The courtroom smelled like copper and fear.
Vernon Wells stood frozen in the chaos, watching Harvey Dent comfort the bleeding mob boss who'd just tried to murder him. Blood pooled beneath Maroni's prone body—three gunshot wounds. The dye that had been swapped for acid dripped from Harvey's face like war paint, half his features stained dark while the other half remained pristine white.
Two-faced.
Vernon's hands trembled. Around him, spectators pressed against the gallery rails, shouting questions nobody could answer. The judge had fled to his chambers. Two bailiffs stood over Maroni with weapons drawn, while the others formed a protective ring around Harvey.
But Harvey wasn't looking at his would-be killer.
Harvey was looking at Vernon.
"Hey, Vernon." The prosecutor's voice cut through the noise with practiced courtroom authority. "Go find someone to help first—isn't that what you were shouting about doing?"
Vernon's mind raced. Medical help. Right. That's what an innocent assistant prosecutor would do. He took one step toward Maroni, hands reaching—
Maroni's eyes snapped open.
Even bleeding out on the marble floor, shot three times, Salvatore Maroni managed to look murderous. The mobster stared at Vernon with the focused hatred of a man who'd just realized he'd been played.
Vernon froze mid-step.
He knows.
Of course he knows. Maroni wasn't stupid—greedy, impulsive, manipulated by a pretty face into betraying Harvey, but not stupid. The man had just attempted murder in open court because Vernon had convinced him the prosecutor was getting too close. And now Vernon was publicly Harvey's assistant, publicly Harvey's ally, publicly standing next to the man who'd somehow known to switch the acid for dye.
Someone knew the plan in advance. Someone took advantage of it and switched the poison. Someone wanted Maroni to deal with me personally.
Vernon turned his head slowly to look at Prosecutor Harvey Dent.
The other man's eyes were calm. Indifferent. Like he was watching a chess game where every move had been calculated six turns ago. The dye staining half his face made him look split down the middle—one side the golden prosecutor Gotham loved, the other side something darker that Vernon had never seen before.
Something that could anticipate an assassination attempt and weaponize it.
Something that could destroy a man with a single word of public gratitude.
Harvey Dent, you schemed against me.
Vernon gritted his teeth. Fear crawled up his spine like ice water. He was a coward—had always been a coward—the kind of man who only dared to do dirty work behind people's backs. The kind who accepted thick stacks of cash from mob bosses while pretending to serve justice. And now he stood in a courtroom filled with witnesses, his cover blown, caught between a prosecutor who'd outsmarted him and a mob boss who wanted him dead.
He couldn't even manage a hateful look. Could only lower his head, not daring to let anyone see the expression on his face.
For Vernon, who had no principles and only knew how to backstab, being betrayed felt like the worst thing in the world—though he was the only one who'd call Harvey's tactical brilliance a "betrayal."
On the floor, Maroni heard the commotion of the crowd but couldn't bring himself to care.
The pain was extraordinary. Three bullets, all center mass.
Nothing immediately fatal, but Christ, it hurt. Each breath sent fire through his chest. His lungs felt like they were filling with something wet and heavy.
For a woman.
The thought cut deeper than the bullets.
For a woman, Maroni, what have you done? You didn't kill Harvey, that bastard who was chasing you. You didn't listen to your father. Instead, you helped Falcone. Threw away every rule, every scrap of dignity.
Will Sofia show mercy when she helps the Romans annex what's left of the Maroni family?
The answer sat in his chest like lead.
He thought, distantly, that maybe dying like this would be more decent. Quick. Before he had to face his father's disappointment. Before he had to watch everything fall apart.
Then a voice that made his soul shudder cut through the chaos.
"I'll save him! I'll save him!"
No.
No.
Maroni's eyes flew open in horror.
Jude Sharp shouldered through the crowd like a man on a mission from God—the worst possible God, the kind that specialized in cosmic jokes. The disaster star himself, Gotham's walking curse, the human embodiment of Murphy's Law, squeezed to the front of the gallery and dropped to his knees beside Maroni's bleeding body.
"Boss, don't be afraid!" Jude announced with terrifying confidence. "I'm here to save you!"
Maroni stared at the familiar face that haunted his nightmares. The man who'd been present at every disaster that had befallen the Maroni family since Valentine's Day. Restaurant bombings. Hideout massacres. The St. Patrick's Day slaughter that had decimated his organization.
A thousand thoughts crashed through Maroni's mind—rage, despair, cosmic unfairness—and after a moment of stunned silence, all those emotions condensed into a single word.
"Fuck."
"Ah, Boss, I really missed your words too," Jude said earnestly, already pulling off his jacket. "But the timing's not right now. If I don't treat you quickly, the ambulance will be here soon."
"Who the hell wants you to treat me?" Maroni coughed, tasting copper. "Aren't you supposed to be a waiter?"
"How do you know I haven't studied medicine?"
Maroni's vision swam. The pain was making him lightheaded, but not so lightheaded he'd forgotten basic logic. "Do you have a fucking license?"
"No." Jude's answer came without hesitation. Confident. Immediate. Like the absence of medical credentials was merely a technicality.
The crowd, which had been watching this exchange in mounting horror, finally snapped into action.
"Get him away from Maroni!" someone shouted.
"He's a black-market doctor!" another voice added.
"A what doctor?" A bailiff tried to grab Jude's shoulder. "How dare you come to court to give emergency treatment without a license!"
"He's not going to die anyway." Jude shrugged off the hand. "Those three gunshot wounds aren't fatal. It won't hurt if I treat him."
"IT WON'T HURT?" Maroni tried to surge upright and immediately regretted it. Blood spurted from one of the wounds. He collapsed back with a wet coughing sound. "Go to—cough—go to hell with your unlicensed—"
His body betrayed him. He spat out a mouthful of blood.
If I were treated by some other black market doctor, I might be fine. But if I were treated by YOU, could I even survive until the ambulance arrives?
Maroni grabbed Jude's collar with one blood-slicked hand, pulling him close with desperate strength. "I'm not your boss anymore. You don't have to be my employee anymore. Cough! Do you understand?"
Jude looked at him seriously. Sympathetically. Like Maroni was the one being unreasonable.
"No way, boss." He spoke with the calm logic of a man explaining basic economics. "People have to eat. And to eat, you have to work. And to work, you have to find a boss. If you don't become my boss, how am I supposed to eat?"
"Go find—cough—go find the Romans!"
"Alas." Jude sighed like he'd tried that already. "Boss Falcone doesn't want me anymore. He even gave me money to come find you."
The words hit like a fourth bullet.
Maroni's eyes went bloodshot. His consciousness, which had been fading into a comfortable gray fog, suddenly became extremely active. Every event of the past months connected in his mind like dominoes falling—each disaster, each "coincidence," each moment of inexplicable bad luck.
The restaurant bombing. The hideout massacre. The failed acid attack that had somehow been predicted and countered. And at the center of all of it, sent directly to his doorstep with Falcone's money, was the walking curse himself.
Jude wasn't random bad luck.
Jude was a weapon.
"Carmine Falcone."
Maroni ground the name between his teeth like broken glass. He'd done so much for Sofia—betrayed his principles, ignored his father's warnings, thrown away the rules that kept the families stable. And all of it had gone straight into Falcone's pocket. The Romans had been stabbing him in the back since the beginning, using this human disaster as a precision-guided missile.
It's Falcone after all.
His father's voice echoed in his memory, words spoken in the orchard what felt like a lifetime ago:
"You have to act like a man."
"The focus of this matter is still Falcone."
The old bastard had tried to warn him. Had known, somehow, that the real threat wasn't Harvey Dent's legal crusade or Batman's nightly patrols. The real threat was the same it had always been—Carmine Falcone, playing chess while everyone else played checkers.
Maroni watched Jude being dragged backward by the crowd. The disaster star was protesting something about first aid and tourniquets. In desperation, Maroni grabbed the man's collar one more time, pulling him close enough to smell the cheap detergent on his street-market clothes.
"Jude." His voice came out as a rasp. "I'll give you double the money. Go back to where you came from."
Understanding dawned in Jude's eyes.
"No problem, boss."
Then the son of a bitch pulled out a camera.
Flash. Flash. Flash.
Jude took several pictures of Maroni's miserable state—blood-soaked, dye-stained, bullet-riddled on the marble floor—before the bailiffs finally managed to haul him away from the scene. The crowd parted for the paramedics, who loaded Maroni onto a stretcher with professional efficiency.
As the ambulance doors closed, Maroni caught one last glimpse through the courthouse windows: Jude Sharp, walking away down the street, examining his camera with the satisfied air of a man who'd completed a successful business transaction.
Jude left the chaos behind without ceremony.
He stripped off his blood-stained coat, turned it inside out so the gore wasn't visible, and tucked it under his arm. Walking around Gotham with blood on your clothes was a good way to get stopped by cops or worse—mistaken for a victim and mugged by opportunistic criminals who thought you were already wounded.
The afternoon sun felt too bright after the dim courtroom. Jude blinked against the glare, adjusting to the normal Gotham afternoon—distant sirens, car horns, someone shouting in an alley two blocks over. The usual symphony.
He checked his system notifications while walking, careful to look like he was just checking a phone.
[System Notification: Mission Complete]
Mission: "Justice Interwoven With Black and White"
Objective: Observe courtroom proceedings
Status: Complete
Reward: Processing...
The text shifted. A new item appeared in his inventory with a small ding of satisfaction.
[Black and White Coin]
Note: Yes, yes, I know that the world will always need a two-faced person. Stories always need actors to act them out. There are as many mad knights of light as there are multiverses. There is nothing we can do about it.
But despair and hope are like two sides of the same coin, inseparable, aren't they?
Note 2: In this year, Gotham gave Harvey a little hope and warmth, just a little bit, which was enough to change Harvey Dent's underlying character—if it were given to the Harvey Dent in other universes, perhaps it would be able to reverse and blur their "madness" characteristics.
Jude stopped walking.
He pulled the coin from his inventory. It materialized in his palm, solid and real. The metal was strange—not quite silver, not quite gold. One face showed a pristine scales of justice. The other showed those same scales, but tarnished, cracked, tilted askew.
Two faces. One coin.
He thought about Harvey Dent standing in that courtroom, half his face stained dark, the other half still golden. Thought about the cold calculation in the prosecutor's eyes—the man who'd turned an assassination attempt into a tactical victory.
The flower that has bloomed cannot turn back into a bud.
Jude looked at the coin in his hand. At the two faces that would always be inseparable, no matter how many times it spun in the air.
He flipped it high.
The coin tumbled end over end, catching the sunlight as it rose and fell. Justice and corruption, hope and despair, the knight of light and the creature that lived in shadows—all spinning together, impossible to separate.
It landed back in his palm with a soft clink.
Jude didn't check which face was showing.
In Gotham, it didn't really matter which side came up.
Both faces told the same story in the end.
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