"It was probably the summer I turned seven," Jude began.
He leaned back in the chair, settling in. Across from him, Drake sat on the couch with Camilla, both of them watching him with the cautious attention of people who had been promised something and weren't sure they'd been told the truth about what it was.
"We went hiking. Me and my parents. I was fearless at that age—loved walking along cliff edges, narrow paths, anywhere with a drop on one side. I had perfect balance. Could walk a ledge like it was a sidewalk."
He paused to let that land, then continued.
"This particular day, halfway up the mountain, it started raining. Not hard—just that kind of thin mist that gets everywhere. I stepped out onto this natural stone bridge, completely exposed, suspended over a gorge. I remember looking down at the valley below. The rain was running down the ridges, gathering into little streams, the water jumping between rocks—"
"Stop." Drake raised a hand. His expression was pained. "We're not sitting around a campfire and you're not writing a novel. Can you just—get to the part that's relevant?"
Camilla patted his arm gently. "I think it's lovely," she said. "Mr. Jude tells a story well."
"Fine." Jude waved his hand. "Anyway. I was climbing and I fell off the cliff. Landed in a cave."
He paused for effect.
"There was a Santa Claus inside. Roasting a reindeer over a fire. He told me that if I shared the story of falling into the cave with someone, all their diseases would be healed. Then he flew away on the other eight reindeer."
A silence.
Camilla's smile froze in place.
"Jude," she said, very quietly. "I'm Christian."
"Oh." He blinked. "Sorry about that."
A beat.
"Well," he said, "at least now we know he's real."
Drake looked at Camilla.
Jude activated the Fast Life Recovery.
He started humming—something low and soft, an old melody from somewhere Drake and Camilla would never have heard, a tune that existed in a world they didn't know existed. It had no name in this language.
Hair.
Black first, thin as wire, pushing through the skin at Camilla's scalp. Then more, thickening and lengthening simultaneously, darkening from black to gold to blonde, falling in waves down over her shoulders and continuing past them, settling at her waist. The transformation didn't feel like watching something grow—it felt like watching time run forward at speed.
Her body changed with it. The skeletal frame filled out from within, flesh returning to hollowed spaces, muscles rebuilding. The hollow geography of her face softened. Her cheeks rounded. Her eyes, which had been dull with exhaustion and pain for months, brightened and steadied.
Color returned to her skin. Not the false flush of fever—actual warmth, actual health, the pink of someone whose blood was moving properly again.
In ten seconds, the dying woman became someone whole.
Drake's hands were shaking. He didn't notice until the tears reached them.
She looked exactly like she had the first time he'd seen her. Exactly. He hadn't realized until this moment how completely he'd stopped being able to picture her this way—how thoroughly the illness had replaced the memory with itself.
She was staring at her own hands. Turning them over. Running her fingers through the gold hair falling around her, feeling the weight of it like she was confirming something she didn't trust. Then she leaned into him, and he held her, and neither of them said anything because there wasn't language for it.
Her tears were silent. His weren't.
Jude kept humming.
He looked at them—this man who'd tried to rob him at gunpoint twelve hours ago, holding his wife in a slum apartment in the worst city in America—and thought, with the calm practicality of someone whose entire operating budget was three dollars:
My only Fast Life Recovery is gone. Drake better find me a genuinely good job.
The next morning, Drake was making coffee when Jude found him.
"How long have you and Camilla been in Gotham?"
"Almost a year." Drake poured water into the machine. "Why?"
"And you were waiting for Victor Fries that whole time?"
"Eight months, actually. Then the accident." Drake's jaw tightened. "I tried to reach the company that funded his research afterward, but they shut down fast. Too fast. So I started looking for information about Mr. Freeze instead."
"Good thing you didn't find any," Jude said.
Drake glanced at him. Didn't push.
"Since you've been here a year," Jude continued, "you must have some contacts. Channels."
Drake caught on immediately. "I can try to find you something. But understand—there are no genuinely honest jobs in Gotham. Every industry has connections. If you want to work here, you accept that, or you don't work."
"That's going to be a problem," Jude said. "Fighting isn't realistic given my build. Theft and fraud would get me caught immediately. Seduction feels like a long shot. My writing career was already not working before I got here, so—"
"Okay." Drake held up both hands. "Stop. Just stop."
By the first two sentences, his mental list of viable options had been cut by half. By the end, he was down to three.
"Let me ask something practical." Drake tried to sound diplomatic rather than desperate. "Do you have any other skills? Specifically ones that aren't on the list of things you just told me you can't do?"
Jude considered this. "I can drive. And count."
"...That's it?"
"That's it."
"Cooking? Cleaning? Basic repairs?"
"A little. Not much. Enough to keep myself fed."
They looked at each other.
"Do you have money?" Drake tried.
"If I had money, I wouldn't need a job."
Drake rubbed his face. "...What if you went back to that cave and asked Santa Claus for a useful skill?"
Jude coughed. "Alright, look. I know my requirements sound unreasonable. But honestly—as long as the work is relatively safe, I'll take it."
Drake thought through every contact he'd made in the past year. Every door he'd knocked on, every favor he'd built up, every connection that had survived him being a broke outsider in a city that ate outsiders for sport.
"Waiting tables?" he said.
Jude nodded immediately.
Drake exhaled. "Alright. Good. Every industry in this city has mob connections—I don't mean hidden ones, I mean structural, from the top down. Restaurants, construction, transport, everything. I've made some contacts. I can probably get you into a restaurant. But you go in knowing that whatever you're working for has a connection somewhere."
"As long as nobody asks me to stab someone with the bread knife," Jude said, "and nobody stabs me with the bread knife, I think we can make it work."
"In that case," Drake said, "no problem."
He picked up his phone and dialed.
The line rang. And rang. And kept ringing, two full minutes of it, long enough that Jude started wondering if this particular contact had been the kind of person whose phone went unanswered permanently, in Gotham, for reasons that didn't bear thinking about.
Then: a click.
"Drake." A rough voice, gravelly, impatient. The voice of someone whose patience had been thoroughly used up long before this call. "What do you want?"
In the background, clear and unmistakable:
Bang.
A gunshot.