#I'm very pro Danny accidentally adopts a whole bunch of talons

[faeriekit]

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

The whole fic on ao3

[faeriekit]

#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.

[faeriekit]

“So what is it?” Danny asked, his apartment phone tucked under his ear. In the corner, the corpse that followed him home from work was busily inspecting his bluetooth speaker. It wasn’t all that interesting an item to investigate, but hey, to each its own.

“I was hoping you knew, sweetie!” Mom said cheerfully, her voice all static and warmth through the phone. “Nothing of the hair sample you gave us tested of anything other than genuine, grade-A human DNA! I think you stumbled onto something entirely new, sweetie!”

“Oh, well, great,” Danny sighed. “Just what I needed; to pioneer new ground in a field I don’t work in.”

Mom’s laugh echoed through the phone line. “Don’t worry, sweetheart! We can take care of the hard stuff; feel free to send us any of your observations or any samples you take, and we can get everything organized together for submission. I’m thinking Geist Journal, Spooks-R-Us…?”

“How about Weird New Jersey? That one’s local.”

Mom made a thoughtful noise. “Good thinking, sweetie! I have a gift for you too, sweetie; I just sent over a baker’s dozen vials of ectoplasm.”

Danny frowned into the phone. Somewhere across his apartment, another body had managed to climb its way onto the couch and was now…staring at him. Yeesh. “I thought I wasn’t due?” he asked, making full on eye contact with the corpse, lest it fall and break something, or, like, keep climbing up his wall.

“Oh no; you’re fine! I was thinking more if you wanted to introduce it to them, see how they react to a new substance…” Mom tried to appeal, wheedling her way into what she probably hoped was a new scientific breakthrough.

Danny rolled his eyes. Experimenting on the bodies he saw at work with a rare and borderline supernatural substance, and on top of that, doing so in Gotham? Danny would be risking rehabilitation in Arkham in twenty minutes flat. “I’ll think about it, Mom,” Danny deadpanned.

It wasn’t a lie. He would think about it. Just…in the negative.

“I’m glad,” Mom cooed. “Anyway, your father and I have dinner reservations at Shellfish station tonight! Your father insists that it’s haunted, but I think it’s actually the house a few feet down off the river. They haven’t banned us there yet, so wish us luck!”

“Bye, Mom,” Danny said, warm with good conversation. “Tell me how it goes. Say hi to Dad for me.”

“Will do! And who knows, maybe you’ll see us in the papers!”

Well. Danny probably would. He hung up and set the phone back down; the corpse he hadn’t been watching left the room. Which. Whatever. It could do what it wanted. The one on his couch came down to shadow him as Danny went to the table, and…

“Hey!” Danny shouted, startling the one next to him. “Did you peel all the rubber pads off my speaker?”

The body in the other room said nothing.

“I needed those!”

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

[faeriekit]

"So, uh," said Danny's boss, glancing down at the cctv monitor, and then back to Danny, and then back to the monitor again. "Would you like to explain...this?"

Danny? He wanted Danny to explain what's going on? "Oh no— this never happened in my town. Why don't you explain to me why Gotham's dead people just—" he gestured angrily to the monitor— "Get up sometimes?!"

"Well," wearily went Mr. Graves. And then: "Hm."

Please. As if this had anything to do with Danny. It wasn't his fault they kept breaking into his workplace...lurking on their ceiling...dragged back by the mortuary at the hospital, again... That coroner's probably going to start asking questions about the same bodies they bring over and over again sooner or later.

(Danny's not looking forward to that conversation either.)

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

[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.

[halfblackwolfdemon]

I would love more, please! This is such a fun premise and your execution (as always) if fucking phenomenally amazing!

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

[faeriekit]

I mean damn I have the whole fic if you want it

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

[faeriekit]

“Fenton!” Mr. Graves hollered from his office upstairs. Danny, who’d been halfway through a peanut butter and banana sandwich, chewed and swallowed.

“What?”

“The police are here!” the Funeral Home director yelled back, apparently done for the day. It wasn’t as if they could scream across the building when there were grieving families in the building.

“So?”

“So they want to talk to you!”

Danny sighed, and set his sandwich aside for later. He sure hoped whoever was the last one on the slab he was borrowing had been wiped up after, or else his sandwich was about to taste nasty. “Tell them to get down here, then!” Danny called back, and hopped off the stretcher to roll his sandwich straight into cold storage.

His lunch would be fine. Probably.

And you know what? Danny was perfectly prepared for the red-headed cop to come down with a notepad and a badge and a big brown overcoat, but he fully hadn’t considered the implications of the guy following after him in a big black cape and body armor.

“Uh,” said Danny, weirded out beyond belief. “There’s a…there’s a…guy behind you.”

The cop jerked backwards to look. And then, for some reason, the guy relaxed at the sight of the most tactical cosplay Danny’s ever seen, ever. “Nah. He’s with me. You never heard of Batman before?”

Danny squinted What the hell was a Batman?

“You’re new to Gotham, aren’cha’.”

“I got this job four months ago…?”

The police detective clicked his pen. “Close enough. Listen. We need to see the John Doe you got in a few hours ago; we have to confirm the case number on the tag for an ongoing investigation. You mind letting us see the body?”

Uh oh. That was one of Danny’s…regulars. “Uh, yeah… One sec.”

Danny wiped his hands down on his apron. He walked down the line of freezers, reaching out for the handle—

“Wait,” said the big, spooky, armored furry in the corner, and wow, was his voice dark. “The body was assigned a different freezer number.”

“Yeah,” Danny admitted, and kept his hand on the freezer he had been reaching for. “I had to move it earlier.”

“Why?”

There wasn’t really a polite way to say your named corpse has preferred freezer it likes to hang out in without sounding like an absolute idiot, so Danny just shrugs. “‘Cause.”

“And you didn’t make a note of it?”

Danny frowned. “I was going to correct the paperwork after lunch. You guys interrupted me in the middle. It’s in here.”

…The cop and his giant black bat of a— friend? Coworker? …More than friends?— exchanged glances, but eventually the cop motioned for him to continue opening the storage door and wheel out their dead guy.

Fine. Finally. Danny wheeled the stretcher out, double-checked his toe tag just for redundancy purposes, and hissed as quietly as he could in the body’s ear: “Behave.”

The body, obligingly, didn’t move. Good. Maybe this would go smoothly, and everything would be totally normal and nothing would happen. “Alright, here it is. Tell me when you’re done so I can put it back.”

The cop and his pal ignored him. Whatever. Danny wheeled his sandwich back out of cold storage, grabbed it off the table, and started eating it again, because what else was he supposed to do?

And, sure, it was kind of weird to see the cop and his friend poke and prod a body Danny knew was aware and sentient, if perhaps not as visibly sapient as Danny himself was. Dead things were weird sometimes. The bodies that swarmed to him always set off his ghost sense, but never enough to actually form the freezing fog in his mouth; it was a cold mouthful of air and quiet awareness, and little else.

But they came. In their quiet moments, they stayed. And in this mortuary room perfectly kept to Danny’s most comfortable fifty degree climate, Danny watched the police guy and his buddy analyze Danny’s most recent stitch job with blue surgical gloves and stainless steel tools.

Everything went perfectly well until Danny sneezed. The cop and the armored guy both kept their attention to their task (although the police guy at least muttered something polite), but the body looked over with its big gold eyes to the source of the sudden sound.

The two men froze. Danny wiped his nose with his sleeve.

“Sorry,” he muttered , embarrassed and a little hoarse. “Allergen season. I’m fine; go back to resting up.”

The corpses, whatever they were, were endlessly obedient. The body turned its head back to its sleeping position and closed its eyes and didn't breathe, which was very convincing, but probably not convincing enough for people who’d just seen it move on its own around zero seconds ago.

“...What,” said the armored furry, voice flat as a rock.

“They’re—” Danny shrugged. “I keep trying to tell them not to freak people out like that, sorry. Last week the little one almost gave the gravedigging crew a heart attack when it popped up out of the coffin a little too early. Harris wouldn’t stop yelling at me over the phone for something like twenty minutes.” You’d think a guy would have something better to do than scream at a random mortician over the line for something that was explicitly their problem once it left Danny's tender mercies.

The cop looked at the cloaked guy. The cloaked guy looked at the cop. “And they are…?” the police investigator asked, almost politely.

Danny shrugged loudly. “What do I know, dude? I just work here. Sometimes the bodies I work on start wiggling as soon as I let go. That’s not my problem.”

The way that the two stared at him implied that they thought that yes, it was Danny’s problem, but that wasn’t his problem either!

Danny took a bit ol’ bite out of his peanut butter sandwich, crossed his legs on the cold stretcher beneath him, chewed, and swallowed.

On the open stretcher, the body clicked its tongue.

“I’m not feeding you, dude,” Danny declared. “You can’t even digest it. It’s just going to sit around until you throw it up, and then guess who’ll have to clean it up?”

The cop made a weird strangled noise, but the correct answer was Danny, that’s who.

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

[faeriekit]

I'm working on it gimme a minute

#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.

[faeriekit]

The big armored dude stood all the way to his full height, which meant that his little helmet ears dug into the corrugated cardboard tiles of the funeral home ceiling. Yikes. "This...body will be taken into custody for further investigation."

Uh. Hm. There's paperwork for that. "Pretty sure that's illegal, dude," Danny pointed out, because who the hell is this guy? "I can't just like...give it to you. Are you, like, the next of kin...?"

The cloaked dude started radiating a huge aura of rage and despair.

Danny was not going to touch that with a ten foot pole.

"...To clarify, my friend here is a consultant on this case," the cop awkwardly explained in the thick silence. "The body is currently evidence in an investigation, and will be taken into police custody for the time being."

Danny shoved the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, made a Time Out T with his hands, chewed, and swallowed. "You want," he tried, careful not to talk too much too quickly lest he burp in front of the police guy and his supervillain-looking buddy, "You want me to box this dead guy back up, load him onto the truck, and send the corpse back to the morgue at the police station...?"

"It'll be safer than having it remain here."

Danny looked at the dead body, continuing to remain dead on its stainless steel slab. It remained as it was before: mostly inanimate.

"...Okay." Danny pretended that made sense. "I mean. You know. Wear your PPE and all that. It's not, like, dangerous."

The giant guy in black made some sort of expression behind his mask, which totally ate any visible facial movements. "We'll keep that in mind."

"Alrighty." Looked like he needed to get this guy's pine book back out from recycling. He hopped off the table, meandered over to the dead guy, and gently patted its cold face. Poor dead guy. "See you in a week, dude. Behave for the furry in tactical gear."

The guy bravely did not react to Danny's comment. Very stoic. "It will not be returning here."

Bold statement. Danny pulled his hand back and crinkled his nose. "Two weeks, then."

And the cop and the furry drove off in their big ol' car with the body in tow, out into the gross gray sunset of Gotham. Alright. That ended Danny's work for the night. He updated the paperwork on one Mr. John Doe, wiped down the freezer table with some good-old-fashioned alcohol wipes, and called a spade a spade. His walk home was only a little more ominous than usual. He could still spot the shadows of the remaining living dead skulking on rooftops and fire escapes.

To no one's surprise, and very smugly, Danny's missing corpse wiggled through a hole in his window screen a week and a half later. It landed hard on the floor, stood up, and stalked off into Danny's bedroom without a word. Danny was doubtlessly going to find all of his blankets and pillows rearranged in his closet and other evidence of nesting, but.

Well.

Whatever made them comfier, Danny supposed.

Still, he'd better prepare for a pretty big wash load soon. Almost none of them knew how to wipe up before they went indoors, and Danny really wasn't looking forward to Gotham muck all over his previously nice-and-cozy winter blanket stash.

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

[faeriekit]

The package arrived in a heavy styrofoam container. It was already on Danny's kitchen table when Danny had gotten home, which either meant he'd been reverse-robbed or one of the dead people who hung out in his home had figured out what packages were.

So. Optimistic it was the first.

Inside it, though, was everything Mom had promised; a pan of Dad's maple-and-walnut fudge, a couple disposable ice packs, a fuzzily developed photo of Cujo Mom had managed to capture, and thirteen-or-so vials of ectoplasm.

There was also a cheap pen Mom had clearly knocked in with her elbow or something as she packed. Score for Danny.

So the first, initial problem arose when Danny first looked up from the open box, ready to set the fudge on the kitchen counter, only to have eight dead people gathered around him and peering into the box. Danny, reasonably, jumped. "Jesus Christ on a cracker—! What the hell?!"

They didn't respond. One's head tilted— probably just to hear him better; it seemed to rely more on its right than its left.

"Back, all a'you. Quit crowding me." Danny shooed them aside. A few obliged and took a step back. "Damn it. Is it the fudge or the ectoplasm?"

No one answered.

Danny set the fudge on the counter. No one moved.

Danny waited.

For a few silent minutes, no one moved. The clock on the microwave was the only marker of time passing in the move.

...One body slowly reached a hand into the styrofoam container.

"COME ON," Danny shouted to no one in particular, entirely fed up with the understanding that experimenting on the stray corpses in his apartment the way his mother wanted him to was probably inevitable. The bodies fled to different boltholes throughout his apartment with eerie synchronicity.

Fine. Fine. Danny would turn into his parents and give these random dead people a sample of supernatural evil scientist ghost goo and see what happened. If this was something they want to engage with, who was Danny, their only somewhat human constant, to stop them??

There was no point in being sloppy, though. Danny pulled one, single vial out of the styrofoam shipping container. He locked the rest in his apartment safe. He found a tablespoon measure that wasn't chipped or warped from the dishwasher, measured out exactly to the top, and no farther, and found a notepad that wasn't totally used up with a shopping list to take notes on.

Danny held out the spoon. He waited.

...One of the corpses peeked its head in through the doorway to hallway. It's expression was endlessly neutral, as always.

Danny huffed. "Well? Anyone volunteering?"

The head disappeared. A different body walked out from behind it— the same one that had been nabbed by the cops last weekend, Danny was pretty sure.

He didn't move. Danny didn't really want to encourage or discourage this behavior when it came down to the final decision.

—The body opened up chapped lips to expose its dry, desiccated tongue and throat. Yeesh. Danny's been in there four times with the jaw-securing mouth, but the wrinkled tongue is a new and horrible sight.

It took the ectoplasm from the spoon.

Danny exhaled.

The body blinked its gol— green eyes, with its black slits dilating for light levels that weren't actually in the room. It didn't leave. Didn't flinch. It just...blinked.

Wait. Had it been blinking before?

"You good?" Danny asked hesitantly. The dead things were all generally the same in behavior and understanding, but...it was something fully capable of moving and making minor choices and observations. Danny didn't actually want to hurt it.

It looked at him. Not just in Danny's direction. At him.

...And it went to the window, squeezed its way through the open gap, and fled off into the pale afternoon sunlight.

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

[faeriekit]

Next part is available here.

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

[faeriekit]

Everyone look at this again, I command it

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.

[faeriekit]

tumblr is hiding the coolest of memes from me??

#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.

[faeriekit]

Danny was back to work the next day, because, you know. What else was he going to do to make money.

The dead people came in and out of his apartment on the regular for weeks afterwards, and some followed him to and from work, but oddly enough they stopped appearing on his table on from Danny's impromptu kidnapping stint.

Strange, Danny thought, actively mixing different colors of mortuary paint on with a palette knife as a corpse peered over his shoulder, But not overly so.

Stories started appearing in the newspapers—things Danny had no context of beyond Rich People Get Arrested! and such scandals, but the reports were enough that Mr. Graves and the day shift  mortician could not stop talking about it between funeral preparations for the Honorable Judge Yerkins, who had passed away a few nights ago.

Weird, but alright.

Mom and Dad published a brief article on the various manifestations and known behaviors of “The Gotham Ghoul” in their state-wide paranormal magazine, despite Danny being unable to get a good picture of the dead people digging through his clean laundry basket, or microwaving his leftovers on repeat thirty second bursts until they burnt, or using up the last of his lotion when Danny wasn’t looking, or lockpicking his stuff again despite being asked not to touch the things in his bedroom.

And Danny was just fine with his life as it was, teaching the dead people how to make macaroni and cheese and how to dial Mom if they got bored and needed human company, when one of the dead guys came through the window with a whole child under its arm.

Danny gawked, spoon in hand. The corpses that had been moments ago peering into the pot quickly bolted in every direction. “What is that?! Did you steal someone’s kid?!”

The corpse whistled one long, cheery note, and held the squirming child out in front of him. “Baby!” the body rasped, which was not one of its usual vocab words.

“Let me go!!” the boy protested, which was fair.

“That’s not a baby! That’s, like , a preteen!” Danny protested, and then realized there were more important concerns to be verbalized. “Why did you steal a preteen?!”

“Baby!” the undead man protested again, and shoved the boy even closer to Danny. The boy tried to make a valiant escape, but, uh. Preteen versus the walking undead was a pretty one-sided fight.

The preteen said a very bad word. Danny gawked.

“…Alright,” Danny said, fully out of deescalation techniques and getting more exhausted by the second. “If you put him at the table, you can watch him eat macaroni. Kid, are you allergic to macaroni?”

The kid said another swearword, which Danny probably should have expected, but the dead guy also promptly sat the preteen down in a chair and loomed over the kid, which was more ominous than anything else.

Danny sighed. Danny finished the macaroni. Danny plated himself a bowl and a bowl for the teenager, who was in a really weird gymnastics unitard with a cape and mask, which. Okay. Looked kind of cold, considering the season. Danny also gave him a spoon, which seemed less encouraging of stabbing behavior than the fork he usually ate macaroni with.

The kid ate his macaroni and glared the whole time. “Are you evil?”

“…No,” said Danny. What was with people and thinking morticians were evil? He just got paid by the hour, man.

“Then why are you getting followed by a whole bunch of Talons, then?”

The dead man’s face scrunched up. Danny’s expression probably matched its, to be honest. “What’s a talon? Like a…claw?”

“No.”

“Alright…? Do you want any garlic powder with your macaroni?”

“No,” the kid said, as if horribly offended. “…Can I have some chili powder, though?”

“Yeah, whatever. It’s your dinner.” Danny went and got it for him, and after a fierce dousing, he and the kid went back to eating under the oppressive weight of the dead guy determined to hold the kid prisoner.

The kid finished his macaroni, which led to the dead man bodily lifting up this kid and dragging him over to Danny’s bedroom, which was not behavior to encourage, and now Danny was going to have to wash his sheets again.

…Or stop the dead guy from putting the kid in the blanket nest in the closet, apparently. “THE COUCH. Do not hold kids hostage in my bedroom closet! You’re not supposed to be in my bedroom closet!! You can hang out on the couch or you can put him back where you found him!”

The corpse blew a raspberry. Horrible new behavior exhibited!! Danny was 100% going to cut back on their unsupervised TV time.

Danny pointed into the living area. “Couch. Now. Or I’m deleting your spotify playlist with all the Lady Gaga on it.”

Apparently this threat was enough. The body testily swung the boy it had been previously trying to suffocate under blankets up under its arms, pointed itself towards the couch, and stalked off.

And you know what. If the dead guy and the kid proceed to wrestle their feelings out on the couch as various dead people peered in from darkened corners. Well. Danny probably should do something about it.

The thing he decided to do was put on Love Island and call it a night. “Budge over,” he demanded.

The dead body budged. It made the boy budge. The three sat on the couch and watched reality television reruns until a Little Women adaptation came on.

“You alright with that?”

The boy shrugged. His eyes did something weird under his mask. “I’salright.”

“Cool. Tell me if you want me to change it. You are getting kidnapped in my house, after all. Least I can do is  make sure the TV doesn’t suck.”

“Can you tell this guy to let me go, then?” the preteen huffed, leaned on even further by the dead guy. “He’s getting a little too comfy with me.”

Danny frowned. Flapped a hand. “Personal space,” he demanded.

The body didn’t budge.

“You’re making him uncomfortable. Move.”

The body rolled over, and rolled its eyes; moreover it proceeded to only trap the kid with a single leg and nothing more.

No more complaints came beyond a plaintive: “Do we have any popcorn?”

The preteen was taking this really well, honestly. Danny was kind of baffled. He’d never been this calm when Vlad kidnapped him for an Attempted Stepfather/Stepson Weekend. “...Sure, kid.”

Movie night was cool, and the living and somewhat-living people had popcorn, and the oddly-dressed preteen was very knowledgeable on what made this a horrible Little Women adaptation considering Alcott’s original intention, actually, and Danny was mostly down for just waiting out however long it took for the dead man who stole this child to get bored by the whole idea and walk off when there was a knock at the window.

…Danny looked at the window.

On the other side of the window was a man in all black armor, and—ah, dammit. It was the bat dude again.

The preteen perked up even as the undead pinning him down hissed at the intruder. Danny was mostly done with the whole situation.

So. He meandered over and cracked open the window. “Didn’t I tell you not to show up here?”

The weird white lenses in the man’s mask barely blinked. “Didn’t you die?”

“Yeah, dude, all the time. That’s not the point, though.”

“That’s my ride!!” the preteen hollered from behind him, which made a little more sense. Danny was mostly baffled.

Danny twisted around. “Your ride’s a…heavily armored dude with little earsies on his mask?” Danny asked the preteen behind him, who made more of an effort to leap up off the couch. Unfortunately, the dead guy sitting basically on top of him still had a good grip on his cape. The boy bounced back onto the couch with a snarl.

“The ears are for bettering public opinion!” the kid shouted back.

…Danny examined the earsies with more scrutiny this time. “I don’t think they’re working,” he admitted.

“Your opinion is noted,” the man said. And then pushed Danny out the way of his own window and crawled inside his apartment.

What the hell.

On the other hand, the deeply armored dude with no sense of personal boundaries seemed perfectly willing to wrangle the preteen out from underneath Danny’s most popular and outgoing corpse friend, so maybe Danny shouldn’t interfere. They seemed fine. Mostly. Everyone was holding their own. On the other, other hand, though, it was about to be Danny’s bedtime, and he had to actually make it to the grocery store tomorrow morning. He’d promised to teach all the lingering dead people how to make oobleck after shift.

Tall, dark and brooding came back with the preteen boy in tights under one arm and the dead man (in Danny’s Chicago Aquarium tee he’d gotten as a gift when he was nine, now worn as a crop top) hauled over his other shoulder. Danny…stared.

“What are your babysitting rates?” asked the armored man, deathly serious.

“…A hundred an hour,” Danny made up on the spot. “But I work nights. No availability. Sorry.”

The man grunted. He hardly moved—his fingers twitched to stop the preteen from pickpocketing his electric yellow belt pouches, but he moved no more than that. “I will reach out to you about weekends. …As you were.”

And then the man. Just. Dove out the window. Preteen and corpse and all.

…Danny locked the window after them. It probably would never stop anyone from bothering him ever again, but at least he tried, you know?

#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.

[faeriekit]

I like to think she adds a gentle golf clap to their repertoire. Danny has no idea where the behavior comes from but sometimes she'll start clapping reflexively and they all start mimicking her and Danny's just: "????"

"Okay." Danny slowly laid the already cold body back onto the table, ready to slide back it into the refuge of cold storage. "Okay. Dead guy. Stay there."

The body didn't move.

"Fantastic. Now. Hang out while I pour the embalming fluid into the pump, alright? It should only be a minute."

And it usually did; working in a funeral home wasn't extremely glamorous, but it paid the bills, and Danny had already been used to the rhyme and rhythm of negotiating death with the public by the time he sent in his mortuary school application. It had been a transition that made sense. And in the end, the degree had only cost him a few extra years post-graduation and a little dig into student loans, and now Danny had a stable 12-8 job and health insurance valid in the state of new jersey.

Today, though, the pump had that decided enough was enough. With a bang and a boom, the pump spat out a cloud of smoke and clunked uncomfortably.

The dead body sat up.

Danny scrambled over to push it back down. "No. We talked about this. Dead people don't move. If you want to stay here and have me put you back together all the time, you have to stay put. Got it?"

Whatever the weird gold-eye corpses were on in Gotham, they at least listened to him on occasion. They weren't ghosts, per se— they never pinged on any of the ghost detection devices Mom and Dad had packed in his going-away-to-college bag— but they were, despite being occasionally animate, perfectly deceased.

Weird. Danny had never gotten used to it. Still, they came in droves, too eager to sit on the top of the basement stairwell and lurk in the corners and stare endlessly at them with their weird, avian eyes, and sometimes they heralded the arrival similarly weird-ass bodies that had lost their heads or their arms or their limbs through the more conventional channels.

"I'm losing too much thread to all y'all coming in all the time," Danny complained to the dead body, who, at the moment, was the only person present to blame. "Stop getting your limbs cut off. This stuff is expensive, you know. It's a specialty order."

The body didn't even have the courtesy to blink. Rude.

"At least let them bury you this time. Every time one of you darts off when my back's turned, my boss thinks I'm stealing corpses. My coworkers think I'm building my own Frankenstein or something."

The corpse neither verbalized nor blinked, but Danny hadn't expected it to; with a sigh, he rolled the corpse back into cold storage, locked its little door (not that locking it in had ever stopped it) and called it quits for the night.

It's not like anyone was paying him for the extra hours anyway.