Jude already knew what the question was really asking.
Not Gotham City in another world. Not the Wayne family in another world. Those were the words, but the question underneath them had only two names in it. Thomas Wayne. Martha Wayne. The strict father and the gentle mother—both of them dead in an alley before their son had grown into himself, the nightmare that never fully receded no matter how many years and how much armor got built around it.
Bruce wanted to know if there was a world where they'd survived. Where the three of them had grown old together. Where the Wayne family had found something other than grief.
Jude gave him the honest answer.
"The other world I've been to doesn't have Gotham at all—different geography, different history. And across both universes I've visited, Bruce Wayne's trajectory is essentially identical." He paused. "In ninety-nine percent of parallel universes, you become Batman. That appears to be fixed."
The silence that followed was long and heavy.
"Ninety-nine percent."
"The remaining one percent is worse. You don't want to know."
"What if I insist?"
"Then I'll tell you."
The silence continued. Batman's voice didn't come again.
After a while, Jude accepted that it wasn't going to. He exhaled slowly and went to wash his face. There was always this, he'd found—no matter what he managed to fix, the world was reliably full of things he couldn't, and the people he cared about most always had something he couldn't reach.
He dried his face, found the biscuits he'd brought back, and walked to the children's dormitory.
"Jude! You're back!"
Solomon Grundy—born on a Monday, as the rhyme went, though his Monday had been considerably more complicated than most—was the first one to reach the door. He was enormous and clean, which was itself a minor ongoing miracle. The children had apparently been bathing him regularly and had, at some point, decided to make him clothes. The result was a patchwork assembly of whatever fabric had been available, colorful in the way that only complete disregard for coordination can achieve. He was wearing it with obvious care, moving through the room with the particular delicacy of a very large person who has recently been given something they don't want to break.
Jude patted his arm and looked past him.
"Jason." He surveyed the room—children awake, television present. "Why is nobody in bed? I told you ten o'clock."
Jason's face performed an extremely rapid transition from delight to guilt. "We were—we stayed up studying. Catching up on lessons. We've been—"
Jude looked at Grundy.
Grundy, who had approximately zero capacity for strategic dishonesty, glanced instinctively at the television. Then he nodded with great enthusiasm, inadvertently confirming whatever part of Jason's account was a lie.
"You weren't watching cartoons."
"No, absolutely not, we were—"
Jude walked to the television set and rested one hand lightly on the back of the casing.
Warm.
He looked at Jason. Jason looked at the ceiling.
Every parent in the country discovers this trick eventually, Jude thought. It's not learned, it's evolved.
He let it go. He sent them all to bed, ate two biscuits, and fell asleep with the , heavy ease of a man who has been through a spacetime wormhole and two universes in the past forty-eight hours and has finally run out of adrenaline.
He slept until the children woke him.
"Jude." Jason shook his shoulder. "Jude. Mr. Bruce is here."
"Why again," Jude muttered to the ceiling.
He got up, ran a hand through his hair, and opened the front door.
Two people stood in the doorway: Bruce, and a woman Jude recognized despite having only seen her from a distance through the membrane of a collapsing timeline. Nora Allen, in her mid-thirties, looking at both of them with the careful, measuring wariness of someone who has decided not to assume anything about anyone until she understands exactly what's happening to her.
Which was, under the circumstances, entirely reasonable.
"Ms. Allen," Bruce said, doing the introductions with the particular formality he defaulted to when he was trying to be reassuring. "This is Jude. Jude, this is Nora Allen—she arrived in Gotham yesterday evening. I had arranged for her to be looked after, but this morning she slipped away from her protectors, borrowed a phone from a clothing shop on the street, and called home."
Jude's eyes went wide. "It connected?"
He stared at Bruce. Bruce's grim expression confirmed it. The same phone number, the same signal routing, a completely separate parallel universe—and it had connected, because apparently the multiverse had not thought to update its contact lists.
He turned to look at Nora more carefully.
She was watching them both. Evaluating. This was a woman who had woken up in a strange city after being stabbed in her own living room, with no explanation she could make sense of, surrounded by unfamiliar people who seemed to know things about her they had no business knowing. She had been told she was safe. She had been told not to worry. She had done what any person with functional survival instincts would do: she'd found the first available phone and called the one number she trusted.
The fact that someone had answered—and that the voice hadn't been her husband's—was its own massive problem.
"Here's the difficulty," Jude said, speaking more to himself than to either of them. "Barry is an adult in this universe. He has a job. He works for the CCPD. But from Nora's perspective, Barry is still a child, and the last thing she remembers is watching a speedster drag him out of the room." He looked at her sympathetically. "She thinks she was kidnapped. And calling home and hearing a strange man's voice on her family's line didn't help."
"I didn't say that," Nora said, with quiet, defensive precision. "The man on the phone was not Barry. My son is eight years old. I've never heard that man's voice before." She paused. "Henry was on the call as well. He seemed to be... covering for whoever it was. Telling me it was Barry."
"So Henry played along." Jude rubbed his forehead. "That's either very good or very complicated."
"In any case," Bruce said, returning to the practical, "you've just come back from Central City. You know the people there, you know the situation. It would make sense for you to accompany Ms. Allen—both to explain what she needs to understand, and to make sure she arrives safely."
"What does that have to do with—" Jude started, then sighed. "I'm busy today."
Of course you are.
"How long ago did the call happen?" Jude asked.
"About half an hour."
Jude looked at the door. Then at the window. Then at the general direction of Central City, approximately eight hundred kilometers away.
"Then Barry's already here."
Bruce's expression shifted—fractionally, but noticeably. "That seems—"
"He has the Speed Force. His mother just called. Half an hour is a generous estimate." Jude paused. "Although there's a possibility—a small one—that he was rational enough to check the train schedule first and realized there's a night service. That's probably what Henry's hoping for." He didn't sound convinced by his own optimism. "Either way, this situation is mine to manage."
"The man on the phone," Nora said again, still watching both of them with that same controlled caution. "He knew things. Personal things. But it wasn't Barry. My son doesn't have that voice. Henry was lying to me—I could tell." Her voice was steady and factual. "I don't know what's happening, and I don't know why everyone keeps telling me not to worry."
"I understand that," Jude said gently. "And I'll explain everything. The honest explanation, not the managed one." He looked at Bruce. "As soon as we—"
Bruce's phone rang.
He picked it up. Listened.
"Hello, Mr. Wayne." The voice on the other end was barely composed—young and urgent and running on an adrenaline spike that had bypassed all the usual filters. "This is Barry. Barry Allen." A frantic breath. "I'm in Gotham City. Where is my mother?"
Jude looked at Nora Allen.
Nora Allen looked at the phone in Bruce's hand with an expression that had considerably more questions in it than answers.
Not rational, Jude confirmed internally. Not even slightly.
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