The Justice League never remembered recruiting you.

That was the first strange thing.

You just… existed there.

Not in the official founding photos. Not in the Hall of Justice archives. No dramatic “welcome to the team” moment. But somehow, everybody had memories around you. Half-formed ones. Batman vaguely recalled you helping during an alien invasion in Montréal. Flash swore you’d once beaten him in a snowstorm rescue race in Alaska. Green Lantern thought Superman vouched for you. Superman thought Wonder Woman did.

And you never corrected them.

Because honestly?

You didn’t remember joining either. You went by Northstar in the League. Quiet, hooded, always cold to the touch. Your powers looked simple enough: enhanced strength, survival adaptation, tracking instincts, weird frost-like energy. The League had seen stranger.

You avoided the Watchtower cafeteria. Nobody noticed at first.

You avoided Martian Manhunter entirely.

That part was harder.

Every time J’onn got near you, your skin tightened like ice cracking over deep water. Something ancient inside you would wake up hungry, snarling, terrified. So you stayed distant, lurking near observation decks or volunteering for remote missions in frozen places no one else liked.

Batman chalked it up to trauma.

He always chalked things up to trauma The truth was older than superheroes.

Older than cities.

Older than language.

You were a Wendigo—not the antlered movie monster humans imagined, but something worse: a spirit of starvation wearing a person’s shape so well even you believed it sometimes.

You had once been human. Maybe.

You remembered snow. Hunger. The sound of bones snapping in a blizzard. Then nothing for centuries except wandering forests and feeding carefully enough not to become a legend.

Until one day, during a magical catastrophe involving Constantine and a cursed Arctic excavation, you ended up helping civilians survive.

The League found you afterward.

And somehow… you stayed.

The problem began when people started disappearing around the Watchtower.

Nothing bloody. Nothing obvious.

Just missing.

A technician transferring shifts. A petty criminal held in containment. A LexCorp spy nobody liked very much.

No evidence.

No alarms.

Just a strange feeling of emptiness afterward, like the universe itself forgot someone had been there.

Batman investigated immediately.

Of course he did.

He checked security footage frame by frame and found glitches surrounding you constantly. Cameras distorted. Audio warped. Files corrupted. Not because you hacked them—but because the human mind wasn’t meant to fully perceive what you were.

Even AI systems struggled.

Cyborg described it best:

“It’s like reality autocorrects around them.”

Then Martian Manhunter finally touched your mind.

It happened accidentally during a mission when debris collapsed and he grabbed your arm to pull you free.

For one second, he saw you.

Not the person-shaped version.

The real thing.

A starving cosmic predator wearing memory like stolen clothing. Endless winter forests stretching inside your soul. Human voices buried beneath snow. A hunger so old it had forgotten what being full even meant.

J’onn recoiled so violently he phased through three walls.

The League thought he was under psychic attack.

You knew better.

And for the first time in years—

you were afraid.

Because if J’onn told them what you really were, everything would change.

Batman would prepare countermeasures.

Wonder Woman would invoke ancient rites.

Constantine would try to banish you.

Superman…

Superman would look disappointed.

That was the part you feared most.

But J’onn said nothing.

For days, he simply watched you quietly.

Until finally, alone in the Watchtower greenhouse, he asked:

“Do you want to hurt them?”

You answered honestly.

“I’m trying not to.”

That answer should’ve terrified him.

Instead, he nodded like someone hearing a confession from another lonely creature pretending to be human.

Because J’onn understood something the others didn’t: