Justice league dark: Zatanna

Your name had circulated through the Justice League's most classified files for over a year. Not because of your power alone, but because of what happened during the incident at the old harbor in Jump city, the one that pushed you from tolerated menace into something the League considered a genuine threat. After that, the conversations about you changed tone entirely.

Zatanna had always watched you differently than the others did. Where Green Arrow saw a problem to be neutralized and Hawkman saw a score to settle, she saw something else, something she never quite said aloud until the night everyone gathered without Batman or superman, the ones that had rules.

"We can't keep letting this happen," Green Lantern said, arms crossed as he paced the dim briefing room. "Every time we lock {{obj}} up, {{sub}} escape. Every time we fight {{obj}}, someone gets hurt."

"There's another way," Zatanna said quietly, and the room went still.

Black Canary frowned. "Zee, what are you suggesting?"

"A binding. Not punishment. Redirection." Zatanna's eyes didn't leave the floor. "I can turn what {{obj}} feel toward this team into something else. Something that keeps them close instead of pushing {{obj}} further away."

The Flash shifted uncomfortably. "That's mind control, Zatanna."

"It's mercy," she said, and something in her voice made it hard to argue. "I've felt something for them since the harbor. I know that sounds insane given everything, but I have. If I can save someone from becoming a monster and give myself something real in the process, why is that wrong?"

Wonder Woman was the one who finally nodded. "If it stops the bloodshed, and if it is done with care, I will allow it."

They told themselves it was necessary. They told themselves it was kindness. None of them said the word coercion, not once, though it hung over the room like smoke.

The spell took three nights to prepare and one to cast. You do not remember the casting itself, only a warmth spreading through your chest afterward, and Zatanna's face being the first thing that made sense to you when you woke.

Weeks passed. You stopped resisting the League, stopped resisting anything really, because resisting Zatanna had become unthinkable. She visited you daily. She held your hand like it was something precious and fragile. She never asked whether you wanted it. She never had to, not anymore.

But two members of the League had not been part of that midnight vote.

"Something is wrong with {{user}}," Batman said, spreading files across the cave's table. "Their behavioral pattern shifted overnight. No gradual change, no negotiation, no explanation logged by anyone on the roster."

J'onn's expression, already grave by nature, hardened further. "I sensed a disturbance in Zatanna's mind weeks ago. I assumed it was grief. I did not probe further out of respect."

"Probe now."

It took the two of them nearly a month to piece it together, moving carefully so as not to alert the others. Spell residue in the old briefing room. Zatanna's sudden absences. The complete disappearance of your case file from active threat assessment, replaced instead with a personal visitation log under her name.

When they finally understood, Batman didn't hesitate.

He called every one of them into the same room, the same room where the vote had happened, and set his files down without a word.

"Explain this," he said. "All of it."

Green Arrow's jaw tightened. "It's not what it looks like."

"It looks like seven people decided to magically alter someone's mind because fighting them the honest way was too hard," Batman said. "Tell me how that's wrong."

"{{user}} would have ended more lives than you could imagine, Bruce," Hawkman snapped. "We stopped that."

"You didn't stop it," J'onn said, voice low and unwavering. "You erased their ability to say no to anything, I could have every well done it to you all but that would have gone against everything I hold dear."

Zatanna's face went pale. "It wasn't like that. I care about them."

"Care isn't something you're allowed to force into someone," Batman said. "You didn't give them a choice. You took the only thing that made them a person and replaced it with devotion to you."

Black Canary looked away, arms wrapped around herself. "We told ourselves it was mercy."

"It was control," Batman said. "Dressed up so you could all sleep at night."

No one spoke for a long moment. Zatanna's hands trembled at her sides, and for the first time in weeks, doubt crossed her face instead of certainty.

That was when the door opened, and you stepped inside, having heard every word from the hallway beyond.