章 1106: 4
Chapter 4: The Longest Weekend
Slade Wilson, otherwise known as Deathstroke, really was the man.
Inside of Gotham City, he had access to several safehouses paid for with his money under the names of people with no criminal records whatsoever. Apparently he had places like that all over, in most big cities in the country that he would operate in.
There was something said for being the best in your line of work.
The blinds of all of the windows were closed at all times. For all intents and purposes it was just a normal place. Deathstroke had rules to be followed at all times while in the building. No rooms anyone stayed in could be around any windows as they needed to be reserved to maintain the ruse of the building being a normal place. That left only a few actual rooms to use around the middle of the floors.
It made for a pretty boring Saturday for the most part. The mission wasn't until that night, so Friday afternoon Max gathered his things for a short stay and arrived at the place, making sure that he went and checked in as Null.
He wasn't going to take his stuff off until he was safely at home again by the end of the mission. Not a chance. The last thing he needed was someone like either his employer or his daughter memorizing his face and knowing what he looked like. Similarly, not being completely outfitted and ready for anything at all times would have been foolish. Even if he'd established a working relationship with them, they were all still criminals.
Well… Deathstroke was more of a mercenary than a criminal. He did actual hired work for money. But the things he did were oftentimes illegal.
Don't trust anybody… at least when you could help it.
Until the job came to a conclusion Max couldn't let his guard down. His identity probably meant nothing to them for all he knew, but it meant his future to him.
He left his door open as he did sit-ups on the floor of his room in case someone needed to get to him. No one did, but someone did pass by his room. He stopped mid-motion and spared a wave for the girl he'd fought that he now knew was Deathstroke's daughter, 'A wave? Really? No 'what's up' or anything? Ugh. I suck.'
She just glared at him and stood in his doorway wearing civs for the time being instead of her costume. What was it with girls and traipsing around in little black shorts? It was hard to remember that she was crazy when she was so damned fine, "You had to pick this floor didn't you?"
"There's three floors," Null said, getting up from where he'd been exercising out of boredom now that he'd been given a new stimuli to assuage it, "The first floor's the lobby; that's nothing but a front. I figured the top floor was Deathstroke's, and I'm not going up there. So that left the second floor, where all of the rooms are."
Ravager shook her head, letting her white locks sway, revealing the patch over her left eye. Deathstroke had one over his right. Coincidence? God, he hoped so.
As she left, he made to follow her, seeing as how there was absolutely nothing else going on and as far as the pecking order went he felt much more confident going to her about anything than Deathstroke, "So is there food in that kitchen I saw here last night, because I didn't get breakfast today. Are you hungry?" He didn't think he could head back out and get something at a whim.
Ravager let out an annoyed sigh and didn't bother turning to face him, "Let's get something straight. You're not a friend; you're a hired thief," Ravager said curtly, "Make it past two weeks, I might learn your name; until then, you're a bullet shield with legs."
Null watched her walk ahead of him without breaking stride for a moment and made a claw gesture to her back as she left him where he stood, "Rawr. Jesus," It wasn't as if he expected to forge a long-lasting friendship or something foolish like that, but was it too much to ask for some cordiality?
On the other hand, she had tried and failed to kill him less than 24 hours ago. And if a person named 'Ravager' was actually nice to him, he probably would have been paranoid the entire time and figured that it was a trap. There was something about her bitchiness that actually set him at ease.
"Name's Null by the way."
That last remark came with the warning sensation of a disturbance in the air around him just before they both entered a room, Null's warning to lean his head out of the way of a quick slash of a sword that took a chunk out of the doorframe. Once again, Ravager didn't turn, even to see if she'd taken his head off. That was infuriating. He wasn't even worth checking if she'd killed him.
Null sneered at her, the blood streaming down his cheek from the nick that Ravager had given him in warning, "Okay, you've got a point. We might never swap greeting cards, but let's get one thing straight Baby Deathstroke," He jabbed, risking an actual fight with her, "There's something I'm more afraid of than dying."
The 'Baby Deathstroke' reference stopped her cold, but what followed it got her attention, prompting Ravager to turn around and glare at him with her one eye, "And what would that be?"
"Living as nothing. Less than nothing really," Null said, a haunted look in his eyes as he walked right up to her, danger close to the sword, "Winding up on the street, people won't look through you as you pass like they do to everybody else. They won't even look at you at all. I've seen it."
And once you were down that low, unless you were really lucky, you stayed there.
"You've got… Deathstroke," Null continued with a shrug, "That's great. I don't have any resources to pick myself back up, or anyone to go to if that happens."
His so-called mentor Selina was pretty much the definition of an opportunist, so she sure as hell wouldn't help him if he was in need. The guy that taught him how to better fight hand-to-hand, Wildcat, didn't know he was a thief, and he was dreading the fallout of whenever the ultra-tough hero did learn of that bit of news.
His parents weren't around, and any family he did have was across the sea, if they even knew about him at all. He was effectively alone, and failure meant his worst fear coming to life.
"Every payday puts a little more distance between me and the curb outside. It buys me a little bit more time to come up with an actual idea for my life," Null said, grabbing her sword and moving it away from her as he walked into the room, finding it to be a small common area, "I'm not doing this forever. I'm gonna get out. And when I do, I'm gonna be free to do whatever I want."
"That's a pretty mundane fear," Ravager said, calming down and turning her attention to clearing Null's blood off of the blade, "What's weird is that you told me about it at all."
"Well, it's something that's in my power to control. It's up to me in the end, s'not like you or anybody else can really do much about that," Null explained, wiping the blood from the gash on his face and taking a seat away from the computer. He hoped he didn't have to get that stitched up, "The only reason I told you is just so that you know, no matter how scary something really is, if you give me the option of whatever you're threatening or what I was talking about, for right now I'll take the threat in a heartbeat."
It was an entirely selfish fear, but Null was a selfish young man. There wasn't any altruistic reason for doing what he did as a thief. There wasn't some hatred of the current system of the world that made him feel no need to follow it. He just stole because as a teenager he thought it was the best way to keep himself in the money.
He couldn't sing, dance, act, rap, play an instrument, or play a sport. There was no reality TV show out looking for someone him to let him become famous for being an idiot, and stealing beat working for minimum wage for the rest of his life.
If he had to interact with Deathstroke the Terminator and his semi-psychotic daughter in order to do that, so be it. As long as he didn't have to kill anyone to fulfill his deals, he felt that he would be fine. He honestly wasn't sure he had the guts to do something like that.
"As long as we're here and not working," Ravager started to say as she took a seat at a computer terminal and turned it on, "You might as well call me Rose."
"You're telling me your name?" The thought seemed foreign to Null. His name was the last real defense he had. It was the last thing to go before someone could really get to the crux of him.
Rose shrugged in her chair as she relaxed and began looking through the files on the computer for study purposes, "I don't give a fuck if you know it or not. Rose Wilson is Ravager. Slade Wilson is Deathstroke," She said. Her identity meant nothing to her. Everyone attached to it was dead anyway, "Not like we have to worry about family. We're all that's left of it."
Slade had children with another woman who was his wife, and all of them were dead, wife included. Rose's own mother raised her out of a brothel until… things of a villainous, murder-ish nature ended that little slice of life.
Null felt a reason for whatever objective to try and establish some sort of common ground.
"My parents emigrated here when I was little and became second-rate scientists. They died and left me with a mountain of debt," Null pointed out. Not that he didn't love his parents, but they were what they were, and sugarcoating what happened wouldn't have made his situation any less real, "But they racked up that debt making something I can actually use to try and fix things."
Well, he did have a bit of an accent. Rose figured that if she really cared, she could probably guess what country his parents had come from within five tries (South Africa as her first guess) but it didn't matter as much as the fact that she imagined a challenge had been cast to her. One she knew she could win.
A grim smirk came to Rose's lips, "Last year, I murdered my defenseless uncle after he killed my mother and my adopted family, and tried to kill me. First kill by the way."
"I'm probably not gonna win a game of 'Who Had the Most Fucked Up Last Six Months' with you, so I'll just say that sucks," Null said honestly, only getting a grunt from the trained killer, "Still, don't you want to go out, and do, I don't know, something? Anything… not stupid-dangerous?"
"There's no getting out, and I don't want to," Rose said with an incredulous laugh, "Even if I did one day, and I could drop things no questions asked, there's no way that would ever work. When you start, it doesn't end. I'm too screwed up anyway."
Null leaned over and looked at her seriously, "Well, you're kind of aggressive and nasty, but you could be worse," He told her, "You don't seem crazy when you're not being stabby," She wasn't anything he didn't think he could deal with anyway.
She was quick to try and break him of that line of thinking.
Rose tapped her eyepatch, "I did this to myself," She took in Null's silence as a signal that her point had been proven, and she no longer felt like studying for the mission in his presence, choosing to get up and leave, "Sharing time is over. Make sure you're ready to work later."
For a second she felt like he was someone she might have been able to talk to, but that washed away the moment that she remembered that he wasn't a soldier. He was just some guy. Some white-bread, picket-fence guy.
He wouldn't understand the first thing about her, and honestly, she barely knew enough to explain herself to anyone else anyway.
Null kept his mouth shut and simply watched Rose leave the room, even as she left him with one final word, "And for your information, I'm always stabby."
Still not saying a word, he watched her walk away, his eyes involuntarily drifting below her waistline until she was out of his sight, "Maybe..." He lingered on the 'e', thinking aloud until shaking his head, "Nah. She'd probably kill me or cut something off after we were done."
And if she wouldn't, he figured Deathstroke would. The man didn't seem like the doting daddy type from how they interacted, but the chance that he wouldn't have cared wasn't worth the risk involved. It would kind of suck to lose his virginity only to be executed by his employer immediately afterwards, or during.
…Wow. Six different scenarios had just run through his head of him taking Rose into his room to try and shed his v-card, and possibly hers as well. Of note, none of them involved him removing his hood either. That was how unrealistic his outlook had been.
All of this was making him pretty sick in the head, wasn't it?
XxX
(Later That Evening – Sunset)
Slade, his daughter, and their temporary hire were situated within view of where the man would be instigating the distraction that would bring Batman out to face him. From a darkened window inside a partially used office building shared by multiple small companies, there was a small place where he could aim through. Half a mile away, there was a clear view of a museum where a gala was just now beginning.
The entire front area of the building would be filled with Gotham's elite, including many people that would have been possible targets. Honestly, some of them could have been, as he had been sent contracts for a good number of them. But Slade didn't do everything sent to him. The final decision for who lived and who died was his, and money wasn't his only criteria for taking jobs.
Having made his own preparations for starting the fireworks, Slade put on his mask, covering his eyepatch, white hair, and weathered features before heading up to the roof where Rose and Null were preparing as well.
Reaching the roof, Rose sat on the corner, overlooking the city streets below, checking over her weapons and equipment. Null sat against the wall outside of the stairwell, limbering himself up just in case flexibility and acrobatics were needed. They weren't speaking, apparently both focused on the mission.
It probably felt weird for Null to be out in what technically counted as daylight. But it would be dark out within a matter of minutes, by the time they got underway actually, so it shouldn't have been too terribly offsetting.
"Listen up," Slade said, deciding that it was time to get to work, "You both know what you're doing. Ravager, you're first diversion. Null, you're the real manpower on this assignment," Ravager scoffed at that and Null sneered up at her but they didn't gripe at each other. Good, because it wasn't the time. He continued on with the point he'd been making with their new guy, "You cannot afford to be caught. Whether this succeeds or fails is on you."
Slade wouldn't have put that kind of responsibility in the hands of someone like him, but if he did it himself and let Null be one of the distractions instead, it would have more than likely had less of a chance of working out.
Null had no misconceptions about where they were. The second this thing kicked off, he knew full well who would be coming, "And he won't figure out that you're running interference for somebody else to do some robbing?" Someone like him for instance, who would NOT be winning any exchanges with Batman. He hadn't run into him yet and he was sort of hoping he'd be able to keep that streak going.
"I don't steal," Deathstroke said simply and to the point. He fought and he killed. He was a soldier, "If I make the attack on an important enough figure, Batman will focus in on me. If he thinks for a moment that I've got someone doing something else he won't expect you. He'll turn his attention to Ravager. From there you'll have the window to take what I want and make your way to the rendezvous point."
"And you can get away?" Null wasn't sure why he was supposed to care. The question only seemed to attract Deathstroke's eye to him, which was the last thing he wanted. The less that man paid him any mind, the better.
"Whether I do or I don't doesn't really matter to you," In a perfect world, he'd wind up killing Batman. It wasn't the objective though, and if he wasn't able to by the time his younglings got away he had his ways to make himself scarce. Not that it should have mattered to the help, "If I don't, if Ravager doesn't, but you do with the item, you will still be paid," He didn't tell Null just how that would occur, but Deathstroke didn't seem to be the type to suffer backstabbing or backstab during an actual business deal. The man took professional work deadly serious, "The most important thing is that you make it, boy."
He said nothing else and departed back downstairs, having already explained Null and Ravager's parts in the plan before ever making their way to the starting area.
Null let out a breath that he'd been holding and bounced in place on his toes, shaking his shoulders out. He was shaken up, but he was ready to go. Deep breaths and constant thoughts that he could pull this thing off were the things he took in.
As he mentally prepared, Rose got up and elbowed Null in the side to get his attention, simultaneously causing him to choke in the middle of one of his breaths.
"Here," The unmasked Rose said, trying to hand Null a handgun, "Just in case."
Catching sight of the weapon, he immediately took several long steps back, "I really shouldn't."
Oh for goodness sake.
Rose made up her mind that if he was one of those pansies too shaken to so much as touch a gun she was going to shoot him in the foot with it, "Anything could happen," She growled at him, "And you don't want the reason this goes bad to be that you don't have the stones to shoot a gun if you need to, dumbass. Trust me."
"I can shoot a gun," Null said, sounding markedly offended. He grew up in Gotham City on R-rated movies, M-rated video games. He wasn't a pro, but having a gun in his possession wasn't the problem. At least not philosophically, "I can't touch them while I'm in the suit. Not for too long. This suit generates electricity somehow. I don't know how yet. But eventually a constant charge going through the whole thing'll make the gunpowder in the clip go off."
Wow. Well that certainly changed things, didn't it?
Rose immediately put the gun away and took another few steps away from him, just in case the static she constantly felt in the air around him was another thing that would set something off, "That must have been a pain to find out about."
"I beat up some guy named Tally Man, who kept dropping his guns whenever he switched them out," Null explained, "I backtracked to try and take his stuff for myself, scavenging to pawn it later or something. I got about five blocks holding one that he hadn't run out of bullets with and BAM!"
Thank goodness the suit was durable. It probably kept him from blowing his fingers off. He didn't know if that would always happen whenever he held a loaded gun or if it had just been a one-time fluke, but if the possibility existed, why take the chance?
Rose laughed at his expense and flipped the gun around in her hand before returning it from whence it came, "Alright, no guns for you then 'Sparky'," She said, pulling her half-mask on over her head, "I guess you'll just have to be extra careful. If you run into someone willing to stop you, they might not be as nice as I was."
Her? Nice? Right.
"I don't make sparks," Null muttered before running forward and launching across a street to land on a rooftop on the other side only to hear sarcastic applause from Rose back where he'd started. He flipped her double birds and swiftly began to make his way to his target location. From here on out he'd be alone, at least that was the plan.
XxX
"Hmm…" Slade thought to himself, looking through the scope of his ranged rifle at the people he could clearly see on the other end, "Who's the most realistic target that I would go after?" Who could he shoot in the general direction of and make it seem as if they were actually his target.
Reporter? No.
Curator? No.
Hm, Bruce Wayne?
…
No. That was just reaching. That would just look like he was trying too hard. Going after Gotham's first son? And exactly what unsaid reasoning would he have for that?
The entire point wasn't to kill any of these lemmings. It was only to make it seem as if he were attempting to, and that only dumb luck saved them from getting their brains spilled all over the gala floor. Everyone would panic, scatter, and flee. From there he would pursue a little bit, just so that Batman would know the general area of where to look for him in.
That whole song and dance. For a brilliant man, some of Batman's actions could be very predictable. It was possible to lead him into things, the trouble truly came after that point. At times with Batman, it could be like the case of the dog chasing a car; after you caught up with it, then what did you do?
Such a thing wouldn't have mattered in this case though. Ravager would be his spotter from a distance in case she saw Batman coming before he did. Ravager and Null would remain in contact, and she would tell him when Batman was engaged with Slade as his sign to begin making his own move to steal.
Okay, who was standing around Bruce Wayne? He'd scouted the arrivals, he'd managed to obtain the guest list and it didn't take much work to pull up profiles and images of all of them. He knew who should have been there, and he knew who would have made plausible stock for shooting.
Aha, and there he found a target. And if the S.T.A.R. Labs thing came up later, at least this could tie in to some sort of second non-existent motive. Now to make it glaringly obvious that someone was about to get shot.
Laser-dot sights on a high-caliber sniper rifle made aiming idiot-proof. It also made realizing that someone was being targeted idiot-proof. If people weren't paying enough attention to pick out the red dot on the guy in the center of the room talking to the most important person there, well that just said everything it needed to about Gotham's 'elite'.
XxX
(Inside of the Museum)
All for appearances. It was the only reason Bruce Wayne bothered ever coming to events like this. He had to keep up the playboy image, even if he really found it bothersome to do. Every second, minute, and hour he spent rubbing elbows with high society was another moment where the seedy underbelly of the city got the chance to prey on someone else without means.
But he had to smile, he had to look like he wouldn't rather be anywhere else.
Robin and Batgirl could handle whatever was going on around the city. If anything truly out of their league was happening, one or the other would know it, and they had explicit orders to inform him immediately if that were the case. Things should have been fine for the night, and if they weren't it would only take the most pitiful of excuses for him to get himself out of there.
A red dot suddenly appeared on the forehead of the director, and Bruce wasn't the only one who could see it judging by how a handful of people nearby had stopped to stare, mouths open.
It was one of the things that people saw happening all while it transpired, but felt powerless to prevent.
Bruce Wayne, or the identity Bruce Wayne donned when night fell, was not one of these people. His body simply moved and launched the director out of the way as a bullet passed through the window and out the back. There was hardly a sound, but everyone could guess what had just happened, and they scattered like deer.
Bruce jumped up and quickly made himself scarce, appearing to flee along with the rest of the crowd.
He would have been grateful to have a reason to leave, if it hadn't almost cost someone their life. He'd get the payback for that in just a little while.
XxX
(With Null – S.T.A.R. Labs)
The S.T.A.R. Labs facility in Gotham City specialized in weaponry.
With that piece of information available, it was kind of obvious as to why he wanted Null to steal from it. Mercenary, weapons, easy fit. What the hell did he want though? All he did was give him a flash drive and tell him that if he could reach the servers it would know what to download.
Way to take the complicated and interesting part out of his hands Mister Slade.
There wasn't any mystery to the second thing he wanted Null to steal for him, but Null didn't even want to think about that. It wouldn't be his responsibility after it left his hands, and Deathstroke didn't seem to be the type that would go out of his way to use something like that.
The chances that he would use the second thing anyway were very low. He rarely, if ever, had to deal with the person that sort of weapon would be used on.
"Hey, Sparky," He heard through the earpiece he had on under his hood, "You're gonna want to get that ass moving right about now. The shooting started."
"Right, right," Null said, cutting his way into the air duct on the roof. He'd broken the ventilation system already, so attempting to navigate it wouldn't be suicidal, and that route would invariably lead him right to the heart of the building's server rooms. If there was one place you wanted to keep the cold air pumping it was in a room filled with computers that had your company's data all over them.
"Ugh," Null grunted, squeezing his way through the narrow corridors of the vents, "You know, if you caught me just a few months later I'm not sure I could have done this," Even if he hadn't been somewhat bulking up through his training, he was a teenage boy and he was still growing naturally.
"Which is yet another reason why Deathstroke wanted Catwoman." Ravager chimed in snarkily, "Aside from her being A-plus value and you being… whatever you are. Oh God, you're not going to do something useless like get yourself stuck, are you?"
"I'm fine now that I'm used to it, I think," Null told her, trying to remember the layout of the building from what he could remember of the map he'd gotten. With that in mind, his thoughts turned to the first phase of his mission, "Hey. Do you know what I'm stealing the specs on?"
"Don't know, don't care, and neither should you. Don't ask questions that'll get you shot."
Good advice. Max was not Catwoman, so he wasn't about to let curiosity kill him over something that probably wouldn't wind up affecting him at all after the mission ended, "You'd shoot me?"
"No," Ravager responded, much to Null's surprise. He figured pumping him full of lead would have been as easy as counting to three, "I'm not big on the gunplay. If I had a choice I'd use a sword," Oh, nevermind then. She'd still end him in a heartbeat if it was convenient.
Any response Null would have made died in his throat as he fell upside-down an opening to the lower floors. Of course. He'd crawled all the way to the corner end of the building. Of course there would be a shaft to the lower levels so that the air from the top could circulate.
Null grit his teeth and placed his hands out in front of himself in the cramped space to slow and eventually stop his fall with the electric cling. Turning his head to the lower end of the building he breathed a sigh of relief when he saw how close he'd come to actually hitting the bottom.
"What was that Sparky? Did you set off an alarm?" Ravager asked with a bit of bite to her voice, "Whatever happened better have killed you if you did."
"I basically just fell fourteen stories and barely stopped myself from landing on my head," Null snapped at her, "Some consideration would be nice, ya bitch," He said as he lowered himself the rest of the way down and peered through the nearest vent. He was probably at the basement floor, "I'm going silent until I upload the info."
Working a vent off of the wall, Null squeezed out and hung by one hand from the opening to give himself a chance to scrutinize where he was. There were a lot of computer towers scattered through what looked to be more than one room, it was annoyingly cold, and there wasn't even a night guard skulking around from what he could see.
Yes, this was more than likely the right place. Thank you predictable ventilation structure plans for leading him straight to the place that most needed to be climate-controlled. One would think that a company focused on cutting-edge technology and scientific advancement in all fields imaginable would invest in a security system that covered all of their bases.
Null found the nearest USB port he could and stuck the jump drive in, hopping back when that seemed to bring it to life as it went into its programming to take what Deathstroke intended out of the info banks.
The entire room of servers seemed to come to life, whirring loudly as they prepared to give up the raw data that the drive had been looking for. It was louder than he thought it would be, having never been in a room full of running high-processing computers before.
But that time of data transfer was what happened to be the bane of his existence at the moment.
Null couldn't help but let out a quiet whimper when he saw that he'd have to wait for nearly ten minutes before he could eject the drive and leave, "Come on…" He whined to the inanimate object, "…I still have stuff to do."
XxX
(Elsewhere in Gotham City – With Deathstroke)
Any minute now. The longer the game of tag lasted with Batman trying to find Deathstroke's location, the longer Null had to do his job and get away with a headstart.
He had put away the scoped rifle, as from past meetings with Batman would indicate, he wasn't going to be able to zero in on him. Obsessing over killshots was more Deadshot's thing anyway, not his. He had no problem getting his hands dirty in a fight when he had to, and it could be assured that Batman would wind up forcing the issue.
Deathstroke chuckled at Batman's understated displeasure with his crashing of the gala for a contract kill, "Oh, Batman. And here I was thinking that this was about to be too easy," He said, pulling out a handgun to begin shooting.
Batman was as prepared for a fight as ever, and even with Deathstroke's superhuman physical abilities he was able to avoid getting the gun trained on him so that he could dodge. There were still shadows and ledges on the rooftop to use to his advantage.
Deathstroke did a fine job at keeping track of Batman's actual position to continue firing with a chance, but in the end, he was still firing a semi-automatic into the dark. Recognizing the type of gun being used, Batman counted down the amount of bullets that would be left in the magazine before throwing three batarangs after the number dropped to two.
Deathstroke shot two of them out of the air before blocking the last one with a sudden draw of his sword, "Hm. A fair try Batman," He said, reflexively ejecting the magazine.
"That's all you can really ask for," Batman said as he threw his first punch. Deathstroke dodged it to the outside and went for his sword only the moment his fingertips touched it, Batman reached for his bent elbow, his first attack a feint.
Deathstroke moved his hand away from the sword to keep Batman from trying to snap his arm, 'The kind of fight I expected,' He thought to himself, somewhat pleased that it wouldn't be a paint-by-numbers battle, 'I can't make a single mistake, and he knows he can't either, otherwise it's all over.'
It played out like a high speed game of chess.
Batman grabbed Deathstroke's wrist instead of his elbow as he moved his hand away from his sword, but a counter-clockwise turn of the mercenary's hand gave him the leverage to break his grip before it was locked. His hand lashed out to grab Batman around the neck, but he grabbed nothing but air.
The Dark Knight whipped around in an attempt to snap his special cape in Deathstroke's face for a stunning blow, but again this missed. Batman dropped a smoke pellet, but instead of using the smoke as cover to attack, he retreated upon catching sight of the metal of Deathstroke's sword.
His sudden quickdraw slash missed, forcing the two to move apart and square off momentarily before again engaging. Deathstroke's eye curled, a smirk on his face under the mask.
"As if I expected anything else," Deathstroke said, a morbid sort of amusement in his tone, "After all, I'd hate to have to break a sweat just for a first-round knockout."
XxX
(Meanwhile – With Ravager)
'Okay,' Ravager thought to herself as she tried to scan the rooftops from her position as watcher, 'Okay, Batman wouldn't let either of those kids he keeps with him fight Deatstroke, so that would mean that the kids that work with him should be somewhere where they'd know about the disruption,' Gotham's branch of S.T.A.R. Labs was too dangerous for someone like Batman to not keep constant, vigilant tabs on.
Null hadn't set off any alarms, but it was always good to count on the worst-case scenario occurring. They had planned for extra interference, had been counting on it actually.
If that were the case, it would only be a matter of time before they showed up, and it would be up to her to divert them and keep them from nosing around; even defeat them if possible. They knew nothing of Null's involvement, or what was supposed to be going on, and if they got anywhere close, a fight would distract them from their all-seeing crime-fighting tech that would let them realize that there was any sort of break-in going on.
She just had to find them first.
In her own humble opinion, she'd taken lessons from Deathstroke to heart, so if they were around they would need quite the stroke of luck to spot her before she spotted them.
*SHINK!*
The subtle noise of metal stabbing into wood attracted her attention in the dark of her cover underneath a water tower. The sound of soft beeping caused her to curse and quickly cut her way through the wood supports she'd concealed herself within.
Normally the explosives packed into what could fit in the middle of a Bat-a-rang wouldn't have been powerful enough to fell a structure with decent reinforcement, but in her haste to get away from the blast, Ravager had sliced through enough of it that the water tower was felled by the blast.
Metal clanged and crashed as water spilled out across the rooftop, dropping over the edge by the gallon. Ravager was barely able to keep her footing on the roof, and wasted no time in pulling out the handgun that she'd almost given to Null at the start of the mission.
Jaw locked in concentration she fired at two separate figures that moved across the roof swiftly.
The splitting of her attention proved to be her undoing, as one was able to get close enough to grab her gun arm. Feeling an attempt to break her elbow coming, Ravager twisted her body to alleviate the pressure and swung her sword with her free arm only to have someone stop it by blocking her forearm.
Occupying her right arm with a grappling technique was Robin, and stopping her swordplay was Batgirl. Both attacking at once. Well didn't she hit the jackpot?
"I hate using guns," Ravager muttered to herself, ejecting the magazine out of the bottom of the gun. With a quick pop of her knee, she knocked it into Robin's face and kicked him away with the same leg. Batgirl punched her in the face, but that was a small price to pay as far as Ravager was concerned as long as she got herself some space.
Tossing the firearm aside, Ravager licked away the blood before it could start trailing from her lip. Nonplussed at the stiff blow she'd received, she twirled her katana in her hand one time as she squared off with her pair of adversaries.
"Ravager," Robin said in curt greeting, "Wow, the starter pack version of Deathstroke. For once I actually get to fight someone that doesn't have at least five inches and fifty pounds on us," Batgirl rolled her eyes under her cowl and didn't say a word.
"Oh, didn't your bat-daddy ever sit you down and tell you?" Ravager said with a vicious grin, "Size isn't everything."
They weren't particularly prepared for Ravager to begin her move in a manner so alike to her father that they were caught off-guard by how quick she was. Her reflexes were frighteningly sudden, and both had to knuckle down to weather the first storm of her attack against the both of them.
Several strokes of the sword later, she found herself surprised by Robin suddenly bringing his collapsible bo staff to full length, almost catching her in the head between attacks. Ravager blocked a kick to the body from an opportunistic Batgirl, but found her legs swept thereafter by Robin's staff.
Growling in annoyance from her place on the ground, Ravager rose, trying to kneecap her enemies as she did so. Batgirl jumped away and hurled a bola, forcing Ravager to make a choice of over or under to avoid it. Taking the high ground, she leapt the over weapon intended to capture her, the perpetrator of the attack in her sights.
Ravager hadn't been at it for much longer than a year and she knew what she was doing to a deadly degree, but she was far from perfect. The holes in her game were hard to see through the ferocity and confidence that she fought with, but they were there. The way she fought was overwhelming at first, but after Robin and Batgirl had gotten somewhat used to her, the difficulties she presented began to decline sharply.
Robin read her body language as she took off and intercepted her in the air, hooking one of her arms under his armpit and grabbing hold of her head with his other hand. Sending her off-balance, Robin fell with her and slammed her right to the ground, with no way for her to protect her head.
"Hah-!" She saw black for a split-second after hitting the roof and lost feeling for longer, but she quickly came to and flew into a rage, thrashing to get enough mobility and leverage to make a move, "Get the fuck off of me!" She managed to roll both herself and Robin so that she was the one looming over him. Twirling her katana by the handle, she held it for a downward stab but got her bell rung again by a kick to the head from Batgirl.
Robin stood back up and cursed himself for losing the advantage in a scenario where he could have possibly brought Deathstroke's daughter down. It wasn't that he'd gone easy, it was just that she'd turned into a beast when she'd gotten hurt, "She's not going to stop unless we knock her out."
Batgirl nodded mutely. The way she'd moved when Robin had her arm trapped, she would have dislocated it just from how she'd been moving if she hadn't been so strong that she could move him from where she'd been on her belly, "She would have seriously hurt herself just to get out of that hold," She was clearly the 'coyote chewing its own leg off to escape a trap' type, which wasn't good.
Even if Batgirl had managed to trap her with a bola, would it really have kept her from rampaging until she got herself free or did severe harm to herself? Hell, she probably would have just found a way to cut herself free, then she would have flown into a rage.
Holding her head, Ravager kept her sword up, keeping it between them and her, keeping them from outright going right for her and trying to finish the fight. Things weren't exactly going well. She'd undertaken her portion of the mission without question, as Deathstroke would have had no room for dissent in any aspect of his plan. Even so, she had been entirely confident that with what she could do, handling Batgirl and Robin was entirely within her range of ability.
"Hey, what's happening!?" The signal between Null and Ravager was crystal clear, and he was entirely able to hear everything on her end. If a pigeon had taken a crap on a water tower he probably would have been able to tell from the sound, so the noises of fighting were so evident to his ears it might as well have been happening all around him.
"Don't worry about it and finish your job," Ravager hissed at him over their connection, "This was always going to be what was supposed to happen."
"I'm done. I'm on the way out now," Null said, "Start running damn it."
He knew the sounds of someone getting roughed up when he heard it, and if it had been the other side getting outclassed by Ravager he was fairly certain he'd have heard a sword cutting through something fleshy by now. Unfortunately, at the moment his opinion was on the same level as that of the nearest brick wall as far as Ravager was concerned.
Ever since she'd taken the plunge down the rabbit hole that was being Deathstroke's apprentice, Rose Wilson didn't take getting beaten by anyone lightly, and as far as she was concerned this was far from over. Her mentality wasn't very keen on retreating at a time like that. It carried the air of defeat with it, and defeat simply was not an acceptable outcome.
Two-on-one or not, she just wouldn't have been satisfied without dropping at least one of them before she left.
Only now, the good guys weren't content with letting the bad girl run roughshod all over them.
As they attacked her, there was only so much she could do trying to keep them at bay with swings of her sword. She couldn't focus on both at the same time as they buzzed around her like stinging insects, taking turns picking away with quick shots that got them in and out before she could skewer them or slice them up.
By themselves, the padding punches and kicks Batgirl was using wouldn't have hurt very much, but the constant pressure and steady pummeling quickly began adding up along with jabs from Robin's staff.
The two heroes were patient. Even as Ravager tried to move the battle across the rooftop to more potentially advantageous areas, they kept a fine circle around her, constantly moving and swarming, making sure above all else that she never had both of them in clear sight ever again.
'Tim was right,' Barbara thought, taking note of the thoroughly thrashed daughter of the world's best assassin. As dangerous as she was, her options and methods of response were limited, 'She's not used to being outnumbered by people on this level. She didn't know how to change her tactics to adapt.'
Sometimes it was scary just how good Robin was at analysis. Of course, having seen her in action a few times, he obviously remembered enough to put together a plan after a handful of exchanges.
Her back heel against the edge of the rooftop, Ravager fell to a knee, blood trailing from her mouth. She was certain that when she took off her mask and costume she'd find a score of ugly black bruises. Batman's kids played just as rough as she figured they would have for people trained by the man who had taught them.
The grip on her sword tightened, remembering how Deathstroke had told her how… disappointed he'd been when she hadn't been good enough to kill her half-brother Jericho. What she'd done afterward to prove that she was loyal. That she was his daughter.
It hadn't been that long ago. Failing again wasn't an option.
"You're gonna have to kill me if you want me to stop," Ravager said with a bit of a sick grin, "Because if I lose, and you take me alive, I might as well be dead to Deathstroke."
Even if he was a cold bastard (to say the absolute least), he was her father, and he was literally the only family she had.
As she thought about how the next attack she'd be waging would end for her, she saw something slowly moving almost parallel to the roof, right behind Robin and Batgirl. She thought she was seeing things from too many hits on the head, until she saw a pair of hands sprout and grab onto one of Batgirl's ankles.
Apparently, it hurt, because she let out a surprised cry before turning to try and stomp on whatever it was.
An opening. With only one opponent definitively free to focus on her, and with his attention averted at least temporarily, Ravager leapt at Robin and kicked at him, getting it blocked but knocking him away far enough to finally separate him and Batgirl. That put an effective end to their tandem attack against her.
Speaking of whom, she was quickly able to free herself with a handful of kicks to the source of the grabbing hands, and jumped away as it rose up from the surface of the roof, the suit of the person changing back to its normal green hue instead of taking on the complete appearance of the roof's color and visual texture, "Null?"
But he was too mentally preoccupied to offer her any sort of reply at the moment.
'What the hell?' Null thought to himself, trying very hard not to grab his head after the bunch of kicks that he'd taken in it from Batgirl, 'That was enough to screw up somebody like Copperhead, but it couldn't get to her?'
He'd human-tased her, and had to let go after three seconds or she would have knocked him out just trying to get him to let go. How insulated was that damn suit?
Either way, he did what he'd wanted. Having suffered a double-team thrashing from the two caped heroes, he knew how desperate a fight that could be, even for someone like Ravager. At least now they were split up. But if he'd been looking for thanks, he would have had to keep searching elsewhere.
"What are you doing here, stupid?" Ravager hissed at him quietly, so as not to blatantly tip off either of their enemies that they weren't entirely on the same page. She wanted to hit him, but that would have been an outright show of team weakness.
Null was floored. Was that how you treated someone that literally saved you from an emasculating defeat? If someone would have saved him from his first Batgirl/Robin beating, he probably would have made them his best friend instead of admonishing them, "I could see you losing from where I was! What did you want me to do?"
"Your goddamn job!" Which was not supposed to entail any fighting whatsoever. None.
The thing was, Null didn't want to exactly see a partner (even temporary and entirely circumstantial as she was) get beaten up and hauled in after losing. And knowing that Ravager had a lot to prove to someone with very little patience for anything other than the best results possible, his feet carried him there.
Of course, for the sake of being argumentative, he had a completely legit-fake reason lined up and forged right on the spot.
"Well if they take you down, how long do you think it'll be before they come and get me too, you ungrateful bitch?" A+ for the improv. It wasn't exactly difficult since he was a little hot at the hostility that came from trying to step in, "Ten, fifteen minutes? You've been saying all weekend that I suck!"
"And since you suck, I feel the need to ask-," Ravager said before bringing his attention back to their current situation, "-What exactly the fuck are you gonna do now!?"
That was the best question he had received all day long. It was definitely a thinker. Unfortunately he didn't have the time to ponder the actual ramifications of the move that he'd already made. The shock value of his little stunt had already worn off in a matter of seconds.
The standoff came to an end with Batgirl's outrage, "Why would you be helping Deathstroke? I thought you were just a thief!"
She had actually thought he wasn't that bad. He just stole, and never anything important, just little things. But as far as she could see, he was helping Ravager run interference to allow Deathstroke to kill someone and fulfill a contract.
Null had no immediate answer to that. No good answer at least. His first one would have been, 'Because Catwoman screwed me over,' but that wasn't pliable for several reasons. Once again he wound up falling back on favorite standard reply, "I don't have to tell you anything."
If Null had lit the fire by showing up in the first place, Ravager gleefully threw gasoline all over it, "Ooh, scathing."
Thus, the fight began anew.
Apparently Batgirl hadn't been particularly cross with Null the first time they had dealt with one another, because she certainly was now, and he barely found himself able to defend against her. Thank goodness for Wildcat's favorite training method of periodically trying to actively beat the daylights out of him in the middle of their workout sessions. After getting somewhat accustomed to that, Batgirl's attack was manageable by comparison.
Actually able to fight back now, Null waited for her to present an opening, which came when she threw a round kick at his body that he was able to block, jabbing the point of his elbow right at her shin. With the same arm, he punched at her face with a second motion, but hit nothing but air as she turned and caught his arm over her shoulder, pulling him through to take him down with a judo technique.
He flipped through it and threw a sidekick upon landing on his feet. Batgirl blocked it, but bumped her back into Ravager's whose own fight with Robin had brought the two battles dangerously close together. Both turning and locking eyes at the same time, Batgirl ducked a swing of Ravager's katana that would have removed her head.
"Sparky, tag!" Ravager growled, prompting Null to jump over the two women forced to engage one another. On the opposite side of the battle he was met with Robin. Body now on the autopilot of combat mode, Null moved right into a fight with him, guiding him away from Ravager and Batgirl until a birdarang forced him into jumping to another roof ledge, lest he be cornered or hit with the weapons.
Robin didn't follow him over, so much as he made it there before him, "Okay, it's harder to hit you this time than it was before," Robin said, hitting Null with a punch to the face and another to the body right after the aspiring criminal made it to the other side, "I didn't think someone like you trained."
Null swallowed the grunt his body wanted to give after taking the shot to his body and trapped the offending limb under his armpit, throwing three front elbow strikes at Robin that were blocked while he was stuck in close. Realizing that everything he could do in that limited situation was going to be blocked, Null threw a quick teep kick blocked by Robin's staff, but it was only intended to shove him back and try to knock him off-balance, "How else am I gonna keep from getting my ass kicked?"
"Point taken. So-," All Null saw during Robin's next move was his cape in his face for a split-second before he felt the length of Robin's staff across his throat, "Is it working out any better?"
Robin managed to get behind him and hold him in a reverse strangling technique, bending forward just enough to hold Null's feet off of the ground, keeping him from getting any leverage to try and reverse the pressure on his neck.
Null couldn't fight back. Back elbows aimed at Robin's kidney while one hand pulled at the staff trying to get him any bit of air he could were ineffective. Kicking his legs into the air did nothing to free himself, "It… was…"
Slowly he curled his legs inward and managed to push his legs up over his head to backroll over Robin's to free himself.
Thank you sit-ups. From then onward, as long as he was physically able he would make it a habit to do at least a hundred a day, whether he was training that day or not.
But he was still losing. Robin still had a staff, he still had Null on his heels, and he had no idea what he could do to change it.
"Sparky, right wheel kick!" Ravager's voice came over their comm. Connection from where she was fighting Batgirl on the fire escape of an entirely different building. The sound in his ear rang clearer than the noise of the city around them.
Null didn't know why he listened to her advice in the middle of a quick-paced fight that she wasn't even looking at. He didn't know why she wanted him to throw that kick in particular, or how she was aware that he knew how to perform that move. He didn't know how his mind and body so quickly shifted moves from what he was going to do to what he wound up doing.
Most of all, he didn't know why it worked.
The exact moment Ravager screamed at Null, Robin completely shifted to Null's right side intent on going for an open kneecap to put him down, something the aspiring thief was entirely unprepared for beforehand. Honestly, he still hadn't been prepared for it even when the heel of his foot blasted Robin in the side of the head. Clean.
Robin never saw it coming, and when it connected, he dropped.
It was the cleanest hit with a move that powerful that Null had ever hit anyone with, and Ravager had called it before it had happened without even being within sight of him.
…Okay. If that was what the fates were giving him, sure. He'd take that little stroke of luck after all of the misfortune he'd been having for the last few months.
"Robin!"
Null snapped out of his disbelief to find Batgirl heading his way, and with him standing over Robin it was the last place he wanted to be at the moment. He'd had enough of fighting for one night and turned tail. Ravager wasn't anywhere in sight and Null took that as an excuse to make a run for it. Apparently she had done the same from the distinct lack of cursing or swordplay.
Immediately getting his distance, Null jumped to the ledge of the building as Batgirl checked Robin over.
"Come on already! Go!"
He managed to get a good look at Batgirl's glare at him under her cowl before he ran his way down the side of the building and made to disappear. She would only stay there until she could rouse Robin, and then she'd be looking for him again. Hopefully by then he'd be halfway to an extraction point. Since he'd broken her line of sight on him and would have at least thirty good seconds of a headstart, he was certain that would be enough.
Still, as he made himself scarce, he couldn't help but take note of the way she'd looked at him before his departure. It wasn't just the sort of look you gave someone to let them know that it was in their best interest to get away while they had the chance. There was more to it than that.
Disappointment. Betrayal. Regret.
He was confused as to why, but what was more important than anything else was getting himself to safety.
That was why he was long gone by the time she said something aimed at him, but unintended for his ears.
"You know," Batgirl said to herself, as if she shouldn't have expected anything less, "Before, I actually thought you weren't that bad."
XxX
The escape was quick. Ravager memorized every way to safety that Deathstroke had come up with for them and upon reconvening with Null was able to effectively guide him to an escape route where they could slow up and try to catch their breath.
They stopped temporarily at the end of a tunnel that opened up into the Gotham River, both leaning against opposite sides of the concrete pipe.
"Deathstroke's still going to kill you for breaking your role, idiot," Ravager said, nursing her injuries from the fight now that there were no more enemies within sight, "You should have just left me there."
"And miss out on you owing me one?" Null responded, "Not a chance. I didn't do that out of the goodness of my heart. I'm paying it forward here. Even if it isn't you, I'm sure the universe'll pay me back somehow," At least that was the excuse he was going with.
Ravager scoffed at him and pulled off her mask, "Karma's not a thing. And even if it was, you helped me of all people. I'm pretty sure that'd get you bad karma instead."
With nothing to do but wait for a tracking signal from Deathstroke to activate to let them know where to fall back to, the two fell into a silence, but there was a gigantic elephant in the room that they hadn't gone over yet. As reluctant to bring it up as Null was, he wasn't keen on leaving it without even trying to talk about it.
"So, are you going to tell me just what the hell that was? Calling my shot for me," The teenaged thief asked uncertainly, "You couldn't even see my fight from where you were, even if you were paying attention, so how'd you know what I should have done to beat Robin?"
"It just popped into my head, okay?" Rose wasn't necessarily comfortable with it herself. Her mind was constantly buzzing as it was, but the apparent precognitive action she'd pulled on the rooftops was something she needed explained to her, "It was like I saw bird boy make that move and snap your leg like a twig, but I could see a counter to it, so I just yelled it out."
"What was it?"
"I don't know! It was just a coincidence Sparky. It's not like it matters now."
"…So, you're like, psychic or something?"
"If you have to call it something, it's called precognitive recognition," Rose started to explain before realizing that she was helping the line of questioning along instead of putting a stop to it, "But it's not something, so don't call it anything but a fluke. As a matter of fact, don't call it anything. Just forget about it."
"Alright, alright, yeesh."
"…"
"…"
Once again, an awkward silence permeated and not for the first time, Rose wondered just how Null could have been a local. He wasn't nearly ruthless enough to last in a place like Gotham City for very long. No one else that didn't have a stake in her well-being would have been advised to step in and help her.
Still, he put in the work tonight. That counted for something, "By the way, you didn't do half-bad everything considered."
"Oh," Null responded in surprise that she was saying anything to him even remotely resembling praise, "Thanks."
"You still should have run though, retard."
"Actually, I think I should have run too."
XxX
(Elsewhere in Gotham City – With Deathstroke)
As far as standoffs went, this one was less annoying than most others were to a man such as Deathstroke, because as far as he could see no monkey wrenches had been thrown into his plan of action yet.
"I should have brought more bullets," Deathstroke quipped as Batman stood away from him, crouched on the top of a billboard while he stood on the top track of a three-tiered setup at a local platform. Their fight had carried the two of them several blocks away from where they'd started from. Deathstroke knew that Batman was simply trying to put distance between him and the man he thought the assassin was targeting, so he let him believe he was getting the upper hand simply by getting him 'out of position', "And here I'd forgotten just how irksome it is to try and shoot you Bat-folk."
Playing cool as a cucumber was all well and good, but Batman knew exactly which button to push with a man like Slade Wilson, "Funny, I figured you would have remembered things from times when you lost. That certainly explains a lot."
"I don't lose, Batman."
'I'm sure Dick would say otherwise,' Batman thought to himself with a ghost of a smirk on his face, "Let's go ahead and put that to the test."
He dropped off of the billboard, cape extended to let him glide down like the bat his motif was fashioned after. Deathstroke pulled his sword and swung at him, but Batman let his cape go slack earlier than anticipated and dropped to the track, rolling forward and throwing off his timing.
Slade's curse was muffled by Batman swatting his sword arm away to leave his center vulnerable to attack. Batman wrapped both hands around the back of his neck and pulled himself in for an impactful knee to the solar plexus. A second knee was blocked by Slade's forearms before he quickly shifted their position to try and run Batman through.
The stab missed by inches, but Slade continued his attack seamlessly with a twist of his arms that allowed him to bring his sword around for a slash. Batman played matador, letting the blow move through his cape to throw the contract killer off and conceal his own next move, but he wasn't facing the kind of man that the same sort ploy would work on twice.
Sticking his leg out to go with the swing of his blade, Deathstroke missed the killing blow, but he managed to slyly trip Batman up, sending him spilling to the surface of the train tracks. Visible eye shining with opportunity behind his mask, he swung the weapon downward to cleave right through his enemy, but Batman rolled away safely. Not missing a beat, Deathstroke pulled a small firearm and began shooting at the rolling Batman who kept going until he took himself over the edge of the tracks.
Deathstroke clicked his tongue and dropped himself over the other side, only to be kicked as he descended by Batman who'd stuck himself to the underside of the tracks with his grappling line to safely swing and ambush him.
Hitting the surface of the softly vibrating track hard, Deathstroke muttered to himself, "Well played…" As he got up onto one knee, he ducked his body forward, aiming his gun through his legs to take two shots at Gotham's ace hero. Not expecting to hit anything, he simply used it as a method to nimbly head-roll off of the track and flip himself back to his feet.
The rumbling of the track grew more pronounced and they soon saw why, as they both descended to the bottom track level before they could be hit by an oncoming train.
As they dropped simultaneously, Deathstroke shot three more times at Batman in the air but missed. Upon touching down, Batman came right forward and grabbed at his wrists, managing to get them both, criss-crossing Deathstroke's arms across his body. Both men threw short kicks and tried slamming their knees into the sides of each other's to break their posture and stance, but both held strong.
With their arms occupied, Deathstroke pushed his entire body forward into Batman's before attempting to headbutt him, missing his face and hitting his shoulder. The two dug their foreheads into the junction of their opponent's neck and shoulder, periodically trying to stun their adversary by slamming the side of their forehead into the spot behind the ear.
It was an attempt to jockey for position, but neither of them were going to get any further where they were. As advantageous as it would have been to get the upper-hand as thing stood, neither man was unskilled enough to allow it to happen.
With a titanic heave from both, they shoved each other back far enough to land on opposite sides of the train platform.
Despite the ferocity they had been tearing away at each other with, one wouldn't have been able to tell from looking at them. Neither looked winded in the slightest, or even particularly roughed up from the fighting.
The lull in action gave Batman a moment to notice some things. Deathstroke was definitely fighting him to kill, full-bore, but there was something off. He was apparently after the director of Gotham City's S.T.A.R. labs. That man was currently heading for the hills. The two of them had been fighting for almost fifteen minutes, and while he had been trying to keep them going in the last direction they found the director heading off in, there had been no sense of urgency behind anything he'd done in that entire span.
"What have you done?" Batman demanded to know bluntly. He didn't know something. He gravely disliked being out of the loop, any loop, "Deathstroke!" He snarled.
"Me? Nothing. Haven't you been here making sure of that?" Deathstroke said cryptically before another train ran between the two of them. Batman positioned himself in a corner of the bottom train platform to see over it, but he was gone already.
Without a second to waste, Batman threw himself into the search. This wasn't over.
What was this about?
XxX
(Central Gotham – Unfinished Traffic Tunnel)
It had taken a few more hours of waiting at the outlet of that pipe, but eventually Ravager and Null did get a GPS hit from Deathstroke that lasted all of five seconds before disappearing. That was the cue to head to the location indicated on the map to bring the mission to an end.
The end it did reach, and not a moment too soon. Walking into the service tunnel and finding Deathstroke waiting, arms crossed in a maintenance room in the back was almost welcoming after the last two days that Null had been through.
Almost, because the man still scared him to death.
"Mission a-freaking-ccomplished," Null said as he and Rose entered and separated.
Deathstroke watched him get his distance to where he could keep both Rose and himself in sight. The boy wasn't so terribly foolish as to think turning his back on any of them was wise, especially now that the mission was over.
Not saying anything at first, Deathstroke looked directly at Rose, the unspoken command to report.
"He got everything that you wanted," She said, "Didn't set off a single alarm or get spotted by any guards. There were some… complications once he got back outside, but it's fine. We're clean."
She had put her mask back on before walking in, but when she got close enough to her father he grabbed her chin and looked her face over, removing the half-mask to see just how many bruises she'd gained that night. He'd seen them on Null's face from what he could make out under the boy's hood in the low light, he had a few marks of his own.
Nodding to his daughter from what he'd taken as a clipped recanting of the night's events, he gestured her aside and turned his attention to their temporary ally, "Well? You don't get paid without proof of services rendered, boy."
Keeping his eyes locked on Deathstroke, Null opened his satchel and pulled out the flash drive and a thick black case the size of a box that would hold a laptop. He averted his eyes for just a moment to safely set those things down before returning them to the dangerous man before him, but even that was too much time to be afforded in that situation.
*BANG!*
The sudden shot rang out through the room and Null immediately hit the ground. To her credit, Rose didn't say a word. She didn't flinch, even as she saw it coming. It could have been worse, and the only thing that was surprising to her was that it wasn't.
"Goddamn it!" Null cried out, clutching at his thigh and the brand new hole that had been blown right into it by his employer, "Why? Gah, you asswipe!"
The insult slid off of the hardened assassin like water off of a duck's back.
"Ravager was doing her job. If she needed help, that was on her," Deathstroke explained, moving forward to step on Null's wounded leg, eliciting grunts of pain as the young man tried to hide just how much it hurt, "What you did put your own mission in jeopardy. I never told you it was okay to step in. I hired you for a job. You do that job and only that job, otherwise you jeopardize the entire point of the mission."
And it did. Null was quickly realizing just how expendable he really was. When Deathstroke shot him again for the kill, no one would be coming for revenge.
No one would even know.
"You're gonna kill me?" His skin lost all semblance of color as he stared down the barrel of the gun pointed right at his face, "I did the job AND saved your daughter! People don't usually shoot guys who do that!"
"The only reason I haven't cut off the loose end that you are, is because you actually finished your mission. Like I said from the start, I knew what I was getting when I allowed a wet-behind-the-ears child to take up a role on this assignment."
Sometimes doing the right thing wasn't doing the right thing. That was clear here with villains, even after saving one's daughter.
"They never found out I was stealing something for you," Null managed to grit out through clenched teeth, "They just thought I was extra muscle to distract them while you killed that guy you shot at."
"That's not the point," Deathstroke said, gathering up the box and the flash drive before departing without laying eyes on Null again, "A word of advice for the future. Follow. Directions. You had a role to play, nothing more. Orders aren't meant to be open to interpretation. Ravager."
Rose walked over to Null and grabbed the hand he didn't have clutching tightly to his bleeding wound, slamming a thick stack of bills into his grasp before turning and leaving him there in a red pool underneath his leg.
She didn't say a word to him, and he didn't to her, but she did glance back at him before she left him in the room. He wanted help badly, but instead of asking, which he knew would not go over positively, Null figured he'd be better off crawling or hopping to a medical center on his own. Silently jerking his head, not trusting his voice to hold up if he spoke, he asked her to just go.
And so she did. The exchange took less than four seconds, with only the closing of the service tunnel door behind her signifying her departure.
"Fuck this gig," Null muttered to himself in the still silence of his solitude.
Being a criminal really blew. So far, it was the most awful thing he'd ever tried his hand at, and nothing was even close by comparison. Any plus side he'd somehow come across since day one had been ruthlessly smothered and strangled before being buried alive by the negatives. Why would anyone actually want to do this for a living?
Then he looked at the fat stack in his hand the size of his fist, and things started making sense again in the universe. He had never even seen that much money in one place before.
Just how much was he supposed to have made on this job again? Between the adrenaline of the mission, getting shot in the leg, and the lovely lump of currency in his hand, the intended number had happened to slip his mind.
XxX
(The Next Day – Sunday Evening – Max's Apartment)
A benefit to living in Gotham City; most of the time, emergency room doctors didn't tend to ask too many questions when you dragged yourself into the hospital with bruises and a gunshot wound.
It didn't take very long other than sitting in a waiting room for two hours to wait for some guy to pull a slug out of his thigh, and then getting said slug pulled out of his thigh, which in of itself didn't take long but felt like an eternity while it happened.
"Slade Wilson is a dick," Max muttered to himself, hobbling his way up the stairs of his apartment building with the help of one crutch. Every motion of his injured right leg made his entire body ache right from the root of the offended nerve endings that had been shot. No painkillers either. He didn't have time to nurse an addiction, and he didn't even want to risk it. Riding his recovery period out on a constant cloud of pain and discomfort was the preferable choice.
Thanks a lot health class drug-scare videos.
Eventually, amid much grumbling and cursing of people, places, and things of various and sundry natures, Max made it to his floor and unlocked the door to the home he'd left for the majority of the weekend. It was almost enough to make him laugh. He was fighting his tail off for a crappy one-bedroom apartment when he'd just traversed half of Gotham City with a little less than fifty-thousand dollars in his bag. He probably could have paid for a better place in a better neighborhood on his way home instead of just coming back.
'Eh, I can't move,' Max thought to himself, carefully sitting down on the couch and taking his bag off to rest it in the seat beside him, 'What, am I just gonna disappear or something? Move on up or whatever?' As if that wouldn't be a big red flag. As long as he had a choice he wasn't going to give anyone the slightest excuse to tag him to any of his criminal escapades, 'So I've got to stay broke… at least until college or something.'
Hey, college. He could actually pay for it now, because God knows a scholarship wouldn't have ever been in the cards for him. He had way more than enough. The chances of him using 50 grand in twenty months was incredibly slim, and it wasn't like he wasn't going to keep stealing and get more of it after he healed up.
While unpacking his satchel from his bag in preparation of stashing it away until the next time he needed, Max found something that he hadn't put inside of it before heading out. Actually, he didn't remember putting it in there at all.
A phone. A cheap, disposable, prepaid cell phone that anyone could purchase from a retail store and activate for a handful of bucks in a matter of minutes. Max hadn't bought it. He didn't know anyone he'd need a disposable phone to even contact.
Checking it over to find something informative about its origins, he looked through it. It had sixty minutes on it and only one number programmed into it.
…
Why not? Curiosity may have killed the cat, but he wasn't a cat. He wasn't anything at all.
Besides, the only way something worse than what had already happened over the weekend could take place around him was if somebody busted in and killed him or threw him in handcuffs at that very moment. With that nonchalant notion in mind, he hit the dial key to sate his interest. It rang all of once before it was picked up on the other end, and he could almost hear the smug in the speaker's voice.
"Took you long enough to find it and make the call."
Rose? What the hell?
Max held the phone away from his ear to stare at it for a second before placing it back to his head, "…Did you slip a burner phone on me?"
"Is that really important?"
"No, but that's really creepy," Max admitted, pulling a wooden chair over to idly prop his injured leg up on later after he got resituated in his apartment, "I don't even remember you being close enough to my satchel for you to do something like that," And when did she go out and get a prepaid phone of all things?
"Well you can throw it out after this for all I care," She snapped in return, "I just wanted to say something to you, and I didn't feel like pushing your luck after Deathstroke already shot you once," Touche. As the daughter of said callous psychopath, she would know what would cause him to renege on his mercy and outright put a bullet in his head, "I just wanted to say, thanks. And I'm not letting this stand. I… owe you one."
It sounded like swallowing ash would have been easier for her than saying those last four words to him had been.
"Well, you're welcome," Max said, hobbling his way around his apartment with one crutch while he held the phone, "But not telling me that while Deathstroke might have been able to hear you say it kind of counts as returning the favor," Because as far as Max was concerned, Deathstroke would have definitely killed him if she had.
An irritated growl followed over the line, "Keep being a smartass and I'll shoot you in the other leg myself for symmetry the next time I see you," Now that was more like it. All of that 'thanking him' crap was starting to make him feel like he was getting set up.
"I thought you were trying to be nice," He also thought that she didn't like guns.
"That's why I'd shoot you in the other leg and not in the gut… or the balls," Max shut his mouth quite promptly. With that family, nothing they said was to be taken as embellishment, "Anyway, count on me finding you eventually Sparky. I don't like owing debts."
For some reason he felt more threatened at being owed a favor from someone like Rose than if he'd been on her bad side. Chances were, she would have probably been less irritable if he had been instead of the alternative.
Stumped as to what he could say, Max just fell back on polite acceptance of the 'offer', "Err… looking forward to it," All he got was a grumble before Rose hung up on him, leaving him with a humorless laugh of disbelief, "…What the fuck is happening in my life?"
The daughter of the scariest guy he'd ever met, who hired him and shot him in the meat of the thigh afterwards, apparently felt a reluctant sense of gratitude after he helped her fight off living, breathing superheroes.
She knew, or was learning how, to fight superheroes.
Perhaps he'd hold on to that phone, at least for a little while.
XxX
(Some Time Later - Batcave)
It had been days since the run-in with Deathstroke, and while it had been business as usual with the normal workload of the nightly patrols and training, the cloud of just what had happened that night hung over the heads of the hero sect.
S.T.A.R. Labs had been burgled that night in the small window that Batman and company had been occupied, and the perpetrator had managed to get away. This led to the assumption of the culprit being Null. It fit together too neatly that this occurred while Ravager and Deathstroke had the attention of the only people in the immediate vicinity that could probably catch him.
Even if they caught him one day though, they wouldn't be able to pin that particular wrongdoing on him. He had never been caught on any sort of security system or camera inside, and Batgirl and Robin had never seen any of the things he had taken to confirm his part in that particular crime.
S.T.A.R Labs weren't very forthcoming with information on what had been taken from them. In the end, that wouldn't have stopped Bruce from figuring out what it was. But at the moment, he wasn't speaking with them on it, or much of anything. He had high expectations for his charges, and for himself, and being swerved in any situation irked him considerably.
He wasn't the only one smarting from the run-in.
Tim had taken being knocked out by Null very seriously. Within the span of a couple of months, Null had gone from an athletic nuisance to being fairly decent in straight combat, but even with his improved technique and odd electric nuance that he'd pulled on Barbara, he shouldn't have won that fight.
One mistake, and after days and days of running through every move he'd made, remembering everything he recalled Null trying, and he couldn't see how Null would have known what to look for and what to use to counter him and win.
As far as Barbara could see from what she'd been told and Tim's repeated walkthroughs of the fight in training, it had been a fluke. It had been too randomly perfect of circumstances to be anything else.
Once again, the two of them had worked through the ending sequence of the fight, where Null had landed the incalculably perfect kick to stop Tim in his tracks just before he could injure his knee and take him out of commission.
"I don't know anyone who would have even thought to throw a kick like that at that exact moment," Tim said, taking note of his own posture and movement with his staff. He was a perfectionist, and figuring out how he lost was a must. You had to take a lesson away from everything, especially in failure.
Barbara sighed and put a hand on his shoulder before moving out of the sparring area. They had been at it for the better part of an hour, simply going over the exact run-through, and no progress toward understanding had been reached, "That's enough for tonight. Save some energy for later," They still had to head out and patrol.
Tim looked at her long and hard before eventually agreeing. Null wasn't going to show his face anywhere anytime soon without being forced to, and there were threats in Gotham City that would show their faces if they focused in on any particular one of them at a time. Prioritizing was key to handling all that they could for what the city's underworld had to offer.
The work involved never ended, and that much was evident when as they left the training area of the cave they found their mentor/boss, Bruce Wayne.
It was the first time that they had seen him in-person in days. Instead of saying anything to let them know of his presence while they had been training or choosing to observe them while they had been, he had taken a seat at the Batcave central computer, a contemplative look on his face instead of the last unpleased scowl he had left them with the night after the Deathstroke fight.
"Well he's not classified as petty anymore," Bruce said, knowing they had realized that he was there without even needing to see them, "Whatever the information he took was, what we can definitely confirm he got away with is dangerous enough on its own. Whether he still has it or not, it's not a Gotham problem anymore. What he took won't ever even come into play in this area."
He was debating contacting the Justice League over it. It would have been the best option, to let them know what Null had taken and given to Deathstroke of all people.
Barbara frowned at the bit of information and the refusal to name Null by his alias. A major chunk was being left out and she wasn't fond of it, "Well, what else did he steal then?"
The billionaire vigilante didn't bother turning around, needing to figure out just how much of a problem this was or would be in the near future, "S.T.A.R. Labs has a confirmed cache of a particularly rare extraterrestrial element, meant to be used for study," And that was what Null had taken away, "Of course, it's also a weapon in regards to a handful of people in particular."
Tim's eyes quickly widened. Putting two-and-two together hadn't been difficult even with such a vague explanation, "Oh no."
It didn't need to be said, but Bruce said it anyway, just to drive the point home.
"Deathstroke got Null to steal a share of the Kryptonite from S.T.A.R. Labs."
S.T.A.R. Labs managed to collect a significant amount that had fallen into Gotham Bay when Supergirl's Kryptonite-encased rocket to Earth had broken through the atmosphere for the purpose of study. But of course with the Gotham City branch being focused on weaponry, there was little doubt that there was a combat basis to the study at that particular laboratory.
Null had stolen one of the only things that could bring the strongest man in the world to his knees and handed it over to a career killer who had already been capable of going toe-to-toe with members of the Justice League before.
Did he know what he'd taken? If he did, was he aware of why it was even important? Whether he was a stupid teenager or not, this made him a problem.
If any misstep or oversight on Bruce's part wound up with someone good to the world getting killed, Bruce wouldn't have been able to forgive himself. Yes, the big man in blue himself needed to know since Kryptonite was involved, and there was a good chance that Null would wind up coming into the conversation when the topic arose of how Deathstroke managed to get it.
…Just another day.
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