Mike Hayes had written the death of Batman seventeen times.
Not the death—DC would never let him go that far—but the small deaths. The moment Bruce Wayne realised he'd failed Robin. The night he understood that no amount of planning could save everyone. The quiet scene in the Batcave where the world's greatest detective finally admitted he was just a man in a costume, pretending he could fix Gotham with his fists.
Mike was very good at breaking heroes so they could rebuild themselves stronger.
He was significantly less good at living his own life.
At thirty-two, Mike had achieved what most comic writers only dreamed of: creative control, critical acclaim, and a salary that let him afford a beach-adjacent apartment in San Diego. His editor, Janet, liked to joke that he had "the Midas touch, but for character development." Fans dissected his runs with religious fervour. His Batman had learned to trust again. His Spider-Man had found the balance between power and responsibility that had eluded the character for decades.
"You don't write power-ups," a colleague had told him once. "You write growth. Trauma, resolve, purpose. You make us care about why they punch things, not just how hard."
Mike had smiled at the compliment, accepted the beer, and gone home alone to his apartment, where he'd reheated leftover Thai food and watched three episodes of a show he wasn't really paying attention to.
He understood heroes better than he understood himself. This was both his greatest strength and his most persistent problem.
The beach at sunset had become his weekly ritual.
Mike walked along the shore, shoes in one hand, letting the Pacific Ocean erase his footprints behind him. The sky was performing its nightly magic trick, turning from blue to orange to that particular shade of purple that always made him think of comic book covers from the eighties.
He was thinking about love.
Not in any immediate sense—there was no one waiting for him at home, no recent heartbreak to process. But he'd been outlining a new arc that morning, one that would finally give Nightwing a relationship that didn't implode after twelve issues, and it had left him contemplative.
All his favourite heroes got someone eventually. Even the broken ones. Especially the broken ones.
He could write romance. God, could he write it. He'd made readers cry over a two-page conversation between Clark Kent and Lois Lane about making coffee in the morning. He knew exactly how to build tension, how to earn emotional payoffs, how to make the quiet moments matter more than the fight scenes.
Living it, though? That required a different skill set entirely.
Mike stopped walking and looked out at the horizon, where the sun was doing its best to set dramatically. This was nice, he thought. Peaceful. The kind of moment a writer would use to signal that something was about to go catastrophically wrong.
He smiled at his own cynicism and started to turn back.
That's when his mind drifted to Wonder Woman.
Not the character he'd never gotten to write—DC had other plans for her—but the idea of her. The childhood memory of reading his first Diana Prince comic under the covers with a flashlight, afraid his parents would catch him up past bedtime. She'd been fighting Ares, and losing, and there'd been this panel where she was on her knees, defeated, and she'd looked up at the god of war and said, "Then I'll die standing."
Next panel: she was standing.
Mike had been eight years old, and he'd fallen completely in love.
Not with her body, though even his eight-year-old brain had noticed she was drawn beautifully. He'd fallen in love with the idea that someone could embody ideals so completely that they became literally divine. Truth. Compassion. Strength that protected instead of dominated.
He'd been chasing that feeling ever since. In his work, in his life, in—
The sun went out.
Mike's brain took a full second to process this impossibility. The sun didn't just go out. But the beach had gone dark, the orange light replaced by shadow, and he looked up reflexively to see what could possibly—
Time slowed down the way it supposedly does before death.
Mike saw:
A whale.
A humpback whale, specifically, approximately forty tons of mammal that had absolutely no business being a hundred feet above the Pacific Ocean, moving not down into the water but across the sky in a ballistic arc that basic physics said would terminate directly—
"Oh," Mike thought, with perfect clarity. "That's—"
Impact.
There should have been pain.
There should have been darkness, or light, or something. The literature on death—religious, philosophical, and otherwise—had given Mike certain expectations about the transition from living to not-living.
Instead, there was a couch.
A nice couch, actually. Leather, well-worn, the kind you'd find in an upscale bachelor pad. Mike was lying on it, fully intact, staring at a ceiling fan that rotated slowly above him.
"Dream," he said aloud. His voice sounded normal. "Obviously a dream."
Except it didn't feel like a dream. Dreams had a quality to them, a sort of fluid unreality that let you accept impossible things. This felt real. The smell of coffee in the air. The distant sound of sirens. The complete and total absence of whale-related trauma.
Mike sat up slowly, taking inventory. No pain. No visible injuries. He was wearing the same clothes he'd been wearing on the beach—jeans, a faded Superman t-shirt that he wore ironically except it wasn't ironic anymore, was it?
The apartment around him was unfamiliar but lived-in. Modern furniture, minimalist decor, floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a city he didn't recognize. Everything was just slightly off in a way he couldn't quite articulate.
He stood up. Walked to the window.
Looked down.
"Oh," Mike said again, but this time it came out as barely a whisper.
The city below was dying.
Not metaphorically. Actually dying. The street twenty stories down was cratered, cars overturned like a child's toys, civilians running in organized panic while emergency responders tried to maintain some semblance of order.
And in the middle of it all, standing over a fallen titan, was Wonder Woman.
Mike's brain stuttered.
She was real. Not an artist's interpretation, not an actress in a costume, but her. The armor was cracked, golden and red and battle-worn. She was bleeding from a cut above her eye. Her dark hair was matted with dust and sweat. She looked exhausted and magnificent and absolutely, impossibly present.
Giganta lay defeated behind her, the villain's massive form slowly shrinking back to human size.
Time stopped mattering.
Mike watched Diana help a civilian to their feet with one hand while coordinating with Batman over her communicator with the other. He watched her move with purpose and grace despite obvious injury. He watched her be exactly what she'd always been in his imagination, except now she was three-dimensional and real and here.
He felt eight years old again.
He felt like he was going to cry.
"This isn't a dream," he said to his reflection in the window.
"No," a voice behind him agreed. "It isn't."
Mike turned.
The room had gone dark despite the windows still showing afternoon light. The darkness was wrong—not an absence of light but a presence of something else, something vast condensing itself into a space far too small to contain it.
It manifested slowly, like an image loading on a bad connection. Formless at first, then vaguely humanoid, then something that hurt to look at directly. Cosmic. Ancient. Amused.
Mike's writer brain, which apparently functioned even during existential crises, noted that it looked exactly like how he would have drawn a cosmic entity trying not to terrify a mortal. Which meant either he'd been right about something fundamental, or this thing was choosing to appear this way for his benefit.
Neither option was comforting.
"Hello, Michael," it said. Its voice was everywhere and nowhere, casual and terrifying in equal measure.
"I'm dead," Mike said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"The whale—"
"Was unexpected," the entity admitted. "Though not unwelcome. Your death was... fortuitous."
Mike laughed. It came out slightly hysterical. "Fortuitous. Right. Great word for getting crushed by a flying whale."
"You have questions."
"So many questions. Starting with: what the hell am I doing here? Where is here? Is that—" He gestured at the window, where Wonder Woman was still visible in the distance. "Is that real?"
"The DC Universe," the entity confirmed. "Earth Prime. Very real. And you're here because you have a very particular set of skills."
Mike stared. "Did you just quote Taken at me?"
"I quote everything. I am older than your concept of narrative." The entity moved closer, though it didn't seem to actually move. "I am what happens when stories become powerful enough to need protection."
"From what?"
"From ending."
The entity explained.
There was a threat. Something vast and inevitable, approaching from outside the boundaries of normal reality. Not Darkseid. Not the Anti-Monitor. Something worse, something that didn't just want to conquer or destroy but to unmake. To reduce all stories to nothing, to render every universe into perfect, silent void.
"The heroes will fail," the entity said simply. "As they are now, they will fall. This universe will die. Your universe will die. All universes will cease."
"Then why—"
"Because heroes don't grow without opposition." The entity's form shifted, showing Mike images: Superman pushing his limits against Doomsday. Batman rebuilding himself after Bane. Wonder Woman forging herself against Ares. "Not monsters. Not mindless evil. Purpose-built opposition. Villains who force evolution."
Mike felt his stomach drop. "You want me to..."
"You understand how to break heroes so they become stronger. You've been doing it your entire career." The entity's presence felt almost gentle now. "You write trauma and resolve and purpose. You make them earn their victories. You make them real."
"By writing them. Not by—" Mike gestured helplessly. "I can't actually fight Wonder Woman. I'd last three seconds."
"You won't fight her. You'll architect scenarios. Build villains. Create opposition that forces growth in specific, necessary directions." The entity paused. "You'll be the villain they need, not the villain they want."
"No." Mike shook his head. "No, there has to be another way. Tell them what's coming. Warn them."
"Would you believe me if I told you?"
Mike opened his mouth. Closed it.
"Even if they believed," the entity continued, "belief doesn't create growth. Only struggle does. Only conflict. Only facing and overcoming opposition that seems insurmountable."
"So what happens if I refuse?"
The entity's form darkened. "I let fate run its course. Everything ends. Heat death of consciousness. No stories. No hope. No possibility of anything ever existing again."
"And if I accept?"
"You'll be marked as a villain. Hunted. Feared. Misunderstood. You'll stand against the heroes you love, hurt them in ways that serve their growth, and you will never be able to explain why." The entity's voice carried something that might have been sympathy. "You will sacrifice yourself so they can rise. Just like you've always done."
Mike turned back to the window.
Wonder Woman was helping civilians now, despite her wounds. She'd found a child separated from their parents and was carrying them while simultaneously coordinating the evacuation. She was bleeding. She was exhausted. She was exactly what she'd always been.
Mike thought about his career. His life. How he'd given everything to making heroes better, stronger, more real. How he'd poured himself into characters and stories and arcs while his own life stayed small and quiet and safe.
He thought about dying alone on a beach, thinking about love he'd never quite managed to find.
He thought about the eight-year-old reading under the covers, falling in love with the idea that someone could embody ideals so completely that they became divine.
"You're asking me to be the villain," he said quietly.
"I'm asking you to do what you've always done," the entity replied. "Sacrifice yourself on the page so others can rise. Except this time, the page is real."
Mike watched Diana set the child down gently, watched her smile at them despite everything, watched her turn back to the battle because that's what heroes do.
He'd spent his whole life making heroes. Maybe it was time to make them better.
"I accept," Mike said.
The entity's presence expanded, filling the room with something that felt like inevitability.
"Then let's begin."