Snart stood at the entrance of the Central City Police Department with the energy of a man waiting for a bus. The building behind him might as well have been a post office.
"You look like you're worried about something," Jude observed.
"I'm worried about you," Snart said. "You're a wanted man. Standing in front of a police station."
"When have you seen me take a risk I haven't already prepared for?" Jude raised an eyebrow. "If someone in there makes me, I promise you — I won't be the one with problems."
"So... How many packs?" Jude asked
"One." Snart tilted his head. "I saw the video online. Came to check if you had a new hole in your forehead. And a military general is 'a little trouble' to you?"
"Isn't that what everyone's thinking?" Jude almost smiled.
"I'm a law-abiding citizen running a food stall." Jude handed over a pack of spicy strips. "If that's not ordinary, I don't know what is."
"Keep telling yourself that." Snart pocketed the pack. "If you ever want to make another arrangement, the offer stands. What takes a good citizen considerable effort, I can generally handle with one pull of a trigger."
"Not while the no-casualties agreement is in effect."
Snart paused. Something in his expression shifted — a minor recalibration. Cisco had given him the nickname Captain Cold a while back, and somehow it had propagated from the lab into the wider Central City underworld, picked up by criminals of all sizes as though it had been filed officially. He hadn't objected. But a public name came with a public standard, and takes money then doesn't deliver was considerably below the standard he'd spent years building.
Jude knew it.
"I hope that general gives you a real headache," Snart said, without particular heat, and left.
Jude watched him go — unnoticed, untroubled, disappearing into the afternoon foot traffic with the ease of someone who'd thought through every exit before he arrived. He let out a quiet breath.
At least the chaos has a ceiling for today.
"JUDE!"
The shout hit him from behind like a physical object. Several heads inside the station turned toward the entrance.
Why is Nagisa here.
He'd know that voice anywhere. The only people in Central City who could produce that particular volume at that particular pitch while switching mid-sentence between Japanese and perfectly fluent English were the Nagisa crowd, and the only reason they'd be at the police station in person was if the group chat had done something deeply unwise.
"Stop yelling," he said, turning. "You're in front of a police department."
Yomogi, startled by the noise, attempted to comfort him by pressing one round paw against the side of his head. The touch was extremely soft. It would have been nicer if the paw didn't have chili oil on it from an hour of uninterrupted snacking.
"Boss, can I pet the cat—"
"Go wash your hands first."
"My boss is being cruel to me, meow." Yomogi jumped off with an air of injured dignity, retreated to the cart, and immediately pulled another spicy strip out of the tray. The disappointment was possibly genuine. The appetite was definitely genuine.
Jude wiped his temple with a tissue and looked at the cluster of Nagisa members who had descended on the police station steps — five of them, faces cycling through relief, residual panic, and the general energy of people who had spent several hours catastrophizing.
"The spicy strips are in the cart. Pack them up."
"Forget the spicy strips, are you alive?!" One of them grabbed his arm to check. "We saw the video — that old bastard had a gun to your head — we've been messaging you all morning—"
"My cousin knows a route through the US-Mexico border," another offered helpfully. "It's not too late to run. Frustrating, but safe."
A third was in the middle of an argument with a fourth: "I told you the headline was clickbait, but you were messaging the group saying Jude was about to die, and you kept going for three hours—"
"I'm alive," Jude said. "Still alive. Right here."
"It's so good that you're alive."
"It really is."
He gave up trying to respond to any of this individually and pulled out his phone. The group chat had approximately three thousand unread messages. He scrolled through enough of them to understand the shape of the situation: it had started as welfare checks, escalated through increasingly dramatic theories, passed through a phase involving hiring someone, and had apparently arrived at a discussion of organized protest action.
"You people," he said to the phone, to no one.
He typed: I'm fine. Here's proof. Took a selfie with three of the Nagisa members, made sure the Central City Police Department sign was clearly visible in the background, and posted it.
The group chat detonated.
"JUDE IS ALIVE"
"Holy—"
"I TOLD YOU"
"Jude is alive and my breakfast is saved"
"Jude is alive. Justice is restored to this world"
He put the phone face-down on the cart.
"Listen," he said to the group in front of him, who were in the process of helping themselves to the spicy strips. "Pass this to everyone in the group. This situation is different from the gang stuff. A general is not a street crew. He has institutional reach and he holds a grudge. Everyone needs to calm down, stay out of it, and not do anything creative."
"What are you going to do?"
"The CCPD is covering me for now. That buys time."
"For how long?"
"Depends on Eiling's next move. But I'll be fine — whatever happens, I'll be fine. What won't help me is a hundred people doing something impulsive and drawing more attention." He looked at them each in turn. "Don't disrupt my rhythm. Clear?"
"We got it."
"If you end up inside for a long time," one of them added, as an afterthought, "we know people. We can make sure the food situation in there is decent."
The first part of that sentence had been genuinely touching.
After sending them off with the spicy strips, Jude went back into the group chat and typed out a more measured version of the same message, aiming it at the segment of the Nagisa network that was apparently debating action.
He closed the app and leaned against the cart.
To actually bring Eiling down — Eiling has to do it himself.
That was the shape of it. Men like that didn't fall because someone pushed them. They fell because they kept moving until they ran out of ground. All Jude had to do was make sure he wasn't standing too close when it happened.