By the second paragraph, Jude already knew who had written it.
Drake.
He smiled before he'd finished the thought — the involuntary kind, the kind that meant something. He'd thought about Drake occasionally during the last few weeks, in the gaps between supernatural crises, wondering how he and Camilla were settling back into Metropolis life. The lack of contact hadn't worried him exactly, but it had sat somewhere in the background as a loose thread.
He kept reading.
"Metropolis worse than Gotham right now."
His eyes stopped on the line.
"Oh no."
The mental catalogue arrived immediately and uninvited: Injustice Superman, eyes cold and certain, doing things that couldn't be undone. The deranged grief-broken version, the one whose loss of everything had curdled into something that looked like righteousness from the inside. Hank Henshaw, pale and wrong in the shape of someone familiar. Bizarro, moving through cities like weather. All the versions of Superman that had gone wrong — and their commonality was always the same: the power remained, the restraint didn't, and what was left was something that couldn't be negotiated with and might not be survivable.
"Please," Jude said to no one in particular. "Not now. I literally just got home."
He pressed both hands flat on the kitchen table and breathed for a few seconds. Then he kept reading.
"Back in Gotham, we'd started hearing news reports about an alien who appeared in Metropolis. He sounded like a hero — Camilla and I were pleased. Having a powerful superhero protecting the city seemed like a good sign for coming back."
"We were wrong. After Superman appeared, Metropolis got strange. There are inexplicable superhumans flying around with him constantly, fighting in the streets and demolishing buildings, seemingly as a matter of course."
"There's also this bald billionaire — Lex Luthor — who keeps going on about some Superman threat theory. He looks and sounds exactly like the Gotham rich lunatics I've met, so I didn't take him seriously."
"Until three days ago. Superman went completely mad and demolished almost every skyscraper in the central district. I don't know how to describe it other than to say: imagine someone firing lasers from their eyes. Entire floors of buildings slid off the top like butter under a hot knife. When they hit the ground, we thought it was an earthquake."
"We couldn't stay. We moved out. We don't know if you're still in Gotham or still in that little rental apartment, so we're sending this to the landlord and hoping it reaches you."
"If you're thinking of visiting — don't come to Metropolis. Don't come to Metropolis. Don't come to Metropolis. We're going to Central City."
"Missing you — Drake Ryan, and Camilla."
Jude sat at the kitchen table for a while with the letter in his hand, reading it over twice more to make sure he'd understood it correctly.
"Superman has actually gone mad," he said, to the empty kitchen. "Which timeline is this? Which version? Which one?"
He thought about it for another thirty seconds.
"It's been three days and Metropolis still exists. Why hasn't Batman—" He stopped. Restarted. "Where's Luthor? Luthor is supposed to be the contingency for exactly this scenario. If Superman turns bad, you turn good, that's the deal, that's how the system works, Luthor please—"
He stopped again.
Because something had clicked.
This was a letter from Drake. Forwarded by someone else — which meant it had gone through at least one intermediary between Metropolis and Jude's mailbox in Gotham. Which meant Batman had almost certainly read it first. Batman received everything that moved through certain channels in this city, and he'd had this information for at least as long as Jude had.
And Batman had not come through the window last night with an expression of crisis.
Batman had come through the window to discuss intelligence gathering and ask whether Jude had supernatural capabilities that might be useful in future. That was not the behaviour of a man watching Superman destroy a major American city in real time.
So either it's already resolved, Jude thought, or it's something that doesn't, from Batman's perspective, require immediate action.
Both of those possibilities were vastly more reassuring than the alternative.
He turned on the laptop and searched for news from Metropolis. Three days of results populated the screen. Two stories near the top:
METROPOLIS UNDERGOES SHOCKING CHANGES — SUPERMAN'S TRUE COLORS?
A CITY IN TURMOIL: THE MYSTERIOUS STORM
The first was from three days ago. The second from yesterday. Drake's letter was dated yesterday.
Two separate incidents in three days, Jude noted. Metropolis does move fast.
He clicked the first story. It had video attached — archival news footage, shaky and obviously live, the kind of thing that gets captured and uploaded and preserved because no one can quite believe what they caught.
The reporter was blonde, professional, mid-sentence when the clip began:
"— the residents of Metropolis are the friendliest people in the world. They possess the unique composure of a city that has seen everything—"
Off camera, someone made a sharp, involuntary sound.
The camera swung. The reporter's face crossed the frame — mouth open, colour gone — and then the lens found the sky.
"Look—" someone shouted. "In the sky—"
"Is that a bird?"
"Is that a plane?"
The reporter's voice came back, barely above a whisper. "That's — Superman."
The footage deteriorated after that — shaking, ground-level, impossible to follow. Somewhere in the blur of movement and sound, a red and blue figure crossed the frame at speed, and in its wake, the silhouette of a building changed shape mid-frame and then didn't stop changing.
In an apartment somewhere in Metropolis, a woman named Camilla had been watching this on television.
"Drake!" — her voice, sharp with fear, carrying into the hallway. "Come quick — Superman's gone mad!"
Her husband appeared in the doorway, took one look at the screen, and said: "Has he finally lost it?" with the tone of someone who had been half-expecting this. "He was already taking buildings apart under normal circumstances. If he stops holding back—"
He didn't finish the sentence. He didn't need to.
On the television, the screams of Metropolis residents formed a specific kind of background noise — not panic exactly, but the sound of an entire city being forced to rapidly revise its assumptions about what a normal day looked like.
"He smashed through every building—"
"He's gone mad, Superman's gone mad—"
"What is he doing—"
Jude watched the footage until it cut out, sat back, and looked at the ceiling.
"Okay," he said. "So that happened."
He minimised the window, clicked the second story, and started reading.
Two incidents in three days, he thought again. And Batman isn't worried.
He made tea and considered what that probably meant for his immediate future.