"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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Coloring is therapeutic - I love this series so much it's been one of my favorite mangas for years
Also look I remembered, here's where you can get a print: https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/whispwill/frieren/
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There is a fairly significant bit of wordplay in Frieren that will escape the notice of most English-speaking viewers, but I quite like it so I’ll explain it here. The title of the series in Japanese is 葬送のフリーレン (Sousou no Furiiren). “Furiiren” is of course Frieren; “sousou” means “funeral rites” or “attending a funeral”, but can literally be translated as “sending to the grave”. Since the story opens with Frieren watching her old adventuring pals growing old and passing away, we’re naturally led to the simple interpretation of the title: she’s attending her friends’ funerals.
(The full official English title is Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, because literal translations rarely make catchy titles.)
Later, as Frieren is fighting Aura, Lügner explains that Frieren is the most prolific demon-killer in history. In the English translations I’ve seen, this earns her the nickname “Frieren the Slayer”. But in the original Japanese, this nickname is 葬送のフリーレン: “Sousou no Furiiren”, the title of the series.
In this context, this line (and the title, too) could be more literally interpreted as “Frieren, who sends you to your grave”. It also means the line is a little more impactful in Japanese — you’re supposed to point at the screen and yell “hey that’s the name of the show!!”
There’s really just no way to preserve wordplay like this through translation so I can’t fault the translators at all for not trying, but it’s a fun thing that’s worth pointing out nonetheless. I just love that this was clearly something the author was setting up from the very beginning.
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In the end, there wasn’t much left of Steve Harrington. No will, of course (because what nineteen year old would write one, even if he knew he was bones walking) but then again, no relatives showed up to sweep it all away.
So when the last of the red was draining from the sky, a ragged collection of teens (but no Robin, never again, because how would there ever be a world with Robin but no Steve) let themselves in with a spare key. Slipped into a hand years ago, one of countless moments. They didn’t glance at the rest of the house, because Steve may have finally filled it with people and joy, but he could never make it his. They climbed the stairs in silence, exhaustion and grief, and pulled open the door.
“God, that plaid’s still awful,” said Nancy, cracking into the silence. And it felt wrong, to be laughing in the room of a dead man, but they could do nothing else.
Taking sobering breaths, wiping tears from eyes and cheeks (joy and sadness and unidentifiable bittersweetness) they begin to spread throughout. Dustin unearthed the spare nailbat from beneath the bed and held it close, heedless of the nails. A high school diploma, a second sailor’s uniform (“for Robin?” “Yeah. For Robin.”), an album full of photos of the kids. But in the end there was a pile on the bed that seemed so so small to be all that was left of a person.
And they piled into the beemer, more people than it was ever supposed to hold, for one last time. And a house in Loch Nora lost the last bit of its light.
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