or, The Four Living Creatures

Created and Produced by Dams Up Water

The rain in New Bat City fell at a forty-five degree angle. It came down in thin, needling affidavits, each drop swearing under oath that something in this town had gone crooked long before anyone bothered to notice.

My office window leaked. So did city secrets.

Weasel, Badger, Beaver, Mink & Otter, Attorneys at Law (and frequently at Grace), occupied the twelfth floor of a rickety old building that had seen better centuries. The brass placard on the door was polished. Everything behind it wasn’t.

Weasel handled strategy—thin smile, thinner ethics.
Badger handled litigation—broad shoulders, broader grudges.
Mink handled appearances—silk voice, velvet loopholes.
Otter handled accounts—always floating, never drowning.
And me? I was Beaver. I built cases, dams, occasionally hope.
All of them leaked.

Business was good, if you defined “good” as “apocalyptic but billable.”

Our biggest client, Mr. Capybara, sat in the waiting room like a retired emperor who had traded conquest for quiet meals and charitable deductions. Once a rice shipping magnate who moved grain the way storms move coastlines, he now spoke softly about reform, restitution, and gluten-free penance.

“I wish to make things right,” he’d say, which in our line of work usually meant, “I wish to make things right without admitting anything in writing.”

But this wasn’t about him.

This was about Wolverine.

A high value asset—and a lone-wolf—they called him. Which was, of course, a contradiction. Wolves have packs, rules, hierarchy. Wolverine had none of that. He had claws, grudges, and a way of solving problems that made coroners rich and philosophers unemployed.

And now Bruce Wayne was dead.

Wayne had been a ghost even before the killing—reclusive, trauma-stricken, a man stitched together from grief, publicity stunts, and questionable nocturnal habits. The official report said “homicide.” The classified brief said “neutralized.”

Either way, the city lost its favorite rumor.

And Wolverine? He didn’t run. Didn’t hide. Just kept moving through the city like a subscription no one had the authority to cancel.

The Five Clans’ Firm had already put the Joker away—Barkham Asylum, iron bars, rubber walls, and a laugh track that finally ran out of audience. That left a vacuum. Vacuums get filled.

See, Bruce Wayne was always a legend in the newspapers first, and in alleyways second. The city needed a bat. It craved a savior, a spectacle—a spectacle packaged in black leather with a logo slapped on everything from umbrellas to insurance policies.

But here’s the inconvenient truth: the bat never flew outside the walls of Brucey’s imagination.

As a child, he learned early that grief was a quiet, cruel auditor, taking notes you couldn’t see. Trauma stacked bricks in his psyche, and young Bruce—business-minded even then—built a brand to hold them at bay. Batman was less a man than a product line: a darkly themed coping mechanism, neatly trademarked in his mind. He influenced, yes; he trained, yes, but training was marketing too, livestreaming his intravenous drip staving off the long-suppressed outcry of his anima. Every shadowy figure he ‘fought’ was part of the city’s need to see danger—an audience willing to pay in attention, adrenaline, and city council approvals.

By the time the press caught on, Bruce had fully committed: “Batman” was the figurehead, and Bruce Wayne, the anonymous back office, quietly underwriting the illusion. The New Bat City media loved it. Headlines don’t sell unless they have a dark cape and an origin story scarier than reality itself. They editorialized his movements, staged crises, and spun each rumor like a legal brief. The city consumed it, and in return, gave the brand life beyond the man who imagined it.

Every rooftop leap, every whispered “I am vengeance,” every grotesque showdown—it was a performance for a city that didn’t exist outside the page layout, a society colluding in its own mythmaking. By extension, the persona of Batman wasn’t just Bruce Wayne’s self-therapy; it was a full-blown, multimedia fabrication, a figment born at the intersection of trauma, capital, urban gossip, and far-right vigilantism.

Even Bruce, in his most lucid moments, couldn’t tell where the brand ended and he began. Maybe that’s why he disappeared into the shadows of the underworld he claimed to diametric oppose.

Wolverine had met the ‘Coon Gang in an abandoned train station submerged below Bat City Hall. Bandana Dan had tied his scarf tighter than usual, as if the knot alone could shield him from bad news. The Reformed Raccoon Revival sat cross-legged on crates, hymnals tucked under their arms like defensive weapons.

Wolverine didn’t sit. He leaned on a steel column, claws retracted, eyes narrow. The shadows clung to him like employees reluctant to clock out.

“I didn’t come here to talk about Wayne,” he said, voice low and gravelly, with the kind of authority that makes everyone suddenly check their own motives. “I came to talk about what he represents.”

Dan tilted his head. “You mean… Batman?”

“Yes,” Wolverine said. “Not the man. Not the suit. The myth. The lore.”

“Look,” Dan said, adjusting a glove, “my people follow rules. We repent. We reform. We—”

“Rules don’t matter,” Wolverine cut in. “Not when one man’s myth distorts the entire market. Every corner, every alley, every low-rent extortion and minor laundering operation—it all had to dodge his shadow.”

A ‘coon in the front row raised a paw. “So… you want to destroy a myth?”

“Batman isn’t a vigilante. He’s a regulatory cartel and a media harlot. And your decentralized operations? They die under his thumb. Imagine every syndicate, every petty operator, running their own show, calculating risk. Then add a bat-monopoly that swoops down unpredictably. Fear becomes a currency. Your margins shrink, your contracts lose integrity, your whole market collapses.”

He stepped closer, letting the silence press like a brief left open too long. “I don’t care about vengeance. I care about equilibrium. Removing the myth lets chaos breathe again. Gives decentralized power back to the players who actually keep the city’s underworld liquid.”

Dan swallowed. “So… you’re the regulator. Assessor and Adjustor, eh?”

“Call it what you like,” Wolverine said. “I’m just enforcing natural law. Myth monopoly kills material efficiency. And in New Bat City, efficiency is survival.”

The Beaverjesuits, who had appeared silently in the doorway like footnotes to reality, nodded. One murmured, “Even divine order respects the principle of balance.”

Dan shook his head slowly. “I always thought legends inspired. I never realized they… cornered the market.”

Wolverine’s eyes gleamed. “Every legend. Every myth. A market risk. You survive by knowing which ones to let stand—and which ones to take down before they bankrupt everyone’s freedom.”

The warehouse went quiet. Outside, the rain whispered like a compliant witness. Somewhere above, a pigeon coughed.

Bandana Dan and the Revival exchanged looks of recognition.

And Wolverine, ever solitary, went out on the hunt…

Our clients didn’t want Wolverine dead.

They wanted him brought to heel.

That’s where things got… theological.

---

The meeting took place at our table, in the Den, which smelled faintly of wet fur and cigarette smoke-stained paint. Present were the partners, Mr. Capybara, and three members of the Beaverjesuits—scholars, mystics, and, in a pinch, aggressive litigators of the soul.

They brought the scroll with them.

One of them unrolled the parchment and read:

“Thus says the LORD God: The Four Living Creatures, they each had a beaver likeness, but each had four faces…”

He went on. Weasel on the left side, Badger on the right, Mink above, Otter behind.

“This,” said the lead Beaverjesuit, tapping the parchment, “is not metaphor. It is organizational structure.”

Weasel leaned back. “You’re saying we’re foretold?”

“We’re saying,” the Frater Doctor replied, “that your firm is either divinely ordained or a scrivener’s error of cosmic proportions. We are proceeding under the former assumption.”

“So it is,” Badger said, cracking his knuckles, “that the law grants us this jurisdiction. What, then, is the play?”

“Conversion,” said Mink, before anyone else could. “We don’t prosecute Wolverine. We recruit him.”

Otter blinked. “Into what? Wolverine never went to Anima Law School.”

“Into the fold of the Kingdom, dear Otter,” said the Beaverjesuit. “Ordo Mustelidae. A cenobitic mountain cloister of friars of the Strict Observance. Silence, labor, communal life, structured penance.”

Weasel’s smile sharpened. “You want to put a one-man crime wave into a monastery.”

“We want to give him a rule,” said the Beaverjesuit. “Right now he has none. Without the Joker, the criminal underworld is decentralized and unregulated. An ego that grows out of proportion can’t be brought back into the fold. It must be abated.”

Mr. Capybara nodded slowly. “Even the strongest on-streaming current can be redirected… if one builds the proper channel.”

Everyone looked at me.

Go figure.

---

The plan was equal parts legal maneuver and spiritual ambush.

First, we boxed Wolverine in with injunctions, asset freezes on his shell companies, and a series of charges so meticulously filed they read like a confession he hadn’t yet made. Badger handled that, and enjoyed every second.

Second, we cut off his escape routes—informants flipped, safehouses compromised, supply lines turned into evidence exhibits. Mink orchestrated the social side, smiling as the city quietly withdrew its cover.

Third, we offered him a deal.

Not freedom. Not exactly.

A vocation.

We found him in a burned-down warehouse by the river, where the rain came in sideways and the shadows minded their own business.

His black trench coat collar flipped up, he was smaller than the stories and larger than the consequences.

“You my attorneys?” he said, not looking up.

“Among other things,” Weasel replied.

Badger slid the dossier across a wooden crate. It landed with the weight of several lifetimes.

“You’re done,” Badger said. “Legally, financially, existentially.”

Wolverine flipped it open, skimmed a page, and snorted. “You think paper stops me?”

“No,” I said. “But patterns might.”

That got his attention.

The Beaverjesuits stepped forward, robes damp, eyes steady.

“We’re not here to stop you,” one said. “We’re here to give you a rule you can’t break without finally breaking yourself.”

Wolverine laughed, low and humorless. “I don’t do rules.”

“That’s the problem,” I said. “And the solution.”

We laid it out.

Ordo Mustelidae. Strict Observance. Work, prayer, silence. A life where violence had no room to hide because there was no room left.

“In exchange,” Weasel added smoothly, “we make certain… obligations disappear. Charges dissolve. Assets restructured. Your cases dismissed… without prejudice.”

“And if I say no?” Wolverine asked.

Badger grinned. “Then we proceed as filed, and your various corporations will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

Rain hammered the roof like a judge with no patience left.

For a long moment, Wolverine said nothing.

Then: “You’re asking me to become… what? A monk?”

“A brother,” corrected the Beaverjesuit. “Among others.”

“I don’t do ‘others.’”

“Then you’ll fail,” I said. “And for once, it won’t take anyone else down with you.”

He looked at me then, really looked at me.

“Why do you care?” he asked.

I thought about Bruce Wayne, about a city that kept eating its own defenders, about dams that held until they didn’t.

“Because,” I said, “someone has to indemnify the dead; and The One Who Lives, of a surety, must be made whole.”

---

The decision didn’t come that night.

Or the next.

But pressure has a way of shaping even the hardest stone. Legal, social, spiritual—it all adds up.

Weeks later, under a sky that had finally run out of testimony, Wolverine walked through the gates of a hermitage no map bothered to chart.

He didn’t look back.

Men like him rarely do.

Around the same time, Little Beaver came back.

He’d been off-world, where prophecy ran thicker than gravity and destiny had a habit of picking unlikely vessels. They said he’d been made something there. Something with a name too large for ordinary conversation.

He returned quieter than he’d left.

No fanfare. No parade. Just a habit, a vow, and a tendency to appear where he was needed and nowhere else.

He worked in silence. Built in secret. Intervened without spectacle. If you saw him, it meant something had already gone very right or very wrong…

Back at the firm, business continued.

Weasel plotted. Badger fought. Mink calculated. Otter charmed.

And me? I kept building.

Cases. Dams. The occasional improbable future.

The prophecy hung on the wall now, framed and slightly crooked. Clients asked about it sometimes.

We told them it was decorative.

We told them a lot of things.

New Bat City didn’t get better overnight. Cities like this never do. But history tiredly shifted its weight to the other foot. Just a little. Enough to notice if you knew where to look.

The rain still fell sideways.

But sometimes—just sometimes—it sounded less like pleading…

…and more like absolution trying to remember the way down.

[composed with artificial intelligence.]