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21st September, 2009
Things were back to normal.
Terra was part of the team—again. Criminals behind bars. Tacos on Tuesday. Movie night on Friday. Pizza on Sunday.
Normal.
So when the alarm blares through the Tower, everyone instinctively assumes it’s another city-level threat. A new villain. An old one. An explosion. Something on fire.
But instead of a distress signal, Black Lightning’s face flickers onto the Ops Room’s massive screen.
Black Lightning. From the Outsiders.
He’s not someone who calls lightly, and definitely not someone who needs the Titans’ help. His team answers directly to Batman.
He says he’s calling because their leader threw a fit and went after Deathstroke alone.
Tara feels the blood drain out of her body. Skin goes cold. Stomach knots. Ears ring.
Her body reacts before her thoughts can catch up—heat surging, vision narrowing, something feral climbing up her spine. Something protective and destructive in equal measure.
Before Nightwing can step fully into frame, Tara shoves past him—too fast and hard, like something inside her has snapped loose. She’s suddenly inches from the screen, breath shallow, eyes wide, every muscle locked.
“Where the hell is my brother?!”
Her voice tears out of her, raw and violent, echoing off metal and concrete.
Black Lightning crosses his arms—not dismissive, or defensive, not exactly. His expression carries a weight Tara isn’t ready for.
“Hospital.”
-
This isn’t a hospital.
Not really a prison, either.
It’s something caught between the two—a place built for the dangerous and the damaged, with just enough medical equipment to keep people alive and just enough security to keep them contained.
Dick called it a high-level security facility.
Which means everything and nothing at the same time.
They refused to tell her the address—for her own good, as if that has ever mattered—but they made one fatal mistake.
They told Brion.
And Brion doesn’t keep secrets from his little sister.
Not even when he’s wrapped in bandages like a makeshift mummy, pale and tethered to machines, tubes threading in and out of him like veins rerouted. Not even when every breath looks like it costs him.
They told her Slade “cut him up good”—that much is true—but they didn’t mention Brion’s slit throat.
Not deep enough to kill him. Not even enough to damage his vocal cords.
No, Slade doesn’t do that.
Even the angle of the cut is wrong.
Brion didn’t want to explain how that happened. He could barely hold her gaze when she rushed at his bedside.
So Tara understands instantly what it means.
And she slapped him until the Outsiders dragged her out.
Getting inside is too easy. It almost insults her.
The guards at the door drop before they can speak—two clean, precise strikes from the stones she pulls straight up from the floor beneath their boots. The rocks slam into their napes, and they collapse like puppets with their strings severed.
They’ll wake up with splitting headaches—maybe bruises, maybe concussions—but they’ll live. That’s all she promises them.
Who the hell assigns human guards to a facility like this?
The cameras are already down. Some she disabled. Others she simply crushed.
Metal fragments glitter across the floor like broken ice.
She’s wearing civilian clothes—she wants him to see Tara, not Terra.
A hoodie, jeans, boots. Normal, harmless fabric.
Except for the gloves from her old costume. She isn’t leaving fingerprints.
It’s a stupid precaution. The Titans will figure it out eventually. So will the League. How could they not?
She doesn’t care. Once it’s done, what are they gonna do?
The inner door has a keypad. Five digits.
She guesses it on the fourth try.
Ironically, it was Slade who taught her how to do this—tilt your head, check the wear on the keys, count the smudges, follow the pattern, and then trust your luck.
She presses the final number.
The door unlocks with a soft click and a slow mechanical hiss, like the building itself is exhaling.
One step forward, pulse hammering, jaw clenched so tightly it aches.
She’s not here to be reasonable.
She’s not here to play by the Titans’ rules.
She’s not here to heal.
She’s here to end this.
One way or another.
No windows. Just harsh neon lights blasting down from the ceiling—cold, clinical, merciless. They’re so bright she has to narrow her eyes just to breathe through the glare.
So much for the patient needs to rest.
As if Slade needs rest. As if Slade deserves it.
Brion impaled him with his own sword. The Outsiders and the Justice League reached the alley before either of them bled out and slapped together a containment plan on the spot.
And now she’s here—staring at him.
God.
It’s unreal.
Seeing him like this is… disorienting.
Slade isn’t just restrained—he’s contained.
Every limb strapped down with reinforced restraints bolted into steel. IV lines snaking into his arms, pumping him full of something S.T.A.R. Labs cooked up—sedatives, inhibitors, whatever chemical cocktail it takes to drag a killing machine down to the level of a man.
Vic said it reduces him to human strength. Slows the healing factor to a crawl.
Weirdly enough, some of the machines aren’t restraining him at all—they’re keeping him alive.
Without them, the damage the sword left would have been fatal.
They wouldn’t want that, of course. They’re still deciding what to do with him.
Drag him to court? Question him? Study him?
Dead men can’t be interrogated.
They removed his eyepatch, too. The jagged scar splitting his right eye socket is fully exposed to the fluorescent glare.
It feels almost… indecent. Cruel, even.
Displaying the only wound he’s ever truly carried, like a trophy mounted beneath a spotlight.
Superheroes have strange ways of showing their victories.
Tara steps fully inside.
The door seals behind her with a slam and a mechanical lock, heavy enough to echo in her bones. The sound lands in her chest like a period at the end of a sentence.
No exits. No witnesses.
“Hi.” She says.
It sounds wrong—too light, too casual. Like she’s run into an old acquaintance at a shopping mall instead of standing in a room with the man who destroyed her life from the inside out.
Slade’s gaze shifts, sliding over to her. Slow. Mechanical.
His expression is blank—not angry, annoyed, or smug.
Nothing at all.
It could be the sedatives flattening him.
Or it could be another tactic. His favorite game: unreadable calm.
Or maybe, horrifyingly, this is just what he looks like without the performance.
“Hello, Terra.” His voice is gravel dragged across stone, subdued by whatever drug is flowing in his veins. His eye tracks her, head to toe. “Or should I say Tara?”
She smirks without meaning to. The grin just tugs at her lips on its own, something feral and nervous at the same time. Her body remembers this dance even if she doesn’t want it to
“Gotta admit, Slade, you outdid yourself. Made it all the way to national news. Deathstroke defeated.”
The metal legs of a chair scrape harshly against the floor as she drags it to the side of the bed.
She sits close, knees almost brushing the reinforced frame, close enough to smell the sterile antiseptic and the faint metallic tang of blood—old blood, dried somewhere she can’t see.
“I’m guessing it’s embarrassing, getting beaten by a C-lister.” She tilts her head, crosses her legs, staring directly into his one eye. “That’s what you called Brion, right?”
Something moves across his face. If it’s a smile, it barely qualifies. More of a twitch than a curve, like a nerve misfiring.
Good. There’s still something alive in there. Something to hit.
She keeps going because momentum is the only thing holding her together. If she stops, she might think. Or feel.
“These fucking Markovs, huh? Always out to kill you.” She props an elbow on her knee, rests her head against her fist in an exaggerated show of smugness. A cartoon villain mocking another on a Saturday morning rerun.
Her pulse hammers beneath the surface, shallow and fast.
He huffs—almost a laugh. “So that’s why you’re here. To finish what your brother couldn’t.”
“Not here to check on your well-being. Sorry.” She says it lightly, but her eyes flick to the tubes and restraints woven around the bed.
Plastic. Steel. Restraints bolted into the frame. She wonders whether any of it actually works on him or if this is another one of his orchestrations, another elaborate stage he’s letting her perform on.
Maybe he could rip himself free any second. Maybe he’s choosing not to.
She forces the thought away.
“It wasn’t you who cut my brother’s throat, right?”
Slade looks amused. “Why? He didn’t say?”
“No.” She reaches into her hoodie pocket, then stills when she realizes it’s empty. No cigarettes. Her fingers curl uselessly against fabric. “He probably doesn’t want the capes thinking insanity runs in the family. Easier if they think I’m the only one with issues.”
Her gaze drifts around the room—no security cameras inside. Perfect.
“But I do wonder.” She continues. “What did you say to make him do something like that?”
“Are you hoping for a confession before you kill me?” He asks, his voice drops lower, rougher. “Something sentimental to keep you warm at night?”
Her jaw tightens. He knows where her skin is thinnest. He knows exactly how to press.
“No.” She says. “Just wanna take something off my chest.”
For a moment, she sees the old rhythm in him—the way he waits, prods, anticipates. He urges her on, impatient, like her feelings are an inconvenience and he doesn’t have time to waste.
“Then you’d better make it quick.”
She looks again at his arms and legs strapped down tight. She catches the faint tremor beneath his skin. She can see him lunging, the bed tearing itself apart, his hand closing around her throat.
The image should terrify her. Instead it steadies her, gives her something solid to push against.
“I hate you.” She says, finally. Her voice doesn’t shake. “I hate everything you’ve done. To me. To Gar. To my brother.”
The words fall between them with weight—not shouted, not dramatic, just factual. A ledger she’s placing on the table.
“Hatred is only one shade.” He murmurs. “Just one facet of a diamond.”
He exhales, long and somewhat weary. Tara can’t tell if he’s tired or bored, or if this is still another performance designed just for her.
Maybe this is a disappointment to him. Maybe he wanted someone else to come finish the job. Someone he respects. Wintergreen. Or even Dick.
Or maybe he wanted his family to do it. Joey. Adeline. Someone who mattered.
She scoffs, hollow. “Is that what you tell yourself? That people feel more than hate for you? That you still mean something to them?”
His left eyebrow lifts, the faintest gesture of amusement—or regret.
“I’m surprised, Tara.” He says quietly. “Do you know me so little?”
The question lands exactly where he aims it—somewhere beneath her ribs, in all the places she doesn’t want him touching anymore.
“I don’t think any of us know you at all, Slade.”
She picks at her fingernails as she speaks, dragging her thumbnail along the edge of another until the skin reddens. The habit is childish, and she hates that he can see it.
Does it hurt—really hurt—that she once let him see everything?
Every raw, jagged piece of her. While he gave her nothing in return.
Not now. That wound is for later. For somewhere private.
“But I do know one thing.” She continues. “You’re like cancer. And we just had the misfortune of crossing your path. Grant was your first victim, even though you keep blaming the Titans for that.”
Slade maintains his ice-cold composure. No anger, no defensiveness—just that terrible stillness that cuts deeper than shouting ever could.
When he speaks, his voice is so calm it feels like he’s not the one strapped to a bed.
“Still, what you are today, you owe to me.”
Tara freezes.
Her hands stop mid-motion, fingers suspended in the air as though someone hit pause on her body. The words echo inside her skull, sharp and corrosive.
She’s always known—somewhere deep down in the pit of her stomach—that Slade played a twisted, formative role in her life. But hearing him claim it, hearing him own it, now…
“I don’t owe you shit.” She whispers, but the words come out unsteady. They taste like rust.
He goes on, patient and precise.
“If I hadn’t found you in that cave years ago, if I hadn’t sent that scorpion after you, you would have starved within weeks. You know that.”
A flicker of memory scorches her vision—
The cave. Damp stone. The cold that sank into her bones. The constant gnawing emptiness in her stomach.
The skitter of claws.
She never knew for sure that the scorpion was his doing, but it all makes sense now.
Her fists clench hard, nails biting into her palms until pain shoots up her arms. Her eyes burn—not from tears, she tells herself, from fury—but moisture still gathers at the edges, blurring the room.
She refuses to let a single tear fall. Not for him. Not in front of him.
Pain becomes fuel. Something solid. Something to brace against.
“Maybe.” She says. “Maybe I was looking for a father figure. Or control. Or acceptance.” Her throat constricts around the words, but she forces them out anyway. “Maybe, deep down, I was looking for a little bit of love.”
Her lips tremble before she can stop them. A bitter, breathless sound escapes her, closer to a gasp than a laugh.
“It’s pathetic, isn’t it? I thought you’d give me all of that.”
Slade watches her the way he always has. Detached. Assessing. Like she’s a variable in an equation instead of a person.
But there—faint, almost invisible—something flickers behind his eye. A shadow.
Recognition? Regret? She can’t tell. And not knowing makes her chest ache.
Tara drops her gaze, arms crossing over herself instinctively, a reflexive attempt to hold her ribs together before something inside splits open.
When she speaks again, her voice comes out small, thin, fraying around the edges.
“I think, in some way… I loved you.” She swallows hard, shaking her head. “Or I convinced myself I did.”
The confession leaves her and hangs there, fragile and exposed—glass suspended in midair, waiting to shatter.
Tara stands abruptly, the chair legs shriek against the sterile floor.
She looks around the room like she’s suddenly starved for oxygen. The ceiling. The walls. The machines. Anything to anchor herself back in her body.
Slade’s glacial stare follows her, unreadable, unblinking. Her confession slides off him without leaving so much as a scratch.
Like throwing yourself against a cliff face and expecting it to bruise.
Her lips press together, trembling for half a second before she forces them still.
The silence stretches—thick, suffocating.
She tries again.
“But you—”
“I never loved you, Tara.”
He doesn’t even pause. The words come out with the same ease as listing an objective, clinical and devastating.
And he uses her real name.
“We were professionals. Not lovers.”
The words hit her harder than she expects. Not because they’re surprising—they’re not—but because hearing them out loud feels like someone tearing open an old scar she thought had already hardened over.
That’s all the confession she’ll ever get.
And it’s true. Somehow, she’s always known that. She just didn’t want to see it.
She steps closer and places a hand on his chest—not tender, or nostalgic, more like marking the spot.
“You’re right.”
Tara leans in, slow and deliberate, until her lips hover a breath away from his.
Slade watches her with that unsettling mix of curiosity and resignation, as if he already knows the shape of what comes next and has decided to let it happen.
Her eyes slip shut.
His goatee grazes her chin.
His breath, assisted by some of the machines, warms her upper lip in small mechanical pulses.
Her hand slides up behind his head—brushes white hair, then moves past it.
His lips are dry.
Her fingers find the cord.
She pulls.
The plug snaps free with a harsh metallic clang.
The machines stop.
The air seems to vanish from the room.
For a heartbeat, there is nothing—just the sudden, terrifying stillness of a man who has survived everything except this.
Then alarms explode.
Shrill beeping, flashing lights, noise slicing through the room like knives.
Tara opens her eyes and whispers against his unmoving mouth.
“I hope you suffer before you go.”
Slade exhales the faintest sound—half laugh, half sigh.
“That’s my good little girl.”
The words slither into her ear, poisonous and intimate.
The part of her he built trembles. For only one second.
“Not anymore, Slade.”
She straightens, pulling away from him as if she’s shedding dead skin.
She gives him one last look. Cold. Finished.
Then she turns on her heel and walks out.
No hesitation. No backward glance.
She keeps flying on a slab of concrete until the compound disappears behind her, until the city lights blur into streaks, until the air burns her skin.
Only miles away—on the flat, barren roof of an abandoned factory—does she finally collapse.
Her knees give out. She sinks onto the gravel, dragging her legs to her chest, arms locked tight around herself like she’s trying to keep from shattering.
The adrenaline drains all at once, leaving her hollow, shaking, nerve screaming and aching everywhere.
And then she cries.
Not quiet, or neatly. Just raw, heaving sobs that tear out of her, shaking her entire body, spilling out everything she tried to hold together in that room.
Everything Slade ever taught her.
Everything he ever took.