tw. main character deaths, grief, suicide, murder, blood and gore, bombs, the joker

the day the world ended

The apartment was too quiet.

It had been days since Melina's last text. Just "I'm okay. I promise." Three words that had never felt less true. Maeve tracked down Melina's last location.

Maeve stood in front of the house her sister had been forced to live in, her stomach twisting with dread. The front door was cracked open. No lights on. The silence screamed.

She pushed it open slowly.

The air smelled metallic and wrong — like smoke and something sharp. Her pulse thundered in her ears as she stepped inside, calling out softly, "Melina?"

No answer.

The living room was empty, but she saw the blood first — a dark stain on the pale rug. Her breath caught, her lungs refusing to work. There were pieces of brain matter splattered all over the floor and wall behind the couch. A partially headless man's body slumped over the couch. She knew the face from whispered threats and nightmares.

Melina's husband.

And that was when the sob choked her — because she knew. She knew her sister wouldn't have just walked away.

Not without her.

Maeve ran.

The bathroom door was closed. A faint smear of red on the handle. She pushed it open with shaking fingers.

Melina was there.

Slumped against the wall. The mirror cracked, smeared with a message in lipstick. Her blood pooling around her like a halo.

Maeve fell to her knees. The scream that left her throat didn't sound human.

JASON'S POV – ETHIOPIA

It had been a trap.

He'd tracked the lead himself. Thought he found his mother — his real mother — only to discover too late that the Joker had gotten there first. He never told Maeve or Bruce.

The warehouse smelled like gasoline and betrayal.

Jason's ribs were broken. His face bloodied. He could barely lift his head as the Joker strolled in, whistling.

"Not gonna be any rescues this time, kid," the clown said sweetly. "Hope you wrote your goodbye letters."

Jason didn't beg. He never would. But as the Joker left him with a broken jaw and a bomb ticking away at his feet, Jason thought of two people:

Melina.

And Maeve.

Not Bruce. Not the others. Just the sister who'd given him her last clean blanket, the girl he loved who never said "I love you" back — not yet.

I'm not ready to go, he thought. There's still so much I didn't get to say.

His hand fumbled for his phone, bloody fingers hitting the speed dial.

Maeve.

One ring. Two.

It went to voicemail.

Jason tried to speak, tried to force something past his lips.

"I'm sorry... I love you Mae—"

The bomb went off before he could finish.

MAEVE – MOMENTS LATER

Her phone buzzed on the floor beside her where she knelt, still holding Melina's lifeless body, sobbing too hard to breathe.

A voicemail. From Jason.

She played it.

The static came first. Then his voice — ragged, weak, but undeniably him.

"I'm sorry... I love you Mae—"

Then nothing.

Then the explosion.

Maeve's hand shook so hard she dropped the phone.

"No," she whispered. "No, no, no..."

Not Jason.

Not now. Not when Melina was already cold in her arms.

Her whole world collapsed in just one hour.

Melina, gone.

Jason, gone.

And Maeve — alone.

LATER – BRUCE'S POV

Bruce stood in front of Maeve, not in the cape, not with the cowl — just as a man with nothing left to offer but grief.

"She found Melina like that?" he asked Alfred, voice hoarse.

Alfred nodded grimly. "And listened to Jason die seconds after."

Bruce looked at the girl curled on the cot in the spare room of the manor — silent, shattered. Just a whisper of the fire she once carried.

I failed them both.

He didn't know yet how to fix it.

Didn't know if it was even possible.

But he would give her a room.

And a key.

And a reason — any reason — to stay alive.