Perspective: Martian Manhunter
Martian Manhunter liked mornings on Earth.
That, in itself, would have surprised most people.
J'onn J'onzz did not sleep the way humans did, but he had learned the rhythm of their days well enough to appreciate the spaces between them. Dawn was one of those spaces—when thoughts were quieter, when the psychic noise of billions of minds softened into something manageable. The sun had not yet fully risen, and already Metropolis was awake in fragments: a commuter rehearsing excuses, a child dreading a test, a man thinking about coffee with almost religious devotion.
Normal thoughts.
Healthy thoughts.
J'onn floated above the city, intangible, unseen, letting the flow wash over him. He catalogued nothing out of habit anymore; Earth had long since proven itself resilient enough to survive without his constant vigilance. He observed because he cared. Because after Mars, after loss on a planetary scale, simple continuity mattered.
And everything felt… fine.
That was the word his mind returned to. Fine.
The city below was stable. Crime rates were low, but not unnaturally so. Governments argued, but compromise existed. People still dreamed of impossible things and failed at them spectacularly. There was no psychic scream, no looming presence of tyranny or despair pressing against the astral plane.
If anything, the mental atmosphere was… smoother.
J'onn frowned, though no one could see it.
Smoothness was not inherently comforting.
He reached outward with his telepathy, gently brushing against the consciousness of the city as he had done countless times before. The familiar chaos greeted him—overlapping emotions, fragmented memories, impulses colliding in endless contradiction. Humanity was many things, but orderly was not one of them.
Yet something was missing.
Not absent in the way a missing limb was felt, but in the way a forgotten word lingered just beyond recall. A shape where something used to be.
J'onn withdrew slightly, unsettled.
You are imagining things, he told himself. Earth had been through worse. Multiversal incursions, reality rewrites, gods punching holes through existence. If something had gone wrong on a fundamental level, he would have felt it. He always did.
He descended toward the Watchtower, reforming his physical shape as the structure came into view—sleek, familiar, unchanged. Inside, the League was already active. Diana sparred with an automated construct. Barry vibrated impatiently near a console. Clark stood near the viewport, gazing down at the planet with his usual quiet intensity.
Bruce was absent.
That, at least, was normal.
J'onn entered the common area, his boots touching the floor with deliberate weight. Clark turned, smiling faintly.
"Morning, J'onn."
"Good morning, Clark," J'onn replied. He hesitated, then added, "How long have you been awake?"
Clark blinked. "Since… early. Why?"
"No reason," J'onn said, though the answer did not satisfy him.
He took his usual seat at the central console and accessed the planetary psychic readouts—tools he had helped design, calibrated to detect anomalies in mass consciousness. Spikes in fear. Waves of despair. External influence.
The readings were clean.
Too clean.
Barry zipped over, peering at the display. "Let me guess. Everything's boring again?"
J'onn allowed a small smile. "Something like that."
Diana approached, wiping sweat from her brow. "You sense trouble?"
"I sense absence," J'onn said carefully.
That earned him looks.
"Absence of what?" Diana asked.
J'onn opened his mouth… and paused.
The answer was there, hovering just out of reach. He could feel it forming, a concept with weight and significance, but whenever he tried to articulate it, his thoughts slid around it, as if encountering a smooth surface with no edges.
"I… cannot say," he admitted.
Clark tilted his head, concern flickering across his features. "That's not like you."
"No," J'onn agreed quietly. "It is not."
Bruce entered then, footsteps precise, expression already guarded. "What's not like him?"
J'onn turned to face Batman, studying him with renewed focus. Bruce's mind was, as ever, a fortress—layered defenses, controlled thoughts, contingency plans nested within contingencies. Yet even there, J'onn felt the same smoothness. The same missing shape.
"I was attempting to identify a change," J'onn said. "One I feel but cannot define."
Bruce frowned. "Define 'feel.'"
"Psychically," J'onn replied. "And… existentially."
That got Bruce's attention.
"Run diagnostics," Bruce said immediately, moving to the console. "Temporal, dimensional, conceptual. Everything."
"They already have," J'onn said. "Multiple times. Nothing registers as wrong."
Bruce's fingers paused mid-typing. "That doesn't mean nothing is wrong."
J'onn inclined his head. "Precisely."
Clark looked between them. "Could it be related to the… restructuring?" He gestured vaguely, as if even he struggled to name it. "Since certain… events, the boundaries between universes have been more… fluid."
J'onn followed the thread of Clark's thought—and again felt that resistance. That soft refusal of memory.
"Yes," J'onn said slowly. "The… restructuring."
Bruce turned sharply. "You remember something specific?"
"I remember knowing something specific," J'onn answered. "But not the thing itself."
Silence settled over the room.
Barry shifted uncomfortably. "Okay, that's officially creepy."
Diana placed a hand on J'onn's shoulder, grounding. "You're not alone in this feeling."
J'onn looked at her, surprised. "You feel it as well?"
She nodded. "Like a song that ended, but the echo didn't."
J'onn closed his eyes.
On Mars, before the fire, before the genocide, there had been stories about the spaces between thoughts. Elders spoke of them in hushed tones—places where ideas went when they were no longer needed, or when they were too dangerous to remain. J'onn had dismissed them as metaphor.
Now, he was no longer certain.
"I will investigate further," he said. "Not through instruments."
Bruce's eyes narrowed. "You're going into the deep layers."
"Yes."
Clark stepped forward. "Be careful."
J'onn met his gaze. "I always am."
He phased out of the Watchtower, not into space, but inward—descending through layers of consciousness, bypassing individual minds, slipping into the collective substrate where shared concepts resided. Justice. Fear. Hope. Chaos. Order.
All were present.
All were intact.
And yet…
There was a boundary.
Not a wall, not a barrier—more like a horizon. A line beyond which his awareness simply… could not go. No resistance. No warning. Just a gentle, absolute stop.
J'onn pressed closer, cautiously.
The boundary did not push back.
It did not react at all.
That frightened him more than any hostile force ever had.
Beyond it, he sensed nothing. Not emptiness—finality. As if something had chosen to stand there, forever, so that everything else could continue without noticing.
A guardian.
A sacrifice.
The thought slipped away before he could grasp it.
J'onn recoiled, returning fully to his physical form, heart—his Martian heart—pounding.
Back on Earth, the sun had fully risen. The city moved on. People laughed, argued, lived.
Normal.
J'onn stood invisible above the streets and watched a family cross the road, a child tugging at her mother's hand, asking a question he could not hear but felt in her curiosity.
He felt an ache then. A deep, inexplicable gratitude mixed with grief.
"Who did this?" he whispered to no one.
No answer came.
Only silence.
And somewhere, far beyond his reach, the sense that someone had chosen to disappear so that the rest of them would never have to ask that question.
J'onn remained there long after the morning passed, standing vigil over a world that did not know it had been spared—wondering why the thought of an unseen protector made his chest feel unbearably heavy.
He did not yet realize he was only the beginning.