Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

   “Ouch.”

   “What--- What is it?”

   A tight smirk stretched across Slade’s face, tugging almost painfully at his cold cheeks. Prague was never very friendly in February. Tempers especially tended to flare at night, as they were doing now. A woman standing outside of the closed coffee shop across the street had just insulted her supposed mate’s manliness before stalking away. The milksop didn’t even call after her. “Just a splinter, Drake. Don’t tell me you were worried.”

   “Psh, for you? No.” Faint tapping filled the background. “I just can’t access every camera in the city being this remote, so you’re my eyes. Well. EYE.”

   Slade rolled it, sipping carefully at the protein shake he’d bought from the gas station a few blocks back. Bitter flavors insulted his heightened senses, reminding him faintly that he had only bought the crap for show. Three minutes until the switch of the night shift. “I don’t know if you’ve been on a stakeout before, but it usually pays to focus.”

   “I stole from Catwoman once, does that count? I’m multitasking.”

   “Unnecessary.”

   “Ugh, you’re just like B. Why did I agree to this?”

   “As I understand it, you volunteered.” Slade could feel his eyelid twitch. “Why I agreed is the real mystery.”

   “Uh, ‘cuz your pack is busy hunting Mask?” The kid’s voice lowered into what was probably supposed to sound like a dangerous register. “Besides, this got you out of our city. I like to keep a close eye on men like you.”

   Slade wanted to pinch his nose. He heroically refrained. He was attempting to blend in here, especially as his window for action grew so close. He could not afford to be distracted by the reminder that this kid had every reason to hate him--- to lead him astray--- to sabotage his attempts. He especially had no time for the bristling anger creeping up his spine at the thought of his pups hunting that cowardly bastard without him.

   It was fine. They had each other to rely on. They had Batman. They had the Birds of Prey--- the Justice League. They would be more reliably protected now that the older vigilantes had fully realized just how useless the name of Deathstroke was as a stopgap measure to his packmates being kidnapped---

   His nostrils flared as he measured his breaths. Tasting the reality of a nervous system that wasn’t feral at all hours of the day had made those instincts harder to control as of late. He did not speak again until he had reined his emotions in, locking them tightly under ironclad discipline. He didn’t need to wear scent blockers. No one could smell him like this. The hoodie hid his hair, the sunglasses his eyes. Unless someone was aware enough to clock the odd use of sunglasses during the nighttime--- At which point Slade would have much bigger problems to deal with than their observation skills, because no one harmless would think twice about that--- he was truly invisible.

   The typing filtered back in as the angry ringing lessened. “Tell me what you see.”

   Slade’s attention flicked briefly to the front of the bank down the road. “Standard Thursday night shuffle. Some traveling prostitutes. Graveyard shifts ending; tired pedestrians on their way home. A drunk couple probably about to be mugged.”

   “A drunk couple?”

   “I think they just broke up, actually.” Slade kept his eye on the bank, waiting for those doors to open. Any second now…

   The typing stopped. “Most bars in that city close at one on weekdays. That was three hours ago.”

   Chilly apprehension raced down Slade’s spine as he broke his staring contest with the front steps of the bank, scanning. The couple he had observed only minutes before had split up--- and disappeared. “One?”

   “Oh-one-hundred, Wilson, yes; what did you miss?”

   “Nothing.” Slade straightened from his casual lean against the wall, forcing himself to keep twitchy instincts at bay as he meandered slowly down the street. A couple of men were trudging down the bank’s steps. “Target in sight.”

   “Uh, okay, yeah; Berens just clocked out.”

   “You can access the security cameras of the bank but not of the traffic lights?”

   “You need to be on site for some of this shit. I wouldn’t expect an amateur like YOU to understand---”

   “I’m going to drop you down a gutter.”

   “Noted; shutting up. I’ll try to access---”

   Slade turned the com off, effectively muting both sides. He wouldn’t be able to disable the tracking in Bat tech without the proper tools--- Pity--- but that had been one of the conditions wrestled into place before his pack omega had allowed him to travel after a lead around the world alone. Never, at any time, was he to disable his trackers. As long as they stayed functional--- and he wasn’t actively dying--- Hood would remain in Gotham.

   There were a lot of logical reasons for the two of them not to be seen together in enemy territory (Everywhere Deathstroke went was enemy territory), such as the fact that the criminal underworld at large didn’t yet know of their alliance. The League of Assassins might have… Cheshire certainly did… but they were their own ghost story, enemies of everyone else’s enemies, and judging by the bitch’s body language the last time they had gone toe to toe, she worked alone.

   Really, though, the logic was just an excuse. Hood was dangerous, but not on Deathstroke’s level; not with a mercenary’s reach. Slade didn’t want his pup to see how deep that rabbit hole could go.

   “Neblikni,” a whisper hissed from the shadows.

   Slade flinched toward the noise before his brain had even begun to translate. Don’t blink, a familiar voice repeated, echoing with months, years, decades of repetition, a voice that wasn’t here right now---

   The shadow melted between buildings, retreating. AWAY from Slade’s target.

   Slade breathed slowly, continuing his careful approach about two blocks behind Berens with barely a hitch in his step. He was being lured away, hunted like a damn animal, but he couldn’t let his reactions get the better of him. As soon as he was made, the organization of ex-DI individuals corralling local crime--- Vigilantes with strictly personal vendettas--- would close in. He had handled much bigger fish than secret service agents, but he didn’t need to make a splash just yet.

   He didn’t want to know what Billy would do if… and when… he saw Deathstroke coming.

   Berens reached his car at last, fumbling with his keys. Trying to ignore the heightened warning signal lighting up the backs of his shoulders with a hot itch, that unmistakable tell of being watched, Slade concentrated on cultivating his scent. He projected hormones facilitating calm focus, coiling reflexes, and overwhelming presence beneath his skin--- Everything but the flight-sparking adrenaline of a hunter on the chase--- before releasing that scent ahead of him into the air.

   The man caught a whiff of him before Slade had reached the car. True to proven field data, he froze, instincts caught in the freeze response as Slade’s carefully crafted scent overwhelmed his reaction time. That sensation of realizing you had wandered straight into a lounging predator’s sights.

   Slade grabbed the man’s right arm, squeezing a pressure point at his inner elbow to keep the muscles relaxed. In the same movement, he reached his other hand around the man’s left side in the guise of a hug, fishing only for a second before finding--- and drawing--- the sidearm. He dropped his voice into an edgy rumble. “Smích.”

   Berens burst into startled laughter that, to his credit, almost sounded real. “Co to tu děláte?”

   “Dobré.” Slade patted Berens’ chest with the flat of the pistol before stepping back, still holding onto the man’s right elbow as he hid the weapon under his own jacket. He smiled widely, all teeth, and raised his voice. “Těší mě. Do you speak English?”

   The man mirrored Slade’s showy, friendly body language, putting on a paper-thin act to play along. “Yes.”

   “Good; my tail isn’t as quick on that uptake.” Because now that he was several seconds removed from initial contact, Slade was sure he recognized that voice, and the knowledge only turned the uneasiness of not-knowing into a hardened caution, quick calculations of what had happened during their last mission, what grudges were likely still held, how many operations run, what possible leverage, and above all… temperament.

   He dropped his voice again, keeping it friendly despite the threatening hug he still had around Berens’ back. “Agent Seven Nineteen.”

   The man swallowed, smiling through the faint stubble gathering under his weak jaw. “I do not know of which you speak.”

   “Agent Seven Nineteen, Agent Winter, where is he?” Slade’s fingers dug into the man’s flesh. “You’re the last person who made a deal with him alive.”

   “I know a Winter.” The man’s eyes flashed with the beginnings of defiance. “Agent Two Twelve. You have the wrong man.”

   Slade’s blood ran absolutely cold. The last day they’d spoken face to face, February twelfth. There was no way that was a coincidence. The texture of a rifle barrel slid beneath his fingertips, blood on his hands, under his nails; echoing last words before everything had gone sideways for the monster in Slade’s head, before he had wrestled back control at the last possible second---

   “I suppose it was only a matter of time.”

   The man sneered, jarring Slade back to the present as sense memory threatened to pull him under. Billy changed his ex-intelligence information--- How?  “Agent Seven Nineteen does not exist. Agent Two Twelve is dead.”

   “Yes, he does that.” Slade projected another wave of scent, this one tinged with the feral, furious desperation ready to unsheathe its claws. “Where… is he?”

   The man’s brief confidence evaporated. “I do not know; he would not tell me, only that he was retiring.”

   Slade’s jaw flexed. Vermont should be beautiful this time of year. It was a joke, a dry crack at the possibility of ever retiring. It had also been code, code for the place Billy had actually wanted to retire, a place he said he’d never been, but swore on his (at the time) three graves that he would visit someday--- “What was the last thing he said to you? Think… carefully.”

   The man licked his lips, accent thickening as his fear increased. “He told me Vermont should be beautiful at that time of year.”

   Slade squeezed his eye shut for the briefest of seconds. Billy had changed his code names--- Why? Billy had left a trail for Slade to find him--- Why?

   The lapse in his focus allowed the man to twist free, darting frantically down the nearest alleyway at a full sprint. Impressively, he held onto his briefcase. Slade’s fingers twitched. It would be so easy to shoot him…

   He sighed heavily, turning around, and finished walking down the street before the itch in his shoulders crept into a present sense, a space being occupied to his left where there should have been nothing. He stopped quietly, gazing out over the rooftops down the sloping blocks ahead. The river glittered under city lights in the distance.

   The shadow didn’t move for a while. Neither did Slade.

   “Honestly,” a rough voice finally lifted, Czech with a heavy Russian accent. “I never could figure out what that joke meant. Every mission we ran together… seven? Your man always told you not to blink.”

   Slade removed his sunglasses to reveal the eye patch. “We ran nine, Volkov. There are RULES.”

   “Yes, yes, never approach you off the clock.” The man stepped from the shadows in a long black overcoat, smiling with a cheer that did not at all match his crooked nose, dark seedy eyes, and days-old stubble. “We are old friends however, are we not?”

   Slade’s eye narrowed. Strike one had been using a phrase that was only Billy’s to trip him up a few minutes ago. Strike one point five had probably been the fake drunks following him from two different directions. (How had he been stupid enough to miss that?--- Rule number one about blending in to people who wouldn’t recognize your face was to draw attention to yourself.) Strike two was obviously the infraction. Deathstroke had a very strict, very well-known set of public guidelines.

   Familiarity, which this man did not have beyond knowledge of a friendship that no longer existed, did not render those rules null.

   “Business or pleasure?” Volkov was pressing.

   Slade casually drew his own sidearm, tapping it against his leg with careless body language. He couldn’t look as shattered, as staticky as something deep beneath his sternum felt. He couldn’t reveal that he was on the third most important mission of his life. “Some personal business. What can I help you with, Volkov?”

   The man’s false smile eased into an exaggerated pout. He switched to Russian. “You never call; you never write. I have tried to find you for a very long time. You are a hard man to reach.”

   “A private contract.” Slade stayed in Czech, subtly refusing to let this slobby bastard dictate the terms of the conversation. Volkov was buying time for something. If he didn’t stay focused, Slade was very quickly going to find out what. “Do you have an offer?”

   The man raised both hands defensively. “Some bitch insulted my sister. I want the fear of God in his soul.”

   Slade’s eyebrow twitched. That would have been strike two point five if he wasn’t sure by now that Volkov was distracting him. “I don’t do family drama; you know that.”

   “What, too unimportant for you?”

   “Too damn messy. I can’t afford to rack grudges like that.”

   “Not even for the Secretary of State?”

   Slade’s instincts ticked up a few notches, heartbeat speeding beneath his ribs. He could sense a couple of entities behind him, both at different degrees to his left, and something was moving to his right over the skyline. They were closing in on him; he couldn’t tell who they were yet. “I’ve hidden most of my assets in the states. I don’t benefit from throwing their government into chaos QUITE yet. Why--- what did he do to your sister?”

   Volkov sighed heavily, pretending to observe his (gloved) nails. “He gave her his money. I just want you to know, ey? This isn’t personal.”

   Slade’s shooting hand twitched up a fifth of a second too late. The street to his left exploded into blinding white light, noise, and scent; a flashbang for enhanced individuals. He staggered back. “SHIT---”

   Volkov already had his gun raised, palming a pair of glowing blue cuffs. Slade’s mental assessment of the surprise attack moved from bounty on my head to trained task force and private contract and quite possibly army. The price already required to pull this hit off---

   His blood unfroze as shadows began to descend, reality clicking into place around the appearance of those cuffs. They wanted him ALIVE.

   Slade dropped every ounce of fight, booking it.

   “You cannot run,” the mercenary cackled distantly through what little was left of Slade’s hearing, bouncing with the sharp deflection of bullets tearing up his clothes, peppering his back, his shoulders, his legs--- “Not from them!!!”

   A round skipped under his foot; Slade missed a step, slammed into the corner of a building, and shoved off in a new direction. His ears were still ringing, his nose flared, full of sinus-melting scents; he couldn’t---

   His finger pressed the mute button on the com. “Kid?”

   “--- sneak attack, Wilson good GOD, if you’d LISTEN to me---”

   “I can’t see.” Slade’s heart shot into his throat, fear threatening to rabbit its way into his focused heartbeat. The prospect of revealing a weakness to a venomous ally seemed far more dangerous than the reality of being attacked by people who were clearly well prepared to bring him in. He changed direction again, shedding his torn coat. The Ikon suit flexed with every movement, lighter now that it was charged with kinetic energy from deflected bullets. “Get me to the waterfront.”

   “Uh, okay, hang a left.”

   Slade clipped another corner on his way, almost too late for the turn. More rounds cracked past his head into crumbly brick. He wished faintly that he’d brought his helmet. Then he was hit broadside by a clothing line full of dresses. “Fuck---”

   “Right.”

   Slade skidded into a slide, twisting, and shot right. Cracking his burning eye revealed a dead end. He sped up, tic-tacking from wall to wall on his way skyward. “Kid!!!”

   “Whoops,” the young voice said dryly. “I had the map in 2D. How’d they get the drop on you?”

   “They DIDN’T.” Slade vaulted over the edge of the roof, grunting. “I don’t have a grapple.”

   “Can’t you jump like forty feet?”

   “Less snarky pup, more direction.”

   “Jump… now.”

   Slade surged into the air, buoyed by stored energy from his suit. He couldn’t see anything but passing blurs, but he managed to break his fall with a roll, hitting the ground at a faster sprint. “Keep it up.”

   “Jump… jump… jjjjjjump---”

   More bullets scraped the space around his skull, whizzing past. Slade rolled over the edge of the fifth roof instead of jumping, dropping down out of sight with one hand clenched around the ledge hard enough to crack stone, to yank, to stop his fall. He kicked off the wall, launching himself at a lower roof. How were they keeping up with him?

   “Take a left. The waterfront is directly ahead of you.”

   Hands slapped against the wall; brake right, surge left, open eyes, cutting wind, JUMP---

   Something punched Slade in the ribs. He corrected reflexive body language before he could ruin his trajectory, spinning into a tight somersault, a skidding stop on his stronger leg to break his fall. He’d lost all momentum by this point, but he didn’t hang around to give the sniper--- Fifty yards east, two floors up, right in the open--- another chance. He rolled again, avoiding the next few shots with the force of adrenaline-heightened speed, took a deep breath, and dove from the edge of the last roof on the shore.

   Plunging into cold water shocked every sense that was still working. Slade swam toward the nearest bridge in three powerful strokes, then floated through the rush, consciously calming his heartbeat. He had seven fucking minutes. Every movement counted starting five seconds ago.

   Shots pelted into the water behind him, but it was dark; too dark to see even with a flare. They would send trackers into the current after him unless they had tagged him already.

   Slade reached out, catching the edge of the bridge’s support, and braced his feet against the slippery side. He curled tight, holding on with three limbs as he swept sensitive fingers over his body. No discernable trackers. The red glow of the flare floated past; he pressed his forehead to the slimy stone, swallowed whatever air was still trapped in his mouth, and slowed… slowed… slowwwwwwwwed.

   They would assume he was swimming down the Vlatava river. All he had to do was mute his core temperature… limit his movements… and hold his breath.

   The minutes ticked slowly by. When he noticed his internal timer speeding up, lungs burning far earlier than they should have, Slade consciously kept a steady count of the seconds. Panicking would be highly counterproductive. His awareness narrowed as he slipped into a meditative haze. Four slow minutes. Five. Six. Seven. Seven point five.

   Just shy of eight minutes, his heartbeat started to pound. Slade squeezed his eye shut, holding on a little tighter. His lungs spasmed. At eight point five minutes, his mouth opened against his will. He kicked against the bottom of the river--- hard--- and shot upward, expelling the water in one harsh breath.

   When he broke the surface, flinging hair from his face, he still managed to swallow river sludge as he gasped frantically for air. “Kid.”

   “---on’t--- ear--- each---”

   Slade grabbed onto the support before the freezing water could sweep him away, panting. Focus slipped back as his cells became saturated with oxygen. “Kid?”

   “--- new--- without m--- ost them---”

   Slade dug the frizty commlink from his ear, growling as shivers began to travel through his chest. All traces of the men on the shore--- all hints of gunfire--- were gone. It would only take them seven more minutes, ten at most, to circle back.

   Slade was down his only set of civilian clothes, cut off from his nearest safehouse, and pinned beneath one of Prague’s most public bridges with a few helpful answers and a lot more unhelpful questions.

Chapter Text

   “Who hurt you?”

   Slade knocked his head back against the headboard, cracking an unfriendly grin. The fresh burner in his hand suddenly felt lighter. “No one of consequence.”

   “You were shot.”

   “Barely.” He glanced down at the fresh set of clothes he’d lifted from a tourist spot, inching up the shirt that sported a colorful map of the landmarks in Prague to get a peek at the Ikon suit. It had deflected the straight sniper shot earlier. He knew there would be a nasty bruise. “Nothing thirty minutes of sleep can’t handle. You felt that?”

   The silence was… concerning. Slade had shut his bonds down before leaving. He was supposed to be good at it.

   “I dunno,” came the grudging answer. “Something… didn’t feel right. In my side.”

   Slade pressed his cold fingers against his forehead, breathing out through his nose. He would have to be more careful. Omegas were especially sensitive to packmates’ pain; he remembered that much from a decade of hellish marriage. This could get very complicated very quickly. “I have a lot of enemies out here, kid. I didn’t even bleed; I’m fine. How’s… how are the others?”

   “Fine.” Jason’s voice lightened. “Good. Pup’s on a live action remake kick. Roy’s been tearing apart the CGI.”

   “I can only imagine.”

   “I mean, he’s right. It’s not even a live action movie then. It’s just… animated, high definition. Anyway, he misses you.”

   Slade’s eyebrows flickered. “I didn’t ask---”

   “I know you didn’t.” Jason’s voice grew muffled for a second, like he had the phone pinned to his shoulder. “This ‘no one of consequence’, did you get the son of a bitch?”

   No, Slade didn’t say. I think there’s a high-profile contract out on my capture, he didn’t say. I can’t think of anyone who wants me alive for good reasons he didn’t say, either. “He’s been dealt with.”

   “Damn, thank fuck. I’d hate to have to haul your sorry ass back to Gotham via private jet. That would suck for everyone involved, really.” Jason’s voice ducked away for a moment. “Sorry, Roy, sorry. Look… I gotta finish breakfast. Will you tell me one thing first?”

   Slade narrowed his eye at the dinky hotel window. Shuttered, of course, and he’d already checked the room for bugs. He still couldn’t shake the uncomfortable sensation of backing into a corner. “That all depends.”

   “I just…” The pup’s tone edged with frustration. “Look, sue me for not wanting you to do this alone.”

   “I’m not alone.” Slade’s lip lifted in a sardonic smirk. “I have tech support.”

   “C’mon, Slade, listen. I know this guy’s important to you, I do, but really? Walking right into an ambush? Without your helmet, without backup?”

   Slade’s fingers tightened, stressing the phone’s flimsy casing. “The kid tattled to you.”

   “‘Bribe’ might be a better word for it. You expect me to believe you really got away injury-free after that?”

   “I did.” Slade’s gaze drifted up to a crack in the ceiling. He tried not to let it sting. It shouldn’t have. The odd echoing sensation beneath his lungs that came with a reminder. Someone didn’t believe in him. (He had never needed that reassurance before. It wasn’t like he had earned it.) “I’ve been at this exact job longer than you’ve been alive, so believe it or not, I know what I’m doing.”

   “Slade, I’m not playing the devil’s advocate here. Just… talk to me.” Jason’s voice softened, sparking an ache somewhere behind Slade’s ribs. “You’re part of a team now. You don’t get to do this alone. You shouldn’t HAVE to do this alone.”

   “Agreed,” Slade ground out, forcing patience. How was it that this punk always slipped so easily under his skin? “That is why I am on the other side of the world chasing down a ghost story.”

   “God, is this karma? You’re so stubborn. I’m being punished for something, I know I am.”

   The frustrated mourning in the kid’s tone drained the fight right out of Slade’s shoulders. He sprawled back on the creaky mattress, sighing, and shut his eye. He should not have been this tired. “It’s too personal. I just… I have to do this alone. The last time…”

   Jason didn’t say anything to fill the silence, probably guessing (correctly) that he was about to get some critical information. Slade rubbed his forehead again, debating with his baser instincts. Sharing nothing would be a tactical misstep. Jason needed to stay in Gotham, needed to be convinced through logic backed with emotion--- The only method of communication Slade had ever seen him use--- to keep out of it. What to share was the real question here.

   Some pattering from the other end of the line… The running of sink water, maybe… coaxed Slade’s attention back to the present. He licked his lips before speaking. “The last time we were face to face I tried to kill him.”

   “Ouch. Misunderstanding?”

   “A sort of mind control. The plot is… involved.”

   “I’ve got time.”

   Slade resisted pointing out the existence of the aforementioned breakfast. They both knew it was just an excuse for Jason to leave the second it was convenient to. “My son was---”

   “Joseph?”

   “Not in his right mind at the time. He used his powers to influence my feral baseline. I didn’t know I was feral then; I wasn’t on guard.” Slade pinched the bridge of his crooked nose. The enormity of the experience did not match the simple words he was using to explain, but that was fine. He didn’t need to put his omega in his shoes. He only needed to get his point across. “I could have fought harder.”

   “Without hurting him?”

   Slade’s throat hurt. Don’t SEE me like that, he wanted to snap. “I couldn’t save both of them, so I ended up saving neither.”

   “You didn’t kill your best friend while your body was being hijacked by your estranged son? I mean, damn, what a situation. No way THAT can be skewed as an accomplishment. I know about Jericho’s abilities, read B’s files. I’m impressed you resisted him.”

   “I’m not sensing much sympathy.”

   “I’ve been under supernatural influences before. It’s not the best time. I hurt someone close to my dad to get under his skin, too. I’ve also been betrayed plenty of times, so I actually relate to everyone involved here.” Jason’s voice dipped. Annoyingly, without feedback from their bond, Slade couldn’t immediately tell why. “It sounds like you handled it, though.”

   “No one died, but…” The alpha sucked on his teeth for a moment, thinking carefully. This was uncomfortably close to feelings territory. “I severed any possible connection with both of them. After I was put back in control… I couldn’t look at him. Something he had said to me…” I suppose it was only a matter of time.

   “…Yeah?”

   “It doesn’t matter. He never did trust me, not in any way that counted. I decided not to give him more reasons to pretend.” The phone case creaked ominously. “He was safer without me.”

   “You ghosted him?”

   “I pretended to have amnesia.”

   “Whoof, THAT’LL do it. So he went into hiding. How did you get him to believe you? I mean, you said you shared a bond. It was still there somewhere, you said. That’s how you knew he wasn’t dead.”

   “It was a fragile one. He’d forged a slim connection with me over time. He probably did it to keep me this side of morally accountable.” Slade squeezed his burning eye shut. “I broke it.”

   The space on the other end of the line grew still. “At… at will?”

   “I used the battle with Jericho to mask that it was purposeful on my part, but in the turmoil… yes.” Slade’s voice edged into a hard growl, trying fiercely to clothe itself. “I told you he was safer without me.”

   “And he just… went with that?”

   Slade could still remember the look on Billy’s face. Not during the break or the battle, but after. The exact moment that Slade had brought his acting skills to bear, looked his brother in the eye, and muttered I don’t know you.

   Something had visibly broken then. Something that even the severance of a bond hadn’t been able to shake loose. And Agent Winter had just… walked away.

   They both had.

   “I don’t know if he believed it,” Slade admitted aloud. “but the outcome was the same. We parted ways.”

   “And you don’t… regret that decision. Like at all.”

   “He’s still alive, isn’t he?”

   “I dunno, that’s apparently up in the air now, isn’t it?”

   “Doubtful.” Slade levered himself upright, suddenly done with this conversation. He needed food. A lot of it. He ached for a voice in his ear that was calling him out in ways that were familiar, that danced around the edges of his temper with the grace of experience. (God--- He just wanted to hear Billy’s voice.) “I don’t know what I’m looking for, what I’ll find. I need you to stay out of it.”

   “Okay.”

   The grudging I’ll respect that… for now in the pup’s tone went unsaid, but Slade heard it. He hung up, pocketed the cracked phone, and tried not to slam the door too hard on his way out.

   Istria’s capes were fairly popular tourist spots, but not at this time of year. It was too cold to swim, and swimming was about all you could justify visiting for. The west coast of Kamenjak was steeper, harder to get to.

   It was also an excellent retirement view.

   Slade dropped his backpack, sighing, and sat down on the beach as soon as he managed to pick his way down the steep cliff to sea level. There were several hidden coves lining this side of the peninsula. No houses though.

   He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting; Billy had never visited. That had been part of the joke. He had known exactly where he wanted to set up shop, though. He’d shown Slade on a paper map when Slade was too wrapped up in work to care. A cliff cutting off an ideal stretch of beach from the rest of Istria. Boats visited the tourist bars all the time. It was a perfect location to barter for the delivery of personal supplies. A hermit’s paradise.

   I’ll let you visit, he had joked while Slade practiced disassembling his rifles, if you ask nice.

   No one was here now, though. Just a cold gray sky and cold wet sand and the quiet sound of waves.

   Slade pulled his shirt up, getting a good look at his left side. It still twinged. The bruise was almost gone, but it had been two days since his armor had taken that sniper shot.

   Bruises like this one usually healed within two minutes.

   “Billy,” he whispered absently, tucking his shirt back into the hem of his jeans. “What’s happening to me?”

   No one answered. He probably should have expected that. Some part of him was still a little bit startled at the lack of responding sarcasm in his ear.

   Groaning, Slade rolled to his feet, leaving his backpack in the sand. It wouldn’t take long to search this place. This coast couldn’t have been wider than two miles end to end, and most of it was bare up to the face of the cliff, which was lined with a grove of trees. There were no manmade structures, not even a dock. The coves were empty apart from the various growths.

   It had been idiotic, he told himself, to think he would find anything. He didn’t even know what he was supposed to be looking for. It was a long shot at best; an inside joke that they both should have forgotten years ag---

   Slade paused on his way through the grove of trees, crouching. He hadn’t been on the hunt for buried treasure, but his sharp vision had caught a familiar shape carved into the gently swaying trunk nonetheless. He ran his fingers over it. A tiny hole, half an inch in diameter, perfectly round.

   You may not need water, a distant voice scoffed, but I…

   Slade squeezed his eye shut, reaching his attention out to grab it. There was more. He knew there was more. They had been in a rainforest… on a mission. No… poaching. Hunting. They had crossed someone’s bad side on their way out. They had run. They had camped for three nights. Four? Three, but almost a fourth. He could still remember the jeep’s tire tracks in the mud, but that was too far. He backed up, following a trail of impressions to the hole in the three.

   To the holes.

   “You may not need water,” Billy griped harshly, hammering a tool into a trunk. “but I for one do not intend to die out here. Especially not for something that I didn’t do.”

   It was accusatory. Slade resisted the urge to follow that thread, to try remembering what he’d done that time to screw them over, and focused instead on the holes. It was a system for water-gathering. He couldn’t remember how it worked, but he remembered Billy being pretty damn proud about it. He remembered partaking.

   He opened his eyes again, despair creeping in to mingle with strange hope, and rubbed his thumb over the drilled hole in the present. It was another very long shot. He had never seen his friend use that system since. Besides, there weren’t enough holes here to make it work; this one was deliberate.

   Why, he had to wonder. Why the clues? Billy could have called him, even after Slade had changed his number. He could have found a way.

   So could you, something reminded him.

   He stood up, huffing. He didn’t have time to argue with himself. He had a rainforest to visit.

   Bwindi Uganda was the first place he’d visited over the past few days that didn’t nip at his nose. The morning’s average temperature was around fifty degrees Fahrenheit. It would only get warmer as the day moved on.

   Slade scrubbed at his eye, sighed, and started to hike. Cursed jet lag. Maybe he was getting too old for this. (The unusual thought startled him. He put it firmly out of mind. Nope.)

   It took a while to reach the same area they had camped at. Sense memories were elusive things, but coordinates? Now those he could remember. When he found the holes in the trees, he searched the area about half a mile in every direction. Nothing was amiss, nothing but the human that didn’t belong creeping beneath the green canopy.

   He didn’t see many animals in his search for clues. Maybe they remembered him.

   As afternoon began to wane into evening, he collapsed in the underbrush, sighing, and picked at an energy bar. He wasn’t hungry. Frustration simmered under his skin, impatience at the fact that it had been too easy thus far. He should have been checking all of the obvious places, the safehouses that Agent Winter had burned through the years; the old allies that would most definitely offer information if the alternative was a sword to the throat.

   Slade stuffed his trash into his pocket, wrinkling his nose. It would be dark soon. He could wrestle an aggressive gorilla if he had to--- He’d done it twice before--- but he didn’t want to test that theory. He pulled out his phone, rubbed his thumb over the home button, and considered. Then he called one of the many unlabeled numbers buried in his mental contact file.

   “Yo,” a cheerful voice answered.

   “I need a pickup,” Slade said without inane preamble.

   “…Deathstroke?”

   “No, actually, this is Santa Clause. I’m calling in that favor.”

   “It… It’s been fifteen years---”

   “Do favors expire for you, Mavens?”

   “No… no sir, of course not. Send me the coordinates for pickup. Where do you need to go?”

   Slade opened his mouth to deliver the coordinates--- and hesitated. A soft beep from his brand new burner phone indicated activation of the hardware he implanted in all of his devices as soon as he bought them. His signal was being tracked.

   “Who,” he drawled lowly, injecting a growl as he counted the seconds. “are they?”

   The answering squeak was almost mouselike. “I… I don’t know what you---”

   “The contract for my capture. You are not the first person I’ve encountered lately with a surprise attack up their sleeve. It’s a big bounty, isn’t it? Who are they? Who authored the contract?”

   “I… I don’t know what you mean---”

   Slade cut the call before the trace could be completed, wrinkling his nose again in disgust. He knew how to read between the lines. Someone wanted his life or worse, someone who had gotten their grubby little fingers into his decades-old fringe contacts. How many could he still…? No. He had to assume that every person he had ever met was compromised. This was big. Maybe big enough for the Justice League.

   He considered that for a moment before deciding that none of this was a superhero’s style. Batman, perhaps, but Deathstroke was confidently safe from that quarter. Not that he couldn’t have brought another decent fight, though, and the urge was there--- The impulse to leap into the open, reveal himself to the criminal underworld, and ROAR. To answer the challenge dogging his every footstep. To rout whoever was on the hunt, draw his sword, and turn predator into prey.

   A very small part of him… a part that he refused to acknowledge… shivered in fear. He was vulnerable. Something was wrong with him, something he didn’t know how to fix. He needed to find out what.

   He needed to find Wintergreen. Quickly, before all of this came to a head.

   Sighing in annoyance, he rolled to his feet, hefted his backpack, and crushed his phone under his boot. Pocketing the remains, he began the long trek through the rainforest back toward the rental car. His phantom of a lead had gone cold. It was time for extreme measures.

Chapter Text

   “You’re in Seoul?”

   Slade shook water from his shoulders, annoyed. It was raining. This, of course, would have been no problem if it didn’t wreak havoc on his sense of hearing. He had grown very practiced at honing control; what he wanted to listen to, what he did not. It made no sense, therefore, that he was suddenly unable to differentiate footsteps from the pit-patter of rain. “Talk to me.”

   “Uh, I don’t have access to your files. What kind of offsite website IS this crap? Double password protected? Slade, I hate to break it to you, but there are much more efficient ways to host your own red box of private contract information. Pen an’ paper, maybe. This method’s ancient.”

   Slade almost growled, but refrained. The third Robin would see it as a challenge instead of a correction. Most Robins did. “Six point seven… eleven… eighteen point five.”

   Softly plipping silence fell as the kid typed. Slade tried not to remember, but it was a lost cause, wasn’t it? The whole point of those numbers was to remember; to recall his greatest mistake, the beginning of a long list of failings that he could hardly remember risking by choice. He had never been perfect, but after the army, during his first chance at civilian life…

   Things had just been different. Different enough that as he lifted his son into his arms for the first time, all he could think about, all his wired brain could focus on, was the weight and circumference and length of the miracle in his hands.

    The serum hadn’t changed much.

   He slapped his chest to expel the ache, coughing. Maybe it was time to change that damn password. Visit the grave. Find clarity an’ move the hell on. “Well?”

   “Uhhhhh… okay, I’m in. Damn, there are… a lot of folders here. No WAY you trust me with this.”

   “I don’t.” Slade smirked as he crossed the street, hands in his pockets. Thank God for waterproof windbreakers. He was shit at remembering old addresses this far back, but he did know that he still had a long way to walk. “It’s gremlin-proof. You also need further passwords for each folder.”

   “You remember individual passwords for about four-hundred folders but not the information that you want me to access? Sounds like a skill issue.”

   “Enter command ‘SNK point eighty-nine point Livingston Contract.’”

   “Ooooooookay, this is it, I think. Password?”

   “Sixteen.”

   “That’s IT?”

   “Did it work?”

   “Yeah, and I’m just curious. Why couldn’t you do this yourself? It’s not like your traffic can be tracked from this dinosaur of a system---”

   “I’m busy.” Slade’s nostrils flared. He could smell dead leaves in the gutters and rain in the treetops and the sweat of a businessman rushing last minute into a building for what could only be a late night deal. Something in shipping, maybe. His senses were going haywire. “Focus.”

   “Busy doing what, asking me for information you theoretically don’t share with anyone else in existence? You should have people for that. This is a huge gamble on your part. You know I could find a way in if I really wanted to. You don’t actually TRUST me with this, which means you’re either tricking me or laying the groundwork for brainwashing of some kind.”

   “Kid---”

   “What am I gonna do, after all; complain about prized access to sensitive information from your most vulnerable---”

   Slade’s patience snapped. “KID.”

   The sharp chatter in his com fell silent. Slade breathed out through his nose, expelling all the sensory information he didn’t want, and tried to focus. Timothy Drake did not know about his newfound physical… issues. There was no possible way. He was rambling, rambling out of bitterness, or maybe he was distracting Slade while he tried to hack his way past un-hackable systems in Deathstroke’s contract information bank… either way. He didn’t know, he couldn’t, and the biggest mistake Slade could make moving forward was letting the brat get under his skin. “I don’t do that anymore.”

   “What, share with potential allies or brainwash them into compliance?”

   “I don’t…” Slade jerked into motion again as the swirling heat beneath his skin reached an uncomfortable peak. Why was he arguing with a pup? “Read me the contained address, please.”

   “Uh, hang on… Fifteen sixty Hyewah-ro. There’s no apartment number or secondary street number; how---”

   “I’ve got it; kid; log out.”

   “…This contract earned you two-hundred thousand, huh?”

   Slade’s teeth ached. He unclenched his jaw as he walked faster. “It was a long time ago.”

   “You can’t do this yourself for some reason, but you could have asked Roy. You could have asked Jason. Why didn’t you?”

   “Drake.”

   “Did you want to spare them the misery or blind them into further trust? Because I’m just wondering. This man had an eight-year-old daughter according to your notes.”

   “He had half of South Korea’s arms business under his thumb.”

   “Was it worth it then, two-hundred thousand?”

   Slade pulled the commlink out of his ear, turning it off. He had faced much worse in his own head than a bitter pup’s words could ever manage out loud. He just needed a breather, that was all. He would deal with the fallout of giving the kid such unrestricted access later.

   His only hope, foolish though it might have been at the start, was that the menace would keep the information to himself.

   The apartment was occupied again. Because of course it was… What had he expected to find? This was a fairly popular tourist spot, not to mention the influx of traveling business partners. The apartment complex was an expensive one. It had been over twenty years.

   Slade knelt on the opposite roof, using binoculars from his go-bag to peer down. The warmly lighted space was decorated much more softly now, fur rugs and bright furniture and paintings hung on the walls. Colored pencils lay scattered across a coloring book on the dining room table. A young child cozied up with her mother on the couch, storybooks in hand. They were talking. Talking about bedtime, maybe. Reading lips was harder when it came to East Asian languages, at least… at least for him. Bingley had been great at it.

   Slade sat back against an air conditioning unit, stunned. Where had that thought come from? He hadn’t considered Bingley or the mission he’d died on in years. It was a blip, really; one battle out of hundreds lost. He had lead so many men to their deaths. Most of them at the behest of someone else, someone he couldn’t see, orders from on high that meant nothing in the long run except for precious human lives.

   He had thought… at the time. After, when he had gone home to a family that didn’t have to mourn, he hadn’t thought three times of the families who couldn’t say the same. Twice, yes, in a drunken stupor post-nightmare, but those memories had eased, blending into the background with time, with Addie’s touch.

   Things had been… simpler… back then. Back when everything was about orders. There was always someone higher to blame, always someone more competent who deserved to have the lives of lost men laid at their feet.

   Or so he had told himself. Just in order to eat… to sleep.

   “Bingley,” he mumbled slowly, testing the name on his lips. BINGLEY!!! DON’T DO IT--- FALL BACK!!! THAT’S AN ORDER!!! “Bingley…”

   He wondered if anyone had gone to his funeral. He wondered if the man had had a family. He wondered if someone else had told them of Bingley’s fate, someone who wasn’t his cowardly squadron leader.

   Many, many decades too late.

   Slade shook his head quickly, trying to ground himself, and rolled to his feet. He was slipping. Was this just… sentiment? Or more damage wrought by his pup’s… invasive foray into the depths of his mental fortitude?

   Well, he was flattering himself there. ‘Coping’ was a better term. Compartmentalizing. He had gotten very good at that, at crushing each little piece that broke off into a tiny little box.

   There were years’ worth of tiny little boxes. Together, as a whole, they might have made something human. Now, separated, they were hell. They were open. Their only purpose was to see him undone.

   Slade pulled out his new burner phone, rubbing his thumb over the home button. He could have called the last number he remembered the beta having. Billy would have changed it, of course--- He was a better agent than Slade, smarter; he would have been a fool not to. Besides which Slade was being watched. The moment he poked his head out of the comfort of off-the-grid anonymity, they would find him. Whoever was gunning for him, new, old, and reportedly uninterested, they would find him. Maybe they didn’t all want revenge… Maybe some just wanted a tool.

   Everyone wanted something. They always did.

   He shoved the phone back into his pocket, growling, and climbed down to ground level. This was one of many safehouses. He had decades’ worth of locations to sift through, locations he wasn’t even sure would be relevant. He did not, judging by the itchy panic lapping at his instincts, have time. Something was imploding. He needed Wintergreen.

   His commlink beeped. Against his much better judgment, Slade shoved it into his ear. “What?”

   “I may have something,” the kid said, clipped, but subdued. “It’s not much. Just a rumor.”

   Slade scrubbed a hand down the back of his chilly neck, forcing his frustration to a low simmer. “I’ll take it.”

   It was much easier to blend in with the streets of Berlin than the streets of Seoul, but Slade didn’t take any chances. He went a triple misdirected route as soon as he got off the plane. False identities would only get you so far.

   Once he was walking along the edge of the river, far away from the center of the city, he finally called Drake. “Are you certain?”

   “I mean, he only shows up on one security feed. Isn’t that it?”

   Slade kicked a rock in his way, glancing around as it skittered across the sidewalk. The tall glassy buildings did a good job of hiding the trashy fences and muddy pavement and messy graffiti lining the actual riverside. He didn’t clock any nearby security cameras, but this was a very big city. Anyone not showing up more than once in searches, even just a visitor, was good. Good enough to be of interest. “If you don’t recognize him, what makes you think it’s him?”

   “Do you have any better leads to chase?”

   “…”

   “Okay… look. One of these file names rang a bell. I didn’t wanna put the work in to crack it open, so I just checked MY files. There’s been a gang experimenting with mutant enhancements in that area recently. The name on the contract file that caught my eye… Haus? That’s the name of the gang’s most public enforcer, though I doubt he’s the real leader behind the scenes.”

   Slade tried to find it, pulling from mission after mission in his memory. “Haus… One twenty-five, a small fry. I killed him for extortion. Or was it… blackmailing?”

   “I dunno, I can’t get into the file, remember? He had a young son at the time.”

   Slade curled his hands in his pockets, bracing himself for another righteous tirade. “You think they’re related how, exactly?”

   “The son is grown up now, dumbass. He’s the one running this scheme.”

   Slade let that sink in, trying not to feel any sort of way about it. “How do you know all of this?”

   “I do run a team. This was one of Beast Boy’s cases a few months back. He dropped it when the gang disbanded; a third party got there first, shot Haus in the face.”

   “Do…” Slade mentally jogged to keep up. “Do you know---”

   “Know WHO? Yes, of course I do; this is me you’re talking to. That’s the one time the guy showed up on cameras, when he was doing the shooting. There were no actual eyewitnesses, but there iiiiiis a bar nearby, so your best bet would be to start there. Sending the address.”

   Slade pulled his burner out as a new text pinged. Something was bugging him about this. Something he couldn’t put his finger on. “Why reveal himself by killing so publicly?”

   “You really haven’t gotten out much, have you?”

   “Pup---”

   “The mutant drugs they were trying to create… They were only experimenting on kids. You had a really messed up moral code back in the day, but when he was working with you, that was one of the deals, right? Superhero sidekicks aside… no kids.”

   Slade combed one hand through his hair, turning away from the river toward the city. It wasn’t much of something, but it was something. More of a lead than holes in trees, anyway, and more real-time details to his liking. Ghosts didn’t leave footprints in the mud. Old agents with personal vendettas did. “You did good, kid. Thanks.”

   “Gasp. Was that an actual compliment? He’s buttering me up for the brainwashing, chat.”

   Slade hung up, suitably annoyed enough that his nerves weren’t able to get the best of him. He walked until he reached the address, then scoped the bar from across the street, lost in thought. He didn’t see anyone identifying, but the answer wasn’t magically going to fall into his lap. He would need to give this a few proper stakeouts; gear, a disguise for infiltration, a few well-placed questions… the works. Staying in one place was far less appealing than chasing his own tail in endless circles around the globe--- At least then he would be moving--- but what choice did he have? This would tell---

   Slade’s spine snapped straight immediately, instincts locked in before his eye had properly tracked the movement. A shadowed gait that hitched a half-second behind on the right side. It had already blended back into the late-night crowd, melting into the backdrop of the city, but it had just been there.

   Abandoning all restraint, Slade shot out into the street, vaulted a honking car, and slapped his hands against a gritty brick building to change direction. One… two… three blocks over. The movement caught his eye again, but it was just an impression this time, faint enough to be imagination, and when he turned the corner to face an empty alleyway… the movement was gone.

   Slade stood still, panting, and waited. He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for. A cat poked its head up from a trash can, suspicious, then returned to its foraging with a flick of its tail. Nothing else moved, nothing but the flicker of the orange neon lights from behind him across the street.

   Slade licked his cold lips. It was just his imagination. A fluke, a memory, a hallucination brought on by false hope. He had never been prone to those, but he had never taken days to heal from a simple bruise, either.

   His whisper cracked as it escaped all reason. “Billy?”

   No one answered, but the silence was heavy. Then… that heaviness was gone.

   “The apartment complex across the street,” the kid’s voice said quietly, reminding Slade that he had simply ended a call instead of putting the pup on block or mute. “The one directly ahead of you.”

   Slade leaned against the wall of the alleyway, staring at the dark building on the far side, and tried to pretend that his heart wasn’t thundering behind his ribs. “What about it?”

   “It’s the only building within ten miles of that bar for the last six months that hasn’t reported any petty crime publicly. Either someone’s keeping quiet or cleaning house.”

   Slade breathed out… breathed in… and started climbing. “Thanks, kid; that checks out. I’ll take it from here.”

Chapter Text

   “Wintergreen.”

   “Mmmfg.”

   “Winter.”

   “Fphmgm.”

   “…Billy.”

   Deep brown eyes cracked open in a sliver of moonlight, squinting grumpily. “Nightmare?”

   He hugged himself, shivering. He wasn’t all that sure he’d been asleep. His body was on FIRE, and say what they would, the doctors who had told him the failed experiment was in fact successful--- that he was stable now; that the serum had fully merged with his every cell. His blood was still boiling; his chest was still tight. He still couldn’t fucking BREATHE.

   They were honing his skills in a desert base. Training… recon… drills. All technically off the record.

   He had a feeling a lot of his work would be off the record from now on.

   The beta sat up as the alpha’s words failed him, worn face sliding into darkness. He was supposedly here as the personal aide, but Wilson knew better. They had only allowed Wintergreen to come because Wintergreen was the only officer who was able to get close to a ‘raging’ super soldier unscathed.

   Wilson never raged. He PANICKED. They didn’t need to know that, though.

   “Okay,” the beta finally mumbled, gruff, but his touch was gentle as he gripped the shaking alpha’s shoulder. “Alright. Let’s go on a run.”

   The runs were more freeing than they had any right to be. He was still on military property, still contained by invisible borders that said “Everything inside belongs to us”, but at night, the air was cool and the horizon was open and the sky was so full of stars.

   So he ran. He ran too fast to kick up cracked dirt with his heels. He ran until the dunes were close enough to touch. He ran until he couldn’t breathe.

   He could have kept running. He could have passed those invisible borders, dug into sandy ground, and run until the sun came up. He could have left it all behind him, but this…

   This was all he had ever known.

   He turned right, skirting the border, and ran all the way around it. The miles and miles and miles of army-owned land fell away like they were nothing. After three laps, when his lungs felt like bursting and his legs ached and his mind was finally blissfully clear, he jogged back to the compound. Pale light filtered out some of the darkness, but to half-feral senses enhanced all the way up to Fucking Aggravating, his waiting friend was visible from miles away. He stood there, watching, until Wilson collapsed at his feet. Then he handed over the water bottle.

   The alpha drank very slowly, even though he wanted to chug the entire gallon, pausing for breath. He still shook, but now it was the cold’s fault. Then a steady set of legs was pressing up against his aching spine, holding firm, and he had something to lean back on.

   “The world’s changing,” Wintergreen said distantly. His hand rested on Wilson’s scalp, combing his hair back to feel his chilly forehead. “We’d better keep changing with it.”

   Wilson snorted around his drink, eyes lidded, as he watched the sunrise. The light pierced into his skull. The pain was… grounding. “You say ‘we’ like you ever join me for these things.”

   “I only don’t wanna leave you in my dust, that’s all.”

   “Ahhh, my fragile ego.”

   “A force of nature losing to a lowly foot soldier? What would you do with yourself?”

   “Cease to exist, I expect.”

   “Right. Better that I stay here; watch you from afar.” The hand stilled, fingers tangled lightly in Wilson’s lengthening hair. It was already white. He had stopped spotting blond strands on his thirty-second birthday last week. “I’ll be waiting. Just as long as you always come back.”

   Wilson closed his burning eyes. “Where else would I go?”

   He knew better than to assume no one was home just because the lights weren’t on. He also knew better than to try the front door. Instead, he rappelled from above.

   The other apartments were all quiet; he had taken his time scoping the place out, so it was well past midnight. Carefully… slowly… he checked for traps as he hovered in the shadows just outside of the window. Nothing. That was unusual--- Was this the right apartment? It had to be; it was the only likely candidate by process of elimination. He quietly blew the hinges, caught the windowpane, and lowered it gently against the wall inside. Then he slipped into a dark living room… and felt the cold kiss of a gun barrel against his neck.

   Reflexes kicked in before he could tell himself that dodging a point-blank shot was a bad idea. The gun went off as he spun; searing heat grazed his skin, ringing filled his ears, and his balance disappeared. He flung his hand out, shoving the weapon away from his face as his other senses amped up to compensate. Shitty aftershave and lukewarm ramen and NOTHING ELSE assailed his nose. He blocked a strike to his throat, reeling. There should have been a scent. An aura. Something.

   He was fighting a ghost.

   “Fuck,” his opponent spat, and the dynamic shifted as recognition kicked in. Cold ruthless efficiency flowed into anger, quick hits that he was fast enough to block but not fast enough to anticipate. One of them landed between his ribs, burning, and he pulled back against it to hook a fist under the shadow’s ribs---

   Don’t, something snapped. Don’t kill him.

   A split second of hesitation lost him the fight. One stinging blow cut across the right side of his head, sending static through his ruined eye socket. Dizzying pain dug into an old knife wound there, one that had healed incorrectly, nerves in all the wrong places. Sense memory drove him to his knees, gasping. He was dead. Supposed to be. Should have been.

   It was only half a square inch in diameter, that scar. No one knew. No one remembered. Everyone who had been on the mission where he had received that wound was dead.

   The pistol appeared again in the moonlight, inches away from his good eye. He panted through the flashes of pain, struggling to focus. Cold dark eyes narrowed from the darkness near the window.

   Slade raised his empty hands. “Are---” His throat burned. He tried again. “Are you going to kill me?”

   “Get. Out.” the ghost spat, too low to recognize, but he still did. He still heard a tremor of rage beneath the chilly overtones. “Before I decide to take your other eye.”

   Slade read the permission for what it was, slowly rolling his legs back underneath him, and levered himself to his feet. He kept his hands up. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. “You got somewhere to be?”

   The shadow ducked fluidly through the living room, unanswering, and grabbed something from beneath the kitchen counter. A go-bag. Something else too… a holster. Some throwing knives. A couple of compact bombs.

   “You’re…” Slade’s ringing senses finally dialed in. There were men on the stairwell… and some on the roof. “Who are you running from? Let me get them off your trail; I can take the west stairwell while you---”

   The shadowy man paused by the door, slinging the bag across his body. He looked so small in the lack of light. His dark eyes were empty. “I don’t know you.”

   Slade’s chest ached. “Billy.”

   The man flung the door open, cleared the hallway, and disappeared. With a curse, Slade lunged after him. He couldn’t smell this bastard, but he could smell the men on the roof, and they were closing fast.

   “Fuckit,” he growled, digging into carpet. He propelled himself down the hallway, FAST, and shoved his friend to the right before the agent just beyond the outside window could shoot. Wintergreen rolled with the hit, successfully shielded from oncoming bullets. Slade didn’t have enough room to stop.

   He didn’t want to stop.

   With clenched teeth, tongue tucked carefully behind his jaw, he barreled straight through the window’s cheap glass, tackled the agent rappelling down the building, and severed his line. The man dropped with a yelp. His last shots whizzed past Slade’s legs.

   Slade gripped the severed line in one hand, spinning with the momentum from his attack, and hit the side of the building at a run. Shots fired from overhead, missing him by a mile. When his weight strained the rope at a dangerous angle, he let go, kicked off, and sailed through the air toward a lower roof.

   A running start wasn’t as effective on a vertical surface as on pavement, but it did the trick. He made it all thirty feet, rolled to break his landing, and came up on one knee facing the opposite direction, already shooting at the apartment roof. One--- two--- three down, but there were more on the way, and they had pinpointed his location by his fifth kill.

   Who WERE these people? Slightly more importantly--- What had William Wintergreen done to piss them off?

   Still fighting dizziness from that perfectly placed blow to the head, Slade rolled beneath their line of sight, slid over the edge of the building, and dropped twenty feet to the ground. The landing jarred his bones more than it should have. Half of them were chasing him now, but half of them were still on Wintergreen’s tail; he needed to act fast. He reached into his bag, yanked out the helmet, and shoved it on before ditching the rest; everything he needed was already strapped to his body.

   As the helmet clicked into place, every sense filtered through the specialized settings; an orange readout filled the frame. His focus snapped to the forefront, taut, and he shot down an alley to his left without looking. He was running before the body dropped, shooting behind him next, then up. Taking one of them alive would be FANTASTIC, but that wasn’t his priority right now.

   He could run short distances at sixty miles an hour. Billy could not.

   Deathstroke took out the knees of a sniper, picking up speed as he bolted around alleyway corners. He had to destroy what was left of his tail before reaching Wintergreen’s; otherwise he was leading them back around to the same spot for tactically unsound reasons.

   Then, on the belt of a body that he dropped from a nearby balcony, he saw a flash of glowing blue.

   Handcuffs.

   Deathstroke’s blood chilled. They weren’t after Wintergreen.

   Concrete fell away in a heady rush as he moved. He gave up maneuverability for speed; already his armor was taking a few hits, but he couldn’t feel them now. It was too late to play it cool. They knew of Wintergreen’s importance.

   He couldn’t smell the beta, but he could smell the stench of eager amateurs on the hunt. He skidded around a corner, using the new angle to fire a few shots behind him--- Three more bodies dropped--- before sprinting in a new direction. If he could cut them off---

   Something rammed into him broadside, lighting up his suit like a damn string of LEDs. He tumbled away, rolling--- Not even the Ikon suit could absorb the entire kinetic energy of a TRUCK, apparently--- and came up shooting at the windshield. Bulletproof, of course, but it did the trick. The agents opened the doors on either side to shoot back. One even climbed out of a hatch in the top that he could have sworn was built for a machine gun. Another dropped down onto his shoulders from above, whipping out a garrot.

   Deathstroke threw the man over his shoulder, letting his armor absorb the blunt of the cutting wire, and punched one of the vehicle’s doors in. The man on the other side collapsed, winded by dented metal hitting him in the ribs. The other vaulted the hood, yelling, and attacked from above with the machine-hatch-guy. They were loud. BOTH of them.

   Deathstroke whipped out his third knife, growling viciously as he kicked at someone’s knee, and punctuated each stab with his annoyance. “I don’t--- have--- TIME for this!!!”

   The gurgling body gave no answer. Deathstroke wasn’t done. This last asshole was gonna get a broken arm for his trouble, he was gonna hurt, he was gonna BLEED---

   The man yelped as his radius snapped, the noise muffled behind a tactical helmet, and Deathstroke froze above his trembling body. Kid. This was a KID.

   He knew what hurt pups sounded like.

   Stomach rolling mercilessly, Deathstroke adjusted his strength, punching the guy’s lights out. Then he vaulted the car, pulled out his grapple, and found anchor. He coiled every muscle as it tugged him toward the top of a building. Then he brought his knees up--- and slammed into the side of the roof at full speed.

   That was gonna hurt tomorrow, but now he had a better visual.

   Stray shots whipped past his head as he hauled himself over the edge of the roof. Either they were thinning out or failing to keep up; he hadn’t made a specific number. Maybe, he thought grimly, shooting some covering fire as he ran--- Maybe they were getting smarter.

   Heat vision revealed a group of moving signatures converging on a single point seven blocks south. He started jumping gaps between buildings. He would reach the first straggler in less than fifteen seconds at his top freerunning speed, so he used the breathing time to reload his pistol. A rifle would be great, actually; did he have time to loot a body? He was burning too quickly through safehouses, not enough time, not enough people to refill his supplies, not enough---

   No one left that he trusted. No one except for the heat signature in the center of his pupil’s line of sight.

   Without slowing down, he took out the five stragglers trailing the pack. Before the ones up ahead could turn around, he dropped, slid right off the edge of a roof, and kicked from wall to wall on his way down. He caught sight of another apartment hallway on the third floor of a building; at the last second, he kicked hard, diving through it headfirst, rolling, and hitting the carpet at a sprint.

   He exited a window at the opposite end of the building the same way, glass flying from his shoulders. It wasn’t a far drop, but the next building’s roof was low enough to grab, so he grabbed it. The sudden drop killed all of his momentum, losing him two precious seconds as he scrambled for traction, and he realized for the first time that he could hear his heartbeat.

   His shoulders strained, pulling at their sockets in a way they should not have pulled. He wasn’t supposed to feel the weight. The muscle he still carried--- the Ikon armor. It was charged up, glowing; kinetic energy aiding his every movement. He shouldn’t have been able to feel gravity tugging so hard on sinew and his only friend was cornered three blocks away and the light hadn’t gone out, not yet, but it would.

   It would if he wasn’t fast enough.

   He clawed against that weight, panic licking in the echoes behind every heartbeat, and found traction. He sprinted harder, faster, until the world was a blur beneath his feet. He was a bug on a windshield if he stopped now, so he didn’t. He found a path up.

   Ledge… corner… height. High, high enough to see the last of the snipers, to shoot before aiming, to hit each mark with one single bullet, to DIVE…

   The warm light that had cornered itself in the top floor of an abandoned apartment building--- away from people, away from the streets--- dissolved into a shadow as heat vision automatically deactivated. That shadow was shooting every man or woman that managed to cross his line of sight, and as of right now, that included Deathstroke.

   The alpha rolled as initial shots pinged off his armor, empty hands held high. “It’s ME, dammit; we need t---”

   The other window shattered as a small round object flew into the suffocating darkness. Deathstroke caught it--- SMACK--- in the palm of his hand, spun midair, and threw it with all the force he could summon back through the opening. It exploded right outside, blowing shattered glass through the air like confetti.

   “Bollocks---” The shadowed man dropped his pistol, likely empty, and drew a knife. Deathstroke was faster; he’d already been lunging, helmet yanked off to display the full force of his snarl. The knife clattered between them as he grabbed Wintergreen’s left hand, twisting it away from his body; one fist wrapped in a t-shirt, threatening to tear, and they grappled, feet skipping around each other’s space as Wintergreen threw his weight back, dragging Deathstroke forward. He kneed the super soldier in the stomach--- Twice--- before jumping. Both feet left the ground as the full force of a Spartan kick nailed Deathstroke in the chest.

   The force wasn’t enough to make him move, to do any more than force the breath from his lungs, but it would be enough to tear Wintergreen’s arm from his socket if Deathstroke didn’t let go. He let go. The shadow flipped, landing on his feet, and sent three daggers whistling through the air. Two of them bounced off. One yanked past Deathstroke’s left ear, tearing flesh.

   “Billy---” Slade held his hands up, trying to shield his face. He could taste his own blood. “Billy, it’s me, it’s ME!!! I came for help, I came back, I need--- I need you, STOP it!!!”

   The beta froze for the first time with a second pistol raised, wreathed in shadow. Pure white hair framed a grizzled face. Slade still couldn’t smell him. “Bugger… the fuck… off. Last fuckin’ chance.”

   Slade couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t… This wasn’t how this was supposed to go. “You know me. They’re still waiting; they’re… they’re out there; they won’t stop, just let me… let me help you. I can get us off the grid, I can…”

   Billy dove for the apartment door; Slade dove for Billy. He caught the beta’s wrist in the hall outside, yanking, twisting him around to grab his shoulders. Billy’s skin was so thin, bones too close to the surface, and the alpha forced himself to ease up before he broke something. (Broke all that was left.) “Billy. PLEASE.”

   The stranger in his hands didn’t even bother pushing back. He gripped the tatters of Slade’s jacket, hissing through his teeth. All the alpha could smell was bitterness. “You’ve burned all your bridges, Slade. Time to swim.”

   Slade let go as the man shoved away, senses shooting into overdrive; Billy had clipped a bomb to his jacket. The beta disappeared around the hallway; two seconds left--- “SHIT!!!”

   Torn from his body just in time, the jacket blew up three yards away; the blast radius knocked Slade off his feet. He slammed into a wall somewhere, ears ringing, and slumped. The suit brightened, absorbing potential energy meant to harm, but his ears bled. He couldn’t hear; he couldn’t…

   He couldn’t breathe.

   There were more of them, the shadows, the men with glowing handcuffs, but he couldn’t track their movements. They were close; too close. He shoved off, propelling himself through one last window. Glass bit into his neck above the suit line. He couldn’t breathe. He skidded off a nearby roof, tripped, and tumbled over the edge instead of jumping. It was only one story down but he could hear the CRACK as one foot hit the pavement, ankle giving out beneath him, and he couldn’t feel it.

   He couldn’t breathe.

   They would come after him now. Billy was safe… wasn’t he? Billy was gone; there was nothing left, nothing but the bomb… Hadn’t he known that Slade would get away, would survive? He must have. Only Slade would have been able to survive, but Slade couldn’t…

   still couldn’t breathe.

   The noise in his throat did not reach his ears, but it made his teeth vibrate. His chest ached, split in two by a phantom pain that he’d sworn never to risk again, but it wasn’t a real break; it couldn’t be; they didn’t share a bond anymore---

   Then why did it hurt his lungs to breathe?

   Bones crunched beneath his fists. He didn’t know if those bones were his. They were going to kill him; it was only fair, and if he didn’t fight them off… didn’t win… they would take him, unmake him, and he would be someone’s weapon.

   He thought he was outside of his own body, the weapon that belonged to no one, and he thought… he should have cared more about that.

   He could taste his own blood now. Fear leaked from his skin, fear that he didn’t know how to name, because it was dark. He had never seen it this way; he had never lost everything there was to lose. Backups… options. All of them. Gone. Everything that was supposed to be worth fighting for. (Why the hell was he still fighting? They were hitting him with tranquilizers, bullets, fists; nothing got through, nothing worked, he couldn’t… he couldn’t stop…)

   He couldn’t stop.

   I left him… so he left me.

       He left m…

            me.

   Somewhere in the in-between, like a train clacking over tracks far away, he realized that the bodies had stopped moving. He sat down on someone’s legs, tipping his head to the sky, and let his own blood trickle into his working eye socket. He couldn’t see the stars.

   He should have cared more about that.

   Through the haze of chemicals that were not supposed to work--- How many times had he been hit?--- an old army boot nudged one of the bodies. “Looks like they weren’t here for me.”

   Slade’s nose caved as his face hit pavement. He couldn’t breathe…

Chapter Text

   “You broke your Goddamn face.”

   Reality swam with the echoes of a sickening ache. He tried to open his eyes. Only one complied. “Wh…?”

   “Your ugly mug,” the voice repeated helpfully, distant. “Stop moving before I break it again.”

   He tracked the moving shadow through empty space. Everything came back in fuzzy pieces, sensory input tingling at his fingertips. The vibration of his boots slamming against pavement… the weightless gravity of a leap into open midnight air. An explosion traveling up his arms, a shockwave pressing the air from his lungs. Shattered glass peppering the surface of his suit. A racing heartbeat tapping away under his thumb.

   Billy. He had Billy. He’d let go.

   “Why?” he croaked around the stuffed cotton sensation in his mouth. He didn’t know what he was asking. Nothing… tracked, nothing made sense.

   “Why’d I come back for you or why’d I hand you a live bomb? I’m not sure either one of us wants to know the answer regardless. Here, drink this.”

   Slade sputtered as the rim of a glass suddenly tipped against his face. It took a few tries before he could drink without choking. It tasted bitter. “What is it?”

   “Water, electrolytes, a few stale painkillers--- The drugs we found in that HIVE lab that actually worked back in the day. You took one hell of a beating. ‘Course you’ll be healed in a few hours, so I dunno why I bother trying to mute your pain… Oh, and a few of those micro trackers meant to stick to your insides.” The glass disappeared. “Now I can avoid you properly just in case you decide to try this shit again. Don’t rebreak your bones anytime soon; those were the only steroid painkillers I had left.”

   Slade blinked hard, trying to focus. Couch… He was on a couch. He could hear cars outside; daylight peeked from behind dusty curtains. The air smelled like damp wood. The ceiling texture was cracked. He could feel every hair on his arms, the throbbing pain in his face, and his ankle… Crap.

   As his companion left for the kitchen, rooting around in the fridge, Slade tried desperately to gather his thoughts. He didn’t know which question to ask first--- If you’ve been on the move, why do you still make room to carry medical supplies for a super soldier? Where are we? How did you move my body by yourself? How long has it been since you had a haircut? How many did I kill; why did you come back?--- but he wasn’t sure he would get answers. Or that he even wanted to know the answers.

   The most concerning questions he should have worried about, maybe, were the unknown drugs, the trackers, and the secondary location. He’d learned a long time ago to trust whatever it was that his unofficial nurse wanted to put in his body. It would either help or hurt on its way to helping, but it wouldn’t kill him, and he’d never stopped to even consider if that was something Billy would try on purpose.

   Not until the night before, and not that it would have worked. Slade had checked.

   “Immortality,” the beta called snappily.

   Slade propped himself up with aching muscles against the arm of the couch, hugging his ribs. “What?”

   “Must be nice.” Billy entered the living room again, chucking a huge bag of frozen peas at Slade’s face. “Look at you; strong, fast, and aside from your nose, the picture of health; you might as well still be thirty. I’m beginning to wonder if you’ll ever leave your prime.”

   Slade raised his hand too late to catch the bag; his movements felt like the lag on a shitty Russian satellite when all you wanted to stream was pirated eighties shows. The peas smacked against his hollow chest, rolling into his lap. He felt cold. “I think I’m leaving it now.”

   Billy either didn’t hear the empty shake in his voice or didn’t care. He left the room again, keeping his face turned away. His hair was down to his shoulders now, or would have been. It was up in a hasty bun, silver strands streaked with blood.

   Slade looked down at his body, just now wondering. The Ikon suit had been peeled off down to the waist, which would have been impossible if anyone else had tried to take it; this one had at least three traps built in. Nothing had gotten through the armor, of course, but he was still covered in bruises, and some of them had been smeared with special numbing cream, then plastered with a bandage. His broken ankle, too, was set. His throat felt almost too thick to swallow, itchy like the allergic reaction he remembered having to pineapple when he was just a kid, but whatever had been in those darts was already wearing off, and the entry sites were bandaged.

   Other than his broken nose, he decided, no blood had been shed. Still… he’d gotten it on Billy. His brain rearranged the implications. Billy had touched him to help long before deciding to get his own hair out of the way.

   “You wouldn’t stop throwing up,” the beta said offhandedly.

   Slade tried to swallow again. It didn’t work. He focused instead on breathing. “I don’t remember that.”

   “No, I suppose not.”

   “Why…” Slade didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know. He didn’t want--- “Why did you come back for me?”

   A long, heavy, defeated sigh. “I dunno, Slade. Maybe old habits die hard.”

   Slade’s mouth moved without his consent. “Is that all I am? An old habit?”

   Billy suddenly reappeared again in the doorway, stock still. Wispy flyaways fell out of his bun, framing his gaunt face. His sunken cheeks were unshaven; his signature mustache was overgrown. His bushy eyebrows almost connected in the middle with the force of his frown, a frown that wrinkled all the way up to his receding hairline, and his eyes--- his eyes were dark. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that.”

   A thrill of trepidation traveled up Slade’s aching spine. He nodded mutely. After holding that haunting eye contact for a few more seconds, Billy disappeared.

   He’s going to leave again, some part of Slade whispered; he’s going to leave and I still can’t walk and there will be no catching him again when he can see me coming. “Billy---”

   “Don’t ‘Billy’ me.”

   Slade’s throat spasmed. “Wintergreen.”

   “Whatever you want to know, Wilson, I can promise you the answer isn’t near as interesting as whatever exciting adventure you left behind to find me.” The beta tossed something wrapped in tinfoil on the couch. Then he turned his back, picking up a packed duffel in the front hallway. “Your phone’s on the island. Solve your own damn computer problems.”

   Slade sat up, pain muted as fresh adrenaline surged through him. “Wait--- Winter, c’mon, please.”

   “There’s nothing you can say to me that will make this worth it, Wilson. Good luck an’ don’t blink.”

   “I’m sorry!!!”

   Billy’s shadow froze by the door, hand on the knob.

   Slade’s heartbeat thundered in his ears. Why do I care? “There’s… no one else. Please. I need you.”

   “You always did.” Billy’s head turned, cocked. Slade still couldn’t see his face. He couldn’t even smell him. “Those bounty hunters. I thought they were after me.”

   Slade blinked hard, something brake checking in his head. “The… contract.”

   “What?”

   “I forgot I… No, they’re not gunning for you. Maybe they want to get to me through you, I don’t know. I don’t know who they are or what they want, but that’s not important; I didn’t come back for---”

   “BullSHIT that’s not important. They had special cuffs on them. Whoever put out that contract not only knows you, but wants you. Badly.”

   “I don’t CARE---” Slade cut himself off to take a breath. Focus. “I didn’t come for help with a case, I came for help. Something… happened to me, something bad; I can’t… This is different. I wouldn’t… You know I wouldn’t ask… if it wasn’t.”

   Billy twisted around, dropping the duffel. “You have thirty seconds to explain.”

   Slade licked his dry lips. There was a bottle of water sitting on the shitty carpet at the foot of the couch. The tinfoil bundle smelled like chicken. Why was it so hard to speak all of a sudden; why couldn’t he move his tongue? The words had played through his mind in a fevered haze for weeks. Now they fell apart into stutters, unsure insecurity that shook at the sight of a wizened stare that didn’t recognize him. “I was wrong.”

   Billy didn’t move, didn’t speak, and the imaginary ticking of a clock almost seemed real.

   “I was wrong,” Slade repeated numbly. What? NO!!! Stop repeating yourself!!! Make him understand!!! “I thought you would be safer without me; I didn’t--- want to face what I’d done, what I could do if we kept--- if you stuck around.”

   Stony silence was his only answer. Twenty fucking seconds.

   “You almost died.” Slade’s throat ached. He forced his voice past it, forced the firing synapses of sparking sense memory to stay in the present. “You almost DIED. I couldn’t have lived with myself then, I can’t NOW, I was--- afraid of what that meant for me. I was afraid to face it, Billy, so I did the only thing I could; I ran. I ran and I was wrong and I’m SORRY for that; I… I can only imagine…”

   No, no; trying to sympathize was going to be the wrong move. The impassive beta still hadn’t twitched. Ten more seconds.

   “I’m not healing right,” Slade’s mouth said in the echoing distance. “I tried something better, something new, and it broke me; I can’t sleep and I can’t eat and I can’t fucking hunt. Something is wrong with me, something big, and I can’t… fix it alone. I don’t know anyone like you. I was wrong. I need help.”

   The silence was devastatingly empty. He exhaled in a rush, head spinning, and tried not to think about how damn exposed he felt. He wished he could snatch it back, whatever emotional thing he had released into the air between them, but it was too late. He had said his piece. All his cards were on the table; Billy’s move. If he still left…

   Slade had dredged everything from the depths of every little box, every denial he had, out into the open. If Billy still chose to leave, what else was there?

   The beta dropped his arms, something new creeping into his muted body language, something… almost concerned. “What exactly did they hit you with?”

   Slade’s mouth opened. It wasn’t… processing. What the words might have meant. “They?”

   “Damn. DAMNIT.” Billy combed one hand through his hair, sighing explosively. “Okay… alright. I thought they were already flushed out of your system, but you don’t have much on you an’ I doubt you can defend yourself like this. I’ll stay until you sleep it off.”

   Slade’s heartbeat sank in slow motion toward his stomach. He wasn’t hearing this right. “I meant it.”

   “What?”

   “I’m telling the truth; you--- you don’t believe me?”

   “Sure, Slade, sure.” Billy grabbed something from the kitchen, sniffing in a way that was all business, and tossed it over. A threadbare blanket. “Get some shuteye; I’ll stand watch.”

   “Billy…?”

   “Don’t call me Billy.”

   “I’m not crazy.” Slade couldn’t feel his fingers. He’d… It was there. All of it, every last bleeding side of it, out in the open. “I’m not high.”

   “Sleep it off, Slade.”

   “It’s ME, Bill--- Wintergreen, LISTEN, I’m not LYING!!!”

   “No, maybe not.” The beta disappeared into the next room, still hiding his face. “Just too zonked to mean it.”

   “Why won’t you believe me?!” Slade sat up, planting his bad foot on the floor; pain shot through his leg despite the steroids. “I’m doing the fucking work; I’ve CHANGED!!!”

   “Sleep it off, Slade. You’re not alone; you can rest.” The bedroom door creeeeeeeeaked shut. “You’ve six hours.”

   Slade stared at the wall, unseeing. This could not be happening. He had made every move, deployed every option; he had saved Billy’s life for fuck’s sake. Then he’d been… been honest. He’d let his words bleed.

   He deserved this, he thought distantly. His best friend in the entire world, the only person who had ever understood, the only person he’d ever felt safe with, felt like himself around, the only person he’d never truly been able to ruin, was sitting ten feet away in another room… and he didn’t believe him.

   The mortar exploded.

   He flinched to his left, trying to get the searing heat out of his mouth, but it consumed him; why wasn’t he bursting into flames? Then he felt it against his organs, the force of impact that had sent him flying without his senses’ notice. Hitting the ground, rolling, scrabbling for a desperate hold on rock, dirt, rebar--- Which direction was UP?

   He couldn’t breathe. Then they were on top of him, the enemy, and all he could feel was the hungry nicking of steel against his sides as he rolled, dodged, and all he could see was red. They would not survive this. It was inevitable, his victory, but he could taste the blood he’d have to swallow on his nail-tearing way to survival on the other side.

   His… and others’.

   He wondered what he was fighting for as they pinned a medal to his chest; as they pumped a dangerous poison into his veins that he could FEEL tearing apart and rebuilding and reinforcing his every cell; as he sat in the silence of post-battle with a hole in his side and fifteen broken bones and blood pooling at his feet, panting through the agony as he waited for hours, for cold nightfall, while his shattered shell began to heal.

   It didn’t matter what he was fighting for as long as he was fighting. He couldn’t imagine giving it up… the fight. He thought he would be nothing without it.

   He fought harder. He sank his fingernails into flesh, ROARING his pain for all to hear, and “Colonel!!!” someone was shouting, but their orders didn’t matter anymore after the start of the fight.

   He couldn’t breathe.

   “Colonel,” someone called again, echoing. “Fuck, snap out of it---”

   He sank to his knees in the water, gasping before his flesh bit into the jagged river bed. He had to hold his breath. The red danced across the surface like menacing little hunters, lines of sight that would get him shot if he stood up, and he was a BEAST now, a beast on a leash, but he still felt pain.

   He didn’t want to be shot. Not right now, not here, alone in the deep of the hornet’s nest where not even the barking orders could fill up the roaring emptiness in his ears.

   He always won, but he was always alone. Sometimes the silence was worse than the pain. So he held his breath… and waited.

   “Dammit,” someone shouted, and they were so far away that he realized he was falling. “BREATHE!!!”

   He couldn’t breathe, and he would have told them so, but he was bailing a carrier and plummeting out over his target ten miles too soon and shells were exploding in the air around him as he aimed his shoulders at the dark ground. He probably should have been more concerned about that, he thought hazily, watching as they exploded in bursts of fiery orange and yellow and white, and the smoke was red, and he only wondered why until he felt the acid in the back of his throat. They were learning, the enemy, about who he was, what he could do, but he had learned right alongside them. To suppress the need to panic. To forget that he was afraid. To ignore the sting of his throat dissolving in his body, of his lungs giving out, because he knew that in a few minutes all would be right with the world, sinew and muscle and flesh snapping back to the way it was supposed to be, a little tougher, a little more worn, but for now…

   for now it was pain, unending waves of agony that he only fought against to keep his shoulders aimed at the ground.

   He forgot to pull his parachute until it was too late. He didn’t die, but his kneecaps fractured, and he wasted two whole hours lying in the dark of the jungle on his back, alone and quiet and forgetting to breathe, just waiting for his legs to heal.

   He had gotten an earful for that when he had returned. No one had asked why he had forgotten. No one had told him that he should have been paying better attention. No one wondered why he barely used his voice to say a word during the debrief. If they did, they kept it to themselves.

   And it didn’t matter either that he woke up three weeks later, screaming. ‘Stress’, they’d said, because they hadn’t asked about the blinding explosions of red dust he’d seen in his dreams, and he hadn’t told them. He’d taken his pain into both hands, letting it bleed, and turned it into rage. Then he’d taken the rage to war. And he was a good soldier, they said, for his efficiency. And he wondered if he would ever be as efficient without the rage.

   He wasn’t always alone in the shifting shadows at his back, and sometimes that was a bad thing. He could still feel the stab of a needle, the feeling of sedative he hadn’t been able to shake, and it wasn’t anything like his first, second, or third time captured… Were they still happening? Beyond the pulsing pain of his cut lip, split open by one hit too many, there was a myriad of other pains; and he could stand it back then, back when his skin hadn’t sewn itself back together every three seconds flat, and it had been a comfort to focus on the lip instead of the lashes across his bare back, to lean into the punishment instead of answering questions with anything other than his number, like a mantra… a chant. “Four seven six nine five one three five… four seven six nine five one three five… four seven six nine five one three… five…”

   “Bloody hell ya jackass don’t you recognize a rescue when you see one?”

   He couldn’t pull his knees together underneath his weight. He couldn’t stand up from the cold floor, couldn’t tug any harder against the ropes cutting into his sleeping wrists. He could smell his own blood, though.

   He still couldn’t breathe.

   It wasn’t for nothing that the air whistled through the holes in his bloody body as he fell. He was getting so used to falling. Why catch himself if that would only make it hurt worse? He would sit in the crater and bear the mindless pain and wait for everything to make some semblance of sense again, and he would relearn how to breathe. He could feel the air cutting past the burning paths the rounds had carved through his flesh. It was not supposed to feel like that. Even less resistance slammed him down, breaking ground, and it tumbled around his body in shattered pieces of dried mud. It got into his mouth.

   Then… nothing. So, SO much nothing. It was worse than quiet. It was HUNGRY. And he couldn’t…

   “Jesus,” someone cursed, or maybe prayed, as acid gushed past the back of his throat. His body remembered what it felt like to break in two. He had almost forgotten the sensation of true pain, because the worst of moments, the seconds that something should have killed him in one deadly blow--- THOSE moments his body resisted. Those moments he longed instead for pain of a cut lip.

   He couldn’t die. Not for lack of trying--- of letting himself hit instead of roll, drop instead of catch, dive headfirst into the bone-shattering impacts instead of taking a less painful route instead. And far less subtle means. Like a bullet.

   “Put it down,” someone coaxed, a gentle croon so unlike the horrid rasp from the bottom of his dreams. “Put it down, Slade.”

   “I can’t die,” he thought he mumbled, but he tasted metal, and he wondered what it was like to breathe.

   “Let’s not test that theory any more times,” the voice told him, traveling faintly across chilly tidewater down his lungs and drifting with desert sand over his legs and rumbling through jungle forests so thick that he couldn’t see his feet. “Don’t you think you’ve survived enough pain?”

   He dropped the weapon that was so much less than the danger he’d become, sinking to his knees, and he thought he could still feel sand. Then he wept.

   Time started making sense again when he realized that he could feel his own breathing. It was hitching beneath his ribs, spasms of phantom pain; a memory from a long time ago when he hadn’t been able to breathe. He could breathe now, though. He listened faintly to the sound of air traveling through his nose, his mouth, his throat, his lungs, and back up again. He listened until he could hear it deepening, smoothing as his body recognized that it could still breathe.

   There was no need to choke on the memories. He’d already lived them once.

   He was cold. That was the second thing he noticed. Pain was absent, and it made his skin crawl, but he stayed the instinct that told him to bite his own arm or slash his own ribs. Absence of pain was not the nothingness or the emptiness or the shock. It was information. There were other things to take its place… Things like the scratchy couch against his bare back, the uncomfortable twist of his knee, and the needles shooting up the arm that was trapped beneath his weight. He shifted carefully, groaning, and rearranged his shell. Better. Not exactly comfort… but not pain.

   It had to be a good thing.

   “There he is,” that voice grouched, and someone shoved a steaming cup in front of his face. “Drink.”

   Slade cracked his eye open, blinking until something came into focus. The cup first. Then the wrinkled face framed with silver, eyes that crinkled in worry, giving away the gruffness to something softer. Something that cared.

   “Billy?” he croaked. A question. So, so many questions. You’re not supposed to call him that.

   “Real,” the blurry vision confirmed. Some of the worry smoothed away, rock instead of impassive steel, and he didn’t know what to do with it. “That was a rough one.”

   Slade pried himself into a sitting position, groaning, and hugged his ribs. It was getting easier to tell which injuries were real. The twinge of his ribcage and the splintering pain in his ankle and the burning down his throat. He tasted blood. “What’d I fight?”

   “Yourself.” Billy tapped the mug impatiently until Slade reached out to take it. “Bouts, you know. It took you a while to come up.”

   Slade’s eye slid to the bandage around Billy’s arm. His instincts bristled against his will. Why do I care? It’s not safe here. Where’s Jason? “Who did YOU fight?”

   “You. Oh, y’know, only for a minute. I figured as hard as it was to watch you tear at your own skin… better you than me. Ya bloody dumbarse.”

   Slade felt the familiar taste of guilt crawl up the back of his throat. How long had Billy stayed? Six… He was supposed to have six hours. (He had told himself that he wouldn’t sleep. He didn’t want to wake up… alone…) “I’m sorry.”

   “Why? You weren’t exactly in your right mind at the time.” Billy snapped his fingers without turning around. “Drink.”

   Slade drank it--- and spat it right back out. “What IS this?”

   Billy sniffed unapologetically. “Tea.”

   “You’re an insult to your country.”

   “For much more dastardly reasons than a bad cup of tea. It’s hot an’ I’m pretty sure you heaved your throat raw. Just drink it.”

   Slade drank it, glancing around as he measured his sips. Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t--- “You’re still here.”

   “It’s only been four hours. I’m actually surprised you slept that long.”

   “Are you okay?”

   “You’ve done worse. Those bandages on your arms are new; snuck ‘em on during one of your lulls. Don’t touch them.”

   Slade’s throat was so dry. “Sorry.”

   “I don’t… wanna keep hearing that, actually.” Billy reached out, grabbing Slade’s nape, and held eye contact as phantom submission dulled the adrenaline pounding through his veins. This close up, finally, Slade could see that his eyes were a dull, washed out, exhausted shade of green. “Say it once. Say it like you mean it.”

   Slade opened his mouth again… and froze. His stomach lurched for his omegas, and when did that happen?--- but he couldn’t push the emotion back down. He turned his face away instead, trying to hide it, the burning shame spilling from both eye sockets.

   “Colonel,” Billy’s voice gentled, sorrow and fondness and grief all at once, like Slade deserved that title. Slowly… cautiously… the beta reached across the aching chasm Slade was trying to push between them, hooking one finger around the silver chain he still wore under every shirt, jacket, and suit. The dog tags clinked together, warm against his skin, and Slade squeezed his eye shut, trying to pretend for just one second that he was someone else. Someone who knew how to fall apart. Someone who could.

   “I’m sorry,” he whispered hoarsely, opening to hold eye contact against the ruthless burn behind every syllable. “I’m sorry I broke it. I’m sorry I cut you off. I’m sorry I left you. It should have been the other way around; you saved me so… so many more times than I… saved you. I should have been yours to cast aside. Not… You didn’t deserve what you got… three decades wasted on a single debt, and I’m so… sorry.”

   Billy pulled away, letting the tags rest against Slade’s chest. Slade couldn’t see his face anymore. The blur was too extreme. “Huh… bloody hell.”

   Slade twisted away, swiping furiously at his eyes. Damn… fucking shit.

   “I guess you really were tellin’ the truth.” Billy stood up, businesslike tone fixed in place, and retreated to the kitchen. “Something has changed. You want pancakes? Of course you want fuckin’ pancakes. I’ll have more tea in a bit.”

   “Anything but that,” Slade grouched automatically, but something lifted from his sternum when he wasn’t being watched so closely, even though his oldest friend was probably still noticing.

   He was very good at that. At seeing Slade Wilson. He had just usually pretended not to be.

   The fluffy pancakes, at least, smelled pretty damn good.

   “Ingrate,” Billy said decidedly when Slade turned his nose up at the fresh cup of tea. He drank it himself before replacing Slade’s with orange juice. “Keepin’ it down?”

   Slade grunted uneasily. His stomach still felt hollow, but it was better than the scraping emptiness from before, and it would help him stay sane. He didn’t dare eat more than one round. Something was still… fragile. Deep down inside, he wasn’t sure the drugs he’d been shot with weren’t causing him to hallucinate this whole thing. “Winter… what’s happening to me?”

   “You’re getting old,” Billy snarked absently, but something in Slade’s raw tone or exposed scent must have made him think twice. He popped his head over the open refrigerator door. The crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes began to soften. “I dunno, Wilson. But I’ll bet my favorite pair of boots that we can find out.”

Chapter Text

   The home button was cracked. He had just bought this burner, too.

   “Oy.” Something smacked against the back of his neck--- a protein bar. “Pack the rest of these. We gotta hurry.”

   Slade rubbed his scruff with a glare. It hadn’t really hurt, but the pressure was… soothing nonetheless. “I know.”

   “I wasn’t able to drag you very far; their cleanup will be about finished by now, so if we don’t wanna be found in the sweep… What are you DOING, mate?”

   Slade flipped the phone shut, pressing back against the muted anxiety overwhelming both closed bonds. “Nothing.”

   “Can ‘nothing’ wait until later, please?” The beta’s somewhat frazzled-looking head of hair popped up in the open bedroom door, eyes narrowed irritably. “We’re on a bit of a time crunch an’ one of us is not bulletproof.”

   “I’m not bulletproof,” Slade muttered unnecessarily, forcing himself to his feet. It hadn’t even been twenty-four hours. His ankle would have healed in four, maybe three if he’d been sleeping, but now…

   Billy hefted his go-bag over one shoulder, locking the bedroom with a key. Slade felt his stare as he collected his own bag, stuffing it with the last of the scanty food supplies from the fridge. Who knew when they would get to stop moving again.

   “Ankle still fucked?” Billy finally asked, sharp and accusing and a strange flavor of concerned.

   Slade zipped up the Ikon suit, grunting, and pulled on a ratty jacket. His helmet was long gone by now, but the rest was easily hidden under civvies. A pair of sunglasses completed the somewhat homeless look. “I’ve had worse.”

   “Yeahhh, no shit, but we’ll have to do a lot of this thing called running, and even Ikon’s most magical design won’t be able to compensate for that.”

   Slade flipped the jacket’s hood up before clipping on the backpack. He was ready to run. Rolling would be difficult if he wanted to hang onto Billy’s supplies, though. “I smell two in the street outside.”

   Billy cursed under his breath, yanking the front door open. “There’s an old condemned fire escape in this building that lets out into the parking garage.”

   “They’ll be waiting.” Slade broke off the doorknob behind them, tossing it down the dark hallway. Something other than the malicious hunting pheromones and the jagged pain shooting up his injured leg and the constant smell of blood assaulted his senses. He spared half a braincell to cursing his luck. Breaking your nose while your sense of smell was dialed up to eleven was a fucking LOUD point of input to contend with.

   “Stairs.” Billy shoved open an unmarked door, booking it down a lighted stairwell. Every footstep echoed. Slade mourned the loss of his specialized helmet, resolving to lift earplugs from the first convenience store they happened to run into. He also didn’t hop the railing an’ plummet several stories to the basement floor like he wanted to. “I win,” he’d shouted up a dozen times before, inevitably reaching their destination before his mission partner had.

   That would have been a risky move even with both working ankles. He hadn’t cared about the potential damage. A few hours of rest an’ even the worst of internal injuries had magically knitted themselves back together. Used to be---

   “The bedroom door,” he finally muttered as the loudest pinging thought finally made it through to his ability to form speech. “Why did you lock it?”

   “A red bloody herring.” Billy slammed open the door marked “EXIT”, barely catching it before it bashed into the wall, and slipped into the shadows in the garage outside. “They’ll spend at least five minutes tryna figure out why we locked up a seemingly important room; that gives us five precious minutes of a head start. Who were you gonna call, by the way?”

   Slade hesitated as he scanned the rows of parked cars. “What?”

   “Not someone with a helicopter, I hope.”

   “My…” His bonds thrummed. He ignored them. “My pups are… I think… they’re worried. They must’ve felt my pain somehow, or… Maybe… during the fight…”

   “You rebonded with Rose an’ Joey? No, no no no, please don’t tell me you got Grayson---”

   Slade shoved off of a wall for balance as he followed Billy into the open, gagging. The scuffed plastic of traffic cones and the stuffy exhaust from hundreds of cars and the faint thread of angry instincts on the hunt--- too-much-too-much-too-much---

   “---ade,” Billy’s voice filtered in from a muffled distance. “What’s goin’ on? You had better not be fucking with me, mate---”

   “I’m… fine; it’s fine.” Slade forced himself to keep walking, pushing back against every sense now, every vibration of his own weight on his own two feet, every spike of pain through his skull that threatened to shake loose the iron hold keeping both bonds shut. “There’s one on the second story, two down Row F; turn left.”

   “Into the bloody street? We’re sitting ducks without a roof---”

   “Now.”

   Billy pivoted without a second’s hesitation, eyes down, and sped quickly across the street just outside. The echoing emptiness of the parking garage folded away behind them, opening up a world of honking-blaring-calling-stabbing-laughing-bright-loud-crowded. Slade shook his head violently, hurrying to keep up. Billy was fuckin’ fast for such a short geezer. “Right.”

   Billy turned right, slowing down to blend better with the night life. “How’re those patches holding up? I can’t smell you.”

   Slade scratched absently at his collarbone, itching the patch through two layers of clothing an’ armor. He couldn’t smell himself either, and it raised every hair on the backs of his arms. He was so used to using his scent as an asset, a weapon, not trying to hide it under military-grade scent blockers that would probably fail within half an hour of their application.

   A growling bark four blocks away made him jump, skip a step. Easy. One wildfire at a time. “Fine. Go left down this alley; they’re moving faster.”

   “I guess they know we left the building.” Billy turned left, limp ponytail bouncing lightly against the back of his neck. The handle of his backpack was torn. What if Slade needed to haul him to safety?

   Just throw him over your shoulder, idiot, some part of him snapped.

   Why are we thinking about this right now? the rest of him asked hysterically, far too slow for an inside thought. He should have been processing at nine times speed. What the actual HELL--- Why wasn’t that dog shutting up?! “Right--- straight.”

   Billy stopped short. “Which is it, right or straight?”

   Slade shoved him into an alcove off the side of the alleyway, pressing them against a door that smelled like peeling paint. A flashlight beam swept past from the roofs above, hesitating on a full dumpster before disappearing.

   “Left,” Slade whispered hoarsely. “THEN straight. “We need to double back; they’ve made our trail.”

   “We don’t have a trail.” Billy shoved him out of his personal space, hopping back onto uneven cobblestones. “Left, then straight. Across the road?”

   Slade wrestled with the suddenly violent urge to tuck Billy under his chin, to shield him, to hide him away where no one could ever hurt--- “Yes.”

   Billy cursed again as they continued walking. “We’ll join that group of pedestrians, cross at the walk. What’s with you? Too feral or too fuckin’ bombed?”

   Slade lifted his lip in a silent snarl. “I’m not high, I told you.”

   “Yeah, well, first time for everything.” The sarcastic asshole stopped near the back of the pack, glancing around to scan the rooftops. The bright traffic lights stabbed into the back of Slade’s socket, making his eye water. Everything was sharp, stretched, like trying to see through a blur of rain---

   “CAPTAIN!!!”

   “---on’t--- without me--- oh!!!”

   “STOP---”

   “Fuckin’ HELL, Colonel---” Something yanked on his belt loop, tugging him back--- “It’s a massacre out there!!!”

   The whistling shells were too loud, too loud, too loud--- Whose blood was in his mouth? “He can’t just---!!!”

   “He can do whatever he damn well wants to!!!” Wintergreen screamed in his face, barely audible over the shower of dirt, exploding fireballs on every side--- “He’s distracting them so we can retreat!!!”

   “Oy, are you mad?” Someone tugged on his wrist. “They’re covering Fifth, Wilson, even I can see ‘em; why are we turning?”

   He threw his arms up, covering his face. Dirt pelted his sweaty skin, carving grooves into his cheeks. The saltwater stung. “FUCK---”

   “Slade.” Slight pressure on his shoulders, further now--- They were pinned, they would never get out--- “Slade. Where are you right now?”

   “I’m…” His mouth was so dry. Billy wasn’t supposed to look this old. “I’m supposed to lead them out. Why did the captain leave? He could have lead them out.”

   “Fuck--- Nanking, is that it? Please oh please tell me you remember that joke---”

   “It’s such a bad joke.”

   “There you are, mucker. Focus on me, ey? I remember that day; it was an absolute massacre---”

   “Why did he…” Slade’s boot caught; he stumbled. They were running… Why were they supposed to be running? They weren’t FAST enough---

   “The cap’n ran to pull their fire.”

   “I got his… his blood in my mouth…”

   “No, that was Collins’ blood; listen to me. You lead the men back through the trenches; then what happened?”

   “We… we won’t make it.” Slade blinked hard, but all he could see was dirt walls, all he could smell was stuffy air, coming rain, and then the downpour was flooding the trenches… The dirt was too dry to absorb the water; their routes transformed into rivers, slowing them down… “Someone’s… drowning, I think…”

   “What did we do when we got back to base, mate?”

   Slade pressed his hand over his racing heartbeat. There was a letter. He was supposed to run the letter.

   “That’s right Slade, we ran---”

   “The trench is caved in.”

   “We turned left… LEFT…”

   Bullets peppered the ground around his feet. Now or then, now-or-then, noworthen? “You can’t keep up.”

   “Bullshit; I kept up just fine. D’you remember the dead horse? Up an’ over---”

   He vaulted a brick wall. Where had the brick wall…? He still had blood in his mouth. “I’m trying.”

   “You’re doing fine, mate; turn right--- What happened next?”

   “Faster.” His legs burned. “We need to go faster. They’re not going to wait, they…”

   “You need to deliver that bloody piece of paper. There it is, that’s it--- don’t worry about me; keep running--- keep run---”

   His heartbeat was so damn loud. It was raining, flooding, and it tasted like his tears. He spotted a truck pulling out, and then he remembered, he thought; he could hitch a ride if he ran fast enough. Dive--- roll--- SLAM. A box dug into his back, creaking, and he gasped for air as the road flowed away behind them. Dizzy, he leaned into it, pulled by the gravity of telescoping vision until someone yanked him back.

   “Oy.” Billy tapped on the rear window of the cab with his pistol. “You, keep driving.”

   Slade gasped sharply, pulling air past the band around his lungs. “What… just happened?”

   “A memory.” Billy collapsed next to him, hunkering down as he also heaved for breath. “Get lower ya bloody dumbarse.”

   Slade sprawled flat, looking up at the winking stars. Tops of buildings rushed past, but the reeling dizziness began to subside. “Where are we?”

   “Physically? Still escaping Berlin.”

   “What are we…”

   “I’ll need at least three dinners before answering that fuckin’ question.”

   Slade groaned distantly, throwing an arm over his face. His ankle was making itself known. Adrenaline tended to block out that sort of thing. “What are we doing in here? Who’s… driving?”

   “Dunno; some poor sod about to wet his pants. We just need to get outside the city limits. Our tail almost caught sight of us while we were running.”

   “Nanking---”

   “Christ, that could have been a better plan. We need to get to a safehouse, someplace with resources---”

   “I thought we---”

   “Maybe the one that borders the airport, but d’you think they’ll be watching? I just restocked, too; I just know there’s a hot cup o’ noodles calling my name---”

   “Wintergreen---”

   “Yeah, yeah, Wilson; I remember.” The beta sighed, raspy. “I was there. I walked you through it.”

   “How…” A laugh pressed against Slade’s throat. It wasn’t funny. “How d’you remember?”

   “How do you?”

   “Just… the details. How…”

   “I’ve spent decades recording your sorry life, you undead bastard. Telling a story.” Billy’s knuckles rapped tiredly against Slade’s ribs. “That one didn’ need to be in writing. Friday the sixteenth, June, nineteen eighty-eight. I remember.”

   Slade pressed his hand over his thundering heartbeat. There was no letter now. Instead, he felt the burner in his breast pocket.

   He WOULD call home. Just… not yet.

Chapter Text

   He looked so fuckin’ old when he was sleeping.

   Slade pulled his hazy attention away from Billy’s worn face, lines of age etched into leather skin, to continue the all-important task of pawing through their bags. They hadn’t had a chance to stop yet, to lose their tail or compare notes. Most of their time was spent eating or sleeping. Or trying to do those things. Despite his body’s diminished ability to heal or crush stone or tank the damage that came with being thrown through three brick walls, he was hungry all the time. It was harder to eat regularly when you couldn’t stop moving.

   They were strangers breathing the same air, sharing the same food, and sleeping--- or trying to--- in the same crappy motel bedrooms. Right now they were parked in the middle of nowhere, Poland, with a stolen pickup truck an’ about seventy dollars to their name. Slade had resources… offshore accounts… pilots on retainer, people who owed him favors, even blackmail leverage over a few local politicians.

   Because of the idiotic contract--- and his lack of knowledge about its origin--- he couldn’t access any of it.

   Well--- okay. Maybe his deep deep accounts. Those would draw attention when active, but not the kind a bounty hunter could pick up. More like the underlords of the biggest crime syndicates in the world.

   Pick your poison.

   Slade silenced another call on autopilot, sending his fifth thumbs-up in response, and dug through the depths of Billy’s bag. All the usuals were there--- Easy-to-carry food, flashlights, a variety of currency in cash, and some burners. The more inconspicuous items were buried in hidden pockets. A couple of old steroid painkillers from HIVE… Liar.  A folded photograph… and a notebook.

   Tossing another glance at his sleeping--- friend?--- Slade leaned back against the foot of the dinky twin, settling into a slightly more comfortable position on the floor, and peeled open the waterstained photo. It was a candid of Slade--- and Rose.

   He squinted in the horrible yellow street lamp light that peeked through the window. The Slade in the picture looked the exact same aside from shorter hair, but Goddamn, Rose looked young. They were cleaning something on a table. Guns, maybe, and she was smirking, both eyes still intact. So was he--- an actual smile. They must have shared a joke.

   He couldn’t remember this moment at all.

   Scraping his tongue over his teeth, he set the picture aside, trying to forget how fond the old asshole had always been of Rose, and cracked open the notebook. The pointy slant of a scrawl dictated regular lists at first, groceries and indecipherable numbers and even some long division, which was hilarious for some reason--- They’d never been able to do that in their heads. Then it slowly shifted as the tiny crinkled pages turned under his fingers. Away from mundane, everyday, necessary life, and toward journal entries.

   He was so sure that the first few “Still fuckin’ constipated” kind of entries were a cover, a smoke screen for anyone who happened to flip through, that he almost skipped over them entirely. His shifting line of sight caught the word sick. He zoned in, flipping through a bit more carefully. “Still bloody sick” and “Can’t stop smelling him” and “Might be losing my edge” stuck out like skinned thumbs. Biting the inside of his cheek, he scanned until he found a more detailed entry.

   “I think they might have cottoned on”, it read. “Not that I’ve left a trail to follow, but I need to keep my eyes peeled; this element is out for blood & there’s no outrunning it all if I’m caught. Oh, and another thing. Stop being a bloody hero. You can make the world a better place without mucking about like an absolute buffoon thirty years younger. Watch your back. There’s no one to watch it for you.”

   Slade breathed out through his nose before pinching it. He didn’t know how to label the tightness in his sternum. He read on.

   “Bastard,” one entry read, and he almost jumped out of his skin he could hear it so clearly. “If ever one day I stop throwing up from a weakened immune system & hearing things that aren’t there because of fucking feral senses, I’ll kill you for this. Skin your bones and bury you all over that stupid little yard by that idiotic cottage you made us stay in for that month in Burma and then MAYBE you’ll feel a FRACTION of the agony you caused me. They’ll never stop finding your body, those who’ll care to look.”

   Slade rested the notebook against his knee, winded. Jesus. Tell me how you REALLY feel.

   The mattress creaked. “Havin’ a good read?”

   Slade flipped the book shut, handing it over. He didn’t want to look up. “Mph… bit of a bore.”

   “You’re tellin’ me.” The notebook disappeared. “Y’know it’s not nice to look through other people’s things. Didn’t Frannie ever teach you?”

   Slade shrugged unrepentantly, wrapping his fingers around his own wrist. “Your journals have never been off-limits to me before.”

   “That’s because they were about you, y’arsehole. What d’you think I had to write about then, the Goddamn color of my mismatched socks?”

   Sorry, Slade should have said, but what made it past his tongue was “Why don’t your socks match?”

   “Well… if you must know. I stole one off a body on a solo gig last month. Trophy, you know.”

   Slade finally glanced up to catch a glimpse of that silver mustache in the dark. “Seriously?”

   “No.” Billy slid over the edge of the bed, propping himself up against the side on Slade’s left. “You got a little more gullible in our time apart.”

   Slade huffed impatiently. “I can’t smell you. I can’t interpret your crap sense of humor.”

   “Yeah, probably because you smell enough for the both of us.”

   “I do not.”

   “You do too. Like desperation and loneliness and feral wet cat. It’s sickening.”

   “That’s not why I can’t smell you, Billy.”

   “Don’t call me Billy.”

   “You’re still hiding from me.” Slade shoved one hand through his hair, baring his teeth at nothing. This was less bearable than watching the bastard sleep. “Can’t we just… straight talk?”

   “You want that?”

   “I want that.”

   “Well alright then, Slade, here it is: I’m dying.”

   Slade’s blood froze. He twisted quickly, adrenaline-sharpened senses picking up the little crinkles around Billy’s eyes. He was staring at the light through the window. He was SMILING.

   “What,” Slade finally said, deadly quiet.

   Billy knocked his head against the mattress, sniffing stoically. “Most people cannae really survive pack sickness at our age, y’know. Not WELL.”

   “How…” Slade’s heartbeat was so damn loud. “How long do you have?”

   “Christ, it’s not like that. Routine sicknesses an’ muscle deterioration, not bloody cancer. I’ve got a few good years left in these old bones. Only that’s why you can’t smell me, Pep. I’ve been just’s feral as you.”

   Slade rolled to his feet, trying to shake the feeling back into his fingers. “On your left, Pep!!! Damn, almost as slow as me dear old mum. You two should have a deadeye contest sometime; see who’s the better shot.”

   Pepper. A nickname. It was funny because it made no sense, because “salt and pepper” didn’t apply when you were a platinum blond instead of black or brunet, but Slade had still gone white before his friends.

   “Wait,” he remembered laughing three lifetimes ago. “If I’m pepper, YOU have to be salt. I guess that makes sense.”

   “Hang on now, that’s no nickname.”

   “Because you’re always SALTY.”

   “I get it, Sergeant. Go to sleep, will ya?”

   He hadn’t been called Pepper in years. Before the break. Before the separation. Before every excuse he gave himself to wave away what he’d done to tear them apart.

   “I never thought of that,” he found himself saying.

   “You didn’t want to think.”

   “Are you saying this is my fault?”

   “AHAHAH--- Oh, you’re not joking.”

   “I never meant---”

   “Ooo, the title of your biography, innit? Right under ‘Good Intentions’.”

   Slade spun on his heel, snarling. “Stop making this about me!!!”

   “It’s always about you, isn’t it?” Billy rose to his feet, cold fury laced through every syllable. “It’s always your Goddamn story, right? The plot twists and the sacrifices and the necessary evils you tell yourself are worth it. How many times have you tried to do away with your own life? It wouldn’t be so fucking selfish if no one would miss you, but you don’t live in a vacuum, so you decided to save us all the trouble, yeah? Break bonds an’ burn bridges while you still had the chance to watch us suffer for it---”

   “I said I’m SORRY!!!” Slade’s heel hit a corner; why was he backing up? “Attaboy Pep!!! You’re up one-oh against Sergeant Tats---” “What do you want me to do, BEG?!”

   Billy threw his hands over his head, lines of yellow light sliding across his skin. “YES!!! Show a Goddamn emotion for once!!!”

   “Don’t---” Slade knocked his head back against the wall. His eye twitched faster than he could track; his side exploded in pain; his chest--- “SLADE!!!” “Don’t think this is over.” “You couldn’t have mentioned this BEFORE-ORE-GET---”

   He’d never seen such a clean hole carved through his kidney before. He stared at it as it bled. He’d never stop bleeding if he stayed on his feet.

   He couldn’t find his feet---

   Slade’s body gasped around gaping flesh. “Don’t ask that of me. Don’t---”

   “Don’t…”

   “It’s alright, Colonel; we’re just---”

   “---each me before your son---”

   “---killed my boy!!!”

   “---will despise you---”

   “Monster---”

   “Man of rage.”

   “Show me you’re a man---”

   “---en don’t cry.”

   He was so fucking small. Slade almost stepped on him; he was in such a hurry to get out the door. Orders, contracts, they were all the same. He needed something different now, something that would give vent to the fire pulsing through his veins. He BURNED. He couldn’t explain; she didn’t understand, especially at night. He needed space. He needed OUT.

   He felt wooden floorboards beneath his knees. He had lowered himself to his pup’s level. He could smell the boy’s salty tears, could hear his mate storming from room to room in the back, angrily cleaning, could sense the crunch of approaching tires on dried dirt down the road.

   It was far too much.

   “You’re the man of the house now,” he said, and he didn’t even have to think. “Men don’t cry.”

   The four-year-old sniffed stubbornly, nodding, and as he shoved himself to his feet, muted fire propelling him toward the next fight, the next battle, the next war, he wondered for the first time if… and how… the experiment had tampered with his mind.

   He left tearful blue eyes behind with the self-soothing thought that it didn’t matter. He would have said it anyway.

   “Don’t---”

   “Slade---”

   “DON’T---”

   “Slade.”

   “Don’t!!!”

   “Slade. Look at me.”

   He gasped for cool air, jerking away from a calloused hand; his head rolled against the wall. He shoved his feet against the carpet, fighting to stay present, and dug his fingernails into sheetrock. What is happening to me?

   “Oh Slade,” someone whispered.

   “Don’t,” he hissed back, and his spit plipped into the soft carpet. He lurched over his knees, then shoved himself back to compensate, slamming his spine against the wall before he could find his balance. He slid until he was on his ass, bracing himself against the reeling pull of then-now-don’t-never-wouldn’t-stop-can’t. “Don’t TOUCH me.”

   The hand disappeared; so did the voice. It didn’t mean anything at first. Then, as oxygen entered his lungs in quick little bursts, he started to feel cold.

   He flexed his hand against his side, staring at the damn ceiling. Popcorn. Gross. It wasn’t even his house… He didn’t think?... but he could have pulled off a remodel if he had the time.

   Why didn’t he have the time? Too much time; not enough time. Too… too hot… too much.

   He was so fucking cold.

   “That happen to you often?”

   He had to clear his throat before he was able to speak. “Not when I’m awake.”

   “Just the three times since we met back up, then?”

   “Four.”

   “Three an’ a half.”

   “I was…” His throat ached. He was going to have to get used to that. “I told you. Something is wrong with me.”

   “They’ve got doctors for that.”

   “I know what those ‘doctors’ can do.”

   “Yeah, fair enough, but I dunno what’s wrong with you either, mate. I’m not magic.”

   “I just…” Slade pressed his thumb into his eye socket until it burned. “I needed you. How many times are you going to make me say it?”

   “As many as it takes.”

   He… didn’t have a good response for that.

   “So you held it together…” The voice drew a little closer, crouching nearby… “until you found me.”

   Sorry, he should have said. This was the perfect opportunity for it. Instead… “I missed you.”

   A slow grin split Billy’s grizzled face. “I missed you, too.”

   Slade twisted away, groaning. “Don’t LOOK at me.”

   “Is that gonna happen again?”

   “Not unless I’m…” Emotional, he didn’t say. “…freaking out.”

   “Then I suggest we leave for the crappy Mickey D’s down the block, ey? Neither of us is gonna keep sleeping an’ I need M&Ms.”

   Slade grunted as he finally found his feet, scrubbing crusty tear tracks from his upper lip. “Tryna get me to a secondary location, soldier?”

   The beta combed his hair back from his face, sighing quietly. “Trying to make this work.”

   Slade took a breath from his stomach. His veins didn’t burn anymore. “I’ll get the keys.”