#3.31
TDBB: Golem Toph 3.31
The process of becoming a zombie, as it turned out, was mostly just incredibly boring.
At least, that was Toph’s current professional assessment. They were trapped against Solomon Grundy’s gargantuan chest, but as the colossal undead titan lumbered deeper into the weeping woods, he hadn’t bothered to keep holding them with his hands. He didn't need to. The parasitic, thick networks of calcified stone and slimy grey root-muscles pulsing from his torso had actively drawn them into his literal frame. They were sinking into him like quicksand made of cold, moldering meat.
By the time the moon reached its highest point through the blistered canopy, Ivy and Toph were entirely submerged up to their collarbones, their bodies pinned side-by-side inside the massive, stinking ledge of Grundy’s pectoral muscles. Harley was stuck just a few inches higher, her shoulders wedged right under the giant’s massive, stone-veined collarbone.
The Rot was actively siphoning the life out of them, and the visual side effects were reaching peak theatricality. Ivy’s usually vibrant, olive-toned skin had faded to a dry, papery chalk-white, her dark lips turning a deep, bruised shade of plum. Toph looked equally pathetic -- her fierce, tan complexion was completely drained, replaced by a pasty, undead grey that made her milk-white eyes blend seamlessly into her face.
"Hey. Sparky. Dirt-bag. Whatever your name is," Toph croaked, her voice hollow and entirely flat.
She tilted her chin up as much as the roots would allow, staring blindly into the underside of Grundy’s massive jaw. "Do me a favor and just pop my head off. Seriously. Smash me into a pancake. Eat my brain. Do something. If I have to hear this stupid poem one more time, I’m going to die of pure boredom before the moss actually finishes growing over my ears."
Right on cue, the massive rhythm of Grundy’s chest rattled beneath them as he took another heavy stride, his voice booming in a slow, depressing drone:
"...Grew a new bone on a Friday... woke up the dead on a Saturday..."
"See?!" Toph groaned, dropping her head back against the rotting flesh with a wet thud. "It doesn't even rhyme! Friday and Saturday? Who wrote this crap? It's torture! I am a prisoner of war and I am demanding a better quality of execution!"
"Toph... save your... breath," Ivy wheezed. She looked completely spent, her eyes half-lidded as she tried to fight the cold, numbing pressure creeping into her lungs. Yet, despite the total lack of Green in the atmosphere, the botanist’s stubbornness refused to die.
She strained against the calcified roots, trying to project her voice up toward the monster’s deaf ear. "Grundy... listen to me. Solomon! It's Ivy. We’ve worked together. Remember Gotham? The botanical gardens? The sewers? You don't want this... the Rot is using you. It’s turning you into a puppet for the Grey. You're stronger than this, you big lug..."
Grundy didn't even blink. He just kept walking, his massive boots pulverizing everything in his path.
Everywhere his feet broke the soil, a thick, weeping wave of grey mold instantly burst from the footprints, spreading like a plague through the grass. Behind them, the massive, silent circle of undead wildlife marched in perfect, terrifying synchronization.
Ivy watched them through blurry vision, her analytical mind still tracing the energy lines despite her fading consciousness. "He’s... he’s gathering them," she murmured, her voice tight with growing dread. "The numbers... it's a literal army. Solomon! What is the army for? Who are you preparing to fight? Tell me!"
"...Silent and cold on a Sunday..." Grundy rumbled in response, completely oblivious, his muddy-olive eyes staring straight into the fog.
"Oh! Oh! I got it! I know!"
The sudden, high-pitched chirp came from right above Ivy’s left ear. Harley’s skin had turned a spectacular shade of curdled-milk white, her vibrant blue and pink pigtails looking completely ridiculous against her newly minted, zombie-pale face. She was sinking into Grundy's frame slightly faster than the others, her manic energy seemingly accelerating the necrotic assimilation.
"I have the ultimate, million-dollar, spectacular plan to get us out of this big, stinky group hug!" Harley announced, her jaw twitching with a hysterical, zombie-like grin. "It involves... it involves a... wait. Hold on. It’s coming back around..."
Toph let out a long, loud, suffering sigh. "Circus. This is the fifth time you've said that."
"No, really! This time it’s the real deal!" Harley insisted, her eyes rolling upward as she stared at the sky, trying to grab a thought out of the air. "It’s a classic! It involves a really shiny piece of metal, a pair of fuzzy socks, and... and... uh..." Harley’s face suddenly went completely blank. Her jaw slacked, her eyes losing their focus as she blinked dully at a passing tree. "...Wow. Look at that mushroom. It looks like a little umbrella. What was I saying?"
"I am going to murder you," Toph muttered, her teeth clicking together. "If the zombie king doesn't do it, I am going to manually break these roots, bite through your shoulder, and end my own misery. I swear to god, Circus, your brain is a literal sieve."
"My brain is doing great, thanks for asking! It’s just... taking a little nap because of the smell!" Harley huffed, trying to pout, though her lips felt somewhat numb. "It’s like my thoughts are playing hide-and-seek, and the seeker is currently winning by a landslide!"
The forest around them began to thicken, the air dropping down to a freezing, stagnant temperature that smelled sharply of wet ash and old iron. Grundy finally slowed his pace, lumbering into a massive, hollowed-out clearing that looked less like a natural bog and more like a crude, primitive ritual site.
The camp was surrounded by a dense, jagged wall of massive, rotten tree trunks that had been dragged and driven into the earth like spikes. But it wasn't the defensive perimeter that caught the eye -- it was what lay within.
Scattered across the clearing were dozens of bizarre, grotesque figures. They were crude, life-sized effigies made entirely of dead sticks, woven briars, and clumps of wet, black rot. Each one had been meticulously shaped to resemble Grundy himself -- huge shoulders, thick chests, hunched postures. They stood in a silent, dead circle, frozen like a macabre audience surrounding a central point.
In the absolute center of the clearing stood three small, jagged grey stones. They were remarkably small -- no larger than Toph’s head -- yet they somehow supported the immense, impossible weight of a massive, black iron cauldron. The cauldron was ancient, its rim rusted and crusted with thick rings of dried slime. Inside the basin, a thick, foul, pitch-black soup was violently bubbling and churning, sending thick plumes of pale green vapor into the air.
There was no fire beneath it. No heat, no wood, no sparks. The cauldron was boiling purely on the raw energy of the Rot flowing through the three stones. It was the absolute heart of the infection -- the localized wellspring that was feeding the entire forest and channeling its power directly into Grundy’s gargantuan frame.
The sight of the camp was a tragic, monstrous window into the zombie's fractured psyche. Solomon Grundy, the immortal monster of Slaughter Swamp, didn't want a kingdom. He didn't want a war. He was just a curse, completely alone in a world that feared him, using the cosmic malice of the Grey to build a silent, rot-woven company of figures just to feel like he had a home.
The moment Grundy entered the clearing, the absorption process accelerated to its absolute limit. Toph and Ivy were pulled down past their chins, their faces completely buried within the thick, stinking folds of Grundy’s rotten chest-flesh. Toph’s mouth was entirely covered by a thick layer of mold, cutting off her ability to swear, while Ivy’s eyes closed completely, her consciousness slipping into a deep, necrotic coma as her heart slowed to a near-stagnant crawl.
Harley was the last to go under. The black roots slithered over her mouth dragging her face beneath the surface of the giant's chest until the pale green twilight of the bog vanished into total, suffocating darkness.
She was completely submerged.
Underneath the layers of rot, it was heavy. Cold. The pressure was immense, pushing against her lungs, trying to force the putrid, dead energy into her system to freeze her blood. It felt exactly like being trapped in a weighted sack. Like being dropped into a freezing, black river with iron weights chained to her ankles.
And right there -- in the absolute suffocating dark of the grave -- something violently clicked inside Harley Quinn’s chaotic mind.
'Underwater.'
The memory hit her like a lightning bolt, shattering the zombie fog in her brain. She wasn't just a sidekick. She wasn't just a clown in a tattered costume. She was an Olympic-level gymnast. She was a performer who spent years studying the art of the escape. She knew exactly how to dislocate a shoulder to slip a straightjacket. She knew how to manipulate body mass to slide through the links of a heavy chain. She knew how to survive when the air ran out.
'You don't fight the pressure,' her inner coach whispered. 'You find the slack.'
Deep inside Grundy’s massive, spongy chest cavity, Harley didn't panic. She relaxed. She let her limbs go completely limp, letting the natural shifting of Grundy’s heavy strides create a microscopic pocket of space between her ribs and his bone-veins. She twisted her torso at an impossible, contorted angle, slipping her left arm upward through the soft, rotting muscle fibers like a knife through old cake.
Up in the clearing, Solomon Grundy lumbered over to a massive, fallen trunk near the bubbling cauldron. He sat down heavily, the wood groaning under his weight, and rested his massive elbows on his knees. He stared blankly into the cold, boiling black soup, his lips moving in a quiet, depressed mutter as he repeated the final lines of his curse over and over again into the dead air.
He was too entranced, too deeply buried in his own cyclical sorrow, to notice the sudden, violent shifting on his right shoulder.
SPLATCH.
A pale, slender hand violently erupted from the tattered fabric of Grundy’s collarbone.
Harley pulled herself free like a creature crawling out of a primordial tar pit. She burst through the surface of his skin, coughing violently, hacking up a mouthful of black, foul-tasting sludge as she scrambled onto the top of the giant's massive shoulder. She was completely covered from head to toe in slimy grey muck, her pigtails matted to her neck, but her eyes were wide, bright, and completely human.
"I... cough... I remembered!" Harley wheezed, wiping the slime from her eyes and sucking in the cold, crisp air of the clearing. She wiped her tongue with the back of her hand, gagging. "Ugh! Note to self: never, ever go cave-diving in an undead guy's cleavage. Zero stars. Worst vacation ever."
She balanced herself precariously on his wide, mossy shoulder blade. Grundy didn't even stir. He just kept staring at the cauldron, his hollow voice a low murmur: "...Born on a Monday..."
Harley took a deep breath, turning around to pull the others out. "Alright, team, the escape artist is on the clock! Guys? Ivy? Tophy?"
She froze.
Where Ivy and Toph had been sunk neck-deep a few minutes ago, there was nothing but a smooth, unbroken expanse of grey, root-woven flesh. They had been completely absorbed into his frame, pulled deep into the core of his mass to be processed into his new zombie inner circle.
A sudden, sharp spike of genuine, icy fear pierced through Harley’s chest. The playful mischief vanished from her face. "Oh, no. No, no, no. Guys!"
She dropped to her knees on his shoulder, frantically digging her fingers into the soft, rotting muscle, trying to tear a hole back into his chest. "Come on! Don't do this! Don't leave me alone with the poetry major!"
From deep within the fleshy mass beneath her knees, a tiny, muffled sound rippled through the rot.
"...Har... ep..."
It was Ivy's voice. It was incredibly faint, choked by the thick, parasitic slime wrapping around her throat, the words barely able to break through the density of the giant's frame.
"Ivy!" Harley gasped, pressing her ear flat against Grundy's putrid shoulder. "Ivy, I can hear you! What do I do?! How do I get you out?!"
"...Har... e... cau..." The voice faded, followed by a low, desperate thumping sound that could have been Toph trying to punch her way out through the bone-veins, her movements sluggish and entirely weak.
"The what?! The cau- what?!" Harley yelled, her hands flying to her head as she looked around the clearing, frantically searching for her brain. "Think, Harley, think! What has letters that start with 'cau'? Cautious? Cauliflower? Caucasian?!"
Her eyes scanned the clearing, darting past the creepy stick effigies, until they finally landed on the massive, impossible structure in the center. The black, rusted iron basin supported by the three tiny grey stones. The thick, soupy black thingy that was boiling violently without a single spark of fire.
"The cauldron!" Harley squeaked, her eyes widening. "The black soupy thingy! Ivy wants me to mess with the soup!"
She didn't have a coherent plan. She didn't have time for one. Grundy’s voice was starting to lift again, his massive chest expanding as the roots beneath her began to tighten, preparing to drag her back under.
With a wild, desperate cry, Harley launched herself off Grundy’s shoulder. She flipped cleanly through the air, her body executing a perfect, high-flying arc over the stick figures, and landed with a heavy splash right in front of the three stones.
She threw her hands against the side of the massive iron cauldron and pushed with everything she had. "Come on, you stupid, heavy piece of kitchenware! Topple!"
The cauldron didn't move an inch. It was entirely too heavy, bound to the clearing by the intense, gravitational pull of the Rot flowing through the stones. Harley’s boots slipped in the mud, her muscles straining until her pale face turned bright red.
The sudden, loud clanging of metal finally broke Solomon Grundy out of his trance.
Slowly, his massive head turned. The muddy-olive glare locked onto the small, muck-covered clown currently trying to vandalize his favorite cooking pot. A deep, rumbling growl vibrated through his chest, a sound of pure, protective malice.
"No touch," Grundy rumbled, his voice dropping into a dangerous, rocky register. "No touch Solomon's things!"
He rose from the log, the ground shaking as he took a massive, thudding step toward her. He reached out with one gargantuan hand, his thick fingers opening like a massive iron claw, sweeping through the air to catch her and crush her into the dirt.
Harley’s heart leaped into her throat. She looked at his approaching hand, then looked at the cauldron, and a sudden, brilliant flash of pure circus instinct took over.
"Hey, butter-fingers! Over here!" Harley screamed.
Instead of running away, she waited until the absolute last possible second. Just as Grundy’s massive, heavy fist came swinging through the mist like a runaway train, Harley dropped flat onto her stomach, sliding cleanly through the muck beneath his knuckles.
BOOM.
Grundy’s immense momentum carried his hand straight into the side of his own cauldron. The sheer, terrifying force of the zombie’s strength struck the iron basin flush. The impossible balance of the three small stones was instantly shattered.
The massive cauldron toppled over with a deafening, metallic crash.
The effect was instantaneous and spectacular. The thick, foul, pitch-black soup poured out across the clearing in a violent, steaming wave. The moment the liquid struck the dead dirt, a horrific, piercing screech echoed through the trees -- the sound of the localized Rot connection being violently severed.
Instantly, the pale green vapor in the air began to dissipate. A massive, volatile reaction rippled straight back into Grundy’s body. He let out a prolonged, agonized roar as a thick, continuous stream of black sludge and rotting moss began to violently pour out of his chest and mouth, reducing his gargantuan mass by the second. He began to shrink, his rock-hard frame softening and melting back down toward his usual proportions as the cosmic buff was stripped away.
With a pair of wet, heavy plops, two pale, muck-covered figures slid cleanly out of the collapsing folds of his chest, crashing heavily into the swampy mud.
"Ivy! Tophy!" Harley screamed, scrambling to her feet and rushing over to them.
They looked completely turned. Ivy was entirely motionless, her skin the color of a winter cloud, her eyes closed as she lay face-down in the muck.
Toph was equally unresponsive, her limbs completely limp, a thick layer of grey fungus still clinging to her cheeks like a horrific beard.
"Oh no, no, no! Don't you dare go full George Romero on me!" Harley cried, dropping to her knees beside them. She frantically grabbed Toph by the shoulders, shaking her violently. "Come on, Tophy! Wake up! Speak to me! Say something mean about my hair!"
Receiving no response, Harley went into full, chaotic clown-doctor mode. She pinched Toph’s nose, took a deep breath, and prepared to blow air into her lungs, only for Toph’s eyes to violently snap open.
A pale, trembling hand shot up, catching Harley by the nose and twisting it hard.
"If your lips... touch my face..." Toph wheezed, her voice incredibly weak, but dripping with venom, "I will find a way... to bend the iron... in your blood... and turn your kidneys into a necklace."
"Yay! She's alive!" Harley cheered, completely ignoring the threat as she pulled Toph into a suffocating, muddy hug.
A few inches away, Ivy let out a long, ragged gasp, her chest heaving as the pure air finally began to clear the necrotic fog from her lungs. The color was slowly, painfully returning to her lips.
"Harley... get us... out of here," Ivy croaked, trying to lift her head. "Before he... recovers."
Behind them, Solomon Grundy was completely breaking down. He wasn't paying attention to them at all. The loss of the cauldron had completely shattered his simple, fragile mind. He was dropped to his knees in the mud, his massive hands frantically scooping up the spilled black sludge, trying to pour it back into the overturned pot.
"No, no, no," Grundy whimpered, his robotic voice entirely confused and heartbroken. His rhyme had broken completely, his words jumbling together into a chaotic, sorrowful mess. "Monday... Sunday... the soup is cold... the stones are broken... Solomon is alone... born on a Monday... where did the dead go...?"
With agonizing slowness, he began trying to pick up the massive, heavy cauldron, trying to balance it back onto the three small stones. But without the ritualistic flow of the Rot, the stones kept slipping, the heavy iron crashing back into the dirt every time he lifted it. He was entirely entranced by the task, completely consumed by his own tragic, desperate loop.
"Alright, team, the circus is leaving town!" Harley announced. She hooked one arm under Ivy’s shoulder and the other under Toph’s arms, hoisting them both upright with a grunt of pure gymnast strength.
Neither of them could walk properly yet -- Toph’s legs were still completely numb from the deep decay, and Ivy was still shivering from the magical drain -- but Harley didn't care. She began dragging them both backward out of the clearing, her shoes splashing through the mud as they left the weeping camp behind.
Through the receding mist, the last thing they saw was the silhouette of the immortal giant, kneeling in the dark, desperately trying to fix his broken cauldron under the silent, empty gaze of his stick-figure company, his voice fading into a lonely hollow echo.
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