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Marcus had terrible luck.
Monkey Prince had even worse luck.
Somehow he was always in the wrong place at the wrong time, doing just the right thing to make people think he was the one causing everyone else’s problems.
It was almost never what it looked like, but it was always enough to land him into a lot of trouble. He must have had some pretty bad karma because the universe was constantly working against him to make him seem like the bad guy. He was actually pretty sure half the Justice League thought he was a new up and coming supervillain running around and terrorizing their cities only to move on as soon as he almost got caught. And those that gave him the benefit of the doubt like Robin and Supergirl, well they had to deal with being the collateral damage to his terrible luck.
And this? Yeah this looked bad.
So it was only natural that someone would find him now.
“Oh my gods!”
Monkey Prince dropped the body he was holding, letting it fall to the ground with a loud, wet thump. He threw his hands up in the universal sign of ‘I surrender, please don’t shoot’. Not that he thought the person standing in front of him was going to shoot anything at him besides a horrified expression, but it still felt like the right move.
“This isn’t what it looks like I swear!”
Billy Batson stood in the doorway gaping at him, his body silhouetted by the bright florescent lights of the radio station he worked at on the weekends. The back door to the building swung shut behind him, plunging them back into the relative darkness of the alley behind the radio station. He dropped the bag of trash he had most likely been trying to throw in the dumpster, old coffee cups and shredded bits of paper threatening to spill out at his feet.
Marcus had been hoping that he’d have gone home for the night and that whatever nighttime DJ WHIZ radio employed wouldn’t be looking out of any of the station’s windows. But apparently that was too much to ask for. He really should have expected something like this to happen. It was just his luck.
“Is that guy…dead?” Billy asked.
“Uh…it’s kind of complicated.”
He looked down at the vaguely human shaped body on the ground in front of him, black ooze slowly seeping out of its orifices and from where he had whacked it upside the head, creating an inky looking puddle at his feet. The thing was that this body had never actually been alive—at least he didn’t think so anyway. It had been puppeted by a demon that he had very swiftly and heroically gotten rid of before it could tear its way into the WHIZ radio building—not that anyone had seen that part.
He wasn’t 100% sure what it had been trying to do—something about eating the hearts of the innocent? Absorbing the power of a pure heart? Something like that. But knowing that his friend had been in the monster’s path and one of its potential victims…well it was a good thing he showed up in time to put a stop to it. Someone had to step up since apparently Captain Marvel wasn’t around to do it.
Marcus wiped some gunk off of his shoes onto the pavement, making a face at the smear of black it left behind. It was going to be a nightmare to get it all out of his fur.
Billy took a couple tentative steps forward, giving the body a wide berth. He glanced down at it, but otherwise kept his eyes on Monkey Prince. There was a strange electrical zing in the air that wasn’t there before. “Did you kill him?”
“No!” Marcus protested. The last thing he wanted was for one of the few friends he had to think he was a murderer. Or a supervillain. Or whatever the latest slander online was saying about him. “I mean—I killed the thing living inside of him, but I didn’t kill him. I don’t think. I mean I don’t think this thing was ever even human to begin with. Or maybe—“
“Right…” Billy nodded slowly at him. “So if he wasn’t human…then what was he? Because killing other nonhuman people is also bad, you know?”
Marcus was suddenly very aware of the fact that Billy had never actually met Monkey Prince before this very moment. The only things he knew about him were whatever he’d seen online—so nothing good. He probably thought he’d stumbled onto a secret supervillain plot against the Big Red Cheese. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time Monkey Prince had been accused of such a thing.
Sometimes having a secret identity sucked. Though to be fair he wasn’t sure how this situation would be better if he was plain old Marcus at the moment. It wasn’t like he and Billy knew each other that well. They were friends, but they weren’t 'I’ll help you hide the body' type friends. He was pretty sure you had to know someone more than a handful of weeks to get to that point. But at least Billy might have given him the benefit of the doubt then.
“Right, yeah. That’s…I mean that’s true,” he babbled. His hands were still up and honestly they were getting kind of tired, but he really didn’t want Billy to think he was going to attack him or something. “But he was a demon. An evil one. That eats children.”
At least that was what he’d gleaned from its evil ramblings about eating the hearts of the innocent. So it wasn’t a total lie.
Billy narrowed his eyes at him, searching for any indication on his face that Monkey Prince was a liar and a murderer. “Makes sense,” he eventually sighed, turning his full attention down to the body between them. “We get those around here sometimes. Usually their bodies just burn up and disappear back into the flames of Hell or whatever. I’ve never seen one leave behind an empty…uh…”
“Meat puppet?” Marcus suggested.
“Yeah, sure. Let’s go with that.” Billy nudged the body with his foot, some of the inky black goo sticking to his shoe. He squatted down to better examine it. “Gross. Is he like…melting?”
Marcus dropped his hands down, resting them on his knees while he bent over to get a better look at things. “Maybe? Or that might be his blood?”
Billy wrinkled his nose at that, though Marcus wasn’t sure which possibility he thought was worse. “You’re lucky it was me that came out here and not Helen. She’d have kicked your ass and asked questions later.”
Marcus was tempted to ask who this Helen person was, annoyed that Billy thought he couldn’t take her in a fight when he had literal superpowers, but Billy cut off that train of thought with a question that he wasn’t nearly as prepared to answer as he should have been.
“So what were you going to do with the body?”
“Uhh…” Marcus glanced behind him, towards the dumpster he had been making his way towards before Billy had stumbled upon him. Billy followed his line of sight and then let out the most offended sound Marcus had ever heard him make.
“You can’t be serious!”
“I can’t just leave it out in the open!” Marcus blurted out, his tail flicking behind him anxiously. “I didn’t exactly have a ton of options. I mean it's not like I want to take a corpse home with me.”
“Can’t you get rid of it with your powers?”
It was Marcus’ turn to be offended. “I don’t have goo vaporizing powers! I have demon killing powers and shapeshifting powers, but none of that does much for the clean up.”
“Oh,” Billy deflated. “Well what do you usually do with them? Please tell me there aren’t decomposing demonic goo monsters in a bunch of dumpsters throughout Fawcett. Because I’m pretty sure that’s a health hazard. And I know a lot of people who go dumpster diving.”
“What? No—there’s only this one body. Promise.”
“Good.”
There was a long beat of awkward silence as the two of them contemplated the body in front of them. More and more ooze came out of it, to the point that Marcus was starting to think that maybe it was melting.
“We could burn it,” Billy suggested.
Marcus tried and failed to stifle a laugh. “Burn it? What if it gives off like, noxious fumes?”
“Well do you have any better ideas?”
Marcus opened his mouth to respond, but since he didn’t have any better ideas he simply sighed. “You got a lighter?”
"So no fire powers either?"
"Shut up."
Ten minutes later, they’d managed to stuff the demon’s body into a trash can—one that Billy assured him would be disposed of in turn—and set it on fire. Marcus had had his doubts considering how wet the thing was, but it went up like a pile of matches, burning down to ash even without the aid of the trash they’d been adding on as a sort of kindling.
“Sorry about the mess,” Marcus mumbled as they stood around the trash can fire and watched the fire flare up. He gestured vaguely at Billy's now ruined outfit. “I have no idea if you’ll be able to get that out.”
Billy shrugged off his sweater to get a better look at the large black stain that now adorned the front. “I’ll figure something out.” He shot Marcus an appraising look. “At least I don’t have fur. This stuff looks sticky.”
Marcus hoped that transforming back would get rid of the worst of it, but he was still skeptical about that. All he knew was that he had a nice hot shower calling his name.
“Thanks for the help Billy,” Marcus said. He could hardly believe how calm he’d been throughout this whole mess. If their roles had been reversed, he knew he’d have been freaking out.
Billy blinked at him in surprise. “How do you know my name? I never told you what it was.”
“Oh um…” Marcus could feel his anxiety rushing in at the slip up. Already he felt the fur on the backs of his hands receding a bit. Not good. Really, really not good. Billy may have been cool about the whole disposing of a dead body thing, but he did not want him to find out Marcus and Monkey Prince were the same person. “I’m a…fan of your show!” He hoped it wasn't obvious he was lying. “Speaking of which, you should probably get back to it. I’m sure this was one hell of a commercial break.”
Truth be told he only knew that Billy had a radio show—podcast?—because Billy’s friend Freddy told him he should do a segment about who would win in a fight, Captain Marvel or Superman. He hadn’t actually tuned in yet because listening to Billy gush about superheroes and how cool he thought they were didn’t exactly sound like his idea of a good time. And since Billy knew how he felt about superheroes he didn't really bring it up much.
“You are?” Billy asked. It might have been a trick of the light, but Marcus swore he saw a hint of a blush on his cheeks at the praise. Marcus resolved to actually check out his show sometime so he wouldn’t be a total liar. He could power through an episode for Billy's sake. Maybe he'll even do a bit about Monkey Prince some day. “But it’s a radio show, how would you know what I looked like?”
Ugh, why did keeping a secret identity have to be so hard?
Luckily he was saved from a potentially very awkward conversation that would have definitely made him come off as a creepy stalker by a woman’s voice calling out from a window above.
“Billy?” she shouted down to them. She leaned halfway out of a window on the third story, eyes sweeping over the unusual scene below. “What’s taking you so long?”
“Coming Helen!” Billy called back. “I just ran into someone and we got to chatting, you know how it is.”
“Well get back inside so we can finish recording this segment for tomorrow. Sterling will have my head if I keep you past 10 again.”
“Be right there.” Billy turned back to Marcus with a smile. “It was good seeing you again. I think. Circumstances could have been better, and it was honestly kind of gross, but it wasn’t all bad. Definitely better than the last time I saw you. Those clones of yours really came in handy when we needed to lift that guy.”
“Yeah, maybe I’ll see you around,” Marcus said, a little bit of pep back in his step now that he didn’t have a demon to worry about. “Maybe next time we can do something less illegal. Something fun. Like play a video game or watch a movie.”
Billy grinned. “Next time.”
Marcus summoned a cloud, hopping on and rising a few feet in the air, waiting for Billy to go back inside the WHIZ radio building again before taking off back home.
Wait, what did Billy mean by 'the last time' they met?