Disagreement

Here is something that nobody tells you about teams of heroes: they disagree.

Not about small things. About important things. And sometimes the disagreement happens right in the middle of a situation that needs a decision, and the clock keeps ticking, and nobody moves.

This is what happened when Brainiac came back.

His ship appeared at six in the morning, bigger than before. Cyborg read the scans in under thirty seconds: the ship had three times the power of the last visit, and Brainiac's target this time was Metropolis itself. The whole city — every building, every street, every person — miniaturized and sealed in glass. Eighteen hours.

The League gathered around the round table.

Superman spoke first. "We intercept in orbit. We meet the threat before it gets anywhere near the city."

Batman shook his head. "We draw him down. We fight on Earth, in an environment we understand. We use everything familiar ground gives us."

Both strategies were reasonable. Both were said by brilliant people with extensive experience. They also contradicted each other completely.

For two hours, they argued. Not loudly — neither of them was loud. Clark's voice stayed measured and his jaw set. Bruce's voice stayed controlled, which was a kind of argument all by itself.

J'onn J'onzz said nothing. He sat and watched with the quiet attention of a very patient mind, reading everything that was said and quite a lot that wasn't.

Diana finally said what the room was thinking. "We are running out of time for this."

Arthur Curry had been king of Atlantis long enough to know the difference between an argument about the thing being argued and an argument about something underneath it.

He looked at Clark. "You want to intercept in orbit because you're afraid that if Brainiac gets close to Metropolis, the city might be hurt even if we stop him."

Clark was quiet.

"And you," Arthur said, looking at Bruce, "want to fight on the ground because if Clark goes to orbit, you cannot follow. And that bothers you."

Bruce's expression did not change. That was how you knew Arthur was right.

"This isn't really about strategy," Arthur said gently.

The room was quiet for a moment. Something passed between Clark and Bruce — some private acknowledgment too complicated to say out loud, and so it went unsaid, and both of them understood it anyway.

"Twenty minutes," Bruce said.

What came out of those twenty minutes was a plan that belonged to both of them. The upper atmosphere — the boundary between Earth and space. High enough that Superman's powers were at full strength. High enough that Hal's ring functioned without interference. Low enough that Batman's defensive perimeter served as a backup net below.

Not orbit. Not the streets. The middle place that held both ideas at once.

Hal Jordan shot upward through the clouds until Brainiac's ship was below him — a perspective its captain had not prepared for. The ring shaped a containment frame around the ship's landing thrusters. Superman arrived a fraction of a second later and went straight for the scanner array — the instruments Brainiac used to lock city coordinates. Clark took hold of it with both hands and pulled.

The scanner array came off the hull in a shower of sparks.

Without his scanners, Brainiac could not lock coordinates. Without coordinates, the shrink field could not set. The ship turned, rose above the containment frame, and accelerated away.

Metropolis stayed exactly the size it had always been.

That night at the Hall, nobody mentioned the argument. J'onn made tea and set a cup near each person. Barry talked about a dog he had seen chasing its own tail in a park — round and round, very determined — and somehow this was extremely funny and everyone agreed.

Clark and Bruce sat at the round table. Late. Warm. Quiet. Bruce was turning a chess piece over in his fingers.

"Good plan," Clark said.

"Yours was good too," Bruce replied. "We combined them."

Clark looked at the round table — eight equal seats, no head.

"That's what the table is for," he said.

Bruce set the chess piece down and looked at the table for a long quiet moment.

"Yes," he said. "Exactly."

Outside, Metropolis glittered in the dark. Every light in every window, all of it full size, all of it safe.

The disagreements that matter always end at the table.

Goodnight.