Fic Prompt #56 — The Boy Who Outlived Gods
The League didn’t find him.
He found them.
It started with a pulse.
Not an explosion. Not an invasion. Just a quiet, low-frequency hum that rolled through the Watchtower like a heartbeat that didn’t belong to Earth.
By the time Batman traced it, it was already inside the station.
A boy — barefoot, white-haired, eyes burning an impossible green — standing in the airlock without a suit.
And smiling.
“You built this place over one of my graves,” he said. “I thought you should know.”
Superman was the first to move. “You’re trespassing,” he said carefully. “We don’t want trouble.”
The boy tilted his head. “Then you shouldn’t have woken me.”
Every sensor, every alarm in the station died at once.
No power failure. No hack. Just… stopped. Like time itself had forgotten to keep working.
And that’s when Martian Manhunter looked at him — really looked — and whispered:
“That is not a ghost.”
“No,” the boy said. “But I used to be.”
They called him Phantom.
He called himself a mistake the universe never fixed.
According to him, he’d been dead for longer than their planet had worn oceans. Every world that discovered dimensional travel eventually crossed paths with him — a tether, a glitch, the echo of what happens when the afterlife cracks open and something crawls back out.
Batman didn’t believe him.
Until Phantom spoke his real name.
His first one.
The one even the League didn’t know.
“Don’t look so surprised,” Phantom murmured. “I watched your kind build language from ash. You all forget — I never left.”
But here’s the thing:
He wasn’t threatening them.
He was warning them.
“Something’s waking up beneath your reality,” he said. “Something older than me. And when it comes, your gods won’t save you.”
When Wonder Woman asked who it was, he smiled again — tired, almost fond.
The lights flickered green.
“He remembers everything you’ve ever buried.”
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