Chapter Text
There’s this unspoken rule in the constitution of vigilantism: if you think you've finished the mission, just know it’s never really finished.
Kind of like a butterfly effect, nothing stays finished and fixed; one thing will be the cause of something else and so on and so forth. It’s hard to really pinpoint what has brought everything to this exact point. Jason would argue his death was the turning point for everything being fucked, Alfred would correct him and say that Bruce’s parents' dying would be the actual beginning. Tim would like to argue that it didn’t matter what event caused them to live the lives they did. What matters is: this is all Bruce’s fault.
It cannot be justified, Tim knows. Of course, it’s not Bruce’s fault that his parents died, which led him to become Batman. And it’s certainly not Bruce’s fault that Tim cannot handle grief in any sort of way. But when one cannot handle the fact that maybe, just maybe, he’s failed to accomplish the mission, it’s easier to blame something else. It’s only when he’s actually dead that he lets the little childish voice in the back of his head talk.
This is Bruce’s fault.
It is. It truly is. If Bruce hadn’t gone up and disappeared into time or wherever he is, Tim would not be here. If Bruce had not been near that damned hyper-adapter, Tim wouldn’t have had the most gruesome six months before his death. If Bruce hadn’t gone, just been here, alive and well, Tim wouldn’t be here, in what apparently appears to be a customer service office for the afterlife, holding the most painfully awkward, prolonged eye contact of his life.
Green eyes blink at him. Tim stares back because, apparently, dying does not exempt him from awkward social interactions. And after about… fifteen minutes of suffocating silence, finally someone spoke—
“Okay, quick question before I panic professionally… why are you here?” Asks the stranger, as if Tim is the one with all the answers. “You’re either a catastrophic administration error or the universe is finally collapsing for real.”
Tim blinks again, “I… died.” He says dumbly, eyes flickering away for a moment. It sounds wrong coming out of his mouth. He shouldn’t be dead. Tim should be alive, barely functional, and running on pure caffeine and spite, but absolutely proving Dick Grayson and everyone else who doubted him wrong. He isn’t, however, because bungee jumping into an ancient timestream rupture isn’t exactly a safe sport, even for adrenaline junkies.
“Right. Picked up on the death thing.” The stranger says dryly. “But why are you here? Specifically.”
Tim’s brows contort indignantly, “I don’t even know where here is! I just died!”
The stranger looks at Tim. Really looks at him, like he’s seeing Tim for the first time since this whole interaction began. And then, with all the seriousness of an idiot, this stranger tells him: “Dude… I think you died wrong.”
Tim reacts with all the maturity of a deeply inconvenienced nineteen-year-old and throws a chair at him. The said chair passes straight through the stranger before embedding itself into a vending machine behind him.
Something inside the machine hisses.
“Great,” the stranger says, staring at the smoking wreckage. “Now the cursed sodas are agitated.”
Tim lets out a scream.
And because the universe doesn’t really care for Tim’s existential crisis, somewhere nearby, a phone begins ringing.
——
“1-800-COSMIC, your ontological suffering is important to us.” The stranger, well Danny—Tim learns finally after the whole vending machine mishap (Cursed sodas have the emotional regulation of a pomeranian. Long story short, to be spiteful, they began spilling themselves all over the floor, and now the room smells like artificial sugar.)—says into the phone automatically.
Tim watches from the other side of the room, halfway clocked out of the entire situation. The other half of his brain is, of course, doing intelligence gathering because when you’re raised in vigilantism by Bruce Wayne, vigilantism never stops.
“Ma’am,” Danny says into the receiver with strained patience, “I need you to stop feeding the sentient void raccoon.”
There is a pause.
“No, I don’t care if it looks polite. It eats dimensions.”
Another pause. Danny pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay, first of all, calling me speciesist is crazy right now—”
Tim watches him pace the room while fluorescent lights hum overhead. Somewhere deeper in the office, phones continue ringing one after another in overlapping waves.
Nobody sounds panicked.
That’s the unsettling part.
Everything here feels catastrophically normal.
Tim has also gathered a few other things because Danny’s existence and his simple action of answering said toll-free number is a goldmine of contradictory information:
One, the universe has a toll-free number for ontological emergencies. Why the universe has this has yet to be deduced.
Two, Danny is overworked. His rhythm tells it all for him—the automatic greeting. The fact that he answers without hesitation.
The complete lack of surprise at the impossible scenario. This is not someone improvising. This is someone who has done this thousands of times. Which means Danny carries responsibility constantly. (Tim will most definitely be finding this out later, alongside the question as to why the universe has a toll-free number for ontological emergencies.)
Three, Danny occupies power far beyond what he presents outwardly, which would be less alarming if Danny did not outwardly present himself like a raccoon that accidentally gained access to governmental authority.. Tim realizes this the moment Danny speaks the words: “It eats dimensions” because not only is it an absurd thing to say, but because the office, the phone calls… they all respond to him like management.
Which means one of two things: Danny is extremely dangerous. Or Danny earned that authority somehow. Tim suspects both because guilty until proven innocent is a far better legal principle than what the United States is running with.
And four, Danny has yet to ask for Tim’s name.
This is deeply concerning because names are usually one of the first things exchanged in social interaction, and Tim is beginning to suspect the afterlife may have fundamentally different priorities than Earth. Given the sentient vending machine, this feels less like paranoia and more like pattern recognition—
“Are you done profiling me?” Danny asks dryly, his expression completely unimpressed as he stares at Tim from where he’s leaning against a desk.
Tim opens his mouth to respond, because he is, in fact, not done—he has at least three additional observations about Danny’s behavioral inconsistency and the implications of a toll-free number existing for ontological emergencies—but the office interrupts him before he can organize them into something usable.
The phone rings. Sharp. Immediate. Like it was waiting for silence specifically to become unbearable.
Danny doesn’t even look surprised.
He just exhales through his nose, already moving.
“Yeah, no, I’m not doing this right now,” he mutters, stepping around Tim like Tim is furniture that has temporarily wandered into the wrong place. “Stay.”
It isn’t a request.
It also isn’t really directed at Tim so much as it is directed at probability itself.
Danny picks up the receiver.
“1-800-COSMIC, your ontological suffering is important to us,” he says automatically, voice flattening into something rehearsed.
Tim notices that immediately because it isn’t just phrasing, it the tone. Muscle memory. The kind of sentence you only develop after repetition stops being conscious.
Which means Danny does this constantly. Which also means Danny is never not doing this. Tim files that away because the dry humor someone like Danny has developed doesn’t come from solely customer service. Not even cosmic customer service.
A pause on the line.
Danny’s expression shifts slightly, as if he were recalibrating.
“Oh,” he says after a beat. “You’re new new.”
That gets Tim’s attention in a way he doesn’t like.
New… what?
Danny leans a little more into the call, one hand braced on the desk, the other already reaching for something off-screen that Tim can’t identify yet.
“Yeah, no, I hear you,” Danny continues. “That’s not supposed to do that. At all. Okay, cool, awesome—don’t move it, just… stop interacting with it emotionally.”
Another pause.
Danny closes his eyes briefly, like he’s counting down something internal or if he’s seeking a higher power for divine intervention. Or both. “I don’t care if it looks sad. That’s how it gets you.”
Tim watches all of this with increasing focus, the way he watches crime scenes develop after the fact, except this one is actively happening and refusing to stabilize.
There are too many implications already forming.
Danny sighs again. “Okay, I’m putting you on hold before you unionize the void. Yes, again. No, I don’t care what your grievance is.”
He sets the receiver down mid-conversation like this is a normal conclusion to anything. Only then does he look back at Tim. Right. As if Tim has been waiting patiently rather than actively assembling a mental model of reality collapsing around them.
“Where were we?” Danny asks.
Tim should answer immediately.
He doesn’t.
Because the office hums differently now, as if it were more aware of itself. Like something has noticed Tim noticing. For the record, Tim does not like things that notice him noticing them. It creates an unnecessary feedback loop.
Regardless, Tim realizes, distantly, that he is no longer actually certain he is in a conversation so much as standing in the middle of an ongoing system that has not paused for him at all.
“You said,” Tim says carefully, because careful is what you do when the data stops behaving predictably, “I died wrong.”
Danny nods once, like that conclusion is still holding. “Yeah,” he says. “Still tracking that.”
Behind them, somewhere deeper in the office, another phone begins to ring. This time, neither of them pretends it’s going to stop.
It doesn’t get louder. It just… continues, like the building has decided sound is now part of the air. Tim briefly considers whether this is what people mean by “open-plan hell” and decides it is worse because at least office layouts on Earth are geographically honest about their bad decisions.
Danny doesn’t move for a second.
That alone is new.
Tim notices it immediately, because everything about Danny up until now has been motion, interruption, response. Even his exhaustion has been active. This pause is different. He’s not ignoring the phones—he’s listening to them.
Then Danny exhales. Something small and flat. “Okay,” he says, mostly to himself. “No jokes for this part.”
That gets Tim’s attention in a way he doesn’t fully like. Seriousness implies structure. Structure implies rules. Rules imply things can be mapped. Mapping things implies responsibility. Tim is not currently interested in inheriting responsibility for whatever this is.
Danny looks at him, then straightens.
“Let’s take a walk,” he says. “This office reeks of radioactive fructose syrup and cosmic stationery.”
Tim does not respond out loud. Mostly because he is still trying to determine whether “cosmic stationery” is a metaphor or an actual hazard classification.
They leave the immediate office space and the sound shifts with them. The phones are still ringing, but further away now—like background organs of a building that has decided it is allowed to have multiple systems at once.
The hallway is worse than the room.
Tim registers this immediately, logistically and somewhat emotionally.
A door displays three different numbers depending on the angle. A corridor extends slightly when he stops paying attention to it, which Tim finds personally insulting. They turn a corner, and the space opens not larger, exactly. More layered. Like the building has stopped pretending it is singular. The building simply refuses consistency, and for some reason, it’s making him feel the flames of hell licking at his ankles. His mother would have called it “architectural indecision,” though she would have said it with the kind of calm certainty that made it sound like a design philosophy instead of a warning.
Tim files that comparison away without meaning to.
Fluorescent lights flicker in near-patterns that almost qualify as behavior but fail at the last possible moment.
He adds a note: lights here behave like they are being supervised, but poorly.
Tim catalogs all of what he is witnessing automatically, because if he stops cataloging things, he will have to start acknowledging them instead. Which is, unfortunately, not on his schedule yet.
He should probably ask at some point where the office is located.
Geographically… and conceptually. Good God, he cannot believe he has to ask that. He adds another mental note: definition of “here” currently unstable.
Danny walks in front of him as if this is not a problem he is emotionally obligated to care about.
“When you die,” he says, like he’s reading off a checklist he has memorized against his will, “you’re supposed to settle. Like, not emotionally. Metaphysically.”
Tim follows half a step behind him, because walking slightly behind someone who knows where they’re going feels safer than the alternative of acknowledging he is currently not supposed to be anywhere at all.
Danny continues, “Most people do it quick. You stop being anchored to… stuff. You get processed. Then you don’t do the ‘half here, half not’ thing because that’s—” he gestures vaguely, “—annoying for everyone involved.”
“That includes me?” Tim asks before he can stop himself.
Danny glances at him.
“It includes literally everyone involved.”
That should be funny. Tim notes that it is not, strictly speaking, reassuring.
They pass a reflective surface that is not quite glass. Tim sees himself in it late and not metaphorically. Literally. In the reflection, Tim is a fraction of a second behind where he is standing.
He stops walking for exactly one step. The reflection does not. Then it catches up. Danny doesn’t look at it or even seem to acknowledge it.
Which is entirely worse.
“So I’m processed,” Tim says carefully, resuming movement like nothing happened. “Just… incorrectly.”
“Yeah,” Danny says immediately. “That’s the issue.”
Tim nods once.
That makes sense in a way that absolutely does not make sense.
Danny keeps talking, unfazed, “You’re supposed to stop pulling in two directions. Like—” he snaps his fingers once, “—done. Stable. Landed. You’re still doing the ‘loading’ thing.”
Tim files that phrasing away immediately.
Loading.
That implies so many things at once: incomplete execution state, temporary, and fixable. The implication should be comforting. It is not.
They pass another door that is labeled three different ways depending on the angle.
Tim does not comment.
Danny continues walking like the building is not actively refusing consistency. “And normally,” Danny adds, “you don’t get much overlap. Life stops, death starts, that’s the transition. Clean enough most of the time.”
Tim hears that sentence and immediately thinks: Then I am not in most of the time.
He does not say it out loud. Mostly because Danny is still talking like this is mildly inconvenient scheduling.
“But you’re doing both,” Danny says, like he’s annoyed on behalf of the paperwork. “Which is why everything keeps… pinging.”
“Ping—” Tim starts.
A phone rings somewhere behind them.
Danny doesn’t turn around.
“That’s not for us,” he says automatically.
Tim files that away too.
Not for us.
That implies categories.
They stop at a threshold that doesn’t look like a door until Danny gestures at it.
“This is intake,” he says. “Don’t touch anything that looks like it’s asking for consent.”
“That’s not usually a problem I have to consider,” Tim says awkwardly snd stiff. What else are you supposed to say to that?
Danny gives him a look.
“You’d be surprised.”
They step through.
The room beyond is too organized to feel safe. It’s too structured. Like reality trying very hard to behave like an office and failing in subtle ways. Screens flicker with names that don’t stay still long enough to read fully.
Tim’s gaze catches one anyway.
TIMOTHY J. DRA—
It glitches. It becomes something else. Then it becomes blank. And then it becomes: DECEASE—ACTIV—ERROR
Tim stops breathing for half a second.
Danny, meanwhile, is already talking. “So usually at this stage you get a clean status,” he says, like he’s explaining printer settings. “One thing. One state. You’re… not doing that.”
Tim looks at another panel.
It flickers again.
DECEASED.
ACTIVE.
MISSING.
ACTIVE.
DECEASED.
His name does not stabilize long enough to remain consistent.
His stomach drops in a way that has nothing to do with physics.
Danny scratches the back of his neck.
“I’m gonna be honest,” he says. “This is kind of new for me too.”
That gets Tim’s attention instantly.
New.
Danny notices that reaction and adds, slightly defensive: “Not like ‘never seen a weird death’ new. More like ‘this is annoying in a way that will probably become my problem’ new.”
Tim stares at him.
That is the first time Danny has sounded even slightly uncertain. Tim instantly does not like it.
Behind them, one of the screens flickers again.
And for a fraction of a second, Tim sees something worse than DECEASED.
He sees: NOT FOUND.
Like the universe briefly forgot to finish describing him.
Danny doesn’t comment on that either. Which probably means Danny saw it too—if Tim has profiled him long enough to assume Danny’s own internal monologue—and he just doesn’t want to say it out loud.
Instead, Danny claps his hands once, too brightly. “Okay!” he says. “Tour continues.”
Tim realizes, once again half checked out of this whole situation, that the problem is no longer just that he died wrong. It’s that whatever he is now… the system keeps failing to agree on what to call it.
And for someone whose entire life has been built around categorizing problems until they become solvable that is, objectively, the worst possible kind of hell.
———
The rest of the tour ended approximately four hours ago and consisted primarily of nonsense Tim begrudgingly decided required acknowledgment. Because since he is technically not supposed to be anywhere at all and is, unfortunately, currently present in cosmic customer service, he might as well attempt to care. Minimally.
This had proven difficult mostly because the afterlife apparently operated on a structural philosophy best described as “functional despite itself.”
Danny had shown him the call-routing sector first, which resembled the nervous system of a bureaucratic octopus and somehow smelled faintly like burnt cinnamon. Tim still did not fully understand why several phone lines appeared sentient, only that one of them had attempted to file a complaint against gravity. Tim ultimately decided it was far above his pay grade to even ask.
After that came Records.
Records was worse.
Visually, it resembled a normal archive if normal archives occasionally blinked at people. The problem was the organization, however. Or lack thereof. Entire classifications shifted depending on observer perspective, which Tim initially assumed was metaphorical until a filing cabinet physically re-labeled itself out of spite.
Danny had noticed Tim staring at it and, with the exhaustion of someone who had suffered greatly and consistently, said: “Yeah, don’t make eye contact with the indexing system. It develops opinions.”
Which naturally implied the indexing system could perceive judgment.
Tim hated this place.
The problem was that after approximately two hours of exposure, he had also started understanding it.
There was structure beneath the nonsense. Not stable structure, but adaptive structure. The systems bent around contradiction instead of rejecting it outright, which explained why the building had not collapsed despite clearly violating several laws of physics, architecture, and basic professionalism.
It also explained why Danny looked tired enough to qualify as a medical concern.
Tim had noticed that too.
Danny did everything manually.
The systems clearly automated certain functions, but every major process still routed back through him eventually. Every call. Every escalation. Every containment issue. Tim was beginning to suspect the entire hotline operated on the principle of “Danny will deal with it eventually,” which felt less like infrastructure and more like an active cry for help.
Tim had accidentally corrected three routing errors before realizing he was participating.
The first happened because one of the call terminals kept redirecting existential crises into aquatic hauntings for reasons Tim still could not comprehend. Danny had spent fifteen minutes arguing with a distraught fisherman before Tim quietly pointed out the categorization overlap was occurring because the system was interpreting “overwhelming void” literally.
Danny had stared at him for a very long time after that.
The second correction had been worse because Tim had not technically touched anything. He had merely looked at a flickering intake panel and realized two contradictory classifications were creating recursive overflow.
The panel stabilized immediately afterward.
Danny looked alarmed.
Tim pretended not to notice.
By the third incident, Danny had stopped pretending these were coincidences.
Which was unfortunate for Tim personally because it meant Danny had started watching him with the expression of someone realizing a raccoon had learned tax fraud.
“Dude you’ve been dead for five hours. Why are you doing paperwork?” Danny asks him, popping open a can of what looks like Zesti but if Zesti had a fictional possessed grandmother that crawls on ceilings.
Tim blinks at him, “Well what else am I supposed to do?”
Danny stares at him for a long moment after that. As if Tim were a developing natural disaster he was witnessing in real time and then realizing evacuation may already be impossible.
“That,” Danny says finally, pointing vaguely at Tim with the can, “is not a normal response to death.”
Tim looks down at the stack of intake forms currently spread across the desk in front of him. Several had been mislabeled, two were caught in a recursive authorization loop, and one appeared to be actively trying to classify a minor haunting as tax evasion.
Which, frankly in Tim’s personal and professional opinion, was insulting to actual tax evasion.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Tim replies, eyes flickering back up to Danny. “You gave me a tour.”
“Yeah, the tour was not supposed to inspire initiative.”
“That sounds like poor onboarding design.”
Danny makes a wounded noise straight from the back of his throat.
“You are literally proving my worst fears about competency right now.”
Tim doesn’t respond immediately because, unfortunately, Danny is drinking something that now has tiny glowing eyes inside the aluminum can. Tim has decided not to acknowledge this because acknowledging things here tends to make them worse.
Danny takes another sip.
The can hisses at him.
“I just don’t understand,” Danny continues, exhausted in a way that feels practiced, “how your first instinct after discovering you died wrong was apparently administrative support.”
Tim considers this carefully.
“In my defense,” he says at last, “the system is deeply inefficient.”
Danny closes his eyes briefly like this sentence caused him physical damage.
“That is the worst thing you could have possibly said to me.”
“You’re understaffed.”
“We are cosmically understaffed.”
“The intake categorization overlaps are causing backlog instability.” Tim continues, because once he starts seeing structure, stopping is harder than dying apparently was.
“I know.” Danny mutters.
“The call-routing sector is compensating manually because the indexing system keeps prioritizing emotional intensity over existential threat level. Also, it’s treating ‘consumed by the abyss’ like a place instead of… whatever that actually is.” Tim gestures vaguely with his hand as he explains.
That gets Danny to stop and slowly lowers the can.
Tim realizes, a fraction too late, that he may have accidentally said something useful.
“…how,” Danny asks carefully, “did you figure that out?”
Tim pauses. Because the honest answer is: he doesn’t entirely know.
He just looked at the system and suddenly the patterns made sense. Enough so that the inconsistencies started arranging themselves into something understandable inside his head.
Like noticing structural fractures in glass.
Or weak points in security.
Or the shape of a problem before anyone else realizes there is one.
“I observed it?” Tim offers weakly.
Danny stares at him with increasing suspicion.
“That is not reassuring.”
Tim gestures vaguely at the desk. “One of your routing trees was looping souls through unresolved maritime incidents because the system classified ‘consumed by the abyss’ under aquatic deaths instead of existential destabilization.”
Danny is silent for a long moment. Then, “Oh my Ancients,” he whispers in mortified awe. “You can read it.”
Tim immediately dislikes the implication of that sentence. “Read what?”
Danny points at the ceiling. Then the walls. Then seemingly reality itself. “The infrastructure.”
There is a beat of silence.
Tim looks down at the paperwork in front of him.
One of the forms flickers slightly beneath his hand. For half a second, he can see branching lines underneath the page itself. Connections. Systems. Pathways feed into each other like circuitry hidden under skin.
Then it disappears.
Tim very calmly places the form back onto the desk, as if it has developed legal rights he does not want to negotiate with.
“Nope,” he says immediately. “Hate that.”
Danny’s eyes flicker from Tim to the form and then to Tim again. “Hate… what exactly?” He asks gently, as if the question itself were a bomb.
Tim is staring at the form as it offended him personally. Which it did. “Everything.”
Danny gives him a flat look, which causes Tim to hesitate.
“I can’t read anything,” Tim says first, too fast, pretty much automatic denial, like stepping away from a label before it sticks. Then, after a beat, his gaze drops back to the desk anyway.
The paper looks normal again if he doesn’t focus too hard. That’s the problem. It only becomes wrong when he pays attention to it in the right way.
“That’s not—” Tim starts, then stops, because he’s not sure what word would even fit. “It’s not reading. It’s just… there.”
Danny gestures vaguely at the space around them. “That is infrastructure.”
Tim gives him a look. “That’s a dramatic word for paperwork.”
“It’s not paperwork.”
“That’s also a dramatic thing to say about paperwork.”
Danny opens his mouth, then closes it again like he’s reconsidering the entire conversation. Tim looks down again despite himself. The edge of the form shifts.
Enough that something underneath it briefly aligns with his attention like a diagram trying to be seen without fully committing to visibility.
Tim’s expression tightens immediately.
“Nope,” he says, faster this time. He slides the paper away like it’s contaminated. “Absolutely not. I don’t want that.”
Danny watches him carefully now. “What did you see?” He stresses again.
Tim pauses.
Because “I saw the structure of reality layered under bureaucracy” sounds insane.
So does “I saw the system trying to decide what I am and failing repeatedly.”
So instead he says the most honest version he can manage without sounding unwell: “Stuff I didn’t agree to notice.”
That earns him a long look.
Danny’s voice is quieter when he responds. “Yeah,” he says. “That tracks.”
A moment of silence passes between them. Then, like he’s trying to pull the conversation back into something survivable: “Okay. New rule. Don’t look at the paperwork too hard.”
Tim huffs once, short and humorless. “That feels like blaming the victim.”
“You are not the victim of paperwork.”
Tim glances at him.
“…I might be,” he says.
Danny makes a sound that is almost a laugh, but it dies halfway through. “You and I both.”
———
By hour eight, Tim has not so much stopped questioning things as he has simply run out of space to do it in real time.
There are too many systems. Too many inconsistencies. Too many things that behave correctly only when not observed directly. It becomes less like an investigation and more like standing inside a problem that refuses to finish unfolding.
He instead chooses to adapt instead, because not adapting has never once been an option he was allowed to keep.
It isn’t until he’s halfway through a pack of gummy skeletons that may or may not have gained sentience while he wasn’t paying attention that Tim stills.
Because he’s missed something.
Something annoyingly simple.
Danny still hasn’t asked his name.
Tim knows Danny’s name because somewhere between hour one and hour two—when the emotionally unstable pomeranian-coded vending machine he threw a chair at began spilling itself onto the floor in pure, unfiltered spite—Danny had looked up mid-crisis and said, “Oh, I’m Danny by the way,” like introducing himself to reality was a minor administrative correction.
But Danny has never asked for Tim’s.
Or at least… Tim thinks he hasn’t.
And the longer Tim runs that fact through his head, the less it feels like an oversight and the more it feels like a system behavior he hasn’t been given the context to interpret correctly.
Tim’s eyes flick back to Danny again, like the thought has been sitting in the back of his mind and has finally reached acceptable processing priority.
Danny, in return, is still watching him like everything he looks at is something that might become a problem if it is not accounted for quickly enough.
“You still haven’t asked my name,” Tim says. It comes out neutral. Too neutral. Like he’s testing whether the omission is meaningful or just another quirk of whatever this place counts as normal.
Danny doesn’t react immediately. That in itself is becoming a pattern Tim is starting to dislike. Then he blinks once, slowly. “Oh.” It lands awkwardly. “Do I… need to?”
Tim almost sputters. Almost. Instead, he watches Danny carefully because who asks that? “I mean…” He says just as awkwardly, “Usually yes.”
Danny shrugs slightly, like that’s an inconvenience rather than a principle. “We don’t usually get that far in intake.”
“That’s not—” Tim starts, then stops, because he’s not even sure what part of that sentence is wrong first. “That’s not the point, Danny.”
Danny sighs, already moving past it in his head. “Fine,” he says. “What’s your name?”
Tim hesitates only a fraction of a second. “…Tim.”
Danny nods like it’s been entered into a system somewhere that matters. “Cool,” he says. Then, after another moment of silence, just long enough for Tim to register it—
“Tim,” Danny repeats.
And that should be the end of it.
It’s not.
Somewhere deeper in the office, a phone rings. The sound is sharp. Immediate. Too clean to be ambient noise.
Danny doesn’t react.
Tim does.
Because this ring is different from the ones before. It’s not part of the background chorus of constant calls. It’s singular. Directed. It has decided on a destination and is now insisting on it.
The sound repeats.
Once.
Twice.
Danny exhales slowly. “Ignore it,” he mutters automatically, like that is a policy rather than advice.
The phone rings again.
Tim watches the room before he realizes he’s doing it. The desk. The walls. The space around the sound like it might reveal intent.
“It’s not stopping,” Tim says.
Danny finally looks mildly annoyed, but not surprised. “It will.”
The phone rings again.
And then there’s a pause.
It’s not exactly silence more than it is sound that arrives somewhere else instead.
Tim feels it before he understands it. It should be concerning to Tim that he’s feeling the ringing. But, alas, Tim is not concerned at all by this.
The phone rings again.
Tim looks at it.
Danny looks at it.
Neither of them move for a moment, like the sound itself is waiting for permission to continue existing.
“…you’re not going to pick that up?” Tim asks.
Danny stares at him. “No.”
The phone rings again.
Tim nods once, like this is simply the next step in a process that has unfortunately reached his attention.
“Okay,” he says.
Danny’s expression tightens instantly. “No. That was not an invitation.”
Tim is already walking over.
“It’s been routed to me,” he says, like that explains everything.
Danny pinches the bridge of his nose. “It is not supposed to route to you.”
The phone rings again, slightly more insistently now. As it has been noted, compliance is near.
Tim picks it up. There is a pause. “Hello..?” He frowns slightly.
For a moment, nothing answers him back. Then the line makes a sound like it is struggling to remember how speech works.
And then… it starts crying.
Tim wishes he were describing this figuratively. No. The line is literally weeping. There is cold water leaking out of the receiver, causing Tim to make a noise and pull it away from his ear. He looks down at his boots because the water(? the liquid? the unidentified substance?) is dripping onto his boot, and Tim feels as though his socks are growing wet.
“…okay,” he says, very carefully, “that’s not normal.”
Behind him, Danny goes still in a way that feels significantly more tired than before. “Tell me,” Danny says flatly, “that is not one of mine.”
“It’s crying,” Tim says.
“I heard that part.”
“It’s… leaking,” Tim continues, because that feels like the most accurate technical descriptor. “Through the line.”
Danny closes his eyes. “I can see that.”
Tim looks down again.
The wetness is spreading, and it’s persistent, like the concept of sadness has decided physics is optional and is now gently ignoring it. It is also, unfortunately, and Tim hates that he can confirm this, reaching his socks.
Tim lifts one foot slightly.
“…it’s on me,” he adds.
Danny makes a sound like a man watching his last remaining coping mechanism walk out of the room.
“Yeah,” he says. “That tracks.”
Tim adjusts the receiver again. “Should I escalate this?”
Danny opens one eye. “Define escalate.”
Tim pauses, “I mean… fix it.”
That earns him a look so exhausted it borders on spiritual damage.
“Do you hear yourself right now?” Danny asks incredulously.
The phone emits another wet, broken sound. Like grief trying to form a sentence and failing halfway through.
Tim stares at it. Then, very calmly, he says, “Okay. I think this is a containment issue.”
Danny points at him without looking up. “That. That right there. That is why I don’t get to leave this office.”
Tim ignores that. Because the problem is still actively spreading onto the floor.
He shifts the receiver closer again.
“Hi,” Tim says, tone switching into something dangerously competent. “I need you to stop doing that.”
There is a dramatic silence before the crying intensifies slightly, as he heard it but took it personally.
Tim exhales through his nose. “Okay,” he mutters. “So it’s noncompliant.”
Danny, behind him: “Do not negotiate with it.”
Tim glances back slightly. “I wasn’t negotiating.” Tim lowers the receiver a bit, trying to maintain his dignity, “…I was issuing instructions.”
Danny slowly sits down, like his bones have given up.
The phone makes another wet, fractured sound. And Tim, still holding it, adds, “I think I can route this.”
Danny immediately objects, “No, you can’t.”
“I think I can.”
“That is not a challenge.”
“It is now apparently my job.”
History repeats itself when Danny begins screaming.
The sound is not particularly helpful, but it doesn’t appear to be emotionally cathartic.
———
So this is the afterlife, Tim concludes.
Not because he has gained any real philosophical insight, but because he has just successfully resolved a phone call that resulted in ontological grief manifesting as physical flooding.
The office floor is now somewhere between “submerged workspace” and “failed aquarium exhibit.” Somewhere in the chaos, a cluster of sentient gummy skeletons has organized themselves into what can only be described as a maritime rescue operation using a tape dispenser as a makeshift vessel.
Tim watches one of them salute before paddling into a pile of soggy paperwork.
He updates his internal model of reality accordingly. Briefly considers whether this is what Noah saw during his ark. Decides it probably is, just with worse lighting.
Yes. This is definitely the afterlife.
He sets the receiver down carefully, because everything here seems like it might become worse if handled without intention.
Danny is still somewhere behind him, mid-existential breakdown.
Tim is not listening to that part anymore. He is instead running through the facts again, because that is what you do when reality refuses to stabilize:
One: He is dead.
Two: He is “incorrectly processed.” A minor inconvenience. Technically survivable. Probably.
Three: The system—or whatever designation this place has—thinks he is an employee. That is a major inconvenience. Tim is not sure whether he wants to be reduced to customer service after death.
Four: He can see things he should not be able to see, though he has decided not to look at them directly anymore out of principle.
Five: The afterlife operates a toll-free customer service line.
And despite all of this, that’s not the worst part.
The worst part is Lucius Fox has just transferred ownership of Wayne Enterprises to him.
Tim lets that sit for exactly one moment.
Then he almost laughs.
What a waste.
A phone in the office rings again. Once. Twice.
Danny doesn’t seem to acknowledge it. He is still somewhere behind Tim, having what can only be described as a mental breakdown severe enough that the screaming has looped back around into muttering. It sounds less like panic now and more like someone trying to verbally renegotiate reality.
The sound continues on anyway, as if waiting for permission to become something more than noise.
Tim looks at it.
And without thinking, without meaning to, without even fully deciding it is his voice that should be used… Tim picks it up.
“1-800-COSMIC,” he says flatly as he stares at the flooded office, “your ontological suffering is important to us.”
To his left: Danny, halfway to voluntarily admitting himself into Arkham.
To his right: the gummy skeletons are now reenacting the ending of Titanic atop the tape dispenser raft.
Tim closes his eyes briefly.
Then sighs.
And before whatever exists on the other end of the line can answer, he says, dry as bone: “Please remain on the line.”