Teetering
Tw/Swearing.
Ao3
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There was no sun here, but the day was bright as Damien ran through the garden. The plants chased after him, vines and roots snaking and snapping around his feet. Above him, Phantom floated, weaving in and out of branches. Suddenly, a willow branch snapped forward, and Damien had to duck out of the way: a front roll and a flip as he dodged the greenery. Then a petunia, teeth bared, lunged, and he jumped backward, not seeing the island's edge until he was rocking back. His foot slipped, and for a sickening moment, Damien was falling down into the endless void of the Infinite Realms. Then Phantom catches him and holds him in his arms as they fly to the great tree at the garden's center, where they land on the highest branches. From here, Damien can see the whole island. It is beautiful, lush, and wild, so different from the training grounds back home. He goes to pick one of the odd black fruits, which hang heavy and ripe, but he's stopped.
“Don’t,” Phantom says, “The fruit isn't safe.”
“But I've seen you eat them.”
“Yeah, but I live here.
You have a home to get back to.”
.......................................................................................
Pennyworth was the first to recover. Stepping past the floor-bound form of Todd balled up and wheezing from laughing, though Damian couldn't think what was so funny, he swept what family he could towards the living room. Damien was unsure just how much of the family was planning on joining them for dinner, but for the time being, it seemed to be just the five of them. Phantom, for his part, gathered his board-line hysterical boyfriend up into his arms and followed after. It was odd to see such a thin person carrying a man at least two hundred pounds heavier as if it were nothing. Strange, Damian faintly noticed he was smiling. When did he ever?... No matter.
The sitting room was, like all of the manor, spacious and decadent, with paneled wine-red walls stretching up so high they seemed to curve to the chandelier, not as large or beautiful as the one in the main hall or even the one in the dining room but still magnificent in its own right. If there was one thing Damien appreciated about living in the Manor quite as much as the freedom it afforded him, it was the sheer beauty and care given to each room. As much as he'd hate to admit it, he didn't know how Pennyworth maintained such a large space on his own. There simply where not the hours in the day. Even attempts to shadow the man had proven fruitless in explaining how he managed.
Finally, Todd seemed to have calmed himself to the point where it was no longer a struggle to speak over him. Father, standing stiffly in the corner where the light was weakest and glaring daggers through Phantom, was the first to speak.
"Who are You."
Damien opened his mouth to speak, only to be cut off with a sharp glance.
"I mean..." Phantom hesitated, seemingly unsure about how to continue. " I'm Phantom. I used to babysit Dami when he was little."
"You were part of the League of Shadows?"
"No!" Phantom seems somewhat over-emphatic in Damien's opinion, not that anyone had asked.
"No, I'm..." He glanced over to Damien, "I'm the king of the Infinite Realms, Dami just used to visit sometimes when he wanted to get away for a bit and I would keep an eye on him."
"What are the Infinite Realms? How did he get there?"
"Oh you know," he floundered, "League of Shadows... Forbidden magic... all that Fun Stuff."
"Elaborate"
Surprisingly, it was Todd who spoke next.
“Look, the League had a natural portal to the Realms they kept squirreled away ok? It was a whole big secret; only the top members were supposed to even know about it.”
“Like the Lazarus Pit.”
“Yeah,”
“Is it dangerous?”
“It's a giant hole in reality leading to another dimension,” Todd said, irritation evident, “ not a fucking Chucky Cheese. Of course it's dangerous; that's why we closed it.”
“We?” Phantom snorted
“Yeah, yeah Mister I-close-holes-in-reality-for-shits-and-giggles. Not all of us can be fucking One Punch Men. ‘Sides, I helped. Hell knows when you were gonna get around to it if I didn't threaten to leave you sleeping on the couch.”
“Hel doesn't know anything about scheduling and you know it.”
Father cut in, interrupting their fond bickering. Silently, Damien wondered how long Todd and Phantom had been dating.
“So the portal has been taken care of.”
“Yep!” Phantom said, “I closed that dumb thing right up!”
“Are there any others?”
“Yeah, but most natural portals don't stay open long enough to be a problem. A stable portal is a little like a fairy; real, but rare enough that you can keep the salt at home.”
Father blinked, unsure how to react to that answer. Damien remembered this; the strange explanations that brought up more questions than answers. As a child, Damien had always found this extremely irritating. It was reassuring to see that this had not changed.
“What is the Infinite Realm?”
Again, Todd answered.
“Exactly what it says on the tin; it's a realm, and it's infinite. Basically, it's a space between universes connecting them all together, and ‘cause there’s infinite other universes, there’s infinite space between them. It's like driving through Kansas. Most folks don't think about the people who take care of those endless corn fields.”
Father glared at Todd, clearly frustrated with his butting in. He very purposefully turned to Phantom.
“Damien said you were king?”
“Yep! Won the title after I beat the last guy into the ground when he tried to flatten the midwest!”
“What does that mean?” Father gritted his teeth, not used to all of this talking. “What duties come with being King of the Infinite Realms?”
Again, Phantom hesitated, glancing over to Damien as if trying to decipher some great mystery, and again, Todd stepped in. Interesting. Irritating.
“Same shit that comes with being King anywhere. He sits through boring ass meetings and makes sure no dumbasses try and kill each other.”
“Hn”
“So,” Greyson said, stepping purposefully between Father and Todd, “How’d you two meet?”
He flashed his signature “socialite” smile. Phantom met it in a wide parody of a grin, eyes impossibly wide and hair glowing ever brighter. Before he could speak, Pennyworth, who Damien was sure had been by the door leading to the front hall, stepped in from the dining room.
“Excuse me, sirs,” he said, voice as level and unreadable as ever, “but it seems dinner is ready.”
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"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.
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