Archive of Our Own ^beta

Demon blood glittered black in the otherworldly light and smoked faintly on Slade’s blade, stinking abominably of sulfur. He grimaced and got most of it off with a flick of his wrist, the rest with a rag that he dropped quickly onto the desert sand as it began to disintegrate. Promising himself a more thorough cleaning later, Slade returned the sword to the scabbard on his back and squinted across the space between the dunes to determine how the others had fared.

The alternate dimension they’d traveled to didn’t seem to have a sun, but the blank, white sky cast the uniform brightness of a summer noontime. Beneath it, iron-red sands rolled out in every direction. Slade didn’t much care for Trigon’s decorating choices, and fortunately didn’t have to deal with them much longer. They’d won the battle, and that obnoxious demon was again trapped in the cloudy, red confines of the gem worn by his daughter.

Slade looked to her first, Raven the witch. She had her head bent beneath her cloak, but she let it fall back as he walked over, met his gaze, and nodded once. Her eyes were clear when Slade searched them, no sign of Trigon in there again attempting to take possession of his favorite vessel.

Around them, the rest of the Titans were gathering, flying or walking or limping over, independently or using each other for support. Slade began a mental count, starting with Raven, brushing off her cloak. The Flash next, a blur of super-speed on the horizon that snapped into smiling focus a few feet away. Cyborg slightly singed and Changeling in green-skinned human form, leaning on each other. Starfire and Troia, flying through the air and landing lightly on the sand. At their backs, Arsenal slid down a dune and came to his feet looking none the worse for wear, though the quiver on his back had been largely depleted of arrows.

Nightwing, of course. The leader, a scuff mark on his cheek and a cut on his arm that had made it through the black and blue body suit. He stopped in the center of the semi-circle and looked about as Slade had, assessing his team.

“Everyone ok?” he called.

Words of assent came in reply from every direction, except—Nightwing scanned the area, then turned to Slade with a frown beneath his domino mask. Slade gave nothing back. If he did, if he moved or spoke or lifted his own mask to let them see his face, the tidal wave of panic rising over him would fall, and it wasn’t time for that yet. He couldn’t admit it was time for that yet. As long as he clung to that belief, he could live in a moment where he didn’t have to deal with the possibility that the worst might be true.

“Deathstroke?” Nightwing asked, cautious like he knew, and he did know; he was Bat-trained and a vigilante for most of his life and one of the most annoyingly intelligent people Slade ever met, so he had to know. He proved as much when he began to walk over, the Nightwing persona dropping off though the mask and suit remained, the responsibility of it falling from his shoulders like a shroud.

It was Dick Grayson, then, who stepped close to him and asked, “Slade, have you seen—?”

“Here!” a voice called, and Slade turned so quickly he almost fell over.

A solitary figure emerged from behind the dune—just one, and a tight clench of fear warred with Slade’s relief—Ravager. The black and orange armor modeled after Slade’s own Deathstroke had a few dents and scratches, but his girl was walking fine, nothing visibly wrong with her save that she was by herself.

Jogging over, Slade met her halfway. “Rose,” he said, hand on her shoulder. “Jericho?”

He couldn’t say his name. The habit of separation came from Slade’s army days, a barrier in case—

“I’m here,” Rose said, pulling her mask off.

Her eyes were a bright, unnatural green that didn’t fit her face. Slade stared, licked his lips. “Joe?” he asked.

“It’s both of us,” Rose told him, and now that Slade was paying attention, he could hear her voice echoing oddly. “Joey got his leg hurt, so I’m giving him a ride back. It’s also giving me one hell of a headache, so can we get a move-on?”

With a final squeeze to her shoulder, Slade let go. “Nightwing?” he called. “Jericho’s here with Ravager. Is that everyone?”

“That’s everyone,” Nightwing replied—as they’d both known already, as well as what Slade was really asking. “Raven?”

The rest were already crowding in behind her, and Slade joined with his children—two of them, in one body. Holding her hands up, Raven called out some magic words that Slade couldn’t use and so didn’t care to remember, and he looked down just in time to avoid being temporarily blinded by the flash of light. When he raised his head again, a perfect circle about eight feet in diameter spun in the air, a blue sky and a view of Manhattan visible through it.

Bringing up the rear, Slade and Rose-and-Joey stepped through and onto the lawn at the base of Titans Tower. He took a moment as Nightwing got a final headcount and Raven closed the portal, feeling the warmth of the sun and the cool breeze blowing off the bay surrounding the island, taking in the boats sailing past the city in the distance. The deep, uncanny expanse of whatever circle of hell they’d been in hadn’t struck him until now that he was out of it.

Then, Rose gripped his arm and grunted, and Joey burst from her fully-formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. No matter how many times Slade witnessed his son’s power, it always managed to startle him in its suddenness. He still recovered quickly enough to catch Joey as he swayed on his bad leg, steadying him as he adjusted his weight.

«Pops, I’m fine,» Joey signed before he could ask, an exasperated look on his face.

Unlike Rose, Joey had foregone a mask with his Jericho suit, opting to dress in a vest over a baggy, white tunic with tights and boots that Slade always thought would allow him to blend in nicely at at Renaissance fair. That meant—once Slade removed his own mask—he only had to pull Joey’s collar down a bit to scent him thoroughly. Joey sighed soundlessly past his ruined vocal cords, tolerating the contact as Slade rubbed his face against his son’s neck. The second Slade let up, though, he readily returned the gesture.

Slade held his arm out, and Rose pressed against his other side, allowing him to repeat the scent-marking on her. By the end of it, their pheromones hung thick in the air, Joey and Slade’s omega and musky-sweet, Rose’s sharper alpha winding through it like a complimentary note. Pulling back, Slade kept a hand clasped on each of his children’s arms for a moment longer, aware of the Titans in the background, checking on each other and giving them space.

He let go and breathed out, mellowing along with their combined scents, his body at last releasing its tension after battle. Only then did Slade feel like they’d won.

*

Two years before Slade was born, he’d had a brother. His brother had been a small, sickly thing that lived for five days and died nameless, buried in a grave marked by a wooden cross. The birth certificate, thin and wrinkled between Slade’s fingers, contained his father’s name and his mother’s, the top space that would have gone to his brother left blank.

Seven years after Slade was born, his mother had bled to death in childbirth, the baby following her a mere few hours later. That other would-be sibling’s certificate wouldn’t help Slade, though, so he left it in the drawer along with his own and carefully tucked the one belonging to his unnamed older brother under his shirt.

Painstaking work with an ancient typewriter housed by the local post office put Slade’s name in the blank space, and that was it, he was ready. The next morning, he hoisted his backpack over his shoulder, left his drunken father passed out and snoring on the couch, and began the twenty-minute walk down out of the holler, the dirt road so steep and narrow it took both luck and prayer to get any sort of vehicle up it after a rain.

Mr. Turner had been Slade’s math teacher the previous year and met him where he’d promised he would, right where the dirt road hit gravel and if followed in one direction, led into town. Instead, after Slade folded his body into the cab’s passenger seat—at sixteen, he was already bigger and bulkier than most grown men—Mr. Turner pointed his pickup in the other direction, and they took off towards the highway.

That part was exciting; Slade had rambled all over the backcountry setting snares and fishing in cricks and shooting game in hunting season and collecting what plants and mushrooms he knew were good to eat, but he’d never been as far as the interstate. He watched the big semi-trucks the most, gripping his knees when Mr. Turner’s comparatively small pickup passed them by, the speed of it astounding. Even that grew boring after awhile, the steady road lulling Slade with its monotony, and the rest of the drive passed in the blur of the landscape and the crooning of the Johnny Cash tape playing from the pickup’s stereo.

Just as the sun had risen about halfway to lunchtime, they arrived at the outskirts of Lexington. Slade tried not to gape at it like the country hick he was: the people, the buildings, the traffic. So much of it, moving so fast. But Slade had a map, and he had a mission. He unfolded the paper map of Lexington he’d gotten from the gas station back home across his lap and directed Mr. Turner accordingly.

“Welp,” Mr. Turner said when Slade told him that here was fine, he could let him out. “I’ve got my errands to run, and I’ll pick you up in a few hours.” He looked unsubtly past Slade out the passenger side window. “You sure you’ll be ok?”

“Yes, Mr. Turner,” Slade said, trying to make his voice deep and relaxed and grown-up. “Thanks for the ride.”

He took care not to slam the door as he got out, and then Slade looked both ways, waited for the traffic to clear, and jogged across the street. There, he waited beneath a tree until he heard the rumble of the old pickup’s engine start again behind him, fading away into the sounds of traffic as it drove off. Slade took a breath, squared his shoulders, and walked up to the little, glass-paneled storefront Mr. Turner had been looking at earlier.

The sign on it read: Army Recruiting Office. Slade pushed through the door, doing his best to project an air of confidence, of someone who was allowed to be here and knew exactly what he was doing.

A bell above the door jingled faintly as Slade entered. No one greeted him, the single room consisting of a few chairs in a waiting area near the front and a desk further back, currently unoccupied. The shabbiness of the space struck him first, the scuff marks on the walls and the shadows of dead bugs visible through the opaque light fixtures in the ceiling. In the corner, an air conditioning unit rattled and leaked. Slade stood uncertainly in the middle of the space, trying to decide whether he ought to sit down.

Before he could, a toilet flushed somewhere in the building, followed by the sound of running water. A minute later, a man came out of a door at the back of the room, partially obscured by a potted plant. He perked up as he saw Slade, hurriedly wiping his still-damp hands on his slacks.

“Hello, hello! Sorry to keep you waiting,” the man greeted warmly. He looked about forty and wore a long-sleeved button-down and a tie without a jacket. When he smiled, Slade didn’t trust it, but he shook the proffered hand and allowed the recruiter to lead him to a seat in front of the desk.

Slade was ready. He had his fake birth certificate, his social security card, and the GED he’d earned earlier that summer. At his age, his teachers found it impressive if disappointing that he didn’t seem interested in college, but Slade didn’t know how the hell he’d afford college, and the GED hadn’t been too much trouble to get. His lack of a driver’s license he planned to explain by how he hadn’t seen the point when he lacked the money for a car, but that he’d driven his share of tractors when a farmer needed extra hands for harvesting season, and he was quick to learn.

That last part about the driver’s license had the incidental benefit of being true.

In the end, Slade didn’t need any of it. The recruiter asked him to stand up again, and when Slade had, walked around him a slow, assessing circle. He stopped in front of him, tapping his chin in thought.

“You’re an omega variant?” the recruiter asked.

The directness surprised Slade a little, though the question itself didn’t. “Yes,” he said; that much was obvious in his size if not his scent.

“Not done growing yet either, I bet,” the recruiter murmured, the conjecture sounding half to himself.

If not for the man’s mild beta scent and the complete lack of arousal in his excitement, Slade might have mistaken his interest for attraction. As it was, the attention felt more like a judge at the county fair sizing up a prize heifer, something Slade’s classmates used to compare him to when they thought he couldn’t hear. 

Beginning to suspect he might not need to, Slade played his ace in the hole to see how it would land. “I haven’t had children yet, sir,” he said. “I reckon I’ll grow some more when I do.”

The recruiter’s face lit up like Christmas, and he rushed to get the paperwork, and Slade knew he’d never needed to worry. About his forgery, or his age, or the sickening outcome where they figured out who he really was and called his father.

He was an omega. The army was always going to want him.

*

Some quality time with a whetstone and some more with a rag and polish removed the last of the stinking demon blood from Slade’s sword and returned it to gleaming sharpness. He tested it out on the dummies in a training field at the base of the Tower, reducing them to straw and burlap in a matter of seconds. The ease of it left him restless, the nearby obstacle course tempting with its proximity sensors and laser drones, but Slade wasn’t here to rack up a bill. Sheathing his sword again, he wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his arm and turned his face into the early morning breeze.

God, he felt hot. Slade frowned, holding onto that realization, turning it over in his mind. Come to think of it, he’d felt hot ever since they’d left that desert hell dimension the afternoon before, his body just this side of burning. Like an oncoming fever, but Slade didn’t get fevers, hadn’t gotten sick at all the decades since the army’s serum made him what he was.

A trickle of sweat snaked down between his shoulder blades, underneath the tank top he’d opted for along with a pair of loose-fitting cotton pants in place of his Deathstroke suit. The weather didn’t justify the uncomfortable warmth of his body, the sun not quite above the Manhattan skyline and the sea breeze pleasantly cool. Neither did the exertion, a word he could barely even apply to the simple act of walking out of the Tower and slicing through a few dummies.

The mystery of it mounted alongside his unease. Just another reason to get off this damned island, as he should have done the moment he stepped through Raven’s portal. But Joey and Rose had asked him to stay with an enthusiasm just shy of begging, and Titans Tower had no shortage of spare rooms, and it had posed a moderately less embarrassing option than asking one of the flying Titans to take him back to his penthouse in the city.

Now, Slade didn’t have a choice. As soon as one of his children woke up, he would have them call a ferry to take him across. From there, the journey to his penthouse was simple and short, and Villain was only a phone call away. In Slade’s line of work, the man’s off-the-books clinic and his flexible sense of medical ethics came as a distinct bonus.

Sighing through his nose, Slade leaned his sheathed sword against a post that had previously housed one of the dummies. And, because he wasn’t an animal, picked up a rake at the corner of the yard and used it to wrangle all the loose straw and burlap into a designated holding area. More sweat beaded on his skin, an uncomfortable nuisance that Slade did his best to ignore. He cleared the rest of the straw, put the rake back in its place, and then became aware of the prickling sensation that meant someone was watching him.

His sword lay about six feet away, or two and a half seconds if he lunged for it, a distance Slade calculated on automatic reflex. When he lifted his head up, though, he found only Joey, coming around the side of the Tower past the obstacle course and walking towards him across the grass. Barefoot, which Slade refrained from scolding him for as he got closer—his son was twenty-five, and if he hadn’t learned better by now, cutting his foot on something might do the trick.

At the edge of the yard, Joey stopped and yawned. «Hey, Pops,» he signed. «We’re making breakfast. Are you hungry?»

We almost certainly expanded past Joey and Rose to the other Titans, and the thought of eating breakfast with a bunch of twenty-something superheroes, especially this group of twenty-something superheroes, sounded slightly less appealing than going toe-to-toe with Trigon again. Slade tried to keep his face bland and his distaste private as he signed back.

«Thanks, but no thanks. I’ve got to get back to the penthouse.»

«Pops,» Joey signed emphatically. «I know you didn’t eat anything today. Come in and get some food.»

He resembled his mother uncannily when he got like this, Addie’s stubborn determination in his raised eyebrows and the set of his jaw. Mostly, Joey resembled Slade—both of them tall and broad and even bigger than most omegas, Joey blonde as Slade had been at that age. Addie came through more subtly in the line of Joey’s shoulders when he shrugged, or in the way his face scrunched up when he was dealing with a particularly thorny problem that required all of his concentration. And every time, Slade felt like he’d missed a step going downstairs, that little jolt and swoop in his stomach.

Bravado pushed him past it. «Or what?» Slade asked. «Are you going to take over my body and force me to eat?»

«If that’s what it takes,» Joey told him crisply.

Yet Slade was still looking him in the eye, and Joey still wasn’t doing it. Slade snorted and said, «If you were going to do it, you wouldn’t have given me any warning.»

Slade picked his sword up as he said it, though, and he followed Joey back into the Tower without further complaint. The building housed several kitchens and dining areas, enough for a team of superheroes to coexist without strangling each other over differences in diet and schedule. Bypassing the large one on the ground floor, Joey led the way to the elevator, and then up to a more private level near the top. Up here, the sun streamed in over the Manhattan skyline and the water around the island, a view that would have been peaceful if not for the cadence of chatter that greeted them. Slade braced himself preemptively as he entered the room.

An open floor plan featured a sleek, modern kitchen and a lounge area with low couches and wide armchairs centered around a giant television. Cars raced past on the screen, the shape of the vehicles F1 rather than Nascar and therefore of interest to Slade only insofar it as it provided a distraction for the Titans watching it, sleep-rumpled with half-eaten plates. Grabbing his own from the counter, Slade forked on some scrambled eggs and a few slices of bacon and was about to move onto the pancakes when Logan appeared, hovering at his elbow.

Literally, as Logan had taken the form of a hummingbird, the true nature of it betrayed the Changeling’s dull, unnatural green. Slade looked for Joey—the damned shapeshifter was his friend—but his son was busying himself at the coffee pot and resolutely not letting Slade catch his attention. Rolling his good eye, Slade shot the hummingbird a baleful look and set his plate on the counter.

“Don’t make me swat you,” he said.

With a pop more displaced air than sound, Logan transformed into his human shape: a narrow, wiry alpha, green-haired and green-skinned, his canines slightly pointed. His long, tunic-like shirt slipped off one shoulder as he yawned and scratched his head, going down to his knees and stopping above a pair of baggy pajama pants. A far more modest outfit than the skintight suit he wore in the field, though Slade would bet he’d chosen it for comfort rather than decorum.

“Can I help you?” Slade asked flatly, folding his arms.

“Nah. I don’t think so,” Logan said with a weird, little laugh that left Slade nonplussed. “Did you sleep ok?”

Slade squinted at him in suspicion. “Whatever antics you were up to last night, I didn’t hear about it, and I don’t know about it,” he said. “Let’s keep it that way.”

That should have settled things, but Logan—vulgar, loudmouthed Garfield Logan—frowned at Slade in what appeared to be concern. He licked his lips, but before he could say anything else, one of the other Titans called his name.

“Gar!” Victor Stone called a second time, tilting his head back to look at him from where he sat on the couch. “Get over here. You’re missing the race.”

Continuing his trend of unusual behavior, Logan looked back and forth between Slade and Stone, hesitating. “Uh, can you give me a—?”

“C’mon, leave the man alone,” Stone interrupted him, waving him over with a sweep of his arm.

Even then, Logan hesitated a second longer, that concerned frown still on his face. But Stone won out, and Logan transformed into a green-hued crow with another barely audible pop. He flew over silently, human-shaped again as he landed on the couch, and curled against Stone’s side as he lifted his arm to make room. The metal plating that covered most of Victor Stone’s body never seemed to affect his mate, nor did the persistent tinge of motor oil that wove through the omega scent from his remaining human parts. God knew how the physical aspect of their relationship worked; Slade didn’t want to.

A mug of coffee appeared in Slade’s periphery, black, a peace offering from Joey for abandoning him to Garfield Logan. Slade accepted it with a huff, only for Joey to blink back innocently and take a slurping sip from his own mug before ambling off to fix himself a plate. Slade shook his head and looked around for Rose, but she failed to appear. No mugs or abandoned plates that might have indicated her presence sat on any of the tables in the lounge area, and Slade was about to ask Joey about it when he noticed the other person missing. Logan and Stone were there, of course, Starfire and Raven sitting across from them on the big, U-shaped couch, Donna Troy taking up the middle seat. Wally West and Roy Harper were sunk into twin bean bags on the floor, the former with his knee bouncing so fast that his leg blurred, the latter methodically cleaning the arrows in his quiver with cotton balls dipped in rubbing alcohol.

Dick Grayson was nowhere to be found.

That…didn’t mean anything necessarily. Grayson could be sleeping in, or taking a call from Gotham, or any number of other mundane tasks. His absence still struck Slade as off, discordant as a broken note. Where his team was, Grayson also was—and now, he was a missing piece.

And where the hell was Rose?

He got his answer a second later as she arrived through the doorway, walking briskly over to the kitchen. In contrast to her brother and the rest of the Titans in their pajamas, Rose had gotten dressed in jeans and a shirt. Flashing a brief smile, she stood on her toes and kissed Slade’s cheek.

“Morning, Daddy,” she said, bright and sweet.

“…Good morning,” Slade replied slowly, trying to suss out her good mood. If he asked, she’d probably attribute it to saving the world and gratitude for his help, but that wasn’t the whole story; it never was.

Keeping Rose in the corner of his eye, Slade gathered his plate and mug and looked for somewhere to sit that wasn’t with the twenty-something superheroes when their missing leader entered the room. Slade looked up automatically at the movement, and then he stopped, and then he looked again.

Like Rose, Grayson had gotten dressed. Distinctly unlike Rose, he wore a tennis dress with a flared collar and a pleated skirt that went halfway to his knees, the color a deep, electric blue with gold accents along the collar and hems and armholes—sleeveless, which showed off his muscled arms. Some omegas would have found that off-putting, Grayson far removed from the thin, waifish alphas that usually graced the cover of magazines, the suggestive bulge at their crotches the only part of them that could be called big. Slade, for his part, appreciated an alpha who didn’t look like he would break them in half, and he admired the figure Grayson cut as he drew closer. His clean, alpha scent came with him, and he smelled appealing— very appealing.

“Good morning,” Grayson said politely as he reached the counter, picking up a plate without looking at Slade. “Did you sleep well?”

“Believe it or not, you aren’t the first person to ask me that,” Slade replied, but with good humor. “Are you playing doubles later?” he asked with a smirk.

Looking back over his shoulder, Grayson smiled in response. “Are you gonna be on my team?”

“We’ve teamed up enough recently,” Slade told him. “I’d rather play against you.”

Grayson laughed and forked a pancake onto his plate. “Well, we can’t go jeopardizing your reputation,” he said. “We didn’t even pay you to fight Trigon.”

“I’m a mercenary. If the world ends, there’s no contracts and no pay,” Slade said, reciting the functional explanation he always brought out when someone wrongly accused him of being a hero.

“Sure. And Rose and Joey asking you had nothing to do with it,” Grayson said.

At the other end of the counter, Rose and Joey were watching the exchange, a fact Slade was both acutely aware of and determined to ignore. He fixed Grayson with a glare that had no evident effect and sipped his coffee. Setting it down, he leaned in close and spoke in an undertone.

“You seem to be begging for me to disappoint you.”

Ever so slightly, Grayson lifted his chin. “I’d have to expect something first.”

A series of shouts came from the lounge area, indicating that something exciting had happened with the racing cars on the screen. Slade took a half-step back, snorted, and decided to leave it there. As entertaining as a pissing contest with Dick Grayson could be, he preferred it on the rooftops of Blüdhaven when they were both in their suits, not with his children tracking them like a sports match and his breakfast getting cold.

“Dad,” Rose said, calling his attention. “There’s a table on the other side of the floor, if you don’t want to watch the race.”

She knew damn well he didn’t, and Slade nodded in thanks.

“Mind if I join you?” Grayson asked. “I’m not much for F1, either.”

«Of course not,» Joey signed with a smile.

They were off before Slade could think to question it, Rose leading the way, Grayson following Joey with a ripple of his tennis dress. Slade wondered idly which of his little friends the kid was courting, but he didn’t care enough to try and figure it out. Evidently, keeping an eye on Deathstroke took precedence over whoever it was, and Slade rolled his eye as he went after them down the hall. If he were going to attack Nightwing or any of the Titans, he respected them enough to do it head-on, without subterfuge.

At the end of the hall, a small dining room sat blessedly quiet behind a closed door. Its floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto the bay, and its round table held just enough room for the four of them to sit comfortably. Slade ate his breakfast and mostly watched and listened as his children and Grayson talked and signed. The sun sparkled off the water below, the air conditioning kept Slade from sweating too much, and he had to admit, if only privately—it wasn’t terrible.

*

When Slade returned from the mess hall, Adeline was waiting for him.

He nearly stopped on the path to the barracks, just a fraction of a stutter in his step, but he knew she caught it anyway; she was too good not to. Recovering, Slade evened his stride and nodded in greeting, hoping it hid the mingled anticipation and trepidation skating along his nerves. He’d been expecting this, just not tonight.

“Captain Kane,” Slade said as he came to a more deliberate stop in front of her, his hands clasped behind him, at ease. Less formal than the at-attention salute their differences in rank would normally require, more than the Adeline she’d requested he call her at their special training sessions, off alone together in the woods.

In essence, a median that wouldn’t give anyone who might be watching something to gossip about. The quirk of Adeline’s mouth showed she understood, and she responded in kind.

“Major,” she said. “Would you like to take a walk with me?”

The request dissolved the last of Slade’s doubt. As his superior officer, Adeline could order him to take a walk with her if she so chose. Posing it as a question meant she wasn’t approaching him professionally, and if the brass found out about this, they’d be punching the air and patting each other on the back.

Or not. Slade might be a good solider, but he was still a solider. He wasn’t under any illusion that he was irreplaceable.

Meanwhile, Adeline was still in front of him, still waiting for his answer. The moment felt inevitable, the whole of his life leading in a straight line to her starched officer uniform, the low building of the barracks behind her, all of it bathed in soft, evening light. Slade let it wash over him and came to the conclusion that there was only one answer he wanted to give.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

Adeline smiled, though she quickly schooled it away. “Come on, then,” she told him.

Dirt from the path burst up in miniature clouds of dust as they walked, a sign that it hadn’t rained in weeks. Adeline didn’t talk, so neither did Slade, maintaining pace with her in silence. She took him past the training fields where he’d run drills and practiced with the other students and into the wooded part of the camp. The course it housed wasn’t active today, but Slade could still find signs of it now that he knew where to look: the outline of practice targets among the trees, the snare of a rope waiting to catch an unwitting foot.

A mile later, they emerged into a clearing at the edge of the pond. The first time Slade had tried the course, Adeline had caught him there, trapped him in a circle of practice targets and pronounced him dead. She’d bested him—the only alpha who had ever done so, the only one who ever dared to try.

Closer to the pond, the path turned down a narrow strip of land between the water and the trees. Adeline walked along it ahead of him, her boots sinking into the mud, Slade making a game of covering her smaller footprints with his. The path dead-ended in a flat, rocky outcrop, worn down by time, and Adeline took a seat on it, facing the water. Joining her, Slade adjusted his weight on the rock, almost close enough for their shoulders to touch.

What remained of the sunset colored the sky an evening blue, the few clouds across it purple as a bruise. It reflected on the water, a doubled, mirror image interrupted by reeds and lily pads. Frogs and crickets hidden somewhere within it had started their nighttime chorus, croaking and chirping enough to fill the air.

After a few moments, Adeline took in a breath and spoke. “You’ve trained well, Slade,” she began. “Even better than expected.”

“That’s not why you brought me out here,” Slade said.

Quiet again, save for the sounds of life around them. Adeline faced out towards the pond, her face in profile like one stamped on a coin and just as expressionless. Her hand gripped the edge of the rock between them hard enough to turn her knuckles white, and she sat just a little too ramrod straight, and it occurred to Slade suddenly that she was angry.

Neither one of them had much patience for bullshit; it was one of the reasons Slade liked Adeline enough to have this conversation. She inclined her head once as if taking his directness for permission, and finally spoke again.

“They offered me compensation to impregnate you.”

Slade laughed before he could help it. “How desperate are they?”

“It’s the same amount you would get,” Adeline told him.

Very desperate, then. “They’ve waited eight years,” Slade said. “They want to see results.”

“You’re the youngest decorated war hero on record,” Adeline replied, some of the anger in her body creeping into her voice. “What else do they want?”

“More. It’s always more,” Slade said readily. “You’ve been serving longer than me. You know that.” He looked at her sidelong, trying to figure out how to phrase the next part delicately, but that had never been his strong suit. He gave up and asked, “What part of it bothers you?”

“The goddamn nerve of them,” Adeline said. She looked at him, then quickly looked away. “Did you know I was an alpha before you applied to train at Camp Washington?”

He knew what she was really asking; despite the wording, the question wasn’t actually about him. Omegas made up all of the other trainees selected for the program at Camp Washington, unsurprising when they outnumbered standard betas in the army two to one, alphas a rarity. To get where she was, Adeline had worked twice as hard to get the recognition and respect she deserved, and now—

Now, she was staring down the possibility that it might all be a consolation prize. The army had brought her here and let her train others, and they had also put in her close proximity to a bunch of omegas she could potentially breed. Perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not.

“I didn’t know,” Slade said. “I only knew they wanted the best, and said this could make us even better.” He offered her something gently: “You’ve done that.”

A small huff escaped her. “I know,” Adeline said. That had never been in question—just if any of the higher-ups cared.

“Did they speak to you about me before this?” Slade asked, wanting to know the same from the other direction, if rather than his skills and rank and accomplishments, they had only brought him here to be close to her.

“One of the brass did point you out when you were getting off the bus, but I don’t know if that’s what he had in mind,” Adeline said. “Your reputation precedes you, you know.”

Allowing himself a smile, Slade said, “Yeah.” He was good, and confident in his own abilities.

Seeing it, Adeline smiled back and gave a slight shake of her head. “No, I really don’t think they earmarked you,” she said, her tone going distant and thoughtful. “I think it’s because we…”

“Because we’ve gotten close,” Slade finished for her when she trailed off.

“Yes,” Adeline said simply, but there was the faintest blush of color in her cheeks, something Slade had never seen from her before. “I was hoping we could…” She swallowed, continued. “Once I’m not your teacher anymore, I was hoping we could spend some time together. Off base.”

Triumph swelled in Slade’s chest like a rising balloon. It was nothing he hadn’t suspected she might feel, nothing he hadn’t half come to expect, but the plain confession of it spoken out loud was going to make him float off into the air if he didn’t keep himself anchored.

Slade dared to draw a little closer, to let their shoulders touch. “I’d like that,” he said. And then, as the idea started to form, “Would you do something for me?”

“What?” Adeline asked, her brow pinching in curiosity.

“Make us run the gauntlet,” he said. “You could pose it as a sort of final test, whatever you think would convince them.”

She breathed in sharp, surprised. “Slade, do you mean—?”

“In the traditional sense, yes. There should be a prize at the end,” Slade said. Given that they were in an army training camp, the prize would be shitty, but that didn’t matter. “If we’re going to do this, let’s at least do it right.” He raised his eyebrows and added, “Show them we don’t need their damn bonus or approval.”

“Alright,” Adeline said, and she leaned against his side, and they sat like that for awhile as the evening deepened and the first stars came out.

The course Adeline put together was a fucking horror, and Slade wouldn’t have expected anything less. He climbed over sheer-faced walls without a hand- or foothold and crawled through the mud, pushing on as his fellow soldiers shouted in alarm as they stumbled into traps. Slade nearly got caught in a net once, only quick thinking and the equally quick slice of his knife freeing him before the rope went taut, and reached the last stretch of the course scratched and dirty, gathering the scraps of his depleted energy for a sprint across the minefield.

He wasn’t alone—Camp Washington accepted the best the army had to offer, and four others had made it this far. Hanging back a calculated distance, Slade let the rest go first, the tactic rewarded as three of the soldiers stepped on the makeshift mines and got sprayed with appropriately red paint. That provided enough for an educated guess at the pattern, and Slade ran with his head low and his eyes to the ground.

Just behind him, Bill Walsh was panting to catch up, running like Slade was on pure grit and determination. Slade pretended to dodge left, then jumped back to the right at the last second, forcing Bill off to the side—and right on top of a land mine. Slade barely avoided the spray that engulfed a cursing Bill and smiled, closing in on the platform that lay at the end of the field.

About six feet still remained between Slade and the finish, and any inch of it could hide a paint-filled landmine waiting to disqualify and humiliate him and render his gambit a failure. Bending his knees, Slade pushed all of his strength into his legs and jumped. He landed on the edge of the platform, his heels hanging over empty air and nearly causing him to lose his balance, but he forced his momentum forward and managed to stay on his feet.

The prize was predictably shitty, a gold-plated plaque screwed onto a rectangle of polished wood that came with a small bonus and a few additional days of leave. Slade picked it up and walked across the finish line, over to the section where Adeline and the rest of the brass waited. Adeline stood a little before the rest, and she smiled wide and bright like she didn’t care who might see.

Ignoring the rest of the officers, Slade walked right up to her and dropped down to one knee, offering up the plaque and everything it represented. A murmur went through Adeline’s superiors, muted disbelief, but Slade didn’t give a damn. Technically, what he was doing was gross misconduct and insubordination, but those bastards had offered to pay good money for this outcome. They weren’t about to jeopardize it by punishing him now.

So, Slade held up the plaque like a medieval knight with their sword, coming home after a battle bruised and bloody but victorious, and Adeline stood above him in her pressed, spotless uniform like the queen who had ordered him to war. She took the plaque and then held his hand in her free one, smiling down at him, and the sunlight haloed her brown hair like a crown.

*

The en suite bath in the guest room Slade had claimed the night before was as state-of-the-art as the rest of the Tower, and he gladly took advantage of the shower after breakfast. Standing under the spray, he groaned as the water pressure pounded the stiffness out of his muscles and washed off the layers of sweat he’d accumulated throughout the morning, leaving his shirt damp.

Fortunately, Joey and Rose hadn’t noticed; the last thing Slade needed was them worrying over nothing. He’d bet the payout from his next contract that this was another gift from the meta-gene activated by the damned serum, kicking into overdrive. A phone call and a blood sample to Villain, and they’d have it sorted in forty-eight hours or less.

But first, Slade had to get off of this island.

He rolled on extra deodorant and dressed in a spare t-shirt and khakis that Joey had evidently at some point pilfered from one of his houses. Slade didn’t particularly know how he felt about that and didn’t have time to figure it out—at the moment, it had the benefit of being convenient and allowed him to pack his Deathstroke suit in a bag. The last thing he needed was to startle one of the Titans while wearing it and get into a stupid fight on the way out the door.

Hoisting the bag onto his shoulder, he looked around the room a final time and, seeing nothing he’d missed, exited into the hallway. Eagerness to get back home put a spring in his step. After the battle with Trigon and the unexpected stay in the superhero clubhouse, Slade looked forward to the solitude of his own space—and, now that he thought of it, the box of toys he kept locked away in the nightstand. He liked to relax after a job well done, even moreso when he’d be waiting for Villain to send back an analysis of his blood.

On the twelfth floor of the Tower, a giant gymnasium took up most of the level, its expanse only interrupted by the necessary support pillars to keep the building upright. Slade took the elevator down and found Joey and Rose where they said they’d be, on the practice mats. A bo staff and a dulled sword leaned against the bags, abandoned at the moment as his children stood near them with their heads bent together in conversation, the motion of Joey’s hands hidden by the angle of his body. They didn’t seem to notice him until he’d almost reached the edge of the mat, and then they sprang apart like he’d caught them with their hands in the cookie jar.

Not that he’d known Rose when she was young enough to go stealing dessert, or was home much when Joey was that age. Slade pushed that thought away and looked at his children critically. They stared back, wide-eyed and innocent. Curiosity sparked, and Slade wanted to pursue it, but…he had enough of his own bullshit to worry about.

“I’ve got some things to take care of in the city,” he said. “Is there a transport I can use?”

A long look passed between them, decidedly uneasy. Turning back to him, Joey signed, «Pops…»

“We were thinking you could stay here,” Rose said in a rush. “Until it’s over.”

Slade tried and failed to come up with what the hell she was talking about. “Until what’s over?”

«Your…uh…» Joey went red in the face and looked down. «Your cycle.»

“My cycle,” Slade repeated blankly, the words crashing down on him, and that meant…

“Dad,” Rose said, red-faced as her brother. “You’re in heat.”

He balked, recoiled. “No,” Slade said. “I haven’t had a heat in over a decade, and I’m on birth control.”

«Which can fail,» Joey added unhelpfully.

“And it has,” Rose continued. “I mean, obviously you’re not in heat yet, but you’re going to be.” She wrinkled her nose and added, “I can smell it.”

That prompted Slade to lift his arm and sniff at his armpit, but he couldn’t pick up anything except the synthetic smell of his deodorant. Dropping his arm again, he frowned at his children and adjusted the bag on his shoulder. All the strange behavior he’d been subject to fell into place: Rose and Joey insisting he stay the night, Garfield Logan asking if he’d slept well, Dick Grayson inviting himself to their table for breakfast.

Good fucking God. The resident alphas had been acting chivalrous.

In that moment, Slade wanted very badly to kill something with his bare hands.

Still, that didn’t mean they were necessarily right.

“I’m not in heat,” Slade said, folding his arms and willing it to be true.

Joey shot him an exasperated look. «I have test strips,» he signed.

At-home test kits proliferated on the shelves of every pharmacy and corner store, easily a dozen along the route between where Slade would disembark at a private dock along the Manhattan shoreline and his penthouse. But that would take time, and Joey’s tests were here, and now that the possibility was out there—Slade needed to know.

Back in the en suite bathroom, both that door and the bedroom door closed firmly behind him, Slade glared at the tiny, plastic cup of urine on the counter like it had insulted him. He’d managed not to piss anywhere except the damn cup, which he’d count as an accomplishment, and he carefully dunked a strip as per the instructions and left it on a square of toilet paper to dry. Three minutes. He checked his watch, then braced his hands on the counter.

It quickly grew boring. Experimentally, Slade reached down and moved his penis aside to poke at his cunt, finding only the usual dampness—no slick. And that made sense because he wasn’t going into heat, and the strip would show it, and his well-meaning children would just have to let him go.

A knock came on the bedroom door, muffled by the second door that closed Slade into the bathroom. He bristled in annoyance and stayed where he was, gritting his teeth as it came again. It repeated a third and fourth time, regular intervals with only a few seconds between, and Slade sighed audibly, zipped his pants up, and washed his hands, hoping the sound of water would deter whichever one of his children had decided to be impatient.

His tactic failed; if anything, the knocking came louder as Slade dried his hands, and he was fast approaching the end of his patience. Letting himself out of the bathroom, Slade marched across the carpet and wrenched open the bedroom door.

“What?” he demanded in a growl, but it was neither Joey nor Rose who stood with a fist still raised to knock on a door that no longer barred the way.

Slowly, Dick Grayson lowered his hand and looked up at Slade. He still wore the tennis dress, its color bringing out the blue of his eyes, white tennis shoes on his feet to complete the outfit. At this distance, Slade picked up on other accents the kid had added, or that he just hadn’t noticed at breakfast: black eyeliner so thin it was almost invisible, the sheen of gloss on his lips. It drew the eye, and Slade had to turn his away before he was caught staring. Grayson certainly didn’t need makeup to be one of the most beautiful alphas Slade had ever met, but he couldn’t deny that it helped enhance him even further.

His scent came through even stronger now without anyone else’s around to temper it, or just with them standing so close, and Slade took a step back before he did something abominably stupid like bury his face in the kid’s neck.

“What do you want?” he asked, forcing his voice calm.

“To make sure you’re not spiraling in here by yourself,” Grayson said. “Rose and Joey told me you didn’t know you were going into heat.”

Slade was going to knock their heads together. “I’m not in heat,” he said.

“From the smell of it, you’ll be in heat by sundown,” Grayson replied, leaning against the doorframe.

“What. Do you want,” Slade asked again with emphasis.

A smile tugged at Grayson’s mouth. “You’re really going to make me spell it out for you?”

That did seem to be the theme of the morning. Rather than say that, though, Slade stood there implacably and stared Grayson down.

He relented, the smile slipping off his face. “I want to spend it with you.”

For a full ten seconds, Slade couldn’t speak. His brain rattled like he’d taken a grenade to the skull, static filling his ears. He opened his mouth, shut it again. Gathered himself and said:

“You—you what?”

“I want to spend your heat with you,” Grayson said deliberately, then laughed. He looked unfairly good when he laughed, the sound as sweet as birdsong, his eyes sparkling. “Is it really such a surprise?”

Maybe he’d slipped into some alternate timeline when they’d left the hell dimension, somehow splitting off from the others—but that would carry hints throughout, little things that were off. Not something as large and glaring as this.

“Grayson, I spent the first year I knew you trying to kill you and your team,” Slade said because it was as good a place as any to start.

“That was a long time ago.” Grayson shifted his weight, pushing his hip out and exposing the long line of his neck. “So. What do you say?”

A scant few feet lay between them, and Slade closed the distance until he could feel the heat of Grayson’s body, their chests almost touching. Grayson had to crane his neck to look up at him, and his scent swirled around him, heady and distracting. Slade felt his cunt pulse, which pissed him off more than anything, and forced his thoughts in order.

“You’re being ridiculous,” he said. “And I’m not in heat.”

Stepping back, he grabbed the edge of the door and slammed it right in Grayson’s face, locking it immediately after. He expected the knocking to start again immediately and exhaled in cautious relief when it didn’t, passing a hand over his face. Respite didn’t mean that it was over for good.

In the bathroom, the test strip was waiting for him on its square of toilet paper. Slade held his breath as he looked at it, at the red stripes standing out stark and plain. Two of them.

Positive.

Numbly, Slade sat down on the closed toilet lid, put his head in his hands, and whispered out loud, “Fuck.”

*

Grant decided to come when they were under heavy fire, trapped in an isolated village two days away from base camp. In later years, Slade would look at his son fondly and say Grant had been the same since the day he was born: hot-headed, impulsive, rushing in.

They’d captured the village an hour before dark—or, rather, the community of farmers and fishermen had preemptively and fearfully surrendered to the battalion. Maybe that had lured them into a false sense of security, led them to cut corners, but Slade couldn’t particularly identify anything that they’d missed. He’d always run a tight operation, and his soldiers outnumbered the villagers roughly five to one, more than enough to check every building and turn over every rock in search of those damned subterranean tunnels Charlie liked to hide in.

From the makeshift command center, one of the larger houses near the center of the village, Slade barked orders and absorbed the reports coming in: four of his soldiers down, a jeep lost to fire, and the rest of them holding on behind the barricades. In the dead of the night, the enemy snipers had the advantage, concealed in the triple canopy of the jungle around them with a clear view of the Americans on the ground. Slade could only guess how many there might be, if taking the fight into the trees to flush them out would mean an end to the assault or a suicide run for the soldiers who tried it.

An explosion shook the air, knocking dust and debris from the thatched roof. Slade straightened up from his protective crouch and righted the electric lantern just in time for the sergeant to come back, admitted into the room past the guards at the door. She had to stoop to get through it, a reminder that her omega size only made up twelve to fifteen percent of the general population in contrast to roughly seventy-five percent of the army. The fact of it slipped easily out of Slade’s mind after six months deployed, the occasional reminders jarring.

“Sergeant Goslin,” Slade said because while he’d never recall the names of every private, he could make an attempt for the officers. “What, pray tell, the fuck was that?”

“Our grenades, sir,” Goslin reported hurriedly, standing at attention.

Slade held back a curse. “Are they past the perimeter?”

“No, sir,” Goslin said. “Most likely one of the villagers, sir.”

This time, Slade did swear. “Get them fucking rounded up!” he said tersely.

“Yes, sir!” Goslin replied, pressing her saluting hand more firmly against her helmet.

With that, Slade opened his mouth to dismiss her, and then he felt something…give. A warm rush of fluid soaked his underwear and dripped down the inseam of his fatigues, and he felt a faint, ringing shock like one of those sniper bullets had found him. Disbelief came first: he was due in three weeks, set to be rotated off in one, and was desperately looking forward to a real bed and a hot shower and Adeline, waiting for him at base camp. This couldn’t be happening now.

But it was, and ignoring the problem was as stupid and short-sighted as ignoring an injury. He wouldn’t do anyone a damned bit of good if there were complications, if he started to bleed out or collapsed from pain.

“Send me the field medic,” Slade said. “Petrucci, if you can find him.”

Goslin went very subtly stiff, and one of the guards by the door whipped his head around in Slade’s direction before remembering himself and turning back to his duties. Neither Goslin nor the guards could see the wet stain on Slade’s fatigues in the lantern light, but they knew Petrucci had midwife training, and there was only one reason to call him mid-battle to a soldier not visibly injured.

“Yes, sir,” Goslin said, a new gravity in her tone.

“Dismissed,” Slade said, and once she left, slid a chair over to the table hosting the electric lantern and sat down.

He could have days; he could have hours. Labor went differently for everyone. A small cramp passed through his abdomen, no different from the false, prodromal contractions he’d been feeling for days, that the medics had told him not to worry about. Slade wanted to laugh at that now, but not at the cost of causing the guards to wonder if he was hysterical. Instead, he pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed.

Two weeks, they’d assured him, allotted plenty of time for Slade to rotate off and deliver the baby safely. His doctors had quoted statistics in their polished offices and shown him charts, demonstrating the low chances of early labor and pointing out that most first pregnancies actually carried on a little past the due date. Only one had said the quiet part out loud, alluding to Slade’s ability to serve his country as long it was safe to do so—meaning, really, the army’s need to take full advantage of the biological changes he’d developed to protect the life growing inside him.

Over the course of his pregnancy, Slade had put on twenty pounds of muscle, decorating his skin with stretch marks and requiring a new fitting of his dress uniform. And that was useful in wartime, better for hacking his way through the jungle and carrying an injured man out on his back, but not so much as the…other changes. Early in his first trimester, Adeline had surprised Slade while he cut up onions for their dinner, and he had shoved her against the counter with the knife at her throat before either of them had time to blink.

The doctor had smiled, blithe and professionally reassuring in a way that failed to comfort Slade at all, and told him the paranoia was normal. It would lessen after the baby was born, though the heightened senses and faster reflexes that came with it should remain, and in the meantime, Adeline should just try not to approach him unexpectedly. Slade had left the appointment furious, and when the deployment orders came, he’d felt a shameful relief.

At least he would have fewer opportunities to accidentally kill his wife.

His abdomen cramped again with another contraction, and Slade gripped the edge of the table where he sat. One of his majors and a lieutenant came in and out, and Slade answered their questions and accepted their reports, wondering if word had started to travel yet, if they knew. Goslin had already been gone too long, and Slade bit his tongue against asking for one of the guards to go and look.

When Goslin returned, it wasn’t with Petrucci, but she also wasn’t alone. A pair of villagers came in with her, stopped by the door and patted down for weapons. Both women, one of them omega-large even before her scent reached Slade’s nose. The first one, the slighter size and milder scent of a standard beta, went past Slade to the back of the house like she owned it—and he realized with a jolt that she did. It was her and her family that they’d cleared out earlier when setting up their makeshift command center, and Slade watched the beta woman warily as she picked up a pot from the kitchen area.

Meanwhile, the omega woman knelt at Slade’s side and looked at him steadily. He looked back out of the corner of his eye, trying to take her measure. There hadn’t been any omegas around when he’d entered the village; he was sure of it, more sure than he was of why she’d really come here.

“Petrucci took a bullet to the shoulder, sir. He’s in good shape, but he can’t help,” Goslin said, then gestured to the women she’d brought in. “They say they can.”

These were the first words Slade had learned to say in Vietnamese: pregnant, baby, labor. In typical omega fashion, his stomach didn’t really show more than the slightest bump, his condition hidden save for the extra sweetness in his scent. He turned to the omega woman at his side, facing her fully, and she squinted at little as if trying to solve the puzzle of him. No fear in her, in her scent or her face: she was a fighter like Slade, and he couldn’t be sure for which side.

She knew, and she knew he knew. Tilting her head, she reached out slowly and placed her palm flat on his stomach, and said something too low and fast for him to understand. Even so, he did—she’d agreed to help him.

In response, Slade nodded, and the omega woman nodded back, and then they began.

The grey dawn saw the baby’s head crest, and Grant was born into the light. His newborn wails replaced Slade’s screams of pain that had filled the long, dark hours, and Slade collapsed shakily onto a cot and held his son’s small, perfect form to his chest. The omega woman looked down at him and smiled for the first time, which the beta who she’d sent to fetch water and blankets and disinfectant never had.

As a habit, Slade didn’t think about why they were at war, or questions of right and wrong, or the lives of the people they fought. He was a soldier; his job was to follow orders and get out alive with as many of his battalion as he could carry with him. Those poor, drafted bastards who refused to fire their weapons and painted peace signs on their helmets might be happy to die with their sense of morality intact, but Slade had never seen the appeal: a moral corpse was still a corpse, and the war would march on without him.

The omega woman had let Slade grip her hand as he screamed.

He looked past her, to Goslin and the half-squad of five soldiers she’d called in to keep an eye on the villagers and Petrucci with his arm in a sling. There was only one thing he could offer, a small and temporary truce, but he would give it freely. His voice was raw and wrecked, his body covered in blood and fluids, but as long as he was alive and conscious, he was still the man in charge.

“Let them go,” he ordered.

Goslin stood aside, and the two women left without anyone stopping them. As she passed through the door, the big omega turned back and nodded at Slade a final time, and then they were gone.

Back at base camp, Slade received a commendation for defending the village against the attack, further entrenching the army and allowing it to push farther north. He also received his real reward: an entire month off-rotation and private quarters to spend it in, afforded to him and Adeline as a married couple with a child.

She met him in the clinic and held Grant for the first time, her face as awed as Slade had been. Adeline looked as perfect as ever: her uniform pressed, not a single hair loose from her bun. So she remained until the doctors released Slade and they went to their quarters together, and they settled Grant down into his crib to sleep. He was so tiny, and it kept surprising Slade over and over, his face, his fingers clutching the edge of the blanket.

Then, he heard Adeline’s breath catch, and he turned and held her automatically as she pressed her face into his chest and cried out her fear and anxiety. Once she was done, Slade tilted her face up and kissed her, and he scooped her up just as he’d done to carry her over the threshold when they first married, when she’d laughed and smacked his arm with the back of her hand in mock-protest.

No laughter this time, just her head resting against his shoulder. Slade carried her to bed, and he lay down with her, both of them warm and alive. Most of the month off-rotation passed like that, in between his room with Adeline and Grant’s nursery next door. The doctors said not to breastfeed him, that it would make the separation more difficult, but Slade had about enough of listening to the doctors. He would deal with any hardship it caused him when the time came.

Too quickly, the month was over, and Slade shipped back out. He kissed his wife and child and watched them disappear below him as the helicopter flew away, bringing him back to where his battalion was ready and waiting for him to re-assume command. In a way, it felt good: the wind on his face, the return to a task he excelled at.

Missing Grant gnawed at him like a hole in his heart, but Slade numbed it with will and covered it up with work. He was a father now, but that didn’t change his duty to his soldiers or his country. He’d been a soldier first.

*

In his room at the Tower, Slade paced in a u-shape around the bed, trapped like a tiger in its cage. He held the phone to his ear and seethed.

“How the fuck is this possible?” he demanded, running a hand through his hair. “I’ve been on the same birth control for years.”

“That could have something do with it,” Dr. Arthur Villain replied, infuriatingly calm.

Slade stopped mid-stride. “What?”

“Your meta-gene. You have a healing factor, and it tends to metabolize drugs, poisons, and really any foreign chemical compound fairly quickly,” Villain explained. “It’s possible your body just got used to your dose and is flushing it out of your system, so to speak.”

With a growl, Slade started pacing again. “Excellent,” he gritted out sarcastically. “What do I do about it?”

“Of course, the other possibility is that you’ve been spending time with a particularly suitable alpha, which could be enough to overcome birth control,” Villain went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Or some combination of the two.”

Pressing the phone to his chest, Slade looked up at the ceiling and counted to ten. Villain was, despite the unfortunate spelling of the name that he insisted was pronounced ‘will-hane’ and his questionable medical ethics, a talented doctor uniquely suited to Slade’s meta-human needs. But he did have the unfortunate habit of falling too much into scientific speculation, which never failed to make Slade feel like his latest experiment.

“Can I take something to stop it?” Slade asked when he could safely do so without screaming.

“No, if you’re already in pre-heat, it won’t do any good now,” Villain told him. “Come see me when it’s over, and we’ll run some blood tests.”

Damn his stupid body. “Fine. I’ll call you,” Slade said, then hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

He tossed it on the bed and then sat down heavily next to it, trying to adjust to the prospect of going through his first unmedicated heat in over a decade. Because his body had spontaneously decided to reject the birth control he’d been taking for years, or—Slade grimaced at the other option. For one thing, he wasn’t some young idiot catching an alpha’s scent for the first time, and for another, he’d barely been around any alphas in weeks. Just Rose, his own daughter, Garfield Logan, who he couldn’t imagine touching even if Victor Stone wouldn’t blow his head off, and…

Dick Grayson, in his cute little blue-and-gold tennis dress.

Who had offered to fuck Slade through his heat.

A pulse of arousal went through him at the thought, and Slade jumped to his feet as if to ward it off with motion. Heat or not, his original plan hadn’t changed: get off this damned island, lock down his penthouse, and make good and thorough use of the box of toys in his nightstand. That last part would just last a few days longer than he’d originally counted on.

Crossing over to the door, Slade opened it and cautiously poked his head out. No Dick Grayson in sight, which came as a disappointment to Slade’s lower half and a relief to the rational part of his brain. He stepped out into the hallway and began walking quickly, ears primed for any approaching footsteps or voices that he’d want to turn around and avoid. Like as not, the rest of the Titans could smell what was happening in his scent, and he didn’t want to meet anyone’s eye or say a single solitary word about it.

Fortune favored him for the first time that godforsaken day, and Slade arrived at Rose’s door without running into anyone else. He knocked three times in quick succession, and she opened the door immediately like she’d been waiting. Looking past her, Slade found Joey sitting on the bed, evidence that Rose probably had expected he might seek them out.

“Well, you were right. My birth control failed,” Slade said, entering the room when Rose stepped aside. “And while I appreciate your concern, I think we’d all be a lot more comfortable if I went back to the penthouse.”

“Oh. Um. Ok,” Rose said, frowning. “Are you going…uh…alone?”

The question momentarily threw him. “Yes,” Slade said slowly.

“Ok,” Rose said again. Pink blotches appeared on her cheeks as she blushed. “We thought that, uh…” She trailed off and shot her brother a look.

He signed: «We thought Dick might’ve talked to you.»

Shock washed through him first, followed quickly by anger. “Did you hold a fucking conference?” Slade asked between his teeth.

“You said yourself, you haven’t gone through a heat in more than ten years,” Rose said, folding her arms. “What if you drop?”

“I have a healing factor. If I drop, which probably won’t happen, that should take care of it,” Slade replied. “Since you both inherited your meta-gene from me, I would think you’d do better at remembering that little detail.”

Rose raised an eyebrow, unfazed and unimpressed. “You should have an alpha. Joey?”

«You should have an alpha,» Joey signed, backing her up.

God save him from well-meaning children. “I’ve survived plenty of heats on my own, and I can survive another,” Slade said flatly. “Now, I’m going with or without your help. I’m sure you could find a way to stop me if you involved the others, but keeping me against my will and forcing me to start my heat distressed will increase my chances of drop more than anything else.”

“There’s an alpha wiling and available to help you, and I won’t believe you if you say you don’t like him,” Rose pressed on stubbornly. “I’ve had to witness your gross flirting for years.”

“Grayson flirts with everyone,” Slade said.

The look Rose gave him then bordered on pitying. “He really doesn’t.”

«Pops,» Joey signed, his face pained. «Dick flirts with you because he likes you.»

All at once, Slade’s head filled with noise. “I’m going outside,” he announced abruptly, turned on his heel, and left the room.

It had turned into an annoyingly beautiful day. Slade walked down to the shoreline and glared at the ocean, sparkling with sunlight and the rippling breeze, and then went and glared at the flowers in the ornamental garden for variety. The blank, reflective windows that composed the facade of Titans Tower made it impossible to know for sure if someone was watching, though someone probably was. Hunching his shoulders against it, Slade began walking down the garden path, kicking pebbles out of his way as he went.

He’d first met Dick Grayson and the rest of the Titans over Grant’s dead body. It hadn’t been their fault, of course, or even something they’d expected; he remembered too well the shock on Grayson’s face. Robin back then, before he’d adopted his current Nightwing persona—the leader. Grant’s death had been the HIVE’s fault, for giving him a knockoff serum, and Slade’s fault, for telling his son stories of Deathstroke the Terminator while failing to mention who was behind the mask. Slade couldn’t claim he’d been a good father to his son, but by picking up the contract on the Titans, he’d been determined in his rage and grief to at least be a good mercenary.

That was the start of it, where it all led back to. It wasn’t a good start—it wasn’t a good basis for anything. Yet, he had waged war against Grayson and the Titans for a year and nearly won, proving his strength and skill against those with powers much greater than the more modest gifts of his heightened senses and healing factor. And it was Grayson who defeated him, though not without Joey’s help.

From a certain perspective it was—well. Traditional was one word for it. Barbaric was another. Mostly, it was left to the realm of Greek myths and Arthurian legends and high fantasy, but there were still a few places in the world where an omega would only accept an alpha who could defeat them. Pulling back from that extreme, Deathstroke’s outsize success as a mercenary could be taken as evidence that he could defend himself and his children against any number of threats. Many alphas would, objectively, find his competence attractive—despite all of the glaring reasons they shouldn’t.

Slade had always assumed Grayson was smarter than that. If he’d thought about it at all.

At the end the path, Slade sat down on a wrought-iron bench twisted into the shape of flowers and branches. He was sweating again, his body too hot. The warning pulse of arousal between his legs thrummed low in the background, something Slade could ignore if he wasn’t actively thinking about it, but that wouldn’t be true for long. His mind kept going back to Dick Grayson like tonguing a loose tooth, the lines of his body and the scent of his skin. It made the arousal worse, and Slade sighed and scuffed his boot against a paving stone.

Some months after the debacle with the HIVE, when Slade had taken a break from mercenary work and had largely replaced it with building his house in Kenya, he’d gotten roped into helping the Titans. Joey had joined by then, which was the only reason Slade had agreed, though he’d still been half-convinced it was some sort of trick. Now, with the years that had passed, Slade couldn’t pull Grayson’s exact words out of his memory, just his smile and the way he angled himself when he stood too close. And Slade had huffed in wry amusement and said something back, and he’d never taken it seriously for a second.

If Rose was right, Grayson had been so-called ‘flirting’ with him for all these years.

With a grunt, Slade got to his feet. He walked the path to the edge of the garden, looked up at the Tower, and waved his arms.

His suspicions proved true: someone had been watching him. From the side of the Tower, a glowing shape appeared, resolving into human form as it drew close. The Tamaranean. Given that it wasn’t Grayson or either of Slade’s obnoxious children, he supposed they’d put watching him on some sort of rotation, and for the sake of his sanity, he would choose to believe that was only because he was a dangerous mercenary in their territory.

Starfire landed in the grass a few feet away, a giant alien nearly as tall as Slade’s six and a half feet if he included her towering, red hair. Her green eyes glowed without white or pupil, but Slade had learned not to be unnerved by such things well before he’d met Princess Koriand’r of Tamaran, that or her golden skin or the shape of her that looked human on the surface but was so obviously not.

A beat passed, and then she asked simply, “Yes?”

It occurred to Slade suddenly that she and Grayson had dated in the past, and that she was maybe therefore not his first choice for this. But he couldn’t very well send her back and ask for someone else.

“Would you happen to have a block of wood you aren’t using somewhere in that Tower? About this big,” Slade said, showing her with his hands. “Cedar would be best.”

The slightest pinch of confusion appeared between her eyebrows. “We have some broken furniture from the last time we were attacked. There should be something about that size.”

Slade inclined his head. “Thank you—” he started to say, but she was already gone, off in the air like she weighed nothing. In a few seconds, she was around the side of the Tower again, back to whatever unseen access point she’d used.

While he waited, Slade sat on the bench again. He tilted his head back to the sun and closed his eye, and he tried not to think about anything: not Dick Grayson, or any of his children living or dead, or the slowly growing heat in his body. A shadow passed over hm, and Slade opened his eye in time to see Starfire returning, a block of wood in her hand.

Still hovering a few inches off the ground, she offered it out to him, and he took it. An uneven lump of cedar, old furniture smell. It would do fine.

“Thanks,” he said, and meant it.

“You’re welcome,” Starfire said, only a little stiffly, and took off again.

Left alone, Slade rotated the cedar chunk in his hand, trying to figure out where to start. Then, he pulled a knife out of his pocket and started carving.

*

If Wintergreen asked, Slade had planned to tell him that he was only going to make sure there was nothing wrong with the headstone. He’d paid for the damned thing; he wasn’t going to let it sit there flawed. Of course, the only thing Wintergreen had asked in his refined Queen’s English, stiff upper lip, was if Slade wanted company this time. To this, Slade had replied that he’d prefer to go alone, and Wintergreen had bowed his head and looked so unbearably sad that Slade couldn’t stay with him another minute.

November leached all the color out of the city: slate sky above the charcoal buildings of Manhattan and the black waters of the bay, skeletal trees and dead leaves, long since brown and aged out of their fall color. They crunched under Slade’s boots as he stepped below the iron gate leading into the cemetery.

Despite the years separating them, the headstones were near identical. Perfect. Same color and shape, same cut and style to the font listing the names and the years, birth and death. Only the ground they sat on differed, the dirt and grass beneath Joseph William Wilson still disturbed from the burial while that around Grant Slade Wilson had settled and grown back.

His sons, four years apart in life, had been the same age when they’d died.

A park bench sat under a leafless tree near the plot, and Slade walked over and lowered himself onto it stiffly. He regarded the headstones at a distance, checking for any discrepancies in height or alignment that he might have missed up close. None emerged, no matter how long he looked, and Slade turned and looked instead out over the water, towards the T-shape of Titans Tower on its private island. They had their own memorial to Joey over there: a statue of him in his Jericho costume, accompanied by a plaque. Slade had been in to see it once, and once was enough.

Sharp burst of memory: the last time he’d been on that island. Grayson had tried to match his burning rage against the ice-cold, steely control Slade clung to, screaming at him about the son he’d murdered. At the end of it, they’d both left with new scrapes and bruises, though Slade’s were faster-healing, and he couldn’t say that either of them had won.

He could feel the control slipping now, another crack in it every time his mind got too close to the past. Slade looked at the sky through the branches, and he breathed in the cold air and felt the icy wind blowing off the bay. A selection of contracts waited for him back at his penthouse, and he reviewed them mentally: the ones he’d discard outright, the others to consider, the questions he’d ask…

The last time he’d lost it, Slade had almost killed a man, and it hadn’t had anything to do with a contract.

He was dangerously close to losing it now.

Meanwhile, still several hundred feet behind him but getting closer, someone was approaching.

She wasn’t trying to sneak up on him; Slade wondered idly if she still could. He’d gotten better since she popped out of the pond in Camp Washington and laughed at his surprise. In part because she made him better, but he’d also fought in a war since then, and been pregnant more than once, and taken the serum that ended up activating the latent meta-gene. A quarter mile out, his enhanced hearing could pick up the leaves under her feet.

Certainly, she could have chosen to follow his movements without his awareness or being physically present herself. The intelligence agency she founded and ran and kept at her disposal had ample resources to track him and probably did so as a matter of course. Slade tried not to begrudge the scrutiny or the little games; he could easily slip the lead if he needed to.

A few minutes later, she drew even with the bench and stopped. On the right side, his blind side. His eye patch faced her like an accusation, but he didn’t mean it as one, so Slade turned and looked at her with the eye that still worked.

“Hello, Addie,” he said. “Here to make another attempt on my life?”

She scoffed, but didn’t answer save to sit down at the other end of the bench. Slade stared at her in profile, at the new, grey hairs threading through her brown, the wrinkles on her face. And that was that question answered: she could still surprise him.

“I should,” she said at last, tightly. “You’ve earned it.”

Undoubtedly he had, for her reasons and others. Slade wouldn’t waste his breath arguing the point.

“Bill Walsh was the Jackal. He’s dead now,” he said instead. “If you didn’t know that, you have the right to.”

“I know,” Adeline replied shortly.

Which Slade had at least half-expected—it was the type of thing Searchers, Inc. would uncover, but the government had taken the body, and he’d never been quite sure. He thought of telling her Walsh’s taunting confession, that he had been the one to recruit Grant for the HIVE, but that might be true and it might not be true. Either way, it would only upset her, and it didn’t matter now.

“I thought I could stop him. When he had Joey,” Slade said quietly because they’d never talked about it. “I thought I could be fast enough. It’s not that I didn’t—”

He’d been leaving for another contract because Joey was in the hospital and Addie was stricken and silent and he’d needed it, to get out, to feel in control of something again, and then there was the gun in her hand and the pain where Slade’s eye had been, and the look on her face. Slade had known then she’d meant to take more from him, much more. So, he’d signed the divorce papers when they’d come, Adeline’s second choice of a plan to get rid of him, and they’d never actually talked about it.

A deep, sharp inhale. “Do you think that justifies it?” Adeline asked harshly. “He had a knife to your son’s throat, and Joey spent the rest of his life mute, he almost died because you wouldn’t give up the name of your fucking client.”

“Nothing justifies it,” Slade said. It was fair, all of it—no matter how much it hurt. “But I thought you’d understand Deathstroke.”

“That you lied to me?” Adeline asked, her voice raising in incredulity.

“Yes. That I lied to you,” Slade told her. “If you knew, it would have made you an accomplice, and I…” He sighed. “After the army thought their damned serum failed and kicked me out, I needed it. I needed to be a soldier again, or I’d go mad.”

Adeline shook her head, not looking at him. So far, she hadn’t looked at him once. “I thought you were a good man, Slade. An honest man. After my first marriage—”

“You never told me about your first marriage,” Slade said, cutting her off. At least not until it had been too late. “We kept secrets from each other all the time in the army. It was part of the job.”

“That’s not the same thing, and you know it,” Adeline said. “It was a job, Slade. Not our marriage. Not our lives.”

She was right, as usual, as he’d known she would be. In truth, Slade hadn’t thought he’d change her mind, and he hadn’t wanted to; he’d only wanted to explain after all these years, finally, finally where it had gone wrong. Even so, a small part of him wished vainly that she’d told him about her first husband, what he’d hidden from her, what lying meant. Maybe he’d have known to talk to her, to save their marriage while it could still be saved, and maybe the entire idea was a conceited fantasy, and likely what Slade hated the most was that he’d never know.

“Addie, I…” Slade shifted his weight, steepled his fingers. “I regret the things I did to hurt you. I know that doesn’t mean anything now,” he said, going on before she could tell him as much. “I suppose you must sometimes wish you’d never met me, or that we’d never married. But I don’t regret that our sons existed and had time in the world, and I don’t regret the time I spent with you.”

Her hands gripped the edge of the bench, her hair swung forward to cover her face. When she leaned back, Slade saw she was crying, tears tracking down her cheeks.

“Tell me what happened to Joey,” Adeline said, remarkably steady. “You were there. I want to know.”

Slade owed her as much. The whole story, as much as speaking it felt like broken glass in his throat.

“There was…he was possessed by spirits. They were hurting him,” he said. “Joey regained control for a second, and he asked me, he begged me to end the pain.”

And he had, and he left that part out. His sword through Joey’s back. The dissolution of his body, flowing ash through Slade’s hands. There hadn’t even been a body to bury, the coffin beneath the headstone beautiful and empty.

For an age they sat there, facing the graves. Adeline’s tears came faster now, and Slade was thinking of Joey’s body, of Grant’s. He was thinking also of the other one, the one he hadn’t told Adeline about because for one thing they hadn’t been speaking then, and for another the last thing she’d have wanted to know about was another woman, another alpha he’d met after their divorce. The weeks in the Cambodian jungle, and the better part of a year in Thailand during the resulting pregnancy. To get the baby out, they’d had to sedate him and cut him, and when he’d woken again…

Lili had come in, her eyes red and her face broken, and Slade had known without asking.

He’d said no, when Lili had asked if Slade wanted to see her, his nameless, dead daughter. Now, he wished that he had, that he’d held her at least once.

“I don’t regret them,” Adeline said, thick with tears. “I wouldn’t take it back.”

“Would killing me make you feel any better?” Slade asked—it bore asking, with the number of times she’d tried.

In response, Adeline shook her head, and she looked at him, her eyes full of grief and love and pain. “No,” she said. “No.”

Slade nodded and said nothing because there was nothing else to say. He was going to get up and leave her there to the graves and her grief when a light pressure touched his hand, and it was—her hand. In her glove. Automatically, Slade turned his palm up and let their fingers lace together as they had on that rock by the pond in Camp Washington, as he’d thought they never would again.

They sat there like that, together with their sons, for what Slade knew would be the very last time.

*

Shaping the chunk of cedar took up the rest of the morning and the early part of the afternoon. The Titans hovered around, keeping an eye on him while pretending poorly they weren’t. After Starfire vanished back into the Tower, it was Roy Harper with his arrows, shooting at targets with impressive accuracy for someone without any meta-human enhancements. Then, it was Garfield Logan, who asked Slade what he was making and, when Slade wouldn’t answer, proceeded to hop about in various animal forms until Victor Stone thankfully pulled him away. Donna Troy didn’t need to ask; she narrowed her eyes at the wood and the knife and announced she’d go keep Grayson busy. Slade only nodded and continued working.

His children brought out lunch, earning some forgiveness for their earlier meddling as Slade tore through a stack of sandwiches. Finished, Slade stretched out his wrists and waited until Rose and Joey went back inside before he continued working. A form was emerging from the cedar, and Slade began working on the finer details with the tip of his knife. He’d always found it meditative, the whittling, ever since he was a child working on ill-suited sticks with his pocket knife. Like the object he saw was already waiting in the wood, and all he had to do was pull it out.

But there was something in the corner of his vision, repetition and distraction: flashes of red. Slade went on carving as if he hadn’t noticed, watching and waiting and figuring out the pattern. In a few minutes, he had, and he counted the seconds and stuck his foot out.

Wally West appeared as if from thin air, or as if from vibrating his molecules at a rate that rendered him invisible to the naked eye. Lazily, too, or Slade wouldn’t have even known he was there. West stumbled comically, an odd look for the Flash in his fire-engine red suit, and turned to gape at Slade in equally comical surprise.

“That was sloppy,” Slade told him. “Or did you want me to know you were there?”

Sheepishly, West rubbed at the back of his neck. “I wanted to see what you were working on. I got distracted.”

“Hm,” Slade intoned, going back to work.

West, however, apparently wasn’t done. “Is that for Dick?” he asked.

“Yes,” Slade said, pausing the motion of his knife as the idea took hold. “I could also use some daisies.”

“Daisies?” West echoed. “Like the flower?”

Slade gave him a moment to realize the stupidity of that question along with a withering look. “Is there another kind?”

Rather than answering, West became a red blur again and ran off over the waters and past the horizon. Slade resumed his carving, adding some final details. Five or so minutes passed, and then West appeared again, holding a pot of daisies in his hand. He placed them on the bench next to Slade and said, “Here.”

“Thank you,” Slade said. He carefully set the finished carving on the other side and plucked the first two daises from the soil they grew in. Full blooms, long stems. They’d do fine. Using his knife, he split a hole in the stem of one flower and pulled the second through it.

On the third flower, when West still hadn’t moved, Slade gave up and raised his head. “Are you expecting a tip?” he asked dryly.

West was staring, or perhaps more accurately gawking, at the daisies in Slade’s hands. He shook himself and asked, “Where did you learn that?”

“Kindergarten,” Slade told him, and huffed out a laugh at the dumbfounded look on the kid’s face.

“I can’t imagine you in kindergarten,” West admitted, laughing back.

“You’re young,” Slade replied. “There should be plenty leftover,” he said, pointing to the pot of daisies with his knife. “You ought to take the rest to your children.”

A small smile answered him. “Ok. I think I will.”

With that, he vanished—gone or just moving fast enough that he really was invisible this time. Slade twisted the daisy chain around the carving, arranged to accent it without obscuring what it was, and tucked the knife back into his pocket. A bit stiffly, he got up off the bench and stretched, his hands and back suffering the most, and his rear all pins and needles from sitting on the hard surface. His underwear pulled away from his body as he stood, just damp enough to notice the discomfort, and Slade grimaced as a fresh pulse of heat went through his cunt.

It wouldn’t be long, now.

He gathered up the flower-wrapped carving and walked purposefully towards the Tower, no hesitation, no time to think. Slade had decided on a course of action, and the only thing in his mind were the steps to follow through. So he did, in the building and up the elevator and down the hall, stopping only to knock on Dick Grayson’s door.

“Yeah?” Grayson asked, muffled.

Taking that as permission, Slade opened the door. The room behind it could have held two of Slade’s and appeared much more lived-in, a desk in one corner with papers and bits of electronics strewn across it, clothes hanging over the side of the hamper by the closet, Nightwing’s escrima sticks leaning against the wall. Musky, alpha scent hung heavy over it all, enough to fill Slade’s nose and settle on his tongue, enough to tell who the room belonged to even if he’d been blindfolded. And Dick Grayson, of course, sitting on the bed, still in his tennis dress. His head whipped up as Slade stepped inside and closed the door behind him, clearly expecting someone else.

“No, don’t get up,” Slade told him as Grayson moved to do so.

Uncertainly, Grayson stilled, and that gave Slade the time he needed. He crossed the room, knelt before him, and presented the carving in his outstretched hands.

It seemed to strike Grayson speechless, the motion or the offering or both. He sat there for a few, frozen seconds with his eyes fixed on the carving like he thought it might come to life and bite him. Slade waited through it, watching him patiently. Then, Grayson reached out with a slow, tentative touch and gingerly lifted the figure.

“This is…it’s a robin,” he said, turning it about in his hands, kept on the folded wings of the bird itself and away from the daises wound about its perch. “You made me a robin?”

From his spot on the floor, Slade shrugged. “I’d have sealed and painted it, but I thought I’d run out of time.”

A pulse of heat between his legs like an alarm, and a trickle of what had to be slick leaked out and soaked his underwear. Grayson’s scent wasn’t helping, made him want to shuffle forward on his knees and rub his face against those thighs peaking out from under the pleated skirt.

Grayson shook his head, denial or disbelief. “You slam the door in my face, and then you bring me a courting gift,” he said, the observation sounding half to himself. “What am I supposed to do with this, Slade?”

“You made the offer,” Slade told him, true enough, and carrying the unspoken implication that Grayson should have been prepared for this response.

Before Slade had consciously considered it, he’d known he wouldn’t impress Grayson by any feats of physical strength or displays of skill. Deathstroke and Nightwing had clashed enough to make that redundant, both intimately familiar with winning and losing and withdrawing in a frustrated stalemate. The handful of times they’d fought on the same side had also let Grayson witness Slade’s tactical skills, organizing their forces for battle or exploiting his resources to get what they needed. And money didn’t matter to Grayson, either—he’d been taken in and raised by a billionaire, and the shitty little loft apartment he kept in Blüdhaven indicated he didn’t place much value on the trappings of wealth.

So, in the dwindling hours he had left, Slade had offered the only thing he could: time and attention and care. The carving of an American robin on a perch, wreathed in a summer flower that grew thick in the fields. Proof that he could sit still if he wanted to, and think, and create something with his hands.

“I didn’t expect—” Grayson broke off, licked his lips. “I didn’t think you’d want this.”

“What do you want?” Slade asked.

For a minute, the only answer he received was the dull, red flush climbing up Grayson’s face. Meaning, he hadn’t thought about it. The possibility had been too dim and distant for serious consideration, a fantasy, a pipe dream. Confronted with it now, he sat there off-balance and unsure, right where Slade had been that morning. Only Grayson hadn’t been afforded hours of carving and contemplation because he’d thought Slade had rejected him outright.

“If you need some time to think, I would understand,” Slade said, breaking the silence as it started to stretch out. “I would also understand if you decide not to accept.”

That caught Grayson’s attention; he looked to Slade suddenly, blue eyes flashing. “Is this conditional?” he asked.

“Yes,” Slade said immediately because he’d been prepared for the question. “I haven’t had a heat in a long time. There might be complications, and I need you prepared to deal with them.” He tilted his head to the side and added, “I’m also too old to let you roll me over and go on your merry way. If you want to do this, you’re going to do it right, or not at all.”

Grayson snorted through his nose, smiled like he couldn’t help it. “You never make anything easy, do you?”

“Say no if you want to say no,” Slade told him bluntly, getting tired of the conversation as his knees were of being pressed against the floor. “I won’t be offended. I’m far from an ideal omega.”

Running a hand through his hair, Grayson laughed again. “I’m not exactly an ideal alpha,” he said. “I’m almost thirty, I’m unmated and childless, and I have the audacity of running my own team.”

At that, Slade wanted very badly to shuffle forward those last few inches, to touch him if only to lay a hand on his knee. But he sensed the balance was delicate, any movement liable to upset it. He held onto his patience and ignored the ache in his bones.

“Whoever might have told you that is either an idiot or a liar,” Slade said quietly.

“Oh,” Grayson said, barely more than a breath. He looked down, his dark lashes fanning out over his cheeks. Leaning over, he carefully set the carved robin on his nightstand, arranging it so as not to crush the daisies. He sat up again and looked at Slade, and his scent burst out, deep and sweet.

Shifting to the side, Grayson made room on the bed. “Come here?” he asked.

Only Slade’s meta-human enhancements allowed him to rise fluidly, his muscles locked and his joints protesting. He sat next to Grayson and tucked a lock of dark hair behind his ear, enjoying his closeness and the way he shivered and the slow creep of arousal in his scent. Slade wanted to bury himself in it, his face in Grayson’s neck, but not yet—not quite yet.

“We can relocate, if you like,” Slade said. “A courtship isn’t a mating bond. Your room doesn’t need to smell like me for weeks.”

“It’s ok, I want it to,” Grayson said in a rush.

That was all Slade needed. Cupping his hand around Grayson’s jaw, Slade moved in slowly, giving him plenty of time to reconsider, to retreat. But he didn’t, and when Slade kissed him, Grayson’s lips parted as if to welcome him in.

*

Slade’s first meeting with Rose was marked indelibly by her kicking him squarely in the groin and running off as fast as her feet would carry her. To be fair to his daughter, though, she was twelve years old, had been raised in a brothel, and Slade was a strange man who had grabbed her by the shoulders and stared intently at her face.

Once he recovered and was able to stand up straight again, Slade had looked to the shocked face of Wintergreen, who had witnessed the whole encounter and seen what he had. A girl with Lili’s Cambodian features and Slade’s white hair and blue eyes, of the age their daughter would have been if she had lived.

If she had lived.

Without a word, Slade stalked off to find Lili.

She was in her rooms, seated in front of the mirror of her vanity, gold-backed and wreathed with small lights. It made her look like an icon as she applied a line of blood-red lipstick in a perfect arc, focused solely on the task even though Slade knew she’d heard him enter. As she finished with her lipstick and started applying powder, her eyes finally met his in the mirror, and then she set the applicator down and sighed.

“I told that girl to stay in her room,” she said.

Any less angry, and Slade might have screamed. As it was, he could only stare at her as his hands shook and finally force out: “Is she—?”

“You saw her,” Lili said simply.

“Why?” Slade asked, his voice strained and helpless.

Lili swung her legs over the bench seat and lowered them on the other side, her body repositioned to face him, the mirror now reflecting the back of her head. She wore a sleeveless cheongsam, red with gold accents and a leg slit that went nearly up to her hip. In it, she was as beautiful as the day they’d met, and when she folded her hands in her lap, she looked serious and determined and not the least bit guilty.

“Your ex-wife tried to kill you for endangering your son. That is why,” Lili said. “And you never seemed to care about being a father. Even pregnant, you kept trying to run off into some fight or other, and it was not an easy pregnancy.”

That had surprised Slade, after Joey. His second had come at home, and he’d been easy, so easy that Slade would sometimes go hours or almost a day forgetting he was pregnant before remembering with a jolt. Primarily, he remembered worrying about the serum, about what it might do—but Joey had come out with wide, blue eyes and a dust of blonde curls, and he was perfect, perfect just as Grant had been.

But with his third, Slade’s luck had run out. Lili had recognized what was happening before Slade did, back in Thailand after he moved her out of Cambodia and into a safer harbor, too many mornings in a row spent with his head in the toilet. The morning sickness persisted throughout the first trimester, and the baby started kicking early in the second like it was trying to punish Slade for his poor decisions. He hadn’t been worried, then; he’d just wanted the damned thing out.

Any time he’d remembered that in the dozen years since, Slade had felt hollow and sick.

“Damn it, Lili. I don’t have standard biology—I spent most of my first pregnancy at war, for God’s sake,” Slade said. “I didn’t need to spend the whole pregnancy in fucking confinement. I’m not one of your girls.”

Lili sniffed. “You didn’t need to go looking for contracts, either,” she said. “If I couldn’t trust you to keep our child safe when all you had to do was not purposefully get yourself killed, how could I trust you to do it after she was born?”

“So you thought it would be better to tell me she came out dead?” Slade had to resist the urge to touch his stomach, at the place where he’d healed too quickly to scar. “You could have just asked me to leave her with you.”

“And to leave her alone, forever, without checking on us or looking for us?” Lili asked. “You would have brought danger to our doorstep, Slade. Even if you didn’t mean to.”

“I had the right to know,” Slade said, falling back on that when he couldn’t deny anything else.

Lili looked down. “Forgive me for saying, but you had two sons when we last met. Since then, both of them have died, and both of those deaths had something to do with you.” She looked at him again and said, “I don’t feel like I made the wrong decision.”

It caught him like a garrote around his throat. Slade clenched his fists and clenched his jaw, his whole body a wound. He thought of the girl, his girl, his daughter, the shock at seeing her face, and beneath that…the panic. The fear.

He’d seen his daughter, and he’d been afraid.

Rather than look at Lili, Slade looked off the side, to the rest of the dressing room. A rack of clothes took up a length of the wall, a painting above it showing a scene of birds.

“What did you name her?” he asked.

“Rose,” Lili said. “Her name is Rose.”

Slade nodded. “Take care of her,” he said, and he turned, and he left the room.

On his way out, Slade collected Wintergreen, and they walked in silence from the brothel to the New York alley behind it and from there to Slade’s car. Driving put Wintergreen on Slade’s blind side, but even so, he could feel the man staring as he took the turns, as he turned on the windshield wipers to clear the first drops of the falling rain.

“Are you really going to walk away from this, Slade?” Wintergreen asked.

“Is there a reason not to?” Slade asked in turn. “Lili seems to be caring for her just fine on her own.”

“Slade,” Wintergreen began.

The next turn, Slade took a little sharper than he should have. “Billy,” he replied, and there must have been something in his tone. Wintergreen dropped it, folding himself silent and reproachful into the passenger seat.

And that should have been the last time, the only time. Slade left town and did his best to forget, save perhaps for some vague idea of finding Rose after she turned eighteen, when the decision of whether to know him became hers rather than her mother’s. But then, less than a year later, he got the call.

On occasion, Slade wondered what would have become of Rose if Wintergreen hadn’t been there, if she hadn’t somehow survived the encounter that killed Lili. It was Slade’s fault, or at least had happened because some stupid, obsessed bastard had discovered and targeted his daughter, her life threatened by his blood in her veins. Damn Lili, Slade thought, for being right, and damn her for dying and leaving him with this: the small, scared girl hunched under Wintergreen’s too-large coat.

He took her to the Titans, but only because Wintergreen got stubborn and obstinate the way he sometimes did and forced Slade to do it himself. The drive there passed tense and silent, Rose mostly staring out the window, Slade reflecting he’d been more comfortable in hostage situations where he’d been tied to a pole for days and waterboarded—and the ferry ride out to the island wasn’t much better. Rose wore the backpack that contained all her worldly possessions and leaned out over the railing, and Slade stood back and gave her space.

When they disembarked on the dock, though, she turned to him with her eyes wet and her chin stuck out, determined. Slade stopped and waited, looking down at Rose as she tilted her head all the way back to look at his face.

“Why didn’t you want me?” she asked.

It was nothing Slade hadn’t been expecting. “What did your mother tell you?” he asked in turn.

“Nothing.” Rose scuffed her foot against the dock and shrugged. “She just said you were dangerous.”

“She told me you died when you were still a baby,” Slade said, leaving out his bitterness and betrayal and just how soon after Rose’s birth that had been. The girl only had memories of her mother now, and it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good to taint them.

A shaky breath, little hiccup of a sob. Tear tracks down one cheek, the other hidden behind a curtain of white hair. Rose wiped her face with her sleeve, met his gaze again, and asked, snot-thick and accusatory: “What about now?”

Before answering, Slade sat down on a bench along the dock, putting them at eye level. He reached out and held his palm gently against the of Rose’s face, and she let him, though she looked distrustful and wary. Slade couldn’t blame her, even as he lifted his thumb to wipe away another tear.

“Your mother was right. I’m too dangerous to be around, and you’re too tempting a target,” Slade said. “You’ll be safe here. I need you to be safe.”

Rose’s face crumpled, and she collapsed into him, her arms tight around Slade’s center. It stunned him for a second, and then Slade was hugging her back, pressing her head against his shoulder, and he wasn’t thinking of Grant or Joey or Rose herself and the years they’d missed because if he did, he might not let her go.

*

One thing Slade learned quickly: Grayson was a biter. His teeth pulled at Slade’s lower lip almost hard enough to hurt and scraped along his jaw like Grayson was thinking about sinking them into his neck. Slade allowed it for a minute, then seized Grayson by the chin and kissed him deep and sloppy. Clinging to his shoulders, Grayson shuddered like he was the one going into heat, and reached for the hem of Slade’s shirt. Slade lifted his arms obligingly to let Grayson peel it off, undoing his belt and kicking his pants off down his legs for good measure.

That left Slade in his underwear, in a pair of boxer briefs with a slick-wet patch growing at the crotch. Grayson zeroed in on it, licking his lips and going for the elastic waistband, but Slade took advantage of his distraction and pushed him back, hard enough to make him flop down against the mattress. In a distinctly un-Grayson-like fashion, the kid flailed for a second in surprise, then came up on his elbows and shot Slade an indignant look.

“What was that for?” he asked.

Before answering, Slade skimmed his hands up Grayson’s calves to his thighs, spreading his legs apart as he went. “I didn’t say you could touch yet.”

A blush spread across the kid’s cheeks, violently red. “Oh my God,” he groaned.

Cute. Slade gave a half-smile of amusement and lifted the pleated skirt of the tennis dress. Beneath it, Grayson wore a tiny pair of black compression shorts, the bulge of his cock huge and enough to make Slade’s mouth water and his cunt pulse. Grayson’s balls didn’t quite fit, part of the sack peeking out from the right leg of the shorts, and Slade ran his finger up it to to make Grayson gasp.

“Lift up,” Slade said, and Grayson swallowed visibly and did.

Hooking his fingers under the waistband, Slade pulled the shorts down his legs and tossed them off to the side. Grayson’s cock slapped against his belly, hard and flushed with blood, and tented the skirt enough to hint at what lay underneath. Picking it up again, Slade took a minute to admire the view. Grayson had shaved, the skin smooth across his balls and the slit of his shallow, little cunt and the crack of his ass. His cock looked about as big around as the kid’s wrist, the loose skin at the base where the knot would form a promise that Slade would be feeling it for days.

Grayson twisted onto his side, partially obscuring the view. “Wait, let me…” he murmured, trailing off as he reached for the zipper at the side of his dress.

But Slade took his hand and he stilled. “Leave it on,” Slade said in a growl, and Grayson bit his lip and said, “O—ok,” and when Slade gently pushed his shoulder, he lay back against the bed.

Laying down, Slade positioned himself between Grayson’s legs. He kept the skirt up with one hand, a makeshift screen that kept Grayson from seeing what he was doing. With his free hand, Slade brushed his thumb across the head of Grayson’s cock, making him jolt and gasp. He grinned and dipped his head lower, sucking the kid’s balls into his mouth without warning, and Grayson twisted and swore.

“Slade, I’m gonna—oh, fuck,” Grayson said breathily as Slade’s tongue teased the edge of his pussy. It wasn’t good for much in the reproductive sense, didn’t connect a uterus much like Slade’s cock didn’t connect to any testicles. Some alphas didn’t even like to be touched there, but from the quiet, whimpering noises Grayson made, he very much did.

Pulling back, Slade kissed his inner thigh. “Cute little cunt you got there,” he said. “Maybe I’ll try it out sometime.”

“There’s lube in the nightstand,” Grayson said.

Which might have been an excuse to get Slade on his back sooner, but he was getting impatient. Sitting up, Slade found the nightstand drawer and the bottle of lubricant and set it down on the mattress. He peeled his underwear off, the wet spot sticking unpleasantly until it pulled away, and then lay back against the pillows. Lazily, Slade lifted his hand and crooked his finger in a come-here motion, and Grayson rolled his eyes, but walked up the bed on his knees to straddle Slade’s hips.

Snapping the cap off the lube, Slade squeezed some out and then lifted Grayson’s skirt to find his cunt. He gasped at the first touch, from the cold if Slade had to guess, and then bit his lip and spread his legs wider. Slade got two fingers in, loosening Grayson up and adding the lube to the slight, natural wetness that his cunt produced, and moved his hands to Grayson’s hips to line him up. He sank down on Slade’s cock like a dream, his breath stuttering out and his eyes going wide. Slade thrust up, and Grayson whimpered and went even redder than he already was, like he wasn’t quite used to getting fucked like this, like he was embarrassed to like it.

Lifting the kid’s skirt up, Slade watched their bodies move together, enjoying that he could see it and Grayson couldn’t: the place where Slade fucked in behind his balls, Grayson’s cock painfully hard and leaking precome. And Slade had gotten off like this before, with alpha and omega variants as well as standard betas, but not this close to his heat. His cunt ached empty, and he needed something in him so badly he could taste it.

“Ok.” Slade stopped moving and tapped Grayson’s arm. “That’s enough. Give me your knot.”

It got him a laugh, Grayson’s scrunched-up face. “‘Give me your knot’?” he echoed. “Romance really is dead.”

But he was climbing off as he said it, wincing a little as Slade’s cock slipped out of his pussy, and Slade raised an eyebrow and said, “Well, if you’ve changed your mind—”

“Oh, fuck you,” Grayson said, and as if to make good on his words, lined up his cock and pushed in.

The stretch was immediate and glorious, and Slade groaned as his toes curled. He hadn’t been celibate—his line of work frequently put him close to someone else looking for quick stress relief—but he hadn’t shared his heat in years and years. This close to it, the weight of Grayson’s cock felt incredible, the press of it lighting along his nerves as Grayson adjusted and started to move. Slade got a hand around the back of Grayson’s neck and pulled him down into a kiss, open-mouthed and panting. The angle brought Grayson in deeper, and Slade hooked his legs around Grayson’s waist to keep him there.

He relaxed into it, the heat growing under his skin, the cresting pleasure that Grayson pulled out of his body. Tangling his fingers in Grayson’s hair, Slade kissed him again and again, and on the next thrust, he felt the first bit of resistance as Grayson pushed into his cunt. Drag on the withdraw, like his body didn’t want to let Grayson go, and then a near-painful stretch that still felt good. Slade hiked his legs up further, and he was saying, “That’s it, that’s it, give it to me,” quiet and muffled against Grayson’s mouth, and Grayson was moaning and whimpering past words.

Sweat dripped from his hair and the tip of his nose, and Slade darted his tongue out to lick a drop away, laughing breathlessly as Grayson, even mid-fuck, still recoiled a little in surprise. Then, his face went slack, and he pushed in a final time, his knot too big to pull out and tying them together. Breathing heavy, Grayson braced a palm on Slade’s chest and reached down to circle his free hand around Slade’s cock, hard and neglected. He hadn’t even realized how close he was, and Slade seized up and came after only a few seconds.

His cunt clenched, and Grayson let out a noise that sounded almost wounded and collapsed down on top of Slade’s body. Still riding the high of his orgasm, Slade pushed Grayson’s sweaty hair back off his face and kissed his forehead, letting out a moan as he felt his cunt milk out the first pulses of come. Grayson could have been asleep, eyes closed and open-mouthed, save for the shakes going through him, like it was too much, and Slade ran a hand down his back to soothe him.

Something caught the corner of Slade’s eye, and he turned his head to find the bottle of lube still on the pillow. Picking it up, Slade worked the cap off one-handed and managed to get enough lube on his fingers without dripping too much on the sheets. This time, he rubbed it between his fingers to warm it before bringing them down to the crack of Grayson’s ass. His breath caught at the touch, but he made no move to stop him as Slade pushed a finger into his asshole, following it quickly with another. He knew when he found Grayson’s prostate because the kid cried out and seized against him, and his cock let out another, larger pulse of come. Slade grinned feral and kept working him, taking all Grayson had to give.

It took about thirty minutes for Grayson’s knot to go down, come leaking out around his soft cock. Slade removed his fingers from Grayson’s ass and let him pull out, grimacing at the gush of fluid from his cunt. Grayson groaned at it, looking fucked-out and exhausted as he sat back from the mess.

“Ah, fuck,” he swore. “I’m gonna have to change the sheets.”

Slade laughed, undeterred as Grayson swatted at his chest.

After, there were clean sheets, and bath robes to take the place of Slade’s discarded clothes and Grayson’s ruined tennis dress, and a dinner platter containing two plates that someone had left outside the door. Slade hadn’t the first idea how that had been arranged and very much didn’t want to know; he ate his burger and fries and side salad and slice of apple pie without looking the proverbial gift horse in the mouth.

The windows of Grayson’s room looked south on a spectacular view of the bay. Slade spent some time watching it, the Manhattan skyline and the sunset in the west, feeling his body slip further into heat. It went full-blown around nightfall, and Slade pawed Grayson’s robe off and fell back with him on the bed, taking his knot again in a heat-drunk haze.

Grayson was young, and in good shape, and he gave Slade the second round easily, and the third without any trouble. When Slade wanted a fourth, though, the room low-lit and the hour nearing midnight, Grayson flopped back against the mattress and whined pitifully.

“Fucking meta-human metabolism, fuck,” he complained. “I’m chafed raw, Slade. I can’t get it up again.”

Part of Slade knew that, but his heat didn’t want to accept it. “What if I finger you?” he asked, kissing Grayson’s shoulder.

“No—you’ve fucking milked me dry, too,” Grayson said, though he didn’t sound as put-out as the words would suggest. “Hold on.”

Twisting over the side of the bed, Grayson opened the door at the bottom of his nightstand and got out something Slade couldn’t see lying down. He puzzled for a moment over the sound of plastic packaging being torn open, half-sat as his curiosity got the better of him, and laughed aloud.

“Did you buy me a toy?” he asked.

“Well, it’s not for me,” Grayson said with a hunched defensiveness. “I just thought I should be prepared if you said yes.”

Intrigued, Slade spread his legs and tilted his hips up. “Let’s see how it holds up to my collection.”

The toy was easily as big as Grayson himself, and Slade hummed in appreciation and approval—at least the kid knew better than to underestimate him. He pushed up to meet the length of plain, black plastic as Grayson fucked him with it like he would his cock, and then gasped as the knot started to swell much faster than a flesh-and-blood one could. Slade opened his eye to find the remote in Grayson’s hand and a smug look on his face, and Slade was going to say something clever when the toy started vibrating and it got lost in a moan.

He came another three times with the toy, finally exhausted enough to sleep when Grayson pulled it out. Slade draped an arm across his waist and arranged their bodies together, and he dropped off with Grayson’s alpha scent thick in his nose.

In the morning, Slade woke to find Grayson above him, his skin flushed and his eyes glassy with rut. That was fast—but Grayson had always been an overachiever. Slade lay back and let Grayson fuck him with abandon, lost in the pinpricks of Grayson’s nails digging into his shoulders and his frantic, erratic thrusts. He whined as his knot locked them together, and Slade came from that, his cunt oversensitive and spasming as Grayson continued to grind against him like he couldn’t quite get close enough.

Rut made Grayson demanding, insatiable, and it matched Slade’s need perfectly. He let Grayson fuck him over the surface of his desk and against one of his giant windows, hold him up against the wall of the shower even as it made the kid’s muscles tremble. When his knot at last deflated, Slade scooped him up off his wobbly legs and carried him back to bed.

They used the toy again, or rather Slade used it when he recovered the wherewithal to worry that Grayson might injure himself if he kept going like this. Grayson still pressed the length of his body against Slade’s, confused and desperate in his rut, and Slade pushed his thigh between Grayson’s pretty legs and watched him use it to get off. “Eager, little puppy,” Slade called him, and Grayson whined and spurted a small, pathetic stream of come out of his spent cock.

Night fell at some point when Slade hadn’t been paying attention or had fallen asleep, the hours marked by intermittently passing out and waking up for another round, and then morning again. The second full day followed the same pattern as the first, a haze of heat and sex and lulls where they ate and showered and Grayson changed the bed into yet another set of clean sheets. When they lay back down together, propped against the pillows with their legs entwined, Slade couldn’t stop himself from kissing him, couldn’t help but think that they fit together perfectly.

By the third day, Slade could feel the intensity of his heat start to slip away, a relief as the soreness of his body made itself known past all the endorphins. The cycle of Grayson’s rut followed at about a twelve-hour delay, but by the time the sun came up on the fourth morning, they moved together without urgency, slow kisses as Grayson rolled Slade onto his back and knotted him, sprawling on his chest after as he’d done the first time.

Slade waited until Grayson pulled out and they cleaned up, and then he took Grayson’s face in his hand, thumb rubbing across his cheekbone. “I have to go talk to my doctor,” he said. “I still don’t know why my birth control failed.”

“Is that Dr. Villain?” Grayson asked. He was on his side, his face sandwiched between the pillow and Slade’s hand.

“He pronounces it ‘will-hane’,” Slade said.

And Grayson laughed and said, “Sure.” Humoring him, but he turned his face into Slade’s palm and kissed it, and then looked at him, his blue eyes serious. “Will you come back after?”

“Of course,” Slade told him, surprised by how much he meant it, how much he wanted to.

It got him a smile, and Grayson shuffled closer. Slade lifted his arm and made room, and he held Grayson against him and allowed that moment to stick, the comfort and the bone-deep contentment. Over Grayson’s head, Slade could watch the sky out of the window, the white clouds and the distant specks of birds wheeling past.

*

“I thought you said you could drop me off,” Slade said, watching the familiar shape of Titans Tower grow closer at their approach.

The plane tilted to the side as Grayson moved the joystick, bringing them in on the descent. “I can hardly land this thing in the middle of Manhattan, Slade,” he said so innocently that Slade didn’t buy it for a second. “We’ll land at the Tower, and I’ll call you a ferry.”

Deeply distrustful, Slade sunk further into the passenger seat and folded his arms. “There are other airfields,” he groused.

“Hey, look at the bright side,” Grayson said, grinning brilliantly beneath his domino mask and the pilot’s headset he wore. “It’s closer than Moscow.”

From the sunshine and green color of the grass at the Tower’s base, it was warmer here, too, but Slade huffed rather than dignifying that with a response. Nightwing spent most of his time in Blüdhaven these days, and Slade had been led to believe the kid would fly them back there after their latest mutually beneficial arrangement. Every time they worked together, Slade swore it would be the last.

Now, he was telling himself that this time, the conviction would stick. The plane landed with barely a bump, and Grayson drove it neatly into the hangar where it lived. He was competent—Slade had to grudgingly give him that, if nothing else. Climbing out of his seat, Slade followed Grayson into the cabin and down the narrow set of stairs. He paused on the concrete floor to stretch, flying always claustrophobic even though the cockpit’s generous size had prevented it from feeling downright cramped.

“How far is the ferry?” Slade asked.

“I don’t know—I haven’t called it yet,” Grayson said, also stretching as he walked past him, arms over his head. “You can wait outside, though. It won’t be too long.”

His body moved sinuous in the black-and-blue of his skintight Nightwing suit; as always, Grayson looked good, and when Slade caught a note of his alpha scent, he smelled even better. But Slade was too damned irritated with him to spare a private moment of appreciation like he normally would. He narrowed his eye through the lens in his Deathstroke mask, unable to alter his situation in a single way as Grayson headed towards the door leading into the Tower proper.

“It had better not be long,” Slade settled for grumbling, then turned in the opposite direction and went out into the daylight.

Spring had arrived sooner than in Moscow, the air pleasantly warm and fresh with new growth. Slade removed his mask as he stepped out of the hangar, a lesser chance that one of Grayson’s teammates would see him and assume he was here for a fight. The rest of his armor he left on in the hopeful assumption he wouldn’t be here long enough to justify removing it. Down on the shoreline, the dock waited empty, and Slade began walking towards it with the intention of waiting for the ferry—and stopped as movement caught the corner of his good eye.

Two figures, suited up like him. A jolt went through Slade, even though he’d been expecting it from the moment Titans Tower came into view through the jet’s windshield. He stopped to watch, out in the open, too big and too garish in his black and orange Deathstroke suit to sneak past, and he wasn’t going to ignore them like a coward.

Whatever Rose claimed to feel towards him, anger and betrayal bordering on hatred going off the last time they’d been near each other, she still wore his colors. Her Ravager, black and orange and split down the mask, followed his design more closely than Grant’s short-lived tenure in the same mantle ever had. She spun a bo staff in her hand, silver and glinting in the sunlight, and Slade couldn’t help but crack a smile at Grayson’s influence. He’d made a thousand mistakes with Rose, but roping Nightwing into training her hadn’t been one of them.

As Rose turned, Slade noticed an odd shape to the mask: a blindfold, covering her eyes. It should have given Joey an advantage as he crept closer over the grass, but Rose swung her staff into his would-be kick at the last second, causing him to hop away and grimace in pain. Setting his foot down again, Joey looked up, and then his green eyes went wide as they found Slade—evidently noticing him for the first time. Joey didn’t wave, and Slade didn’t either. He stood there instead and waited for the inevitable.

Dodging another sweep of the bo staff, Joey raised his hand and snapped his fingers. That must have been the signal, because Rose dropped the staff and reached for the blindfold, lifting it and the mask off of her head. She smiled as she shook her white hair out, self-assured and pleased.

«Had enough?» she signed, then frowned at the look on Joey’s face. He jerked his head in Slade’s direction, and she turned to follow it, and then her expression went sour. “Oh,” she said aloud.

Joey moved between them, putting his back to Slade, and signed something to Rose behind the shield of his body. She sighed audibly and replied in kind, and, before Slade could try to parse out their conversation, went and sat on a pile of rocks at the edge of the training field and folded her arms.

Meanwhile, Joey was walking towards him. Slade had dreamed this exact scenario so many times that he couldn’t quite make himself believe it was real now—his son, alive again. Confronted with the approaching, unavoidable fact of it, his mind focused on the details, an anchor. The curls of Joey’s blonde hair, the garish colors of his Jericho suit.

He’d known Joey was alive, of course. Ever since he’d woken up in the middle of the street, not knowing where he was or how he’d gotten there. The battle raging around him had made the context clear quickly enough, though, and the fragments coming back burned like fires in the dark. Stumbling away, Slade had felt the bone-deep certainty even before he’d seen the proof, the shadow-shape of his son jumping from body to body of the Titans who fought him, forcing them to fight each other.

Somehow, impossibly, his son had lived—his son was alive.

And then Joey was gone again, vanished into Raven and spirited off through a magic portal. Slade had made himself scarce before the Titans went looking—he’d been markedly less friendly with them in those days—but he’d kept tabs. Logan had gotten word to him when Victor Stone had trapped Joey, still volatile, in a computer file, and he’d been alerted when Raven had finally put his son back in a body of his own.

That body was now coming to a stop an arm’s length in front of him, the first time Slade had seen his resurrected son face-to-face. His eyes were as green as ever, the ugly scar vanished from his throat. Probably, that meant Joey was physically capable of speech again, but Slade had seen him signing, and he wasn’t going to ask.

“Hello, son,” Slade said.

A small smile, bittersweet. «Hi, Pops,» Joey signed.

Quite suddenly, Joey was in his arms. Slade didn’t quite remember who had moved first, or when he’d opened them, but he was holding Joey tight enough he’d have worried about hurting him, had Joey not been hugging him back just as hard. He smelled the same, and Slade squeezed his eye shut so the tear wouldn’t fall.

They parted, and Slade fought for his composure, stepped back, took a breath. He signed, not trusting his voice: «Are you well?»

In response, Joey nodded shakily, and his face crumpled like he was about to cry. «I’m sorry for what I did when I took you over,» he said. «I didn’t mean to hurt you.»

Slade laughed at the irony, short and surprised. “My God, Joey, I ran you through with a sword. Don’t apologize to me.”

«I was dying anyway, and I was in pain,» Joey said. «All you did was stop it.»

Which was far more credit than Slade deserved. He looked down, at a loss, and eventually settled on: “How much do you remember?”

«Nothing, really. I just woke up, and…» Joey trailed off, his hands faltering. «I don’t remember going into you when I—when I died, but I think I knew you’d be strong enough. Your enhancements,» he explained. «Possessing a normal person that long would have killed them.»

And Joey along with his unlucky vessel, as likely as not. Slade had unknowingly harbored his son’s soul for years and emerged none the worse for wear, except…he’d woken in that street with his head clearer than it had been at any point since Joey’s supposed death. At first, he’d assumed it was the grief, and then Slade had gotten used to it, the strange fuzziness, the way the world sometimes seemed distant, the lapses in time. Things he’d done without knowing why, that he couldn’t explain looking back, like…

Like he’d been someone else.

Even so, Slade couldn’t lay the blame at Joey’s feet. Sweet, sensitive Joey couldn’t hurt people the way Slade remembered doing in those years, Joey with his artist’s hands and musician’s heart. But Slade had never been cruel or violent without a reason or a contract to justify it, and all he knew was that it had seemed to make sense at the time. Giving Rose the serum while knowing what it was doing to her, trying to kill Wintergreen for getting in his way, shooting out Impulse’s knee on the flimsy reason that kids shouldn’t play hero. Slade had never cared about that; he’d joined the army when he was hardly older than that boy.

It wasn’t him, Slade thought. It wasn’t Joey. Trapped in the same body and mind, they’d simply and horribly driven each other insane.

Through it all, though, Joey had lived, and for once, Slade’s meta-gene had done something good for his children. Damnably ironic, after the years he’d spent cursing the thing, cursing the serum that had activated it and let him pass it down to Joey and Rose like it had skipped over Grant. If Joey hadn’t had his powers, Slade had thought he might still be alive—and now he was, because of the same thing that had killed him.

Slade took a breath, and he met his son’s eyes, and he placed a hand on his shoulder. “It’s over now,” he said. “Don’t trouble yourself about what’s past.”

Ducking his head, Joey nodded, and Slade let his hand drop. They stood for a minute in mostly comfortable silence, looking out at the sea. Slade kept trying to grasp the surreality of the moment, and it kept slipping away; he could almost believe Adeline would come around the corner and Grant would walk up the hill, all his worst mistakes reversible and fading like a dream.

Which reminded him, like biting into a bitter seed in the fruit: “Have you talked to your mother?”

«Yeah,» Joey said shortly. «I went out to see her. She’s ok.»

It rankled before Slade could stop it, that he’d gone to Adeline first—but that was stupid, and he knew it was stupid, and it bothered him all the same. Adeline hadn’t been the one to kill Joey, and it wasn’t her body he’d been trapped in, unconscious for years before suddenly bursting to the front in an eruption of violence. No wonder, then, that Joey hadn’t sought Slade out, and as time passed, he’d convinced himself that was for the best.

Until, of course, Dick Grayson had decided to stick his nose in it.

«Are you going to be in town for long?» Joey asked, looking up at him cautious and curious.

“I’ll be at my penthouse for at least the next few days,” Slade said, and answering the unspoken question, “You’re welcome any time you’d like.”

At that, Joey smiled wide and brilliant. «Ok. Tomorrow?»

“Tomorrow’s fine,” Slade told him.

Joey’s gaze flicked to something over Slade’s shoulder, and his smile faltered a little. «I’ll see you then,» he signed.

He walked off across the grass, and when Slade turned to watch him go, someone else came into sight: his daughter, coming towards him. Through his surprise, Slade reflected that she must have been what Joey was looking at earlier, and he braced for whatever came next. A slap to his face, a screaming tirade—God knew he’d earned all that and more.

But when Rose came to a stop before him, she only folded her arms and glared at him, narrow-eyed. Slade looked back, keeping his expression neutral, his own arms loose at his sides. Thought about saying something to provoke his daughter, just to get this over with, and ultimately decided against it.

Finally, she spoke. “You hurt me,” she said. “A lot.”

“I know,” Slade said.

“You know?” she repeated mockingly. “That’s it?”

Holding back a scoff, Slade asked, “Would an apology mean anything to you?”

“Try it and see,” Rose snapped.

“I’m sorry,” Slade said, and he meant it.

From the way Rose looked down for a moment and swallowed visibly, she knew. “I don’t know if I can forgive you. But…” She trailed off, sighed. “Joey says you were never like that before. He seems to think I should give you another chance.”

At a loss, Slade kept silent. He wanted to reach for her, but didn’t dare.

“I’ll never know if I don’t, right?” Rose asked rhetorically. “If you forced me to take the serum and put a goddamn radioactive rock in my head because Joey possessing you made you crazy, or if you really are that fucked up. So, fine.” She pointed at him, hard and accusing. “You get one more chance. But if you fuck it up this time, I will gut you in a way you can’t come back from.”

And Slade felt it again, the distance between him and Rose, the wall as thin and invisible as a sheet of glass that hadn’t been there with Joey. He couldn’t pinpoint what it was. That Joey was a man like him and an omega like him, while Rose was an alpha; that Joey was Adeline’s son, and Slade had barely known Lili; that he had known Joey since birth, and Rose only as a teenager. It was all of those things and none of them, slipping through Slade’s fingers as he tried to grasp it.

“That sounds fair,” Slade said at last.

A small twist of a smile, like she just couldn’t help it. Nothing like Joey’s, but it was something, it was a start. Rose reached out and clasped Slade’s arm over the plates of his Deathstroke suit, only for a second, but he felt the phantom of it as Rose let go and turned away and walked back to where she’d been practicing with Joey. Slade stayed where he was for a few minutes longer, watching their fluid forms move like a dance.

Then, freed, he made his way down to the dock where Dick Grayson was waiting, still in his Nightwing suit. A ferry approached, cresting closer over the waves. Slade watched it as he stood at Grayson’s shoulder, looking at him sidelong through his good eye.

“The next time we work together and you get injured doing something stupid, I’m going to take you to Gotham and leave you on Daddy Bat’s doorstep,” Slade told him precisely.

Grayson, predictably, threw his head back and laughed. “I suppose I earned that,” he said.

Looking back up the hill at his children, Slade said, “You certainly did.”

*

For all Villain liked to work out of a hidden lair, the drive leading up to it was pleasant enough, full of trees and dappled sunlight. It might have even been peaceful if not for Wintergreen in the seat next to him, practically buzzing with the effort to keep quiet as Slade had requested on his second appointment in as many days. Villain had insisted on discussing his test results in-person, like as not a needlessly overdramatic directive that would end with Slade getting poked and prodded again as the doctor loved to do.

He pressed down on the accelerator a little harder, willing them to reach their destination and get this over with. “You know you didn’t have to come,” he said. “Villain’s already a doctor. I don’t need a nurse.”

“I wouldn’t wish you on a nurse,” Wintergreen said. “You’re a terrible patient.”

Slade scoffed. “I have a healing factor, Billy,” he said. “I don’t get sick.”

“Call it an inference, then,” Wintergreen said amiably. And, more seriously: “This could have something to do with your meta-gene, Slade. You can’t say for certain you won’t need help.”

It was the reason Wintergreen had given for coming with him, the one Slade knew would make it impossible to keep him away. “It’s not my meta-gene,” he said.

“Do you know what caused it then?” Wintergreen asked.

Like a snapshot, Grayson’s face came back, flushed and fucked-out as he pushed into Slade again, hazy and desperate. Three weeks since Slade had left him after their cycles had passed, three days since he’d gotten back stateside from a job he’d taken to feel like himself again. He’d needed time away from Grayson and his sweet, alpha smell, space to think and rationalize what he’d done.

Back in the present, Slade focused on the road and answered Wintergreen’s question. “No.”

Some ten minutes later, they drove off the road into the hidden entrance that led to Villain’s off-the-books clinic. Gloom closed in around them as the rolling door slid shut, and Slade blinked his eye to adjust to the light as he parked his car in an empty spot. By the time he got out, he could see normally again, and Villain was waiting in his white doctor’s coat like a specter.

“This had better be good, Villain,” Slade said without preamble, waiting until he heard Wintergreen’s door close to lock the car behind him.

“I’m sure you’ll find it worth the drive,” Villain told him with a small, knowing smile that Slade didn’t like one bit. “If you’ll follow me.”

He walked back into the shadowed hallway leading into the deeper recesses of his clinic. Sharing a look with Wintergreen, Slade rolled his eye, put his hands in his jacket pockets against the air-conditioned chill, and went after the echoing sound of Villain’s footsteps. The silence rolling off of Wintergreen carried a distinctly troubled air, and Slade wanted to tell him to stop giving himself an ulcer, but Villain would hear and probably say something to make it worse, and the hallway wasn’t long enough. In another few steps, it gave way to a well-lit room with a vaulted roof, the walls lined with gleaming medical equipment kept meticulously clean.

Across it, Villain was already sitting in front of a computer display, the small, glowing lines of a report filling the screen before them. He glanced over his shoulder as Slade and Wintergreen entered, then gestured them over with a wave of his hand.

“Come read this,” Villain said.

With nothing else for it, Slade walked over, his annoyance growing with every step. The grainy letters of the report didn’t look long; Villain could have damn well read it to him and saved him the trip. Hell, he could have probably sent it in an e-mail. Stopping behind Villain’s chair, Slade bent over to peer at the screen.

He read the words, then read them again. A slow, sinking disbelief settled in the pit of his stomach and made his heart pound in his ears. Slade stood up again, hyperaware of Wintergreen beside him as he rocked back on his heels.

“That’s impossible,” he said when he could get words out. “I had a tubal ligation years ago.”

“You did,” Villain said patiently. “But that was years ago.”

And as Slade glared down at him in consternation, his brain refusing to make the logical leap, Wintergreen spat it out: “Slade. Your healing factor.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Slade swore.

Either out of pity or practicality, Villain let him escape without forcing him to give any more blood samples or take off his clothes. Slade stalked out of the facility with a print-out of the test results clutched in his fist and Wintergreen on his heels. Correctly reading Slade’s silence, Wintergreen kept his mouth shut until they crossed the border from New Jersey to New York.

“What will you do now?” Wintergreen asked tentatively.

Slade sighed through his nose and didn’t start shouting, though it was a near thing. “I’m going to drop you off,” he said. “And then I’m going to go have an overdue conversation with Grayson.”

“Oh!” Wintergreen said in surprise, then cleared his throat and went on faux-casually: “I think that’s wise.”

Given the choice, Slade would have made the drive up to Blüdhaven and stewed the entire way, but Grayson wasn’t in Blüdhaven—he was still Titans fucking Tower, and Slade didn’t have the patience to wait. After depositing Wintergreen at the apartment he kept in the city, Slade chartered a boat and steered it too fast across the bay. Water arced along either side of him, foam in his wake. This time, he would make sure he could leave under his own power.

The training fields at the base of the Tower came into focus as he drew close, one occupied by the clashing forms of Donna Troy and Starfire. Slade kept them in the corner of his eye while he tethered the boat to the dock and started up the hill, but they didn’t do more than stop and watch him curiously as he walked across the grass. That the other Titans were watching and taking precautions in case he turned hostile was beyond doubt, but Slade wore civilian clothes and approached openly, which reduced the chances he’d have to ward off an attack.

Not that he’d mind the opportunity to show he could still knock them on their assses. 

But the door opened before Slade could knock, and there Grayson was, standing on the threshold. Even prepared for this, Slade had to stop for a moment and just look at him. The tennis dress was gone—stained and ruined, actually, as Slade had seen to the last time he was here—and in its place, Grayson wore plain blue jeans and a white t-shirt and a smile.

He looked not a single iota less desirable.

“Slade!” Grayson said. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

“I was in the area,” Slade said, which wasn’t a complete lie.

Grayson laughed like Slade had said something funny. “Come in,” he said.

None of the other Titans appeared as Grayson led him to the elevator and then to a small room of mismatched furniture that looked over the bay, the privacy of it a small favor for which Slade managed to dredge up some gratitude. He closed the door behind them and pressed his fingers over the pocket of his slacks, feeling the crinkle of folded paper within. A numb shock every time Slade thought of it, proof that it was real years after it should have been possible, even without the procedure.

“Slade? Slade!” Grayson called, and Slade looked up at him and blinked in time to see him crack a half-smile. “Were you listening to me?”

Belatedly, Slade played back the one-sided conversation—something about a mission in space. “You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

“Yeah?” Grayson raised an eyebrow. “And what were you doing the past few weeks?”

“I had a contract. Just security,” Slade said before Grayson’s sudden frown could get any deeper. “It was boring. No one died.”

Nodding, Grayson looked off to the side. “Ok,” he said.

“I needed to clear my head,” Slade told him, explaining even though he didn’t need to.

“Ok,” Grayson repeated. “I get it.” He looked at Slade again and asked, “Did you see your doctor?”

Now, then. Slade’s heart flipped in his chest. “Yeah,” he said, and, with that, pulled the piece of paper out of his pocket and handed it over.

Taking it, Grayson looked between the folded square and Slade, and when Slade offered nothing, began opening it up. Slade watched the movement of his eyes as he read it, watched them go wide and realization and flick back to his face, mouth open in surprise.

“You said you couldn’t get pregnant.”

“I didn’t think I could,” Slade replied. “I had my Fallopian tubes completely removed after I found out Rose was alive. I thought that would be enough.”

To get around his healing factor, he didn’t say. Grayson looked at him dubiously and asked, “You never thought they might grow back?”

“Well, my fucking eye didn’t, did it?” Slade snapped.

Grayson winced like he’d been struck. “I always thought…” He trailed off, and his mouth worked in a way that let Slade know he wouldn’t like whatever came out next. “I mean, given what you’ve healed from since then, I always thought that was partially…psychological.”

Like the few seconds between a bullet making it past his armor and the pain sinking in, Slade couldn’t feel it, couldn’t react at all. Psychological. The word echoed in his head, and Slade fixed Grayson with a long, hard look that the kid refused to look away from. Part of Slade wanted to walk out, turn his back and leave the Tower and pilot his boat back to the mainland—but he knew if he did that now, he’d never come back, and he didn’t want that either. He settled for sighing and running a hand back through his hair.

“Are you trying to imply that I wanted this?” he asked.

“You’re here, aren’t you?” Grayson asked in turn.

Which stopped Slade because—he didn’t have to be. He could have quietly and privately taken care of this without involving Grayson at all. And he’d known that, he had, and yet…there had never been any option in Slade’s head save for coming directly here.

A plum-purple loveseat sat in the corner against the windows, and Slade went over and sat on it heavily. Grayson joined him, taking a more tentative seat at his side, keeping a gap between them. He still clutched the damning piece of paper in his hands.

“You know my children,” Slade said. “I’ve never been a good—” Omega, he thought. “Parent,” he said.

The paper crinkled as Dick folded it, and he set it down on the couch cushion. “I’ve seen you get better,” he said quietly.

At that, Slade couldn’t say anything, then or when Grayson drew closer and took his hand. He let his breath out long and slow and squeezed Grayson’s hand back, intertwining their fingers. This wasn’t the kid’s fault; he didn’t deserve Slade’s fury.

Finally, he said. “You know I couldn’t be around you. For the pregnancy.”

“What are you talking about?” Grayson asked with a little shake of his head—evidently, he didn’t know.

“The paranoia makes me dangerous,” Slade said. “Adeline accidentally startled me when I was pregnant with Grant, and I pulled a knife on her.” He paused, pushing away the pain of the memory. “I didn’t have the serum then, either.”

At that, Grayson went quiet, staring at Slade with wide-eyed alarm. “Did you ever talk to anyone about it?” he asked.

“My doctors said it was normal,” Slade said.

“What, your army doctors?” Grayson asked, spitting the word out like a curse. “That’s not normal, Slade. There’s people you can talk to, things you can do. Clearly, they didn’t give a damn as long as it was something they could use.”

It rang true, and Slade hated it. He let go of Grayson’s hand and looked blankly out the window, angry at the doctors, at the army brass, at his father, at himself.

“You don’t have to go through that, and you don’t have to do it alone,” Grayson said gently. “I can be with you.”

Looking back at him, Slade asked, “So, you want me to keep it?”

“It doesn’t matter what I want,” Dick said immediately.

Chivalrous, and unhelpful. Slade resisted the urge to roll his eye. “I didn’t ask that,” he said. “I asked what you want.”

“I…” Dick looked at him and quickly away. “I want you to keep it. I want to mate with you, and I want to see what our child looks like.”

“Alright,” Slade said. “I’ll take that into consideration.”

He couldn’t offer more at the moment, and to Grayson’s credit, he didn’t ask. Slade draped an arm around his shoulders, and Grayson tucked his legs up onto the couch and pressed against Slade’s side. This close, his scent filled Slade’s nose, and Slade turned his head to kiss Grayson’s temple. A quiet satisfaction bloomed in Slade’s chest, and he relaxed for the first time since he’d last been here with Grayson in his arms.

***