Born on a Monday

[Harlan Higgs]

He had died again. He knew it, somehow.
Floating in the murky in between place where the most basic part of Solomon Grundy's awareness went, he waited.
And waited.
And waited.

Until finally, he could feel again. First, the pressure. The old, familiar pressure of thousands of pounds of dirt and mud, crushing his body, hardening it, reforming it. But it felt different this time. Not as painful, for one. And it didn't feel like mud. It felt like something softer, but not wet. His rotten brain searched for the word.
Blanket. It felt like a blanket.

Then, much quicker than any time before, he was himself again. Good old Solomon Grundy. But there were no trees, no bushes or hills, nothing familiar about his swamp. Just a void.
And the glowing silhouette of a man, speaking to him. Speaking and holding something shiny.
Grundy was silent. All of his fractured knowledge was drawing to a conclusion, one that hadn't been reminisced on for years and years and years. His realization only grew stronger when the brilliant figure handed him the shiny ball and disappeared. Before Grundy could open his mouth to speak the stranger's true name, he fell away into sleep again.

And awoke once more, buried in dirt. But this dirt wasn't packed hard, and Grundy could move. He flexed his muscles and began reaching, reaching and churning the earth around him, digging upwards like he had so many times before. The soft earth crumbled before his grasping hands until he was reaching for air, and Solomon Grundy burst out of the ground with a roar and a yell.

He got to his feet, brushing the dirt off of his clothes, and noticed that it was white. The ground was white, and everything around him was white as well, as white as he was. He looked up at the sky and the glinting, beautiful fountain before finally giving his realization voice in his guttural, growling bass timbre.

"Heav....en? HEAVEN! Grundy....GRUNDY IS FREE! FREE! FREE!

The hulking giant jumped up and down on the ground, laughing boisterously. He sat down on the ground, his large hands scooping fistfuls of dirt and molding it into large round balls. Once he had three of them, he stacked them into a misshapen pile and smoothed them together.....

[Harlan Higgs]

After a few hours, Grundy had succeeded in constructing a sort of long, low wall made entirely out of white dirt. It wasn't any more than a few inches high in most places, but he sat inside the "perimeter" just the same. There were several mounds of dirt stationed along the edges that looked melted and more humanoid, their edges blurred where he had used water from the fountain to make them stick together. Eventually, he had grown tired of building things with dirt and just watched the horizon, staring at the far off gates and the endless white sky.

"SOLOMON GRUNDY.....BORN ON A MONDAY...." He said to himself, a crooked smile on his face as he waited patiently, no costumed heroes appearing to beat him up, no fat little men trying to entice him into working for them. Just Solomon Grundy and the endless whiteness, waiting.

[Harlan Higgs]

It had been several hours, and Grundy was starting to get bored. If this was Heaven, then surely there was more to it? He shifted off of his seat, which was really just an elevated mound of white dirt, and inspected what he'd built so far. Poor excuses for snowmen stood guard around the line of dirt he'd painstakingly crafted with water and earth. Grundy sighed. There was definitely more to Heaven. Shiny things for him to find and keep, friends to play with, things to eat. Getting to his feet, the white giant stretched his shoulders and began trudging away. He'd leave "Fort Grundy" for someone else to find and wonder about.

Scanning the horizon, he picked a random direction and began heading east towards the blur at the very edge of sight. Maybe there was something else that way. As Grundy walked, he tried to think about what he might find, and what truly being dead meant for him. He'd always thought that it would be like going to sleep and not waking up again. But apparently, there was more to it than that. Heaven was really just another place to explore and have fun in. His wide lips cracked into a smile as he thought about it, revealing his tombstone-like, mossy teeth. There would definitely be gold. He loved gold. Maybe more of those shiny things that God had given him before he woke up here.

He continued trudging onwards across the vast white plane, his boots leaving shallow impressions on the dirt. Almost nine feet tall and weighing half a ton, Grundy nearly shook the ground around him when he moved at his methodical, plodding pace. He'd moved at this speed most of his life. Err, lives. It was very confusing. He could only remember bits and pieces of his previous existences, like when he'd lived with the green lady and her plants, or when he had stayed in the sewer with Two Face. The armor clad man in black was present in his memories too, and Grundy growled as he remembered. Batman. Batman was always hurting Grundy, always stopping and never listening. He clenched his fists and quickened his pace slightly, although as the anger ebbed away he resumed his plod towards the structure in the distance.

Speaking of which, said structure was getting larger in his vision. Grundy could make out small dots clustering around it and entering it, although other things had come out of it as well. Not many though, and he didn't have the patience to focus on it for longer than a few moments before continuing forward unceasingly.

"....grundy bored. hope heaven have more for grundy to see."
He mumbled to himself, patting his clothes and feeling the shiny ball of Omnilium in his jacket. He took it out and looked at it, stopping as the different colors glinted and entranced him for a minute. After he tired of watching it, he put it away again and resumed walking forward, the gate growing larger and larger on the horizon.

-Some time later-

Finally, Solom Grundy arrived at the gate. The large, rough stone that made up the structure reminded him of a building he'd once been in, and robbed. Gotham National had held more than a few bars of gold bullion, and Grundy remembered stacking and restacking them in his lair until Batman had found him once again. The gate looked intriguing, though, and the swirling vortex between the columns of stone definitely held some interest to the undead giant. Stomping forward, he entered the portal, hoping it would lead him somewhere a bit more exciting than the featureless blankness of the Nexus.