The flight back to Gotham left the following morning.
Jude sat across from Constantine at a small table near the window of a fish and chip shop near the airport, working through his plate with the focused appreciation of someone who had recently not had a stomach. A chip. A piece of battered cod. Another chip.
"Can you believe," he said, "that in all the time since I landed at Heathrow, this is the first actual British food I've eaten?"
"That tracks." Constantine was reading a newspaper with the detached interest of someone looking for something to be annoyed by. He glanced up. "By the time you finish that, you'll have eaten everything worth eating in England."
"That can't be right."
"Greggs, maybe. I'll give you Greggs." He turned a page. "But other than that? I'm sorry. That's genuinely it."
Jude put down his fork and looked at him. "Nothing else at all."
"Have you heard of stargazy pie? Flatbread with fish heads poking out the top, pointing at the ceiling. You can't possibly want to eat that." Constantine folded the newspaper, found nothing in it that warranted his continued attention, and set it down. "I've been meaning to ask you something since last night."
"Go on."
"How did you do it?" He said it quietly, leaning forward slightly — the tone of a professional asking a professional question. "The resurrection. Seven days with Mnemoth inside you, and then you just — sit up. I've never seen anything like it, and I've seen a significant amount."
"I have an item." Jude nodded at his wrist, where the phone charm had been before it burned itself out in activation. "Little totem — you saw it. It's gone now. One-time use."
Constantine stared at the bare wrist.
"That thing?" His expression had the quality of someone discovering a beloved professional belief is incorrect. "It had no aura. No magical signature at all — no lineage, no practitioner trace, nothing. It looked like something off a keychain at a tourist shop." He paused. "And it brought you back from the dead."
"It did."
"That is impossible. Something with that capability would require enormous reserves of power, a formal arrangement with forces on the other side, and almost certainly an equivalent sacrifice of some kind. There are no shortcuts to resurrection, Jude. The universe keeps accounts."
Jude considered how to phrase this.
"I'm not quite the same as you," he said. "I'm somewhat out of place in this world — there was never really a slot for me in it. You're different. You were born here, raised here. Cause and effect, fate, destiny — it's all woven through you and everyone you know. Which is why, for you, breaking free of a specific outcome is so much harder." He picked up another chip. "My situation is different. Cross-regional business, essentially. Your Western theology and the Eastern underworld don't have an extradition treaty between them."
Constantine sat with this for a moment.
"'Out of place,'" he repeated. "'Non-native.' That sounds like something from outside the universe entirely."
"Not quite that dramatic. Just — elsewhere."
"So if Lester had been holding that totem instead of you—"
"He probably wouldn't have made it."
Jude didn't elaborate. What he didn't say was that the system had been clear on this point at the time: [This item cannot be used on this target in this event]. Perhaps in whatever the original shape of events had been, Lester had always been the one who didn't come back.
He'd chosen not to find out.
"Anyway." Jude wiped his mouth and pushed the plate aside. "If you need something in future — come find me. I have a price list. Paid miracles are still miracles."
Constantine pursed his lips. He reached into his coat, produced a cigarette, and lit it at the table.
"You nearly died," Jude said. "Twice. In the last week."
"You're not skin and bones anymore," Constantine said pleasantly. "A couple of breaths won't kill you."
Jude stood, collected his bag, and headed for the door.
"What's the saying," Constantine called after him, without looking up. "'Easier to change mountains than a man's nature.'"
Jude pushed the door open.
"Or," he said, "you could put it another way. Fate has plans of its own."
He slept through most of the flight.
When he woke up, Gotham's skyline was already below him — grey and layered and unmistakable, the particular architecture of a city that has survived so many disasters it has learned to wear them as ornamentation. The plane banked over the bay and came down.
Good, Jude thought, looking out the window. At least nothing caught fire this time.
He cleared the airport, hailed a cab, and watched the city reassemble itself around him on the drive back to the cabin. A work crew of prisoners in orange vests on the roadside. The familiar smell of rain on asphalt and something chemical from the direction of the bay. Two cop cars outside a convenience store, lights running, nobody visibly in a hurry.
Still operating, he noted. Relatively.
Gotham's crime rate was what it was. The gap between the official statistics and the actual situation had always been significant, mostly in the reassuring direction — things were better than the numbers suggested, because the numbers were generated by a reporting system that had its own interests. Jude had been chipping away at the underlying infrastructure for long enough that the improvement was real, even if it wasn't visible yet. A long-term project. He wasn't in a hurry.
He opened the cabin door and immediately located his pillow.
He held it with the sincerity of a man reuniting with something that has never let him down.
Some things, he thought, you don't appreciate until you've spent a week slowly dying in a New York basement.
It was the middle of the night. Sleeping was the appropriate response. He was asleep inside two minutes.
"You travelled to the United Kingdom, Sudan, and New York." The voice came from across the room, dark and unhurried and completely without warmth. "I couldn't find any departure record at Gotham Airport."
Jude lay still for a moment with his eyes open.
That voice. He'd gone weeks without hearing it and somehow the first word had been enough — the specific register of it, the complete absence of anything so human as a greeting.
He felt, in order: a small involuntary flicker of something embarrassingly close to nostalgia, and then, arriving immediately behind it, the familiar low-grade irritation that had characterised most of his interactions with this particular person.
Some things you don't appreciate. Some things you appreciate fine and they still manage to be aggravating.
"Do you know what time it is?" Jude said to the ceiling.
Batman said nothing, in the way that Batman said nothing — pointedly, waiting.
"It's the middle of the night." Jude sat up. "I just got off an international flight. I've been having a very unusual few weeks. And you're in my cabin, which — for the record — has a door. A functional door with a handle. I've mentioned this. Commissioner Gordon told me you were on reduced hours. Alfred told me you'd been working late." He looked at the figure by the window. "You don't have time for regular activities but you have time to investigate me?"
"Something happened in London and New York," Batman said. "People died. Mysteriously."
"Yes. I know. I was there."
A pause that was not quite a pause — more like a recalibration.
"John Constantine. Papa Midnight. Gary Lester." Each name landed with the precision of someone who had done their research. "A Dinka sub-tribe in South Sudan. You were with all of them."
Jude looked around his cabin for something throwable. He rejected several options as insufficient.
"Since the Holiday Killer case," Batman said, "I've maintained intelligence infrastructure in the UK to avoid blind spots. It didn't require significant resources."
Jude pressed his hand to his face.
"Those are not people with good reputations," Batman continued. "The tribe has a history of practices outside conventional frameworks. I wanted to make sure you weren't—"
"I was saving the world!" The words came out louder than intended. He lowered his voice. "Or — a significant portion of New York. Which is adjacent. Constantine's social circle is what it is, I can't control who he knows, I was a paying client—"
He stopped.
The silence that followed had a particular quality to it. Evaluating. Confirming something.
"So," Batman said. "You do have capabilities outside conventional parameters. Enough to address threats of that nature."
Jude looked at him.
The pieces settled into place with the specific unpleasant clarity of someone realising they've been asked a question that was never really a question.
"I've become a backup plan," Jude said. "Haven't I."
Batman said nothing.
Which was, Jude had learned, his version of yes.
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