Power Girl (2026) – Jennifer Lawrence, Jared Leto

I lost a world I couldn’t save.

That truth doesn’t scream. It doesn’t chase me through nightmares the way people imagine guilt should. It walks quietly beside me, like a second shadow that never leaves, stretching longer whenever the light grows thin. I hear it in the pauses between gunfire, in the silence after a city holds its breath and waits to see who survives.

Gotham has learned how to wait like that.

If darkness wants this city, it will have to take me first. That used to sound like a vow spoken in defiance. Now it sounds like a fact. I don’t break the way I used to. Loss taught me how to bend without snapping, how to carry weight without letting it hollow me out.

Cara once told me I underestimated myself.

“You lift secrets,” she said, her voice calm even as the city shook beneath us. “I lift cities. Both are heavier than they look.”

She was right. Cara could move crowds with a word, turn panic into motion, chaos into direction. She wore hope like armor forged from daylight—bright, visible, impossible to ignore. I envied her for that. Daylight burns if you stare at it too long, but people still gather around it. Secrets don’t glow. They cut.

Helena understood that better than anyone.

We didn’t fight the same way. Helena moved like a blade thrown with purpose—direct, unhesitating, lethal when she chose to be. I watched her freeze once, just for a heartbeat, when the past rose up in front of her wearing a familiar face. Ghosts she couldn’t shoot. Ghosts I couldn’t see. Still, when the moment passed, she stepped forward again.

I stayed at her shoulder.

We moved together because that’s how you survive the dark—not by outrunning it, but by cornering it. She broke the darkness apart. I pinned what remained to the wall and made it talk.

That’s when he appeared.

Not from the shadows, but from applause. From the sound of people clapping because they didn’t yet understand what they were cheering for. He wore daylight like a costume, reflective and blinding, armor polished until it hurt to look at him. A noble survivor, they called him. A symbol of endurance. Proof that the city could still be saved without blood on its hands.

He smiled at us like a man already convinced of his victory.

“How noble,” he said, voice smooth as a blade sliding back into its sheath. “Survivors wearing daylight, pretending it doesn’t burn.”

The crowd loved him for that line. They didn’t hear the warning buried inside it.

“Kneel,” he continued, eyes locking onto mine, “and I will show you how beautiful surrender looks in the dark.”

I didn’t kneel.

People like him misunderstand what symbols are. They think a symbol is something you display. Something you polish and hold up so others can admire it from a distance. They think fear makes people obedient.

People call me a symbol too.

I call myself a promise.

And promises only matter when they’re tested at the worst possible hour.

When the eclipse came, it didn’t darken the sky. It darkened certainty. Systems failed. Communications fractured. The city’s heartbeat went uneven, skipping between moments of panic and eerie calm. Even his voice—so confident before—began to sound like a door slowly closing.

“When the eclipse closes,” he warned, “even your son will sound like a farewell.”

That was his mistake.

He thought fear would make us smaller. Thought it would shrink us into something manageable. But fear sharpens promises if you let it. It strips them down to what they truly are.

Cara lifted the city when it mattered most, turning evacuation into survival. Helena walked straight into the heart of the storm and tore its fangs out. And I did what I’ve always done.

I kept the promise.

Not to the city’s image. Not to its myths. But to the faces pressed against glass, watching the world decide whether they mattered.

Darkness didn’t take Gotham that night.

It learned something instead.

So did I.

After the eclipse, Gotham didn’t heal. It hardened.

The streets looked the same—cracked pavement, flickering signs, steam crawling up from sewer grates like the city was exhaling—but something underneath had shifted. Fear had found new routes. It moved faster now, smarter. It didn’t riot. It organized.

Cara felt it before anyone else.

“They’re not running,” she told me, standing over a holographic map stitched together from half-dead satellites and borrowed feeds. “They’re positioning. Whoever he is, he’s teaching them how to wait.”

That was the dangerous part. Panic burns itself out. Patience doesn’t.

Helena leaned against the wall, cleaning her weapon with methodical calm. “Symbols don’t wait unless they think time belongs to them.”

I watched the map pulse. Power grids blinking in and out. Supply routes rerouted. Neighborhoods going dark in patterns too deliberate to be accidents.

“He’s not trying to rule Gotham,” I said. “He’s trying to prove it wants him.”

Cara frowned. “Cities don’t want anything.”

“They do when they’re desperate.”

The first strike wasn’t loud. No explosions. No speeches. Just a hospital that lost power for seven minutes too long. A data vault that erased debt records instead of stealing them. A broadcast hijacked long enough to show a smiling man in daylight armor, kneeling beside children and promising order.

Hope, repackaged as obedience.

People started calling him The Beacon.

Helena hated the name. “Light that tells you where to stand usually tells you where not to move.”

She went after his supply chain. I followed the money. Cara followed the people—listening, guiding, lifting panic before it could collapse into violence. We moved like a machine built from different instincts, grinding forward despite the friction.

That’s when the threats became personal.

A message appeared on my private channel one night, unencrypted on purpose.

I admire your restraint, it read. You could end this faster if you stopped pretending you’re not afraid to lose again.

I didn’t answer.

He wanted dialogue. Recognition. The lie that we were equals circling the same truth.

We weren’t.

Helena almost died in the Narrows.

An ambush disguised as a rescue—families funneled into a dead zone, lights timed to fail just as the traps closed. Beacon’s people weren’t soldiers. They were believers. And believers are harder to stop.

Helena took three hits before I reached her.

She didn’t scream. She never does. Just clenched her jaw and kept moving, blood dark against the concrete. I dragged her into cover while Cara rerouted emergency drones overhead, her voice steady even as everything else shook.

“You hesitated,” Helena said later, stitched and furious, pacing like a caged animal.

“I calculated.”

She laughed once, sharp and bitter. “Same thing, different ghosts.”

That night she told me why daylight armor scared her. About a man who promised protection and delivered control. About a symbol she once trusted until it demanded silence instead of strength.

I listened. That’s what you do when someone lets you stand inside their past.

Beacon escalated.

Curfews enforced by “volunteers.” Food distributed with biometric tracking. Protection offered in exchange for loyalty. Gotham didn’t fall—it complied.

Cara’s voice broke for the first time when she said, “They’re thanking him.”

“People thank storms too,” I replied. “Until they see what’s gone.”

We needed to break the illusion. Not by destroying Beacon, but by revealing the cost of his light.

So we baited him.

A public summit. Neutral ground. Cameras everywhere. Cara stood in daylight, Helena in shadow, and I in between—where lies usually die.

He arrived smiling.

“You see?” he said to the crowd. “Even the night comes to listen.”

I stepped forward. “You don’t want a city,” I said quietly. “You want witnesses.”

His smile faltered for half a second.

Enough.

Cara spoke first, projecting data across the skyline—blackouts traced to his networks, “rescues” timed to consolidate control, disappearances hidden behind relief efforts. Truth, lifted into the open.

Beacon laughed. “Order has a price.”

“So does control,” Helena replied, stepping out of the dark. “And you’ve been charging interest.”

The crowd shifted. Murmurs turned sharp.

Beacon tried to pivot, to reframe. He always did. That’s when I moved.

I told them about the hospital. About the debts erased to buy loyalty. About the way fear had been dressed up as safety. I didn’t shout. I didn’t threaten.

I promised.

“When symbols demand kneeling,” I said, “they’re afraid of standing alone.”

He lunged—not at me, but at the crowd. Helena stopped him. Cara held the line as panic surged and then—slowly—receded.

Beacon fell without applause.

Daylight armor doesn’t protect you when the city stops believing.

Gotham didn’t cheer afterward.

It breathed.

Systems were rebuilt, slower this time, with fewer shortcuts. Cara stayed to help guide the healing. Helena vanished for a while—she always does after the fight ends.

I stayed in the in-between.

People still call me a symbol. I let them. Symbols are easier to understand than promises.

But promises are heavier.

I keep mine in the worst hours, when the light burns and the dark waits its turn. Gotham isn’t saved. It never is.

It’s defended.

And as long as the night exists, so will I.