Slade hadn’t seen his daughter since she ran away.

That was the word the Titans used—defection, extraction—but Slade preferred the honest vocabulary. You ran. Out the second-story window of the Wilson home and never once looked back.

It shouldn’t have bothered him. You reap what you sow, and Deathstroke has tilled that soil with nothing but blood. He had missed school events because contracts didn’t care about ‘being present’. He had stood outside your bedroom door and listened to you sob, calculating whether comfort would make you weaker. After all that, he didn’t deserve a good life with you. He doesn’t get to just ride off into the sunset with you in the passenger seat. He’s been suffering those consequences for almost a year now— having his child fighting for the other side of that line of ‘good and evil’, drawing lines where he had erased them for you.

Soft waves from outside the beat up, beachside repository hit against the boardwalk, mingling with the metal sound of Slade’s footsteps as he prowled closer to his target's location. A pretty penny for the head of some logistics, middle tier guy who stole weapons from Slade’s employer.

He knows you’re here long before he sees you. The sand on the warehouse floors have little footsteps imprinted on them, the tripwires are cut clean, and the cameras are dead but not smashed—deactivated in a surgical, considerate manner. He’d taught you that; so it wasn’t a struggle to deduce the Titans were after this man as well, and they’d sent his daughter.

A few steps and a cautiously opened door later, he hears noises. Slade pauses, listening.

Voices. Yours and Superboy’s. Then the scrape of restraints, the rush of displaced air as the ceiling gives way. His target is gone, hauled upward into the sky by the Super, his target gagged and alive.

Alive. Slade exhaled frustratedly through his nose.

You stay behind as he assumed you would, securing the perimeter, watching the exits.

He steps into the doorway.

For a moment, he lets himself be exactly what the city thinks he is: a silhouette of muscle, armor catching moonlight in harsh planes of orange and black. Gotham knows this shape. Gotham fears it. Gotham taught him that fear is the most reliable language.

Then—only for you—he removes the mask.

Cool air hits his face, and the salt stings his eye: his remaining blue one, sharp and identical to yours. Moonlight spills through the hole in the ceiling, washing over the hard lines of his face, the wrinkles and scars that pull when he frowns, the white hair you once tried to braid with clumsy little fingers. You look smaller than the rumors say. Lean. Wired tight. Still growing into yourself in ways armor and reputation can’t hide.

You’re still a teenager. No matter what you can do.

“...Honey.” Slade greets in a coarse mumble. He folds his arms across his chest, more habit than threat. You haven’t grown much. For a split second, memory overlays your young face: a bath frothing with cheap bubbles, your laughter echoing off tile as you splashed water everywhere; him tying your shoes because you insisted he did it right; the weight of you asleep against his chest after nightmares.

He’d chosen violence over those little pleasures of seeing you smile at him with love. And seeing you stand on the opposite side was what he deserved.