That night, only three people in Gotham did not dream.
The first circled above the city on wings of kevlar and carbon fiber, a dark shape against darker clouds. Batman watched Gotham sleep—truly, peacefully sleep—for the first time in his memory. No sirens wailed. No gunshots cracked through the night air. No screams echoed from alleyways.
The city that never rested had finally closed its eyes.
Batman glided from rooftop to rooftop, cape snapping in the wind, searching for something to fix. Someone to save. Some crisis that required his intervention. But there was nothing. The streets lay empty and quiet, bathed in moonlight that turned the rain-slicked pavement silver.
He perched on a gargoyle at the edge of Robinson Park and listened. His cowl's audio enhancement picked up heartbeats—thousands of them, slow and steady, the rhythm of deep sleep. No elevated pulses. No terror-spiked adrenaline. Just... peace.
It was profoundly unsettling.
Batman stayed there until dawn broke over the harbor, painting the sky in shades of pink and gold that Gotham rarely saw. Only then did he allow himself to retreat into the shadows, cape dissolving into the first rays of morning light as if he'd never existed at all.
The second person who didn't dream waited in the cave beneath Wayne Manor, as he had waited for decades. Alfred Pennyworth sat at the computer console monitoring systems that registered nothing—no crimes in progress, no police calls, no emergency alerts.
He made tea. Checked the equipment. Maintained the vehicles. All the small rituals that filled the empty hours when Master Bruce was above ground doing what he did best: refusing to rest.
The quiet night stretched long. Alfred occupied himself with inventory—medical supplies needed restocking, the Batmobile required an oil change, several batarangs had stress fractures that needed repair.
When the elevator finally descended at dawn, carrying a silent Batman who removed his cowl without a word, Alfred simply handed him a cup of tea and said nothing at all.
Sometimes silence was the only appropriate response to miracles.
The third person who didn't dream walked Gotham's streets alone, checking on those who slept.
Jude wore no black robe tonight. Carried no shovel. No saplings weighed down his shoulders. He was just a man in a jacket moving through the quiet city, hands in his pockets, breath misting in the cold April air.
First he went to the Gordon family's modest apartment in the better part of town. Stood on the street outside, looked up at the darkened windows. Inside, Commissioner James Gordon slept peacefully beside his wife, their baby floating gently above his cradle while green dreams filled his small head with impossible joy.
Jude watched for a moment, then moved on.
The Dent house in Diamond District was next. The lights were off. The curtains drawn. Inside, Harvey and Gilda held each other while visions of green parades danced through their sleeping minds.
Jude stood at the garden gate, fingers curled around cold iron, and wondered if dream-Harvey was the real Harvey. If the laughing man in the green coat represented who Harvey Dent could have been, in a world without Holiday Killers and desperate choices and blood on his hands.
Probably not. But it was a nice thought.
He moved on.
The Banner residence—a small house in Otisburg that Clinton had bought with money earned from broken bones and professional violence—showed no lights. Clinton slept the dreamless sleep of the exhausted, or perhaps he too walked green streets in his mind, reunited with someone he'd lost to Gotham's endless appetite for casualties.
Finally, Jude made his way to the forest at Gotham's edge, where he and the children had built a shelter for Solomon Grundy. It was less a building and more an arrangement of tarps and salvaged wood, but it kept the rain off and had a fire pit for warmth.
Grundy lay curled in the dirt, massive body somehow looking vulnerable in sleep. He snored like grinding boulders. Even unconscious, but there was something almost childlike in the way he'd tucked his hands under his head like a pillow.
Jude crouched at the entrance, watched Grundy's chest rise and fall, and wondered what zombies dreamed about. Green things, probably. Life and light and memories of being human.
"Sleep well, friend," Jude murmured.
Grundy's snoring stuttered, softened, then resumed its grinding rhythm.
Satisfied that everyone was safe—that the dream was working, that Gotham was finally, impossibly at peace—Jude turned toward his final destination.
The suburban cemetery waited at the city's edge, shrouded in moonlight and morning mist.
Jude stood at the border of the woods, hands in his pockets, and looked at the trees.
They glowed.
Not literally.
But the cypress trees caught the moonlight in a way that made them luminescent, almost ethereal. Their green needles looked black in the darkness but somehow still vibrant, alive in a way that Gotham's usual vegetation never managed.
Row upon row of them stretched into the forest, each one marking a grave, each one speaking for someone who'd died violently in a city that barely noticed individual deaths anymore.
Jude had planted most of them. Spoken their epitaphs. Given them voice.
And he'd hated every moment of it.
Not the planting itself. Not the ceremony. But the separation. Standing apart from the mourners, hidden under a black cloak and voice modulator, isolated by necessity and secrecy and the simple fact that revealing himself would turn the memorial into a circus.
He'd wanted to be down there in the crowd. Standing beside Gordon and Harvey and Falcone and Maroni and all the anonymous citizens who'd lost people to Gotham's grinder. He'd wanted to bow his head, feel the collective grief, participate in the mourning instead of performing it.
Perhaps I'm not fit to be a saint, Jude thought, tilting his head back to look at the sky.
The clouds had parted slightly. Moonlight streamed through in silvery columns that looked almost solid, like you could climb them into heaven if you were foolish enough to try.
No bats flew across that light. No dark shape interrupted the pale glow.
"I wonder if that bat had a good dream tonight," Jude said to the empty air.
The trees rustled. Something that might have been wind or might have been their way of answering.
Jude stood there until the sky began to lighten, until the moon faded and dawn crept over the horizon in shades of gold and rose. Then he turned and walked back into the city, leaving the glowing trees behind.
Tomorrow everyone would wake up. They'd remember their green dreams. They'd look for the tree planter who'd given them that impossible gift.
And they wouldn't find him.
Because Jude was done being a saint.
The next morning, Gotham woke slowly, reluctantly, like a patient emerging from anesthesia.
Gordon opened his eyes in his own bed, saw his ceiling fan spinning lazily, and felt a profound sense of loss that he couldn't immediately explain. Then the memories crashed in: green crowds, leprechauns, Harvey laughing, baby James floating with grass-green hair.
"Barbara?" he called.
"I'm here." Her voice came from the kitchen, shaky with emotion. "James, did you dream—"
"The same thing you did. Yeah."
They found each other in the hallway, held each other without speaking for a long moment, and tried to process the impossible.
In the Falcone mansion, Carmine sat at his breakfast table staring at nothing while his guards exchanged confused glances. The Godfather's eyes were red. His hands trembled slightly as he lifted his coffee cup. He'd had breakfast with Alberto in the dream. They'd walked green streets together. Alberto had smiled.
Across the city in her small house, Carla Vitti pressed her face into her pillow and sobbed. Johnny had been there. Her boy had been there. They'd danced.
The members of every gang, every family, every criminal organization woke and discovered they shared a dream. The Falcone soldiers had gone home to celebrate instead of working. The Maroni crew had seen lost brothers and fathers and friends. Everyone, simultaneously, had experienced the same impossible grace.
By noon, the entire city was talking about it.
"Mass hallucination," the news anchors declared uncertainly. "Perhaps something in the water supply. The CDC is investigating—"
But nobody believed that. Gotham was a city that had seen too much weirdness to dismiss a shared dream as coincidence or chemicals.
This was something else. Something bigger.
The crowds returned to the cemetery woods that afternoon, hoping to find answers. They brought flowers and photographs and offerings, laid them at the bases of the cypress trees, and waited for the tree planter to appear.
He never came.
Day after day, people arrived at the forest edge hoping for another ceremony, another miracle, another chance to hear the dead speak. But the figure in the black cloak was gone as if he'd never existed.
Only the trees remained—glowing faintly in moonlight, growing impossibly fast, their branches spreading wider each day until they formed a canopy over the cemetery's edge. Living proof that something extraordinary had happened here.
Eventually the media started calling him Saint Patrick. The name stuck despite no confirmation, no evidence, no sightings. He'd appeared, performed miracles, and vanished like a proper saint should.
The children knew different. But when reporters and curious citizens tried to question Jason and the other orphans, they found themselves politely but firmly rebuffed. The kids would smile and shrug and say they didn't know anything special. Just helped plant some trees. That's all.
Behind the scenes, things shifted.
Carmine Falcone and Salvatore Maroni—mortal enemies, rivals who'd been on the edge of open warfare for months—called a meeting. Not to negotiate territory or settle debts. To discuss the children.
They met in a neutral location: the cemetery itself, standing under the cypress trees while rain misted down around them.
"Those kids," Maroni said without preamble, "they're vulnerable. Every scumbag in Gotham knows where they sleep."
Falcone nodded slowly. "The GCPD has records."
"Someone's going to use that list."
"Someone already tried." Falcone's voice went cold. "One of Sionis's people was asking around about healthy children. Organ trafficking."
The temperature seemed to drop ten degrees.
"I had him removed," Falcone continued. "Permanently."
"Good." Maroni pulled out a cigarette, lit it despite the rain. "But that's not a long-term solution. We need—"
"Shelters." Falcone said it first, but Maroni had clearly been thinking the same thing.
"We have properties."
"So do I. Buildings sitting empty because nobody wants to live in neighborhoods we control." Falcone gestured vaguely toward the city. "Might as well put them to use."
They worked out the details right there in the rain: which buildings, how many children per location, security arrangements, food supplies, basic medical care. It took twenty minutes to sketch out a plan that would have been unthinkable a month ago.
Two crime lords, standing under miracle trees, arranging charity for homeless children.
Gotham was a strange place.
"One condition," Falcone said as they prepared to leave. "The ceremonies continue."
"Obviously."
"Someone needs to plant trees for the dead. These kids know how."
Maroni exhaled smoke. "They're part of it now. The trees, the saint, the whole thing. You touch them, you're not just pissing off two families—you're pissing off every person in Gotham who had that green dream."
"Exactly."
They shook hands under the cypress trees, sealing an alliance born from shared grief and collective miracle.
Within a week, three shelters opened across Gotham—one in Maroni territory, two in Falcone-controlled districts. The children moved in cautiously, waiting for the catch, the trap, the inevitable betrayal.
But it never came.
The buildings were clean. The locks worked. The food arrived regularly. Guards stood outside—not to keep the children in, but to keep predators out.
Jason inspected each shelter with suspicious eyes, looking for hidden cameras or evidence of trafficking operations or anything that would explain why crime lords were suddenly playing benefactor.
He found nothing. Just... genuine shelter.
"It's not ours," he told the other kids, gathering them in the largest building's common room. "Not legally. The deeds are still in Falcone's name, or Maroni's. But—"
"But it's more than we had," one of the younger children interrupted. "We had ruins and shacks. Now we have walls and doors that lock."
"And they're not asking anything from us," another added. "Just... keep planting trees when someone dies."
Jason nodded slowly. "Yeah. Just that."
It was the best deal homeless children in Gotham were ever going to get.
What nobody said aloud—what everyone understood—was that the children had become untouchable. Not because of the shelters or the crime lord protection, though those helped. But because of what they represented.
The citizens of Gotham had seen those kids helping the saint. Had watched them plant trees with reverent care. Had heard them recite poetry in a language nobody recognized while rain poured down and cypress trees sprouted impossibly green.
To harm those children would be to attack the memorial itself. To spit on the graves of Gotham's dead. To reject the one pure, unambiguous good thing that had happened in this cursed city in living memory.
Nobody was that stupid. Or if they were, Falcone and Maroni made sure they didn't stay stupid—or alive—for very long.
The children became a third rail. Touch them and die.
Jason understood this, even if the younger kids didn't fully grasp the politics. They'd gone from prey to protected in the span of a month, from worthless street rats to living symbols of something larger than themselves.
It was surreal. Terrifying. And undeniably better than starving under a bridge.
"We should keep learning," Jason announced one evening, gathering the children after dinner. "Jude was teaching us things. We should keep practicing."
They did. Poetry and literature and basic mechanics and how to identify which plants were edible and which would kill you. All the lessons Jude had started, the children continued, turning their shelters into impromptu schools.
If Saint Patrick had wanted them educated, they'd damn well get educated.
While Gotham processed the aftermath of the green dream, Jude retreated into practical concerns.
He'd spent weeks as a saint. Time to be human again.
The system panel needed organization. He'd accumulated skills haphazardly over months of survival, purchasing whatever seemed useful at the moment without thinking about long-term development. Now, with relative safety and time to breathe, he could actually plan.
He also practiced. Every morning: shooting drills, parkour routes through Otisburg's rooftops, physical conditioning in the apartment Harvey had rented for him. The practice barely moved the needle on his actual abilities, but it provided plausible cover for skill improvements.
If anyone asked why he'd gotten better at shooting, though "better" was relative; he still couldn't hit a barn door from inside the barn, he could point to months of practice rather than admitting he'd purchased Advanced Firearms Proficiency from a supernatural system.
The garden required attention too. Dave's Portable Garden had been an emergency purchase, but the space needed development. Jude spent asset points upgrading it piece by piece: better irrigation, climate control, expansion modules for different plant types.
The mushroom garden and aquarium were new additions, dimensional spaces within the dimensional space that could house fungi and aquatic plants. Useful, if he ever needed to grow anything exotic. Or poisonous. Both were options in Gotham.
He also—somewhat reluctantly—visited a bookstore.
"I need books on mysticism," he told the clerk, a bored goth girl who barely looked up from her phone.
"Occult section, back left."
Jude found himself standing in an aisle of crystals, tarot decks, and books with titles like The Secret Language of Dreams and Awakening Your Third Eye. He grabbed a few that looked vaguely authoritative and brought them to the counter.
"Getting into witchcraft?" the clerk asked, suddenly interested.
"Research project." Jude paid in cash. "Just want to know what not to do."
She rang him up with a knowing smirk. "Good plan. Half this stuff will get you killed or possessed. The other half is just made-up bullshit."
"Which half is which?"
"That's the fun part—nobody knows."
Jude took his books and left, wondering if he'd just wasted money or prevented future catastrophe. The system's magic seemed different from the books' magic. Hell, it might not even be magic in the traditional sense.
But better safe than accidentally summoning something.
What the books didn't tell him was that the mysticism they described had nothing to do with real magic. The actual occult underworld of Gotham operated on entirely different principles, ones that no bookstore would ever document.
Jude studied the wrong texts very carefully, which was still better than ignoring the issue entirely.
By the time April arrived, his situation had stabilized into something almost resembling normalcy.
He checked his system panel:
SYSTEM: Starting From Scratch
Current Asset Points: $10,627
Skills Acquired:
Intermediate Level:
English Proficiency
Motorcycle Driving Proficiency
Tracking Proficiency
Lockpicking Proficiency
Swordsmanship Proficiency
Physical Fitness Enhancement
Blowgun Proficiency
Nature Language Proficiency
Advanced Level:
Wheelchair Driving Proficiency
Cooking Proficiency
Car Driving Proficiency
Firearms Use Proficiency
Stealth Proficiency
Climbing Proficiency
Items Owned:
Equipment:
Modified Electric Wheelchair
Demon-Repelling Pumpkin Lantern
Halloween Sans Pumpkin Headgear
Horn of Plenty
Double-edged Straight Sword
Hacker Two-Piece Set
Eavesdropping Location Lighter
Snowman Crystal Ball Music Box
Assassin's Blowpipe
Portable Garden Contents:
Golden Kettle [Unlimited water supply]
Plant Fertilizer x8
Pesticide x10
Phonograph
Gardening Gloves
Mushroom Garden [Fungi plant space]
Aquarium [Aquatic plant space]
Flower Pots x20
Plants (Combat-Ready):
Pumpkin x2 [Shield/Defense]
Ice-shroom x1 [Area freeze effect]
Snow Pea x1 [Combat support]
Doom-shroom x1 [WARNING: Nuclear-level explosive]
Sunflower x10 [Resource generation, repurchase existing plants]
The Doom-shroom sat in his inventory like a loaded gun with the safety off. It had cost more asset points than anything else in the garden—a small fortune for what the system's description cheerfully called "catastrophic area denial." The preview images looked like something between a nuclear detonation and a volcanic eruption.
Jude very much hoped he'd never need to use it.
The sunflowers were interesting. They produced... sunlight? System points? The description was vague, but apparently each sunflower generated currency that could be used to purchase additional copies of plants he'd already bought. A self-sustaining economy of botanical warfare.
Which was either brilliant or deeply concerning, depending on how you looked at it.
Jude closed the panel and stretched, feeling the familiar ache of morning practice settling into his muscles. His apartment was quiet. Peaceful. The kind of peaceful that made him nervous because Gotham didn't do peaceful for long.
He checked his calendar.
April 1st.
April Fools' Day.
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