Leviathan

The black armored car pulled into the driveway. Amanda Waller waited for the all-clear and exited the vehicle. She was exhausted - only the thought of her armchair and Johnnie kept her walking. She'd supervised overnight clean-ups before, but she'd done it with fire in her eyes (and sometimes coming out her mouth, from the look on her subordinates). Not this time.

Waller collapsed on the cushion and twirled the ice in the glass. A morning breeze brushed her feet.

"Can I offer you anything?" she said absently. "Fruit, insects…"

"…blood? No thanks." Batman walked into view. He was shifting weight from his right leg, and there was a damp patch to the left of his abdomen. He looked tired too. "I don't drink in the morning."

"Neither did I. But some of us need a day job."

"I'm not a morning person." He sat across from her. "Your security hasn't improved."

"You can tell them they're all fired on your way out, it won't make a difference."

"They're shutting down Cadmus?"

"You know better than that. I'm taking the fall for the Luthor fiasco, not entirely undeservedly. The Project will be repackaged, renamed, rebooted. It's too good to be killed. Not that good at its stated purpose, but that's not what really matters, is it?"

"You lost Luthor's funding."

"They'll do it old school: military budgets, covert ops budgets, heck, even covert budgets. Nothing screams Money like National Security, and what greater threat than a conspiracy of metahumans? It's even unpatriotic to disagree. Pork is fed to constituencies, politicians are happy, generals are happy, more funds are approved – you know the drill."

"And the irony is there's actually an honest argument to be made."

"There usually is," said Waller, getting up for seconds.

"Did you catch the press conference earlier?" asked Batman.

"The report's on the table, if you want to take a look. One analyst recommended taking out as many of you as we could right there, go out in a blaze of glory."

"Where do you find these people?"

"Same place we found the Mutual Assured Destruction geniuses: the top schools in the country. The analysis made it all the way to my desk, so it wasn't such a minority opinion."

Batman flipped through the pages. "Priority seven out of seven isn't much of a priority."

"My guys tend to be meta-centric. I can get you bumped up to maybe a five." She sat down. "Hey, the League won, Cadmus was set back; why the gloom?"

"We're opening an embassy at the World Assembly now. I'm not sure whether that takes us farther or closer to the Justice Lords."

"Hearts and minds."

"We used to have that before, most of the time. We didn't need a PR campaign."

"Working solo must be so much simpler. That's bureaucracy for you."

"You start worrying about popularity, pretty soon you get dragged into the media circus. What's to distinguish you from a lynch mob? It used be you did the right thing, and people acknowledged that."

"You enjoy the solitude in that ivory tower, don't you?"

"It's getting rather crowded. The tower isn't a symbol of superiority, it's a symbol of neutrality."

"It symbolizes whatever people think it does. You really thought the greatest power on the planet could be neutral? There's no avoiding politics. Is it a better use of your powers to catch crooks or build public works in poor countries? Every repressive regime you don't overthrow is at least partly on your heads."

Batman frowned. "We don't do coups."

"And if you did, they'd be on your heads too. It's a catch-22. What standard can you hold the whole world up to? With what legitimacy? There's no pleasing everybody. Heck, some people don't even deserve to be pleased. But how do you decide which ones?"

"We don't, we keep it simple. We have no more right than anyone else."

Waller leaned back in the armchair. "For as to strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself."

"Hobbes."

"One smart tiger, my classics professor used to say."

"Cute."

"He was, too. But what do we do when we find Nature hath made men so unequal in the faculties of body and mind? What good is a social contract for mutual defense? Why not cut-out the middle man and surrender to a mortal god? Do we even have a choice?"

"Superman and the others gave you a choice."

"So did the Justice Lords, at least initially. Maybe villainy is the inevitable human – or alien – response to power."

"Like what happened to Cadmus."

Waller smiled. "Touché. On hindsight, working with a super-villain wasn't such a smart move. But who else has the expertise?" She walked over to the world map hanging on the wall. "We're not the only Government looking for countermeasures. Maybe the embassy can help after all."

"By sacrificing autonomy?"

"The vigilante days are over, wake up and smell the politics." She paused. "Thanks, by the way, for cleaning up our mess."

"Don't thank me yet. Eternal vigilance."

"The price of freedom." Waller turned around. She wasn't surprised to find the room empty.