Cold-Blooded: A DC Universe Fanfiction (#Wattys2015)

Chapter 15: Slade, Rose: Cooperation

December 8-11th:

Under the supports of the Moskovski Bridge, Deathstroke lay for a moment, stunned by the impact. Then the pain came rolling in. Broken ribs, punctured lung, spinal injuries. Broken pelvis? No. Bad enough. Not so bad that a hotshot won't take care of it…

He reached for the ampules in his waist pouch. 'Hotshot' was slang for a hellish compound of adrenaline, cocaine, methamphetamine, morphine and digitalis used only in extremis to get someone up and moving even if they had a broken leg, as it had an addiction rate of ninety percent after one dose. He carried five of them at all times, and this was only the third time he had ever had to use one on himself.

Ten ccs directly into the neck later, he was sprinting for his getaway vehicle. The driver was dead—he pulled the body out, sat down in the pool of blood, and drove. Six hours after that, he was twelve million richer and disembarking from a plane in Paris. The hotshot had worn off by then, but his regenerative abilities were still repairing the damage. No part of his body wanted to move. He made it move anyway.

Checking his messages, he found one from Rose's watcher: Flower boarded plane en route Tokyo.

Slade had found the virus the day after Rose installed it. Realizing what had happened, he also knew how his daughter's mind was likely to work, and therefore, the news from her watcher was not unexpected.

On his way to the baggage claim, he had to stop for a moment as black spots swam in his vision. Hastily taking a square of fine cotton from his pocket, he coughed a dark and ominous clot from the depths of his lung, and disposed of the handkerchief in the nearest trash can. His bags weren't yet going around on the luggage carousel, so he sank down on a bench and waited. Pain? What was pain? Weakness leaving the body, that was all…

"Pardonnez moi, Monsieur. Ou est la catastrophe?" a woman's voice asked. Excuse me, sir. Which way is the catastrophe?

"Ici meme," he rasped, turning. Right here. A private joke of theirs.

Yukie's face went from bright and welcoming to stricken, worried. "This time, you are not joking. You're hurt."

"Yes. Don't worry, if I were going to die I would have done it already. I don't need to go to the hospital or see a doctor. By this time tomorrow you'll never know anything was wrong." She had never seen him when he was badly injured before, though once or twice he'd postponed a rendezvous because of it. Well, she would have to get used to it, if—.

"As long as you stay conscious, I will respect that. If you pass out or stop making sense, then I will use my best judgment. Wait here, I will arrange matters." Arranging matters meant organizing a wheelchair to get him to a taxi and getting a porter to wrangle their bags. He stayed quiet and let her. It was that or another hotshot, and he preferred the pain.

The next morning, he was much improved. The night before, his torso was the color of a basket of blueberries. At daybreak, it was an impressionist landscape. However, Yukie suggested they stay in Paris another day that he might recover further. He would have agreed, except that Rose was on her way to Tokyo. Who knew what might happen to her alone there?

He endured the flight, customs, and the taxi, until finally they arrived at their ryokan, where his daughter was arguing with the innkeeper. She looked as though she had been sleeping on the street—and smelled like it, too. More than that, being a young girl, she was effectively trash-talking to the man by using the assertive form of speech, a nuance that someone who had truly studied Japanese would have known. Finally she blew her nose right in front of him, confirming all around that she had crawled out of a gutter.