The writing prompt is simple: “I wonder if, in superhero universes, the villains ever get contacted by those Make A Wish Foundation people.”  Read the initial response here, then read my continuation.

July 12. Crazy to think this whole thing has been going for six months today. Dare I think it might be workable long term? Not completely thrilled with the nickname “The Villain Wrangler”, but at least it got the message across, and doesn’t make me sound like a brand of protein supplement. (Beats “Booster Gold” then! sorrynotsorry)  I can live with it. There’s one potential fly in the ointment, one way it could all go horribly, terribly wrong… but it hasn’t come up yet. Maybe never will. Yeah. I can call it implausible, going on impossible. It’ll be fine. Probably.  And you know, apart from that, everything is cool. This is cool!

July 15. Yeah. Spoke too soon. You’d think the damned Stephen King movie and the fast food commercials between them would have made this unthinkable, but nope. Takes all sorts. Yishan Dai goes by Terry, and he’s got, optimistically, another six months. Leukemia is a bitch. He got in touch with the Foundation, and the Foundation listened to his Wish, and probably shuddered, and then they got in touch with me, because that’s what they do.  It’s what I do.

It’s the implausible, impossible problem. Terry wants to meet his hero, and his hero is a clown.

July 17. When it’s a new-to-me villain, I start by putting the word out to my contacts. In this case, I have no idea who to call. The clown doesn’t seem to make friends. It doesn’t matter though; this morning I’m woken by a knock on the window about five minutes before my alarm.

“Hartley? What are you–”

Hartley hushes me. “Code names! Come on! Walls have ears!”

“OK, sorry. ‘Ludwig’. What can I do for you?”

“What can you do? You can go back to little Terry Dai and offer him his second choice, that’s what!”

Not surprised, and I totally agree, but I feel like I have to stand up for my client. “What do you mean? Surely you’re not that scared of The–”

I feel the constricting of my throat with the high-pitched noise. After a second, it passes. ‘Ludwig’ hisses, “We don’t say his name.”

“Woah. He’s really got you spooked. It’s that bad?”

“It’s that bad.”

“Woah.”

July 18. Terry’s Mom called. Told her I was still on the case. These things take time.

July 20. An hour after sunset, and I’m walking back from the 7-11 with a chilli dog for dinner. The voice from the alleyway had been gargling way too much gravel. He addresses me by name. “I advise you to disappoint your client” is all he says. I totally agree! But it’s not that simple! I make to reply, but the alley is empty. I hate it when they do that.

July 21. Conference call. Hartley (‘Ludwig’), Len (‘Chilly Willy’), ‘Kitty’ (she won’t tell me her real name), and Edward (‘The Riddler’ – he’s oddly unimaginative when he’s not on a crime spree). Edward is way creepier than you expect, given his schtick. Usually, getting even just these four to agree is like herding, well, villains — but today they’re singing from the same song sheet: give this job a miss. Try something else. Someone else. Clayface is around, and he’s interested in getting into my little black book, which is a surprise. Some guy named Per Degaton apparently wants to “get in on the ground floor”, whatever that means, but there’s an explanatory note from one David Clinton advising me to avoid him. Thing is: I didn’t write that note; it just appeared there between ticks of the clock. Definitely need to follow that up.

July 24. I give Terry the news. He’s obviously heart-broken, but he’s had so many disappointments in his short life, what’s one more? He thanks me solemnly.  I ask him if Clayface would be OK as an alternative, but he tells me “he’s not the one that matters”. No idea what he means by that.

July 30. Alarm from Keystone General. One of my contacts (an intern, not a super villain) calls to let me know Terry is gone. So soon! This one hits me harder than most. I’m muttering platitudes when the intern interrupts: no, not dead. Gone. Terry is missing.

Hartley, Len and his sister Lisa, plus James, Mick and Digger meet me at the hospital. Six of Flash’s Rogues in one spot, and not a bank vault to be seen!  But Keystone and Central are their turf, so they take this personally. I can tell they’re all nervous though. James isn’t even cracking jokes! They’ve been making plans. James air-walked up to Terry’s room and did something with his bag of tricks. “They got out this way,” he says. “Leapt from the window to the parking garage, looks like.” The others are mystified. That’s not our target’s usual M.O. – he’s much more into blowing up hospitals, not leaping about like a monkey. (I don’t actually say it like that to them. Mention of monkeys makes the Rogues nervous. I guess every gallery of villains has its own Big Bad. But the clown is everyone’s Big Bad.)

The theory is that our quarry has taken Terry to one of his hide-outs, but which one? James hops the several storeys to the top of the parking garage. He yelps in surprise, and there’s a thud! and an oof! and he topples back unconscious. He’s held aloft, ten feet off the edge of the top floor, by his ridiculous shoes. Lisa makes some movement with her hands and there’s a golden pathway in the air, directly from where we’re standing to the point in space where an unconscious James Jesse is dangling. She skates up the steep path, grabs him and follows through to dump him through the open window to Terry’s room. where she knows there’s a handy bed. Before I can react, she swoops down and grabs me. This woman is strong! I barely have time to experience the second worst case of vertigo of my life before she deposits me with a grunt on the concrete of the parking garage’s top level.

Terry is there. So is the clown. Lisa and the rest of the Rogues make themselves scarce. Len always told me they weren’t heroes; guess this is what he means. OK, funny guy. You and me.  Lucky I stopped off at the gas station on the way here, so my bladder is empty.

Terry is talking, and the clown is being… strange. One minute he’s this hunched, grasping, cackling mess; the next, he’s ramrod straight, almost balletic, hopping from one foot to the other like he’s on a trampoline. He seems to be fighting with himself. Terry doesn’t care. He keeps talking. He was always such a quiet kid, tacitern almost, all the times I saw him. Now he’s on a roll.

He talks about the cancer. About how it started small, little aches and pains, trips to the doctor. Then the diagnosis, and his parents’ tears, and the sit-down talk in the hospital parking lot — this one, in fact — when his parents explained about what was happening to his blood and his bones. Then come the tests. The questions. The needles — so many needles!

The clown is listening, I can tell, but there is a fight going on. One part of him wants to taunt this child, to torment him, to laugh in his face and then pick him up and dash him to the ground like a sack of kittens. But something is holding him back.

In the shadows in the corner of the lot, I see a rustle of dark blue and black, the uniform of a very famous former sidekick. You’re a long way from home, I say to myself. Just stay back. He seems to understand. He keeps to the shadows, and doesn’t interfere. I try not to look obviously relieved.

Terry talks some more. He talks about the incident in Gotham with the school bus. The man in the black cowl was a little late that day. Sixteen laughing twelve-year-olds, sixteen bags, sixteen funerals. He talks about how his cousin was one of the sixteen. As far away as here in Missouri, children were mourning. That was maybe a month after his diagnosis, when he was still able to go to school most days.

He tells him, then and there, as I watched, as the man in blue and black watched. He tells him: you make people scared. You make them sad, and you hurt them, and you kill them. And you laugh. You think you’re the biggest, baddest thing in the world. But you’re not. I know what is. I’ve got the biggest, baddest thing in the world growing inside my bones. It’s bigger and badder than you could ever be.
And I’m still here.

The clown breaks free. Whatever was holding him back, it fails, just for a moment. With a cry of triumph, he grasps the child by his hospital tunic and lifts him off the ground. “You’re here now, baldy boy! You’re here NOW! But you won’t be for long! And when you’re gone, I’ll still be here!” And he laughs that laugh, the one you know from so many TV broadcast interruptions, and my blood freezes.

Terry’s floating. He doesn’t care that he’s being dangled off the ground by a madman. He looks the clown in the eye. “When I’m gone, someone else will still be here. Still fighting something bigger than you. Still winning, for a little while at least. It’s bigger than you, it’s scarier than you, and it still can’t win forever. And neither can you.”

The clown wants to scream, but instead he stiffens. Puts the child down, gently. Then without a word, he leaps for the balcony and, with unexpected grace, executes a perfect arc through the air to the next building, like some master of the high trapeze. Behind me, the man in blue gasps. One word – mysterious: “Boston?” I guess he thinks his arch enemy is going to leap all the way to Massachusetts? I don’t know.

August 23. Terry seemed to rally well after his kidnap ordeal (as the Central City Citizen insists on calling it), but the old adversary redoubled its efforts — the cancer, I mean, not the clown. We lost Terry three days ago. He wrote me a letter, thanking me for giving him his chance to pass on an important message. As for the the clown, welll… I kept expecting to hear of tantrums thrown, reprisals, smiling corpses up and down the eastern seaboard, but… nothing. Terry’s entirely-too-small coffin sits in Saint Carmine’s while a lot of people I recognised file past to pay their respects and then get out before anyone can snap photos. The epitaph has his name, a couple of dates, and the words “I’m still here”.

It’s as I’m walking from the grave that the priest taps me on the shoulder. He’s an old man, frail, but for this one moment he moves differently, like a gymnast. His voice is different too, just the inflection. “Thanks kid,” he says. I ask what for. “Don’t matter. Thanks. But this is a one-off, ya hear me? It takes a lot out of you, riding a crazy horse. Not sure I could do that again. Do yerself a favour and take that name off of your books, capiche?”

I nod.

The priest stoops a little, shakes himself and says, “sorry, what was that?”

I don’t explain.