#marn writes

spoilerwarning hey are you giving out my number to randos???? wtf

the three dots that indicate he’s typing appear, then disappear, then reappear again. steph watches raptly as robin evidently types and retypes the same sentence for about five minutes before sending the finished product.

robinofficial Oh shit. I meant to tell you about that It’s been a week He’s one of the Phantasms, I’m trying to get them on the app they didn’t really know there were other teens out there doing what we ow hey hey come on man that’s just rude I’m clearly composing a text message here Sorry on patrol

of course he is. honestly, she’s impressed that he bothered to text instead of sending a voice memo. but robin always manages to say a lot in a few texts–steph’s been keeping loose tabs on the phantasm story, but had no idea they were a crew. let alone teenagers. maybe she’s gotta get better about actually reading the hundreds of messages in robin chat she wakes up to every morning.

she tabs back into her texts, saves the unknown number as “phantasm?” with a ghost emoji, and types back:

yeah this is she is this the grey guy with the mask and the killing mobsters?

the phantasm takes longer than robin to respond. so long, actually, that steph has drifted back to her reading for class by the time her phone buzzes once–and then, insistently, again. and again. she realizes, with an equal mix of bafflement and social terror, that the phantasm is calling her, and jabs the accept button before she can talk herself out of it.

the music in her earbuds cuts off mid-lyric, replaced by crackling and shuffling on the other end of the line. someone walking? maybe he pocket dialed her by accident?

“hi?” steph says, uncertainty pitching the word up into a question. it’s hard to shake the feeling she’s about to hear something she really shouldn’t.

“hey, sorry,” the phantasm says. his phone’s microphone is shit, but the words–and the thick accent, which is unexpected–are still mostly audible. “i hate textin’ on this piece of junk when i’m out doin’ shit.”

doin’ shit might mean cape business. there’s a muffled quality to his words that steph can easily envision coming from the full-face skull mask she’s only seen in blurry 480p.

“are you killing people right now?” she asks, wry.

“what? no?” he says, at least having the decency to sound offended at the implication. “you think i’d call you from–”

“i mean, you posted you showing off a guy’s severed head to tiktok.”

his laugh crackles down the line. “okay, point, but nah. i’m just trespassing.”

“where?” steph asks, before she can help herself. it’s not like she’s gonna publish anything about this–but still. sue her for being a little curious about what the mysterious phantasm gets up to when he’s not jumping mobsters on their home turf.

“guess,” the phantasm says; she can hear him grinning around the word.

“um,” she says, caught on the back foot, “wayne tower.”

“nope.”

“amusement mile.”

“nah.”

“arkham?”

she asks it as a joke. he doesn’t answer.

“you’re shitting me,” steph hisses. she’s home alone, but still feels a pathological need to lower her voice like she’s been brought in on a conspiracy. “what are you doing breaking into arkham?”

“long story,” the phantasm says, and she can almost hear the shrug in it.

she rolls her eyes. “fucking try me. you clearly wanna brag about being there.”

“i’m not in the actual–i’m not in the fuckin’ asylum,” the phantasm says. he hasn’t lowered his own voice whatsoever; he must not be worried about getting caught. “just on the, uh, the grounds.”

“why?”

“look, this ain’t exactly why i called–”

“okay, well, too bad,” steph says, finding a ballpoint pen amidst the mess on her bed and toying with its clip. “s’what we’re talking about now. you got a name, by the way, or are we sticking with phantasm?”

he’s quiet again–and when he does speak, it’s weirdly serious. “you can’t tell.”

“oh–hey, i won’t,” she says, thrown by the sudden sincerity. maybe she overstepped. it’s not like she knows robin’s real name–or anyone else on the stupid frog app. “and you don’t have to tell me, if it’s too–”

“jason.” he says it fast and uncertain, like a grenade he’s afraid of throwing. steph’s not sure what it’s supposed to mean. she knows, like, three jasons at her school, and she’s pretty sure none of them are this guy.

“okay, jason,” she says, making the snap decision to reciprocate. kind of the least she can do, really. “i’m steph. why are you trespassing at arkham?”

“i am–” he cuts himself off with a grunt and a thud, like he had to jump over something. “lookin’ for a body.”

steph can feel her eyebrows climbing up her face. “dead body?”

“only kinda body worth lookin’ for.”

“anyone you know personally?” from the way he’s talking about it, she’d guess not, but it can’t hurt to ask. and the nosiness is kind of second nature at this point.

“takeout place near me missed a protection payment to the triad,” jason says. he sounds vaguely breathless with exertion. “owner got taken to the woods out here an’ shot. i think they’re payin’ off the guards so they can bury shit out where nobody’ll find it.”

“jesus,” steph says. she’s still flicking the pen clip with her thumbnail, bending it back as far as it goes. “and you think you can find it, because–”

“because i’ve got the dead guy tellin’ me where to look,” jason says, with such confidence that he must be telling the absolute truth.

“huh,” steph says. she’d add something else, but she’s coming up short. not every day a guy tells you he can hear dead people.

then again, she accidentally participated in a ritual to open a gate to hell two months ago. maybe her definition of what counts as an everyday occurrence in gotham needs to take a walk off the trigate bridge.

she can hear jason crashing through underbrush on the other line, leaves crunching under his bootheels. there’s a dull sound, some kind of sudden impact, and he swears somewhere distant from the receiver.

“shit, sorry–one sec. i dropped you.” the mutter is accompanied by a shuffling noise that steph assumes is him feeling around in the dirt. “knew i shoulda brought a flashlight–”

“you don’t have a flashlight!?” the question comes out of her louder than she means for it to; she feels her cheeks starting to burn with embarrassment in its wake.

“oh, there you are. thanks for yellin’.” jason’s voice is much closer again–and a lot wryer. “yeah, my eyes glow when i got a ghost with me. it’s like havin’ headlights. but the mask ain’t got, like, a lot of peripheral–”

“your phone doesn’t have one?” she asks, cutting him off.

“this piece of shit? i got it for like twelve dollars. it doesn’t even have a keyboard.”

“okay,” steph says, evenly. “so how are you gonna get back out?”

he makes a soft, winded whuh noise, then chases it with, “sorry, what?”

“of the woods, genius. how are you gonna get back out in the dark? once you find the ghost, isn’t that, like, unfinished business settled? ghost’s gonna leave. no more headlights.”

jason is silent for a long time. steph can only tell he hasn’t hung up on her because she can still hear the sounds of his clothes rustling as he walks.

“i,” he says, finally, “did not consider havin’ to leave.”

“yeah, i kinda got that,” steph says. she’s already on her feet, one foot nudging the storage cube that holds her spoiler costume out from under the bed. with the moped, she can get to arkham in–what, twenty-five minutes, tops? and mom’s working a shift until six in the morning, so nobody’ll know she even left the house.

“look,” she says, cradling her phone between ear and shoulder as she starts to change. “i’ll come get you.” 

“i’ve got other people i can call,” jason protests. if the phantasm is a whole crew, he probably does–but there’s a part of steph that hates to let him hang up and go back to his own little self-contained bubble of vigilantism. not when they could both make a new friend out of it.

“sure,” she says, “but i’m offering. and you gotta buy me a burger after. transportation fee.”

“are you kidding?” jason asks. “i’ll buy you three burgers.”

steph smiles to herself as she pulls her boots on. “burger, fries, and a milkshake, and we’re even.”