More Lady Gotham AU but this is about Solomon Grundy and it’s from very early in the Lady’s process of clearing out her curses. She needs Knights, and she picks Solomon, and the Bats are none too pleased to hear that Grundy’s broke out of Arkham and lost himself in the sewers again.
“Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday…”
A low, steady drumbeat echoed through the sewers, rippling over the standing water. Beneath it, Tim heard the familiar heavy tread of the revenant, sloshing through the sewers. His step and his customary rhyme kept perfect time with the drumming. Odd. Grundy wasn’t one for unnecessary noise. Tim wouldn’t’ve assumed the zombie could even manage to keep a rhythm.
“Christened on Tuesday, married on Wednesday...”
Tim slid around a corner, wincing as the echoing drumbeat and the low hiss of Grundy’s voice clashed unpleasantly in his earpieces, kicking up a round of high-pitched interference. He tapped a short code to Oracle over his wrist comm, bursts of static in a code that she’d designed.
“We’ve got nothing, Red.” Her voice came through his earpiece a few seconds later. “There’s too much interference, and Constantine still won’t come out and tell us what he’s looking for, so we’re flying blind here.” If Tim were a little less confident, he’d have said Barb actually sounded worried. “Just… find Grundy and get him out, alright? No theatrics.”
“Copy.” Tim tapped back, turning down another low corridor. Grundy sounded louder now, the sloshing distinct enough that Tim could track it. He tapped another message out on his comm. No response for ten seconds, then twenty, and Tim did his best not to take that as a bad sign. He had a zombie to catch. Down here, then left, then -
Tim froze, the top half of his face just barely peeking around the corner. That was Grundy, sure enough, hunched over and shambling down a sewer tunnel towards an unidentified light source and what looked like an open junction room. But that was not his voice. It was lower, louder, vibrating in the cobbles beneath Tim’s boots. It sounded… off. Directionless. Like there were a thousand speakers in the sewers playing the same words in different voices all at once.
“Buried on Sunday…” The voice said, and Tim watched Grundy shudder as if a freezing wind had blown across his shoulders, still stubbornly sloshing towards the junction room. I shouldn’t go in there, Tim thought. This is magic shit. Constantine said we should keep our noses out of it if we saw it. This is out of my wheelhouse and I have no backup. I should turn around right now.
There was a long moment where he really did think he was going to leave. Then Tim felt his stomach drop as he realized the drumming had stopped. Grundy reached the junction room, faltered as if he’d seen something, and dammit- Tim darted forward, feet utterly silent. He had to know.
He let his eyes adjust to the unnatural brightness of the junction room as he tucked himself into the shadowed eve of the doorway. Grundy had already shambled forward far enough that Tim couldn’t catch his eye, but now he could see what the revenant was looking at.
“This is the end…” Grundy rasped under his breath, just loud enough for Tim to catch. “...of Solomon Grundy.”
… Fuck. Tim thought. I should’ve gone for backup.
There was a - well, a figure, of sorts, standing in the center of the junction room. The shallow trickles of water that ran from the surrounding sewer tunnels met in the center of the room like the spokes of a wheel, forming a circular well about twenty feet across. The person - the thing in the middle of the room looked like it had just risen from the pool, water sloughing off it in sheets, but the pool itself was utterly still and reflective. Tim thought for a moment that it was drenched in oil as well, but as his mask’s lenses refocused he realized it was hair - long black hair, so thick it shrouded the naked form of the being beneath it and so dark it seemed to suck the light from the air around it.
The few places the hair did not manage to cover it looked like how a woman might look, if she’d been floating in Gotham harbor for a week. Tim knew - he’d seen victims in that state. The swell of their veins, the slip of the skin around the hands and feet, all of it purpled and pale and wrong in a way his hindbrain refused to let go of. It was huge, too. Though it was sunk into the water up to the knees Tim guessed it stood at around seven feet, broad in the chest and hips, oddly muscled, like it hadn’t quite been sure what went on inside a human body and had made do with its best guess.
Grundy walked forward, uncoordinated even for him. It seemed as though something was coming loose in the revenant, his joints shaking and crumpling beneath his own weight. The water grew deeper as he grew closer, meeting first his knees, then his hips, then his chest, but it barely rippled at his passing. Something was flaking off him as he went - little brown chips and bits that floated away from him in a trail.
How deep even is that pool? Tim leaned just the slightest bit forward, distracted for a moment. He shouldn’t have. The thing’s head snapped up from where it had been tracking Grundy, hair parting, and Tim’s gut rolled.
Its face was a shattered mess. Half its jaw was broken open in an injury similar to ones Tim had seen on victims of a repeated baseball bat to the face. Teeth jutted out at odd angles, some human, some long and curved to a cruel point. Its eye sockets were empty, torn out and bloody, and leaked trails of black down its face and neck. They fixed unerringly on Tim, even as Grundy reached whatever platform it was standing on and began to climb out of the deeper water.
A hand emerged from its cloak of hair and reached forward. Tim couldn’t control a flinch, but it hadn’t reached for him. Instead, it bent, ever so slowly, and offered the hand to Grundy, sockets still trained on Tim’s mask in the distant shadows.
Its jaw moved vaguely, far too swollen and torn to mouth actual words. Besides, Tim could see into its open mouth even at a distance, and it had no tongue. “Solomon Grundy…” The voice came a few seconds later, as if the sound was traveling from miles away. “Born on a Monday.”
“Christened on Tuesday… Married on Wednesday…” Grundy rasped, slowly reaching out to take its gnarled, swollen fingers between his grey, rotting ones. Tim felt something in him cry out in relief as it turned its torn-out gaze down to meet Grundy, freeing him from the inescapable sensation of being Seen.
Jaw working, it helped pull Grundy up onto whatever platform it stood on under the water. “Took ill on Thursday…” came the voice a few seconds later, as its other hand trailed slowly over Grundy’s hair and face. Its palm alone was big enough to cradle Grundy’s skull, tilting the dead man’s head back and forth ever so gently.
It’s… checking his injuries? Tim blinked in confusion as the hand swept carefully over the row of staples in Grundy’s skull and lingered on the hole in the front of his neck.
“Worse on Friday…” Tim hardly wanted to anthropomorphise this thing, but he swore it sounded almost regretful, tapping gently at every rotting pit or torn patch of skin visible through Grundy’s moldy, moth-eaten sweater. He hoped the camera in his mask was catching this, but he doubted it. Magic made anything with an electrical component unreliable.
For a long moment, Grundy and the sewer thing stared at one another, silent but for the sound of water sluicing off the creature’s body into the reflecting pool. The thing still held Grundy’s face between its massive palms, thumbing gently over the edges of his slit throat. Then, as if they’d come to some conclusion Tim couldn’t hear, they moved in tandem. The figure bent down, spine arching unnaturally until the pale ribbed ridge of its back emerged from the cloak of hair. As it did Solomon straighted, squaring his shoulders and bringing his head up higher than Tim had ever seen it. Solomon’s broad grey fists were dwarfed by the size of the thing’s face, but he held its shattered jaw between them anyway, pulling it down until its forehead rested on Solomon’s.
“... Died… on Saturday.” He said, sounding almost proud. Tim was struck with a sudden sense that he was watching something he should not be, rocking half a step back as the thing settled its hands on Solomon’s shoulders.
Another long pause. Then, with a swiftness bordering on violence, the thing lurched forward and shoved Grundy beneath the surface of the pool and held him there, its jaw moving. Tim saw the revenant thrash against its grip once, then twice, then fall still.
“...Buried on Sunday.” Came the voice from everywhere. The hunched thing looked up again, pinning Tim to the wall with its empty gaze. The teeth in its open maw rippled as it silently aped speech.
“This is the end… of Solomon Grundy.” It roared seconds later, thunderously loud. Tim clapped his hands over his ears as that and the sound of trickling water grew louder, loud enough to hurt as it echoed against the junction walls and layered over itself over and over again. Tim shrunk back as it battered at him, but he couldn’t seem to look away as the body held his gaze, unaware or uncaring of the cacophony.
Then, just when it grew loud enough that Tim genuinely worried it might damage his ears, the thing leaned forward and dove into the water where it’d just drowned Solomon Grundy. The water peeled back to welcome it with barely a ripple, stilling the instant the ends of its black hair were pulled down after them.
Tim’s hands were shaking. Slowly, he turned and pressed his back against the wall, then slid down it. Between one second and the next he watched the quality of the water in the junction shift, visibly darkening. Leaning forward, he flicked an anti-glare filter down onto his lenses. Sure enough - he could see the floor of the sewer tunnel beneath the pool now, barely a foot deep.
“-im?! TIM! Come in, Tim - Fuck, tell me you’re alive!” Barbara’s voice crackled through his comm. Tim flinched, nearly cracking his head against the brick behind him, then grabbed at his wrist.
“Ye-Yeah! Yeah, I’m here - I’m alive.” Tim stammered, head reeling. He could feel a migraine building behind his temples, his heart throbbing in his eyes.
“Holy shit, don’t do that.” She snapped.
Another staticky crackle, then; “Robin, report. Why did you lose contact?” Shit. Batman. Bruce, actually, Tim noted with surprise. It was subtle, but you could always hear when he was too worried to hold the cowl in his voice.
“... You guys are not going to like the answer to that.”
