Generally speaking, Jude believed that people weren't born evil.
There were exceptions, obviously. Psychopaths. Certain politicians. That one kid in every school who pulled wings off flies and seemed to enjoy it. But Victor Fries hadn't been one of those. By any account Jude had ever encountered, the man had started out as something close to the opposite.
Brilliant researcher. Cryogenics expert with credentials that made other scientists reconsider their life choices. And devoted to his wife in the specific, total way that made people around them slightly uncomfortable, because it was real. Not performative. Just two people who'd found the one person they couldn't do without.
Then she got sick.
Terminal. Incurable. The kind of diagnosis that came with a countdown measured in months.
And Victor Fries, being both a genius and a man who had never accepted limits when he wanted something badly enough, decided that the diagnosis was wrong. Not medically wrong—the disease was real, the prognosis was real. But wrong in the deeper sense that he refused it. He'd built his entire career on making the impossible into the merely difficult. He would do it again.
He built a cryogenic chamber. Experimental, high-spec, the product of years of research compressed into a frantic race against time. It worked. His wife went into stasis, preserved at the cellular level, the countdown stopped while he kept working.
It should have ended there. Brilliant man loves his wife enough to freeze time itself. You could write a decent film about it.
But this was Gotham.
The company funding his research looked at the numbers and pulled the plug. Profits over people, the oldest story in the world. They tried to shut the experiment down. Victor fought back. Things turned violent, because of course they did, because this was Gotham and everything here that could go wrong catastrophically did.
The equipment ruptured. Gas. Supercooled air. An explosion of liquid nitrogen cold enough to shatter metal.
Victor Fries should have died in that lab.
Instead, he'd lived. Changed. His body temperature had dropped to sub-zero and locked there. Room temperature, the temperature of any normal space any normal person inhabits was now lethal to him. He needed to stay frozen just to function.
So he built himself a suit. Cryogenic armor. Weapons powered by the same cold that kept him alive. And then he'd gone after everyone who'd been involved in destroying his life, and then after everyone who got between him and his wife's cure, and now Gotham had another supervillain and the scientific community had lost someone who might actually have done some good.
He still kept his wife frozen. Still searched for a cure. Funded his research through bank robbery and worse. And despite everything, he was generally considered one of Gotham's less catastrophic problems.
Because at least you understood why.
Jude turned the relevant information over in his head and looked at Drake.
"This specialist who recommended Fries to you," he said carefully. "You two have a history, or something?"
Drake looked up from where he sat hunched on the rusted chair. "What? No. Why?"
The man actually ran through his mental files, going back over every interaction with the specialist, trying to identify an offense.
"Just checking. And you know what happened to Victor Fries? After the recommendation?"
"I heard there was some kind of accident. A testing incident." Drake shrugged. "He and his wife both went off the grid after that."
Off the grid. Right. Into a refrigeration suit and a Gotham most-wanted list.
At least Drake hadn't found him yet. If he'd actually made contact with Mr. Freeze, this conversation would be going very differently.
"So what's the plan now?" Jude asked.
Drake's laugh came out hollow. "Plan." He said the word like it belonged to another language. "I don't have a plan. I managed to get us settled here, get Camilla into some kind of stable situation, and now I'm just—stuck. No options. No road forward."
He gripped his own hair with both hands, that same unconscious pull.
"I just needed enough for next month's medical bills," he said, voice going tight. "That's all. Just enough to keep going another few weeks."
His breath caught.
"And then I ran into you." The words came out with sudden, ragged force. "I actually believed you could help. Brought you back here thinking—I don't know what I was thinking. I'm an idiot. A complete idiot who can't even manage a robbery right, let alone—"
The tears came then. Not quiet ones. The kind that had been accumulating under pressure for a long time and had found their way out at the worst possible moment—wrenching, ugly, the specific sound of a person who'd been holding it together past the point where holding it together was possible.
"I'm useless," Drake got out between breaths. "I can't save her. I can't do anything. I'm watching her and I can't—"
Jude didn't say anything. Didn't offer reassurance, didn't tell him it would be okay. The man had been carrying this for months. Some of what was coming out now was just weight that had nowhere else to go. Interrupting it would be worse than letting it run.
He pulled over another rusted chair, wiped the rain off with his sleeve, and sat down. The cold of the metal came through his jacket immediately and settled into his bones. He looked out at Gotham's skyline—wealth stacked in towers, all those lit windows up high, and down here in the dark the people who couldn't afford to be any higher than the fourth floor.
Bad luck finds the people who can least afford it. That's not profound. It's just how things work, and it's rotten, and there's no larger meaning in it.
He sat with Drake while the rain fell and the city made its usual noises.
A key in a lock. The apartment door swung inward on reluctant hinges.
Slow footsteps. The careful pace of someone conserving what they had.
"Camilla." Drake's voice changed when he called her name—something in it that hadn't been there before. Something that had survived everything else intact. "I'm back."
Jude followed him inside.
A woman came out of the bedroom. Thin in the way that went past thin into something medical—bony at the shoulders, no hair left, not even eyebrows, skin with that pale translucency that meant the body had been consuming itself for a long time. She moved with one hand on the wall, not for dramatic effect but because standing upright was genuinely expensive in terms of effort.
When she saw Jude, surprise crossed her face. Drake introduced them quickly, gave her some version of the new friend story. She smiled.
It was a genuine smile. Warm and unhurried, the kind that had nothing to perform and nothing to prove. Even through everything the illness had done to her, Jude could see the shape of who she was underneath it—the kind of person who made rooms feel easier to be in.
He did the quiet arithmetic of what he was looking at.
Three months. Maybe less.
He wasn't a doctor and he didn't need to be. The conclusion was legible.
The apartment itself surprised him. Clean. Not immaculately clean—the furniture was old, secondhand, clearly what previous tenants had left behind—but kept. Maintained. Drake had obviously been putting work into it even as everything else in his life was falling apart. Some people, when things got bad enough, stopped being able to hold the small things together. Drake was apparently not one of those people.
Camilla moved slowly back toward her room. Then Jude noticed her hand reach behind her back.
She produced a pistol from somewhere he hadn't seen, and carefully placed it in the drawer of her bedside table.
He kept his expression neutral.
If Drake hadn't been the one through that door—if it had been anyone else—she'd have had the barrel up before they'd finished stepping inside. No hesitation. No warning.
Honestly, it was the most reassuring thing he'd seen since arriving in this city.
This was Gotham. This was a slum building with a probable corpse decomposing somewhere down the hall. Not being armed would be the aberrant choice.
And then he watched Drake walk into the bedroom.
Watched him pull out the gun from the robbery. The one he'd shoved in Jude's face less than two hours ago. Watched him take a magazine from his pocket.
Put them both in the same drawer.
Separately.
Jude's eyes stayed on those two objects for a moment.
The gun was real. Had always been real. But Drake had loaded it after the fact, not before—because when he'd been standing in that street demanding everything Jude owned, the weapon had been completely unloaded.
He'd pointed an empty pistol at Jude's head.
The safe time had never been in any doubt at all.
Jude sat down on the couch and looked at the middle distance.
He should probably feel relieved. In practical terms, the threat had been zero the whole time. He hadn't needed the safe zone for that particular encounter.
What he mostly felt was a specific, low-grade annoyance. If he'd known the gun was empty, he could have—actually, no. He couldn't have done anything smarter than what he'd done. He'd had no way of knowing, and an empty gun wielded by a desperate man could still crack a skull open. The outcome wouldn't have changed.
Still.
He pulled up the system and looked at the save point sitting there, purchased and unset. He'd been so focused on the night's events that he hadn't gotten around to using it.
If he'd been shot—even by a gun that had somehow become loaded—his "Starting from Scratch" run would have ended here, on night one, in an apartment building that smelled like something no one had reported yet.
He activated the save point.
SAVE POINT CREATED
Location: Drake & Camilla's Apartment Save Reads Available: 20/20 Time Limit: None Status: Active
If you reach a near-death state, you will be prompted to load this save or decline. Maximum 5 active save points simultaneously. Save points can be cancelled, moved, or recycled (costs vary).
Active Save Points: 1/5Current Location: Saved.
Remember: Death is temporary. Poverty is the real enemy.