#menacemasked

“No, seriously!” Dick insists, mostly to himself. “Fifty feet, straight up when he saw me, I honestly thought that was going to be how I died, in the Batcave off-hours with a kitchen covered in icing.” 

He holds up the tupperware container like the blue and orange frosted cupcakes can back his point. “And B heard about it, you know how he is, and he radioed in from Thailand to suggest I should get rid of them and wait it out, so. They’re edible and I need to be off the radar for a few hours—trade?”

Battle intro: This ends now, Slade!

Victory: I’ll take those answers now.

Defeat: I’m not—done!

[ Catnip racket seems reasonable. That cat knows more than it’s telling. Just look at the eyes. (Bless, we seem to have a mutual stalking arrangement going on. I could use a participant in my as-yet unconstructed BH6 verse, y’know…) ]

//He was behind it all the whole time. Probably meddled with Project Silent Sparrow too.

[ Inheritance? Lottery win? Someone’s good with stocks? Or, uh, not to be painful, but. Estate sale earnings from the Hamada bros’ parents coupled with gifts from sympathetic relatives might do it. Supplemented with bot fight money, ofc. ]

//Oh, that last one hurt. I keep forgetting sometimes that the house the brothers lived in with their parents would have to have been sold when they moved in with Cass. D’: I like to think that they lived outside of the city, maybe with a bigger house, not so much an apartment.

          "You—you cannot be alive!" Starfire’s eyes are wide as she stared at him, certain that she must be imagining things. The last that the Titans had dealt with Slade, he had regained control of Terra and had nearly killed them all.

          He was the one who held Jump City in fear.

          He was the monster for Robin’s psychological torture, for all the nightmares their leader faced.

          He was the reason that their friend Terra was dead.

Send me one of these AU suggestions and I’ll write a short fic about them with our characters!

"You think you’re so strong now, don’t you? So independent.” Slade’s voice was smooth and oily, taunting the son whose arm he held tight in his grip. Jericho was writhing, trying to pull away and escape, but a mercenary like Slade didn’t have anything less than a grip of steel. If he wanted something in his grasp, it stayed.

"You truly think you’re breaking away with the Titans. That I won’t be able to reach you any more. But let me tell you this - no matter where you are, no matter how fast you run, no matter how many walls you build, I will always, always—” 

Something feathery smacked him in the face. Slade lost his grip on his son, staggering back, and Jericho was gone as soon as his arm slipped free. The duck flapped wildly over his mask with a raucous quacking before regaining its senses and flying away, leaving feathers stuck all over Slade’s incredibly evil mercenary headgear.

Why hadn’t he thought to check the weather forecast before going after Jericho?! More ducks began to fall, increasing from a drizzle to a good downpour, and Slade held his arms up to shield himself.

“For goodness’ sake, Joseph, don’t pick that up! You don’t know where it’s been!”

Jericho already had a duck in his arms, of course, and Slade realised belatedly that if he’d wanted to teach him not to pick up the rain he probably should have done it about ten years ago. The animal had landed wrong and hurt its wing, and one glance at the crooked feathers let Slade know that any attempt to pry his son away from it would be completely futile. Wasn’t that overbearing fussy kindness always Joey’s way?

With a deep sigh, Slade relented. Temporarily.

“Fine. We splint that thing’s wing and then I take you back from Adeline and the Titans.”

 Jericho’s glance back was still poisonous, but not quite strike-Slade-dead-on-the-spot poisonous. So animals were the way to go when his son was being particularly difficult to get hold of, were they? 

Oh, don’t start. You brought this on yourself.