#tw death scene

[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

[a-scary-lack-of-common-sense]

Part 2/2

By the time Stanley had realized he wasn't as alone as he believed himself to be entrapped in this ravenous abyss; he had honestly begun to suspect that he was finally starting to properly lose his mind.

In all the ceaseless miles that Stanley had journeyed during his apparent permanent residence within the dark devouring void, not once had he encountered another conscious, walking, talking being similar to himself. Every other formerly living creature that he had crossed paths with had been so... silent. Empty. Dead, in every sense of the word. It was as though the very essence of life itself had been sucked out of their bodies with a straw, their forms slowly falling apart piece by piece under the vicious gluttony of the darkness that surrounded them. They looked like they actually were supposed to be there, unmoving and comatose, unlike him.

So, when Stanley first began to encounter the twins, all of a sudden, he wasn't the only one in the dark.

When meeting the first pair of them, he found himself standing in a lake.

He hadn't even noticed the changes at first. It felt as though he had been walking for weeks on end, his body moving purely on autopilot and his aching legs leading him towards a destination only it knew. A thick fog of forgetfulness and flickering memories had descended upon his brain like a heavy blanket of numbing static as he had traveled. In this absentminded state, he hadn't even realized that the ever-present undulating, buzzing darkness surrounding him had begun to gradually shift and morph to form a horizon line; stretching into tall looming cliffsides that almost seemed to close in on him. Once the nonexistent floor beneath his soles abruptly began to ripple and warp, like the disturbed surface of a shallow puddle; only then did he finally notice his transformed environment.

The transition was seamless, almost dream-like. One moment, he was still surrounded by that filthy, overwhelming abyss; and the next, his boots were suddenly plunged deep into the cold, dark lake water.

The silence didn't leave, however. It still choked and stuffed its way into Stanley's ears to clog up his mind with thick cotton; the eerie quiet not quite matching the calm, almost serene scenery the void seemed to have abruptly transformed itself into. Like a movie with its sound cut off; leaving only the unsettling hum of the projector to fill the empty air.

It was odd. The lake was surely incredibly deep. He could obviously tell from how thin and pathetically small the shores appeared all the way from where he now unceremoniously stood in the middle of the lake. Stan could look down and see the darkness below his feet swallow what meager light that managed to break through the murky waters. The overwhelming black almost seemed to beckon him, gaping and haunting; a bottomless underwater pit of pitch black that never seemed to end.

And yet, he didn't sink. Stanley remained perfectly level, the almost ink like waters stopping just at ankle level, as though he were held up just above the surface by some invisible force. Even the writhing waves seemed small and low, as though the waters were shy to climb up his legs further than that. It was odd, so very odd.

However, it wasn't nowhere near as odd as the sight that greeted him when he finally lifted his eyes from the waters.

Stanley had crossed paths with truly unbelievable sights in this strange somewhere; from bursting, collapsing stars; to the imploding heat death of entire universes, but none of them seemed to hold the candle to what he saw then when he lifted his eyes:

Children.

Two, to be exact. Two, nearly identical looking children stood motionless before him; completely soaked through to the bone as though they had taken a plunge into the frigid water that pooled around their ankles. It was a girl and a boy, both adorned with twin expressions utterly devoid of emotion, their wide eyed stare seeming to burn holes into his thin jacket. Their drenched clothes sagged off of their scrawny frames; thin rivulets of water dirpping off of them and disturbing the glassy surface of the water at their feet. The little girl's hair had messily stuck to her face in thin sodden strands, her cheeks still full and round with youth just like the boy's. They looked young. Too young to be in a place such as this.

Oh, but their eyes; their eyes.

They burned with such anger; such injustice, brighter than any dying star or galaxies he had ever seen. Anger towards the world, to fate, to whatever cruel deity that had deemed them fit to be sent to this wretched place so prematurely. They were too young to be here; to be entrapped like he was amongst this hungry darkness. And yet, here they were, sheer denial against their own untimely deaths being the only thing keeping them awake and conscious amongst the dead and rotting. A show of juvenile defiance to nature itself so vehement even the all-consumign darkness seemed hesitant to devour them whole just yet.

It saddened him. It saddened him to know that they belonged there, that they were supposed to be there. He could see it, he could feel it; they were dead. No amount of determination could deny that universal fact.

When they spoke, Stanley could hear anger:

Stan chuckled in a futile attempt to lighten the suddenly heavy atmosphere that threatened to crush him whole. "A lake monster? You kids and your imagination," he teased, hoping to somehow rid the poor kids of the haunted look that seemed to whirl in their glares. No child should have been burdened with such a knowing look; such eyes that looked like they had seen everything there was to see about the world, the horrid and the good.

Clearly, it had been the wrong thing to say, and Stanley's faux pas was rewarded with a scowl from the little boy. A world's worth of sour contempt etched into every contorted groove that his grimace seemed to dig into his much too young face. Stan suddenly felt guilt squeeze at his weary bones for having caused that.

"That's what they all said," the boy spat out, eyes shining with a sheen of wetness Stan wasn't sure he was prepared to deal with.

Stan left that first interaction with the twins with the feeling of guilt and sorrow still clining to him.

He couldn't have known, at the time. He couldn't have known that this wouldn't be anywhere near the last time that he would meet the pair. He hadn't realised just how many of them there were. After that first pair, his endless journeying within the Abyss was hardly be spent alone anymore. Countless more times, he came face to face with the exact same two young and impossibly worn faces; forced to meet one pair of beaten and bruised kids after another.

Not one pair had died the same death as another. Some had gotten lost, prey to whatever threat that had snatched them up out in the open; some had fallen from high up; some had been crushed under an incredible weight; some had burned; some eaten alive; some zombified. Some didn't even seem physically harmed at all, body perfectly intact, and yet that same faraway, distrubed look in their eyes remained.

He thought the worst ones were the ones he found alone. A little girl or a little boy, left all lonesome without their other half there. Twins, he remembered a pair of them telling him once.

Once, he had come across a town full of silent, stone statues. It was a rustic, shabby, almost nostalgic looking town- odd and strangely familiar. The sight of it had tugged at an aged memory that had long since wasted away in the back of his mind. It was serene, almost deceptively so. The sun shone; the air smelled crisp and fresh; numerous waterfalls continued to crash down from the tall cliffsides; and a soft nonexistent breeze whistled through the thicket of pine trees that blanketed the outskirts of the town. None of it seemed to match the gruesome scene of the hundred wailing statues that littered every inch of the town.

He had found the boy's statue on the other side of town, deep within the green forest and toppled over the gnarled roots of a towering tree. Like the rest of the townsfolk, he too, was frozen mid-shriek; his stone face twisted and contorted into a mock impression of a silent scream as his body lay paused in a writhing struggle. He made sure to be gentle when he carried the boy's statue over to place it beside the girl's, whose statue stood far deeper into the forest, sporting the same rictus grimace of terror as her brother's. It somehow felt wrong for them to have been so far apart from one another, even in death.

He had come to dread meeting of the twins. He hated every second he had to confront yet another pair of dead children that did not belong here, but fate had decided they did. He despised having to listen to their tales of woe as they wept about the injustice of the world, of having died young; he despised himself for being unable to do more than weep with them.

"We don't belong here, Grunkle Stan," he would listen to the little girl weep, calling him a title he didn't recognize. He never remembered if they had ever told him their name, but they all seem to know his, without a fail. "If we're dead, then what about you? What about Grunkle Ford? Mom? Dad? What about them? We can't be dead, we can't be," they would say, confusion and frustration written all over their faces. They didn't understand. They didn't understand why they had come to the darkness so early, so unfairly.

He never knew what to say, he'd never been good with words.

All he could do was kneel down to their levels and engulf them in his arms, hoping he could somehow squeeze the pain straight out of their bodies in his embrace. He hugged them, because what else could he do?

[spadillelicious]

Sunhinged? This guy is no longer connected to the doorframe! /ref

[smoker00182726271615262]

Dracula

[divineandmajesticinone]

VAN HELSING (2004) dir. Stephen Sommers

[startreklesbian]

MONKEY MAN 2024, dir. Dev Patel

[kondietorei]

IF A TREE FALLS IN THE FOREST AND NO ONE IS AROUND TO HEAR IT, DOES IT MAKE A SOUND?

[motrothi]

Catelyn Holding Robb

I was listening to "I Have Never Loved Someone" by My Brightest Diamond, and it made me sad about them. Go listen if you'd like to be sad too.

[audliminal]

Survivability Bias Pt 3

Masterpost

Content warning: This chapter involves depiction of a train derailment and subsequent fire throughout. There is also brief mention of death. I will be putting a brief summary in the description if you prefer not to read this part.

Danny jolts up from his fitful sleep. He’s intangible and invisible before he’s even fully sitting up and he’s in the air before he registers the loud boom that woke him. Any concerns about his bright transformation are made totally irrelevant by the warning sirens blaring in his head.

Wait, no. Those are real sirens.

In the distance, lights are now accompanying the sirens; flashing as they speed down what looks like main street. It’s pretty clear where they’re going too, from the violent orange glow cascading over the tops of the nearby buildings.

I knew it, Danny thinks, flying towards whatever disaster is unfolding. probably it’s stupid to get involved, when he still knows so little about this place, but- well, old habits die hard. It doesn’t take long for the problem to become obvious, and Danny freezes as he struggles to process the scene before him.

The metal carnage is nothing like Danny’s ever seen before; what looks to be a freight train has derailed at the worst possible location, sending its cars careening into the various apartment buildings and stores on the east side of town, and to make matters worse, one of them has clearly crashed straight into the gas station by the freeway, and fire is spreading faster than Danny could have imagined.

Danny can already see two buildings blazing, but he quickly focuses his attention towards the carnage of the train itself. Luckily it’s fairly obvious what direction it was headed, and Danny moves fast, looking for the engine. In ghost form, physical sensations always feel a little more distant but even through that, Danny can feel his heart rabbiting in his chest. Luckily it takes less than a minute to find the engine, but as he approaches it, the presence of death catches in his throat, and he immediately knows it’s a lost cause.

He can’t sense any actual ghosts, though, so instead Danny whips around to stare at the derailed cars. He’s far more used to fighting than he is rescues, but he can hardly just ignore the possibility of people trapped, so he carefully begins phasing through the wreckage, searching and listening for signs of anyone. Already, people are starting to gather outside; both those who were nearby and those who have managed to escape on their own, and Danny is careful to maintain his invisibility as he works. 

Danny’s made it through about half the wreck by the time he spots the firetrucks arriving, he’s pretty certain that nobody’s trapped under any of the cars, and he’s also thinking more clearly. The fire has also gotten worse now, and Danny watches as fully equipped firefighters spill out onto the street, already jumping to work as the fire chief shouts out orders. Some rush to start battling the flames, but others head towards the crowd.

They’re getting headcounts, Danny realizes. It seems so obvious in retrospect, but of course, Danny would have to be visible to check with anyone. And now that they’re here, anything he tries to do in secret would probably just make things harder. There is, of course, an easy solution to that, but- Danny has yet to find any evidence that all the meta stuff is anything but propaganda.

Even as Danny considers the dilemma, he knows what he’s going to do. He’s survived danger before, after all, and if he can keep people from assuming ghost, then he’ll have an advantage on them even if it comes to the worst. Besides, there’s that whole great powers-great responsibility thing, so in a way, it’s kind of his responsibility...

Danny floats out of the wreckage before shifting into visibility, figuring it’s probably polite to approach in their field of sight.

“What can I do to help?” Danny asks, causing most of the crowd to stare in shock. Belatedly he realizes he’s still floating, but actually that’s probably a good thing. Makes it clear he’s a meta right off the bat, at least

“New hero, huh? Powerset?” The man responds promptly, leveling Danny with an even gaze. Probably the lack of shock is a good thing. Probably.

“Uh, flight obviously, enhanced strength as well, and um... The ability to turn people and things intangible?” Danny responds promptly. It’s far from his full set, but he figures those are the most relevant, and keeping most of his tricks under his sleeve makes him feel better about what he’s doing.

“Is the fire gonna hurt you? I’m not sending some kid in there to die of third degree burns or smoke inhalation.” The man frowns, giving Danny the distinct feeling he’s not particularly impressed with Danny’s answer.

“Oh! Yeah, no, I’ll be fine! I like, don’t exactly need to breathe? And I’m fine in extreme heat too, so it shouldn’t be a problem...” Danny trails off and the head firefighter narrows his eyes as he tries not to flinch at the assessing look. To Danny’s right, someone shouts and when he turns to look, he sees a firefighter wave their arm and plant some kind of flag before moving on. No longer paying attention to Danny, the chief walks over and speaks to another firefighter. Danny wonders if he’s been dismissed, but before he can do anything, the chief calls out to him.

“Alright kid, you’re up, I guess,” he says, when Danny walks over. “We don’t know how injured he is, so do not move him, but if you’re strong enough to move this stuff fast and safe, that’ll be a damn good help.” He gestures to the twisted mess that Danny’s pretty sure was the edge of a building. 

Danny nods, stepping forward to examine the rubble. The firefighter that spotted the man points to a couple beams.

“Those beams are protecting him from the worst of it right now, but we’ll need to move them in order to get him out, so you gotta make sure that there’s nothing that’ll fall on him him when you move them.” 

“Righty-o,” Danny says, stepping forward to grab the two support beams he’d pointed too. He carefully examines the rubble collapsed around and over it. It’s sort of like a puzzle, he realizes - not quite the same as fixing his parents tech; certainly nothing here is supposed to be smashed together like that, but-

Danny blinks and refocuses. If he  just moves a few things first, he thinks he can get enough cleared away and just intange the beams. He tries to be fast as he does, without forgetting the emphasis the chief had put on safety, and after a few moments, he’s ready to move the beams. He gets into a good position, and then carefully makes them intangible, ready to react if anything bad happens. When nothing does, he carefully pulls them up and away, watching as the waiting firefighters rush in and start to work on actually extracting the guy.

He watches for a bit as a backboard appears and they begin a very slow and careful process of getting the guy onto it.

“Kid,” the chief calls, pulling Danny’s attention away.The chief guides him towards one of the buildings that’s on fire. “Got two people trapped on the third floor here. The stairs are unsafe, so if you can, get yourself up there, locate them, and get them out.”

Danny nods, not waiting for further instruction. He flies up two floors, and goes straight through the wall with his intangibility. The majority of this building isn’t terribly damaged, but one side has collapsed in on itself so if that’s where the stairs were, he can understand the difficulty. The air inside is already thick with smoke, and he quickly stops breathing, belatedly remembering that he’s supposed to not get smoke inhalation. Luckily, it doesn’t take long to catch the sound of voices, and Danny follows it to a room where two people are huddled next to an open window. Right, that’s a smart way to limit the danger of the smoke.

“Rides here!” Danny announces cheerfully, dropping his intangibility. Both people startle as they spot him, but one recovers relatively quickly.

“Him first,” they say, nodding towards their companion, who definitely looks more dazed.

“Right, here we go!” Danny says, stepping forward, and scooping the person up, and wasting no time flying directly through the building, and down to the waiting paramedics. There’s no stretcher currently available, so Danny gently sets them on the ground away from the worst of the smoke, before flying back to get the other person. They’re already standing up, and waste no time in wrapping their arms around his neck as he picks them up and flies them out to the medics as well.

Danny hardly has time to set the person down, before the chief is pulling him away again. They send him in to save a couple other trapped people, but after that, it sounds like everybody is accounted for, because the chief starts focusing all their energy on putting out the fire, rather than just containing it.

Danny is surprised to find himself pulled into helping with this part too. He gets assigned to a fire attack team, and Danny trails along after the two firefighters as the enter the building and begin to fight the fire from the inside.Occasionally, one of them will point at some piece of wall or ceiling and ask him to check what’s on the other side. He goes where they say, looking for signs of the fire, and when he does spot flames, occasionally tearing stuff down so they can get to it with their fire hose. It’s honestly a fascinating process. Danny’s never been anywhere near a major fire and the fact that the firefighters actually do more damage to the building as they work echoes in Danny’s brain as a morbid refrain.

What they’re doing is clearly working though, because he can actually feel the ambient temperature going down as time goes on. He briefly wonders if he should be trying to use his ice powers when one of his teammates complains about how hot it is, but they have protection, and he doesn’t want to risk any more info on him getting out. And anyways, he’s busy enough just doing his job. By the time they leave the building, Danny is exhausted. The interrupted night’s sleep is making itself known, alongside the surprising realization that Danny has actually worked harder tonight than he ever has before.

He lets himself half-collapse against a wall beside one of the fire trucks, once they finish their work putting out the fire. Beside him, his teammates are divesting themselves of their gear. it’s funny, Danny was anxious about revealing himself at first, but this whole night - and Danny belatedly realizes the sun is beginning to drift above the horizon now - he’s not been scared at all. Sure he’s been worried; with people in danger he’s hardly going to feel good, but in the last few hours he’s both worked harder than he has in any of his fights, and he’s done it without feeling terrible. Now, with just everyone accounted for and just about all of them either fine or in the hands of doctors, he feels odd.

It’s not a bad feeling or anything, kind of like when he successfully beats a hard level in a video game, or how he used to feel when he finished science projects in middle school.

Satisfaction, he realizes. And that’s what it is, though it’s far stronger than any version of it that he’s ever felt before. He does have a lot to feel proud of too. He  helped, even though he wasn’t sure it was safe to, and he might’ve actually saved somebody’s life tonight.

“You did good, kid.” One of his teammates says, echoing Danny’s thoughts. He startles a bit, feels himself flushing, and then in his embarrassment, he feels himself tumble over into a full blush. It’s always felt more embarrassing blushing in his ghost form. The way his skin actually glows with the green tinge is just so obviously inhuman, and he tries to avoid, tries his best to seem normal and alive, even when he’s a ghost.

Of course, these people don’t know he’s a ghost, but from what he’s seen, most of the heroes out there at least look functionally human, and he waits for the firefighters around him to freak out at the reminder that he isn’t even remotely one of them.

“Damn,” one whistles. Green glow is a new one. Makes your freckles real cute though.” The others laugh, and the other of his teammates steps forward to pat him gently on the back.

“Stop embarrassing my new favorite hero,” the chief says, walking up to join them. “You gotta name?” 

“Oh, yeah!” Danny answers, desperate for a distraction from this line of conversation. “I’m Danny!”

“Danny,” the chief responds flatly. he almost sounds exasperated, though Danny can’t imagine why, unless...

Unless that absolutely sounds like he just introduced himself normal and they think he’s a hero and he sounds like a dumbass without a secret identity, which- technically isn’t exactly wrong. 

“Yup!” Danny says, trying to make it sound intentional. “Danny Phantom at your service! Y’know cause of the intangibility and like. It just sounded good?” There. That sounds plausible. If he actually does end up having to be a hero, though, he’ll probably need a different first name. If he gets a civilian identity, that is.

“Well, Phantom,” the chief grins, that same assessing look from before back, but noticeably more relaxed now that there’s no immediate danger. “We’re damn grateful for all your help, and if you need anything you come let us know, alright?”

“Yeah, one of his teammates echoes. “You’re an honorary firefighter now, you should come hang out at the station sometime!” A couple of the others echo the sentiment. It’s surprisingly kind, and Danny smiles at the unrelenting wave of welcome.

“I’ll think about it,” he offers uncertainly. “For now, I think I ought to go back to sleep for a few more hours.”

“That sounds like a good idea, Danny,” the chief says. “Just make sure to get something to eat first. You’ve burned a lot of calories today.”

“Yeah, will do,” Danny offers an awkward salute to the man, and then, before he can actually fall asleep standing up, he takes off to hunt down a good spot for a nap.

[mayplayer59]

I'm a little obsessed with this guy

NANKIDAI TELL ME EXACTLY HOW HE DIED AND MY LIFE IS YOURS ‼️‼️

[akans-dead-at-sea]

It's alright

30 second timelapse:

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price interview on the set of "The Masque of the Red Death" 1964

[geneticdriftwood]

persephone's in hell; a rooftop conversation

for @mysterycitrus

persephone's in hell, @mysterycitrus // white winter hymnal, fleet foxes // assorted dc comics

[daturagirl]

datura world

[cinematicnomad]

THE TERROR ▸ 1.10 we are gone

lady silence watches crozier go to each of the dead bodies here to check who it is, and close their eyes.

[taiistired]

i need you more than anything