Justice League Inspiration

High above the Earth, where the stars are always out because there is no atmosphere to blur them, the Justice League Watchtower turns slowly in its orbit. Through the great curved windows, Earth hangs below like the most beautiful painting ever made — blue oceans and white clouds and the brown-green shapes of continents drifting past.

Today, inside the Watchtower, the Justice League was having a disagreement.

Not a fight — a disagreement. There is a difference, and Superman would be the first to tell you so.

The situation was this: a rogue weather system of unnatural origin was bearing down on the coast, and three separate heroes had three separate ideas about what to do. Batman wanted to identify and disable the device causing it before it made landfall. The Flash wanted to evacuate the coastal towns in the next four minutes. Wonder Woman was already heading toward the source of the storm, Lasso of Truth at her hip, ready to confront whoever was responsible.

All three of them were right. That was the problem.

Superman stood at the center of the round table and listened to all three plans without interrupting. He was like that. He had the kind of patience that made other people feel heard — not just tolerated, but actually listened to. His eyes moved from face to face. He nodded. When they finished, he spoke.

"All three plans happen," he said simply. "At the same time."

The room went quiet.

"Flash — you have four minutes to get every person off that coastline. Every person. Nobody left behind."

The Flash was already half-standing. "On it."

"Batman — coordinate with Flash's evacuation route. Keep the device from firing again once it's found. Wonder Woman has the source."

Batman pulled up his tactical map. "I'll need the satellite feed."

"Already rerouted." Superman had done it while talking. "I'll handle anything in the middle — structural failures, people the Flash can't reach in time, anything that needs strength."

Wonder Woman looked at him across the table with an expression that was the closest she usually came to a smile. "You do this without thinking," she said. "Find the thing that connects everyone's idea into one."

Superman shook his head. "I listen. That's all. You all had the right answer. I just helped you hear each other."

WHOOSH — the Flash was gone, a gold-red blur vanishing toward the coastline. Wonder Woman was right behind him, her golden lasso already uncoiling.

Batman looked at Superman for a moment. "You know," he said, "for someone with your powers, you spend a lot of time listening."

"The powers help in a fight," Superman said. "Listening is what prevents the fight in the first place."

Batman almost smiled. Almost.

On the coast, the evacuation happened in the space of a heartbeat — the Flash running in loops that no camera could follow, lifting children and carrying grandmothers and guiding dogs and generally making the orderly evacuation of twelve thousand people look like something that had been practiced for years. Superman arrived above the water as the first great wave reared up, two stories high and still climbing. He flew directly into it.

KRASSSHHH — the wave struck him like a wall of cold marble and he did not move. He set his feet in the water and he pushed back. The wave folded, broke, scattered into foam and spray that fell harmlessly in the shallows.

Inland, Wonder Woman found the device — a resonance cannon camouflaged in the hillside — and the figure operating it. One sweep of her golden Lasso of Truth and the cannon's operator was disarmed and speaking very honestly about who had sent them and why. Batman, listening on the comms, was already cross-referencing the name.

Twenty-two minutes after the Watchtower briefing began, the coast was safe. Every person accounted for. The weather system, deprived of its energy source, began to dissolve harmlessly over the open ocean.

The Justice League reassembled in the Watchtower. The Flash flopped into his chair with the satisfied look of someone who has done a great deal of running. Wonder Woman cleaned her lasso with a cloth. Batman closed his tactical map and filed the case notes.

Superman stood at the window and looked at the Earth below.

This was his home. Not Krypton — he had never known Krypton. This blue world, with its seven billion ordinary people and its extraordinary heroes and its messy, complicated, beautiful insistence on doing better. He had come here in a spacecraft the size of a cradle, and this world had given him a family and a name and a purpose.

He would protect it until his last breath. Not because he had to. Because he wanted to. Because somewhere down there, in Metropolis, Lois was writing a story and Jon was doing his homework and the people of Suicide Slum were tending their gardens, and all of it — every bit of it — was worth everything he had.

He pressed his hand flat against the cold glass of the window and looked down.

"Still beautiful," he said softly.

Nobody heard him. But he said it anyway.