I started re-watching the Justice League animated series for the first time since I was a kid, and immediately fell in love with J'onn J'onzz all over again, whom I absolutely loved even as an eight-year-old watching for the first time.

Just a small note to add that this is technically an AU where the events of the show take place in 2024/the current year. Why? Because I was like six years old in 2001 and have no idea what it would've been like to be an adult before the Internet and smartphones were super common. The actual time period of the show doesn't seem to matter much in the grand scheme of things, after watching/rewatching it a couple times. We see some old boxy PCs in science labs and things a few times, and people have older cellphones, but the actual tech level doesn't affect the show at all, especially considering that all the heroes and villains have sci-fi-level advanced tech as it is. Additionally, the political/historical events in 2001 never come up in the show either. So yeah. I pushed it all to 2024, just to make it easier on myself. So if you see mention of a smartphone or something, it's not an anachronism.

Eventual Smut.

One

Kate turned as trouble rolled toward her on a hospital bed. A gaggle of nurses surrounded the bed as it came nearer, as they put an IV in the patient's arm, as they spoke quickly of emergency surgery. She barely heard them. What she felt was the patient's pain and fear, his heart squeezing in his chest, beating erratically. She felt the sweat breaking out across his body, felt his panic, though his emotions were fading with every passing second. She rushed toward the bed even as the nurses continued to push it up the hallway, intending to go past her and into an operating room.

"Get out of the way!" she ordered.

They did.

Her ungloved right hand reached out and touched the man's face, which was twisted and furrowed in anguish. The feelings—both physical and emotional—came on much stronger now, nearly overwhelming her as they always did. She was drowning in that pain, but even as she felt suffocated by it, she sucked it all into herself, focusing on the point of the problem: the man's heart. In a handful of seconds, she absorbed the damage of his heart attack into her own body, felt the physical pain and emotional turmoil dissipate inside her, down to her fingers and toes, and then it was gone.

"He's all right now," she breathed. "I've stopped his heart attack and absorbed any damage it might've inflicted on his heart. He'll be okay." She leaned heavily against his bed, gripping the side rail in both hands—one gloved, the other bare.

"Thank you, Kate," said one of the nurses.

"Thank you," the others murmured in unison.

"Thank you," the man whispered from where he lay on the bed.

Kate lifted her eyes to look at him, a middle-aged man of average build, brown hair and eyes. In her time at Metropolis General Hospital, she'd saved hundreds just like him. After years of practice, it didn't take her much time at all to do it, but the aftermath was always the same: emotionally taxing and, eventually, physically exhausting. "You're welcome," she said, and stood up straight on swaying feet. If he'd been her first patient of the day, she would've been fine, but she'd been here five hours already, and her energy was flagging.

As the nurses rolled the man down the hallway, much more calmly now, she stumbled away to find somewhere to sit down. She needed to go home now—she could tell she was done—but she'd have to get her energy back up enough to even walk the few blocks to her apartment.

She stood up out of the hard plastic chair in the hallway she'd collapsed into and began to make her way out of the hospital, putting her right glove back on as she did. All around her were the sensations of other people, their pain, their fear, their regrets. The man who'd been suffering from the heart attack had had many regrets, none of which she knew in detail. She could only read emotions and sense pain, not hear thoughts. She was not a telepath, but an empath, and as she took the elevator down to the first floor, she was glad of that not for the first time. She couldn't imagine how much harder her life would be if she could hear the thoughts of her patients as well as sense their feelings. Her job was overwhelming enough as it was.

A sprained ankle, a torn ligament, a brain tumor, appendicitis. A visitor in mourning, presumably mourning the last days of their loved one's life. Kate breathed and pulled her empathetic senses back into her body, at least as far as she could. She could never cut it off completely, wasn't sure if that was even possible or if she merely lacked the proper training, but she could dampen the sensations, the emotions flooding her system. She checked out, then, as she reached the front doors of the hospital which slid open at her approach, she gave one last cursory sweep. There would always be people left behind, there would always be someone she could have saved if she'd just stayed one more hour, but at twenty-nine years old, she'd had to learn that she could not save everyone.

For each injury or illness healed, she expended some amount of her own life source, which required time to replenish. Heal too much too soon and she would kill herself, and what would be the good of that? One extra person might be saved in a day, but at what cost? Upon her death, she would no longer be able to help the countless others who would need her tomorrow, next week, a year from now.

So she went home to her shitty apartment two blocks down from Metropolis General Hospital and fell into bed, and when she awoke hours later, she inhaled whatever food was in her fridge without really tasting it. It was ten o'clock at night so she decided on a shower and spent a long time under the water, trying to scrub away the memories of pain and terror and melancholy that permeated the hospital. For all its hardships, though, she could not say she had a thankless job. Working there gave her purpose and pleasure in life—seeing sick people get well again in seconds under her touch, hearing their thanks, witnessing a visitor burst into tears as their friends and relatives were miraculously cured. That was what made it all worth it.

Still. It was exhausting. She dried her hair after her shower and then went back to bed, knowing she'd have to be up bright and early the next morning to do it all over again—

Pain tore through her mind, like someone had set her brain on fire. She screamed, though she was unaware of that, clutching at her head, clawing at it.

Mars. Earth. Invaders. Death. Destruction. The end of all things.

Images flashed in her mind, lighting up against the dark of her room. There was Mars as it was now, dusty and desolate. There was some unrecognizable version of it: green and lush and full of life. There were its people. And then, in a blink, everything was gone, and Kate saw only wreckage and death, and, underneath, felt a sense of impending doom. She saw the Earth in all its glory, and then a great fire came and overtook her vision, and when it was gone, the Earth had been razed to the ground, darkened, forever altered.

The pain was fading now, as were the visions. Kate sat in bed, breathing heavily, sweating profusely. She pulled her knees up and rested her forehead against one of them. The room felt as though it were spinning. And even as it all disappeared, like some horrible nightmare, she felt a sorrow that was not her own, a sorrow so profound that it broke her heart. Despite all that had happened in the last thirty seconds, years spent honing her empathetic skills made instinct take over; she reached out, trying to find that sorrow, to soothe it. Someone was begging for her help. But, try as she might, she could not pinpoint the source. It slipped away like smoke and disappeared entirely. Her last impression was that, whoever it had been, they were very old.

Kate sat up in bed for a long time, sweating and shivering, then lay back down uneasily. She had no idea what had just happened. She spent an even longer time lying there, waiting, though she wasn't sure for what. She kept expecting a second mental attack—or whatever that had been. Knowing Metropolis, it was probably some supervillain out and about, wreaking havoc. Perhaps someone who messed with people's sleeping minds. Could all that have been a nightmare concocted by a madman?

One hour passed and nothing more had happened. Kate checked her phone continuously, looking at the time and also scrolling the news feed to see if there were any reports of crazy, painful dreams. There was nothing. Eventually, the adrenaline drained from her body and, despite the uneasy feeling still in the pit of her stomach, she put her phone down for good and drifted off. No more nightmares plagued her. Not for another six months.

###

Kate checked her watch. It was nearly six p.m. She'd just gotten home from her shift at the hospital and breathed a sigh of relief. It was Friday and was time for her weekend. Being who she was, she wasn't required to work regular hours at Met Gen, but she had no interest in risking life and limb as an actual superhero, so putting herself on the hospital's roster as a "nurse" was easier, and she got paid more if she did work regular hours. Still, compared to most nurses' twelve-hour shifts, her own were more like 9-5. She wasn't sure it was possible for her to spend twelve hours a day healing people, even if she got four days off a week. She needed more regular sleep to recuperate than a twelve-hour would give her, and even then, she was often stretched thin.

She scarfed down some food, then drew herself a bath and soaked for a long time, even fell asleep for a while. When she woke up, the water was tepid, and she got out, shivering. A little while later, she sat curled up on the couch with a mug of tea, watching some mindless reality TV on a streaming service. She planned to sit here and vegetate and probably eat some more, and then go to bed and sleep til noon.

The world had other plans.

Pain impaled her brain in claws of fire. It felt like someone was squeezing it in a very large hand. The mug of tea clattered to the floor, spilling liquid across the rug. Kate did not notice. She sat hunched over, teeth clenched, her head in her hands, screaming. Then, through the pain, she saw visions. Strange, terrifying beings—tall, featureless, milky white and stretched like gloop—marched across a ravaged landscape. A comet plummeting toward Earth. Great moving structures as tall as skyscrapers shooting deadly beams amid a city of screaming civilians.

Underneath the visions, Kate felt a sense of impending doom, of terror and urgency.

And underneath that, a sorrow so vast it threatened to swallow her whole. A sense of the worst kind of resignation. He was trapped here, and would never be rescued now. It was too late. He would die like all the rest, because they had not believed him.

"Where are you?" Kate asked aloud, her voice muffled, strained from pain.

But he was slipping away from her again, just as he had six months before. At the time, when there'd been nothing on the news about people having strange psychic visions or about some supervillain giving people nightmares, she'd assumed that this awful pain and these visions had been some kind of stress response due to her job. She spent long hours around people in immense pain and wore her body down to heal them. She often did not get enough sleep. She'd thought that she might've been experiencing some form of PTSD. Or even, perhaps, someone in her apartment building had been having a nightmare and her empathetic powers had picked up on it. But she'd never heard people's thoughts before. Whatever it had been, when it had not repeated itself, she'd forgotten about it. Now she knew that, whoever he was, he was real and he was reaching out. And she would not let him slip away this time.

Even as the fiery tendrils of his mind slid away from her, even as she felt his exhaustion from keeping up their mental link for these scant few seconds, she clung to him desperately. Her eyes searched the darkness of her cupped hands. "Tell me where you are!" she begged, and would welcome that fire in her mind again if only he would answer her. "Let me help you!"

He tried. He tried to plant the vision in her mind, but it was fuzzy like television static and she could not make it out.

"Please!" she cried, and reached out to him, across the space between them. She did not know what she was doing, had never tried to reach out with her mind before. She'd never been telepathically linked to anyone and did not know how it worked—did not think she could actually do it. But she tried. Even as he slipped away, almost to nothing, almost a memory, she clawed at those tendrils of his mind, reaching, reaching. And then, as if grasping the hand of someone falling from a great height, she wrapped a tendril of her own mind around a tendril of his, holding fast.

WHERE ARE YOU?

HERE.

His response was just as loud, just as desperate, just as strong, even as she screamed in pain and so did he. This connection was sapping all of his strength. He was fighting something which dampened his psychic abilities. She could feel his utter exhaustion, teetering on the edge of passing out. Yet his mind was strong. And the visions came.

A government facility hours away, up in the mountains, guarded by many soldiers. And deep inside, behind a locked vault with a metal door two feet thick, was a strange prisoner on the edge of despair.

She would rescue him. She did not know how; she only knew that she would. This she tried to convey to him. She tried to tell him, I am coming, but the effort had proved too much and he had once more disappeared from her mind. As far as she spread herself to find his consciousness, she could not. But that didn't matter. She knew where he was and she would go there and get him out even if it killed her.

It probably would kill her.