so this was kind of messed up for him to die to an enemy he’s not even friends with! Vlad is halfway across the country!! There should be no one around to pick a fight with on the east coast.

This is bogus, Danny thought, laying limp in bed as the hand was wrenched out of him. I want my lawyer. If this was that Bat dude's fault, he’d better run. 

His body was lifted. And then, still, in the dark of morning, they were gone from the apartment. 

And you know what? Danny would rather have flown the whole way by himself, thanks; getting carted around by a guy who thought he was clearly dead was absolutely murder on the joints. More than. Perhaps. The murder on the him. 

Okay Danny had to carefully not crack up at that one. He’d have to remember that for later. 

His dead (“dead”) body was dragged over fire escapes and through empty buildings, over the border of at least one Gotham neighborhood he could recognize, and then into the sewer. Which was nasty inside— oil-slick yellow and smelling like puke. Danny swore to himself in silent fury that he would start throwing up as soon as the situation was a little less dire. 

What time was it? Danny was a little too fearful of his life/afterlife to check his cell phone—

Danny dangled from cord-taut arms a little more tensely. Augh, his phone was where he had left it: on the bedside table charging pad. Well. This kidnapping had just gone from bad to worse. 

His limp body was brought down a labyrinth of sewer tunnels and into a suspiciously located ornate gold and black ballroom, which was weird and spooky and now Danny was a victim of whatever the local Vlad equivalent was, so, great.

"Show me the necromancer," someone croaked.

Danny got held up by the arm, dangling midair, in his freaking Men's Youth pajama pants XXL he got on sale at Walmart and a Deadpool tee he stole off his sister three years ago. If he had known he was going to get kidnapped he would have picked better pajama pants.

"Hm. Scrawny."

Rude.

"And it is dead?" the voice croaked, and Danny got shaken around a little. "Hm. Its influence over your servants may not be over. Send it to the workshop for further investigation."

"As you wish," said the guy holding him. Which. Freaky response.

Danny felt himself be dragged down a few more flights and several sets of stairs—ow— and suffered the indignity of being hauled upright, thrown down into a glorified box, and had the lid slammed on him.

He was left in what felt like a dark, cold coffin. ...Great. The temperature only dropped the longer he was in it.

He breathed out. His breath fogged up. That wasn't right. Danny was always cold; even as the temperature dropped, Danny felt as though he was comfortable. At least, he was comfortable temperature-wise, if not in-a-stone-coffin-wise.

But his breath fogged up.

Something rapped on his coffin. Danny didn't move. If someone was going to potentially see something, Danny would rather find out more before pulling a disappearing act and losing...whatever this murder attempt was.

The sound stopped.

And then the box opened. No one made any noise: neither the creaky old voice nor the dusky kidnapper voice made an appearance. Danny dared to peek.

Above him had circled all of his regular visitors. Dead corpses, all with eerie, slit eyes; all stone still, not-breathing. Not moving. Only watching.

Danny had forgotten how similar he was to them, he thought.

The usual one— dark, lank hair, ash skin, glowing eyes— patted Danny on the forehead. It felt weird. Corpses always felt weird, sure, but they usually didn't feel you up of their own volition.

"Behave," it rasped, and made a shushing gesture.

Danny was fully capable of recognizing his own order.

He shushed.

#i'm very pro danny accidentally adopts a whole bunch of talons previous installments

*

The next day, the body was back.

The green was gone from its eyes, but the awareness wasn't; it spent about an hour watching people go around outside Danny's apartment, which was new behavior. None of the corpses that shadowed him had shown any interest in garden-variety humans before. Now it sat at the window and watched families come home from school or head to their afternoon shifts.

That went into Danny's notes.

After that hour, it taught itself to flush the toilet repeatedly, rearranged the contents of Danny's half-assed linen closet (again) and then stood hovering over the safe where Danny had stashed the ectoplasm.

"...Okay," said Danny.

The dead body croaked. It was a new sound, but there was no context for it. Danny just kind of...wrote it down and hoped for the best.

The day after, Danny woke up at a very reasonable ten forty eight in the morning to find stray corpses feeding each other spoonfuls of ectoplasm in the kitchen.

At that point he kind of had to throw out the notes on how much each one was dosed with, because what the fuck.

"Really?!" Danny shouted, spooking the bodies into fleeing behind chairs and doors and back into his closet again. The only one that didn't flee was Danny's ringmaster corpse of the hour, of course. "You really couldn't wait??"

It stuck out a withered black tongue out at the mortician, who was, really, the victim in all of this. A victim to his parents' whims and a victim to the dead people who followed him around all the time.

This was how Danny found out that, when it doubt, the corpses could just tear through solid steel if they were motivated enough. The finger-marks were so deep and so embedded that they actually looked more like rough claws in the metal.

Great.

Danny ordered a new locking cage for the fridge on Prime and darted off to work. One of his regulars was on the table, though, so Danny just ended up doing what he would have at home— sewing up a gash in its neck and reattaching dead fingers back onto dead stumps.

On the third day, in which four of Danny's frequent fliers had learned from the first how to flush the toilet (and therefore raise the water bill immensely) Danny got a ring from a dark voice he (almost) recognized.

"Is he here?"

Danny squinted, jerking the phone further under his ear as he whipped up some scrambled eggs. The dead girl leaning over his shoulder leaned a little closer to watch the egg froth up. "Is who here? Who is this?"

"This is Batman. Is— the body requisitioned from your facility currently at your place of residence?"

Danny fully let go of the whisk. It landed haphazardly in the glass bowl he'd been stirring in. "What on Earth is a Batman?" he asked, incredulous.

"I visited your workplace previously."

Oh! "Yeah, the cop's friend. I remember now." Danny pulled the whisk out of the liquid eggs and held it out to the body. The unusually animate cadaver mostly prodded the whisk wires and paid no attention to him. "No one's here but me, though. Not that it's your business...?"

"And there are no non-living bodies currently in your apartment?"

Danny ignored the flushing noise in the other room. "I don't know, dude. They practically live in the walls at this point. Don't come over unless you have a warrant."

The call ended with a click.

His omelette turned out amazing, by the way. In case you were wondering.

On the fourth day, the ectoplasm was gone, because the corpses had apparently all taught each other how to lockpick the container in the fridge.

"Okay, some of that was meant to be my dinner. No more lotion at the funeral home now, okay? Now you all can be ashy forever. I'm so serious," Danny complained to the only visible dead person in the room.

The dead person held up a cracked egg. It was probably a gesture of peace, but now there was egg on his vinyl flooring to deal with. And. It wasn't exactly all that comforting in the end.

On the fifth day, Danny awoke to the sensation of a hand jamming itself through his neck until it punched into the mattress beneath him.

Fuck.