Batfam x Neglected!Dead!Reader
You had died in a cold room, alone and afraid.
Not heroically like the rest of your family would, or peacefully, or even surrounded by your family.
You died in a damp, cold basement of starvation and pneumonia after the low level kidnappers who’d taken you for ransom declared you a lost cause after all the familial contacts in your phone had left you on voicemail.
The last memory you remember of being alive was of coughing, of thinking you were so hungry, of telling yourself that you would wake up in just a bit, and then everything went black.
The GCPD found your body, what, two days later? You couldn’t really tell. Or be bothered. Your starving body was rotting on the floor while your soul stared at it as a ghost. It was natural, and perfectly reasonable, you assumed, to freak out.
The body had been unable to be identified.
Turns out, when a body rots in a damp basement, along with nearly a month of starvation and pneumonia and broken bones, without any person items that hadn’t been sold off, it was hard to tell who a body was related to.
And bodies with souls that haven’t moved on, as it turns out, rot much faster.
So you followed your body. You watched your own autopsy, the gentle dissection of your body, watching a specialist determine you were still a child, that you died of starvation and pneumonia and lingering blunt force trauma.
Your body was put into storage, a cold, dry coffin on a wall of cold, dry coffins, that left your soul feeling nothing but a cold that couldn’t be shaken.
You spent most of your days roaming the streets after that. You were anchored to these few sections of Gotham, the rich district, the precinct, and the few streets in between.
Dogs could see you. As could cats, squirrels, birds, most animals, interestingly enough.
You stayed at the manor most. Not because you enjoyed it, no.
But because every single day, you held out hope that maybe, just maybe, someone would check their phone for your messages, someone would ask where you were, someone would identify you, and you would be able to move on.
You watched as everyone went along with their lives, and whenever someone asked where you might be? Brushed off.
It was always the same 5 rotating excuses.
Out, you’re old enough to take care of yourself.
You missed living. You missed being warm. You missed being able to feel and cry. You missed at least being slightly acknowledged when you were in the house.
Now the only living things who knew you existed in the manor were the crows in the trees, Ace, Titus, Alfred the Cat, Lucy, Batcow, and the bats in the cave.
And then Duke came along.
It felt like he was there to replace you, to fill the unconscious void you left in the family that none of your family seemed to realize existed.
And then he saw the family pictures on the mantle for the first time.
“Hey, Tim? Who’s… that? In between Jason and Dick?”
Tim looked up from his maybe 4th coffee for the day, glancing at the photo Duke was staring at. You weren’t smiling in the photo. You were sitting in between Dick and Jason, smushed in between them, looking like you’d be anywhere else. Your clothes weren’t half as nice as the suits everyone else was wearing, and you had bags under your eyes. It was supposed to be a candid photo, everyone chatting and arguing and adjusting their clothing, while you… just stared at the camera with unfocused, tired eyes.
“Oh. That’s B’s kid. First biological one. 2 years older than Damien, I think.”
Duke blinked, staring at the photo, unintentionally ignoring Tim’s voice. He hadn’t seen anyone that looked anything at all like you these past few days.
“- never home anymore. I wouldn’t bother looking.”
“Hey. You… heard that, right?”
Duke swore he was hearing voices. He’d been told over and over again that it was just the manor settling. Just someone getting home late from patrol. The manor was too safe and secure for anyone to come and live inside.
No one else seemed to notice it.
Well, besides the animals. They’d bark or whine or purr or moo at something that didn’t even seem to be there.
He’d caught both Titus and Ace, on multiple occasions, barking at absolutely nothing, and curled up, whining. Though the later was nearly exclusively Ace. Titus just barked.
But either way, Duke heard that one voice nearly every night. And, unfortunately, tonight was just like any other.
“I hate you, you know? I die and not even a day later my replacement moves in.”
And normally, Duke wouldnt talk back. He tired a few times, and it never worked. But tonight was different.
Midterms were about to start, and as a result, teachers at Gotham Academy had been piling on hesr more and more work to get grades in.
“I’m no one’s replacement. And I’m trying to study. Can you please just shut up for a few hours?”
The voice, thankfully, went silent for a moment, before, “Oh. Oh my god. You can hear me. How can you hear me?!”
That, in all honesty, wasn’t the reaction he was expecting. But the voice rambled on.
“No one’s even noticed I’m gone, no one can hear or see me, well besides Ace I think, so no human can see me, but either way, do you realize how huge this is for me?!”
“Am I the first to be able to hear you?”
“Wait. Were you the one on the photo on the mantle? The one that looked like…” Duke trailed off, remembering your features the best he could.
“Yes!” Duke could swear the owner of the voice seemed to be jumping for joy. “Thats me! That was… me.”
“Was?” He asked, cautiously, waiting for a reply, one that was instead met with silence, a slight creak in the slightly open door, and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the room.
It seems whoever was speaking to him… was gone.
Your cries were haunting Bruce. Nearly every night, for an entire month, he’d be tormented by the same sound from sundown til sunrise.
A child, crying, begging for their father to come save them.
Every hour, the cries got quieter. Fainter and fainter, changing from wails of pain and pleas to be let go to begs of mercy and to not be abandoned, and finally, around sunrise, soft, almost inaudible cries of forgiveness, with wet, painful coughs echoing during any seemingly empty stretches of sound.
He swore he knew who the voice belonged to, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
It wasn’t Duke or Damien’s, nor was it Cass or Stephanie’s, not Tim, Jason or Dick, not even Barbara’s.
The only person that left was you.
You, who he clearly remembered allowing to go to a friend’s house and stay the night for as long as you wanted.
You’d basically moved out, at this point, though Bruce figured that a call every once in a while would be nice.
And yeah, he did see your voicemail. All 30 of them. One per day, every day, at the exact same time. But your friend’s mother hadn’t called and you never got into any trouble, so you were most likely fine. Of course, he was slightly concerned when, after 31 days exactly, the voicemails stopped, but he’d check them later.
When Duke had asked at dinner how the person who haunted the house died, the rest of Bruce’s children, along with Bruce himself, of course, looked at the newest addition to their household in confusion.
Duke then clarified. “The person on the mantle in that one photo? The really dusty one in the left corner? Right in the middle?”
Damien clicked his tongue, saying your name like it was a curse. “The elder biological child? Why would you assume that they have died?”
Bruce nodded slowly. “Right, you two haven’t met in person yet. I’ll call them over tonight, you can see them tomorrow morning. They basically live at one of their friend’s houses.” Of course, Bruce would never admit he didn’t know the name of said friend.
“I swear I heard a voice though.”
“I’ll call tonight and you can meet them in the morning and see that they are, in fact, not dead, if it’ll help. Now. How long have the voices been going on?”
“Just since I saw the photo. But I swear, I-“
“Duke, that was nearly a week ago.” Tim spoke up, looking genuinely concerned. “You’ve been hearing what you think is a dead person’s voice for a week?”
And the conversation devolved from then, and Bruce ignored the sinking feeling in his gut that something was very, very wrong.
Jason knew a lot about death, speaking as someone, who, well, had been brutally murdered.
But even so, that didn’t ease the pain in his heart as he finally listened to those 31 days of voicemails after ignoring them for nearly a month.
Last time he’d seen you, you’d both argued. Or was it just him yelling at you while you tried to defend yourself, like a cornered, starving dog. He assumed you’d be fine. That 31 voicemails was you being dramatic and too apologetic and that you needed to toughen up.
And now he was hearing 31 days of you being starved and beaten and tortured, everything getting progressively worse and worse every day, until on the 31st day, the kidnappers simply… gave up. Said you’d die within 20 days max if you didn’t get help and hell, they gave the damn address.
Which Jason then searched up hoping in his heart that someone alive had been found there to see what he could find. And to his despair, there was something.
Multiple articles. Dated back weeks ago. All the same story.
UNKNOWN BODY FOUND AT KIDNAPPING SITE. BODY HAS YET BE TO IDENTIFIED BY CORONERS OR POLICE. IF ANY INFORMATION IS AVAILABLE, PLEASE ALERT THE GCPD.
Jason felt like he couldn’t breathe.
You were supposed to be the one thing in his life that wasn’t touched by violence. You were the one kid is this godforsaken family that took care of yourself and cooked and did homework and got on the honor role instead of being a vigilante who got bruises and broken bones.
Goddamn it. So Duke wasn’t crazy after all.
Art for what reader looks like as a ghost! (TW: Body Horror)
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