He's looking from Nightwing to the grave, where some kid - Tim, apparently - was hellbent on digging out some other kid.
It didn't feel like the usual grave, was the problem. Not that he was around graves, or graveyards, very often. Maybe if Sam were here, or at least Tucker, to interpret the digitized grimoire Sam insisted they have a copy of.
But... no, this felt familiar. He drifted closer, putting a hand on Tim's shoulder, careful not to startle the kid, "Hey," He said gently, "Hey, I've got this. Why don't you go stand by Nightwing?"
Tim immediately tried to throw his hand off, and he went with the motion, disconcerted at the wisp that left his mouth when he was jostled closer to the grave - it didn't, yet, have any of the rustling motions of self-disturbed dirt, but the unease was getting stronger. Whomever this kid was, there was something... bad? Going on behind this.
Nightwing had stepped forward, wrestling Tim away from both the grave and him, "Tim! Tim, it's okay, it's okay. Let Ghost work, alright?"
And Nightwing was looking at him with the sort of panic he usually didn't see. Or, well, hadn't seen up until this news. When he nodded, kneeling in Tim's spot, grabbing the shovel and tossing it to the side, the others retreated a few steps away with the sort of tenseness that told him he needed to work fast.
He took an extra second to assess the grave, laying a hand on top of it. The feeling was eerily familiar, and were he in his human form, his heart probably would have skipped a beat. As it were, the remembered sensation of electricity ripping through him was enough, and he slammed his eyes shut, shoving an intangible arm through the grave.
What he picked up - what he grabbed - was not a normal human. It almost made him lose his grip, but he grunted, curling his fingers around squirming cloth and yanking.
The grave dirt was, naturally, disturbed, but luckily he was already floating, and he ignored the shocked exclamations from behind him. Pulling the newly dead, the newly reanimated from their burial was more difficult than he was willing to inform Nightwing, or Tim, about.
Sam had speculated one time that graves functioned like nodes to the Ghost Zone. It made sense, if he was honest, and the three of them had spent a lot of time in various libraries researching myths and cultures about how the dead were tended to.
What made someone a ghost, really.
It helped him more than he had initially expected in the Ghost Zone - being a halfa ostracized him enough, and the conditions of his ghost form meant that the location of his grave was... debated upon. Clockwork hadn't helped much, outside riddles that would have made Mister Lancer proud, and Frostbite was a little more helpful, even when he needed to learn a lot more about what Frostbite was even referencing.
So when he pulled this newly-made halfa out of his grave, he knew enough from experience to crush the kid against himself, letting his core do the talking while he scratched a quick sigil on the grave.
Mostly it was just a door-lock, and he'd have to teach it to the kid later, but the last thing he wanted was yet another portal that he needed to catch ghosts from. Especially in Gotham. There simply wasn't enough thermoses for this city, and he wasn't particularly happy at the idea of risking a visit to Amityville for ghost-hunting supplies.
Whomever the kid was, they had no idea they were still intangible, and he thumped himself on the grass outside the grave, sighing as he shifted his arm - and the kid - out of intangibility. Nightwing and Tim... said or did something, but he currently had some bigger fish to fry.
He remembered the way Sam and Tucker had panicked, rousing him after they thought he had died despite - in retrospect - just needing a moment to become conscious again, and he let that memory help him, wrapping his arms around the other halfa in a crushing grip that would only come across as comforting.
"Hey, hey," He murmured, barely audible over the crying of the kid, the other kid, and the superhero kid. Exhaling carefully, he modulated his voice - not the scream, but the timber, an echo of his core that he could put into his speech, "Kid. C'mon. Everything's okay."
Nightwing and Tim flinched back, the humans unused to the haunting quality of one ghost speaking to another, but the kid he was holding did - thankfully - calm down, the grip on his suit less panicking and more orienting.
"That's it," He praised, running one hand through the kid's hair, making a note of the streak of white. This was a strong kid - a hard death, then, and he murmured wordlessly in sympathy. There would be time, later, to figure out how the kid died, see if there was anything he could do about it, "There we go, up and at 'em."
However much time it took, it didn't feel like enough, and Nightwing and Tim slowly approached, lingering at the edges of his vision. They were speaking, too, careful and soft - the same way Sam and Tucker did, when they realized they didn't need to panic.
Slowly, very slowly, he shifted, Nightwing catching on and kneeling next to him. The kid went with little fuss, trading the familiarity of another halfa to someone that was, blatantly, familiar before death. He kept a hand on the kid's back, anyway, raising a brow at Nightwing.
The superhero looked up at him, then away, the mask outlining his eyes hiding, for once, little of his emotions. He rocked back on his heels, letting the family re-acquaint themselves.
He turned his attention back to the grave. It reeked of something ghostly. And old, the kind of old he'd probably have to ask about when there was a bit of time.
As it were, he dug out his phone, happy for the case Tucker managed to mail him that kept his phone mostly functional in the Ghost Zone, because it let him use it in his ghost form. Sam's grimoire glitched a little in the opening, telling him that this was no usual resurrection, but he found the page on additional wardings with little issue.
The kid would probably come back to his grave, once he realized what it was, so even if he had any nails or salt on him, it'd be a dick move to use them. He settled for drawing with his finger, letting a little bit of energy from his core collect at the fingertip as he drew sigil after sigil, to better separate the memory of death from the person, to contain whatever this was, and to stabilize the portal before anyone could use it to rip open the Ghost Zone.
Again. He really hated dealing with that.
He watched Tim shuffle next to him, blatantly attempting to memorize the work, and tried not to smile. Maybe he could teach someone - maybe not in Gotham, this place weirded him out, but...
Layers of seals finished, he clicked off his phone's screen, putting it back into his pocket and settling in to wait out everyone's reunion. He had some time, but not much - Bludhaven probably had some more requests of him, and he really, really, did not want to miss out on some hot fries.
"So," He said casually, slouching and putting his hands in his hoodie's pockets, getting everyone's attention as he smiled cheerfully at them, "Who died?"
