Under the Red Hood

Chapter 2: Sow the Wind


Ilya Yarosin hated dealing with the operations side of the Bratva. When he was behind a desk, tracking the ebb and flow of money and illicit goods, he was happy. The lower they stayed under the radar, the smoother the business ran. Acting out in the open, on no matter how small a scale, always made things messy. And messy was always bad for business. It was what Ilya had told his superiors several years ago, when one of them had been carried away with the idea of extravagant vengeance. He had told them not to go after one of the most gifted, and relentless, killers on the planet. He had told them to cut their losses and walk away.

And then his superiors had taken that man's daughter and shot her in the head.

That she had miraculously survived wasn't the point. It was the principle of the thing. In response, the man whom the Bratva had tried to cow— Slade Wilson— had tracked down and psychologically brutalized a girl named Tara Markov: the daughter of the very boss who had crossed Slade. Tara, who had been in the process of being groomed into the next generation of warrior for the organization, had wound up petrified. The scorpion sting in the tail of Slade's revenge.

And now, mocking them from seemingly beyond the grave, a clone of Slade had outed the Bratva as the owners of highly clandestine and illegal cloning technology. Technology they, in reality, neither possessed, nor knew how to use. But that wasn't stopping every intelligence and law enforcement agency under the sun from raiding every warehouse, safe-house and rat-hole they knew belonged to the Bratva. Ilya could hear Slade laughing at them, puppets on his strings.

The journey to Jump City had passed with a surprising lack of incident, and finding the Red Hood had been easy enough since the vigilante had exposed his face on live television. Ilya had tailed him to a dive bar outside the heart of downtown, far enough away from the massive Tower in the heart of the city to ensure they wouldn't be interrupted. Ilya knew Slade had let himself be followed; there was no way he would have kept track of him otherwise. Muttering a quiet prayer to whomever might be listening, the old soldier entered the bar. As soon as his eyes had adjusted to the dim light, he saw the unmasked face of the Red Hood sitting at a corner table, his back to the wall. A bottle of vodka sat on the table, next to a pair of shot-glasses.

Making his way over, Ilya slid into the booth seat without a word. The Red Hood poured the vodka and slid a glass over to him, a smile on his face.

"I figured they'd send you."

The phrase was more than enough for Ilya to confirm his suspicion that Slade had been lying through his teeth about not holding onto any memories from his previous body. The bitterness and quiet anger in his voice was that of an old man, with scars far deeper than his current body was capable of possessing.

"They didn't. I volunteered."

Slade grunted, lifting his shot-glass.

"Nazdarovya."

Ilya accepted the toast, draining his shot in one gulp and pouring another.

"You're going to let me out of here alive, Wilson?"

The look Slade gave him in response told Ilya everything he needed to know. A moment passed in silence before the older man spoke again.

"You screwed us over in a big way, you know," he said. "We'll be reeling from this for a long time. But I can't understand why you did it. You know how this story always goes."

Slade smiled, drinking his own shot and pouring another.

"Not always," he said. "The pieces in play are different now. Do you and your friends really want to be fighting a war on two fronts?"

"I certainly don't. But I'm not the only one who gets to make that decision. Kynazev and the others want your head on a platter."

Slade snorted, his brown eyes glinting with disdain.

"Yes, yes. I told them it would go about as well as the first time. Of course they didn't listen. What I wonder is, will you be able to fight a war on two fronts?"

"In what sense?"

Ilya smiled as he poured another shot.

"You won't be able to keep up this act forever. Sooner or later, Robin and his little band will put it together that we didn't clone you, and that you're still their arch-nemesis. Do you really think they'll keep letting you run wild once that happens?"

Slade shrugged.

"They'll have no choice. He might be single-mindedly determined to an admirable degree, but Robin is no murderer. Unless I give him cause, he won't come after me."

"And you think giving yourself a new body means the Titans will forgive you for everything you've done to them in the past? I doubt that somehow."

"Their forgiveness doesn't concern me. I already have the public on my side, and some people in very high places in this city owe me quite a bit. Even if I was arrested, I'd be acquitted and I'd walk."

The smile on Slade's uncannily young face made Ilya fight back a shiver. He sighed, feeling the weight of his years on his shoulders.

"So then, why did you do all of this? What point are you trying to prove?"

"I'm done trying to prove anything to anyone. I've torn this city and its Titans apart multiple times. Each time, they've rebuilt. I'm not interested in seeing if they can do it again. I know they can. Soon enough, they'll have had peace for so long, they'll have lost the taste for war. And by that time, I'll have taken over this city as a hero rather than a villain. As I said, I love a challenge. So no, Ilya, I'm not trying to prove a point. I'm just settling a debt. One last vestige of my old life."

The other man nodded, hardly satisfied but knowing that was the best answer he was likely to get. He finished his last drink, bid Slade a silent farewell, and left the bar. Ilya was halfway down the block headed back to his car when he tripped and fell over an uneven piece of sidewalk, hitting the ground hard and grunting in pain. As he made to rise to his feet, he saw someone standing over him, and rolled over to find himself looking into the last pair of eyes he ever thought he'd see again.

"Tara?"

There she was, glaring down at him with the same cold, pitiless hate he'd seen in her eyes as a child, when the Bratva had forced her powers onto her. But she was older now, the innocence of her youth replaced by scarred determination and seething anger. Ilya felt a chill down his spine, and knew that he would not rise to his feet ever again.

"What we did, I wanted no part of it," he stammered, hoping to buy enough time for a passerby to appear. "I never wanted to hurt you."

"But you did," she hissed, and Ilya knew from the sound of her voice that she was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, Tara Markov. "You ruined my life."

She closed her right hand into a fist, and the sidewalk around Ilya warped and shifted. The stone turned liquid, flowing over the old man and burying him without a trace beneath the ground. Terra stood staring at the ground for several moments, hugging her plain black hooded sweatshirt tighter against the rising wind.

"Feel better?"

Terra sighed, not turning to look at Slade.

"No. But I wasn't expecting to."

The silence stretched between them, years of words unspoken on the breeze.

"Are you going to tell them?"

Her laugh was jagged.

"Obviously. It'd go great. 'Hey guys, it's me, the homicidal maniac who almost got you all killed. Can we be friends again?' Did the cloning process kill half your brain cells, Slade?"

The young man who was now calling himself Red Hood shook his head.

"I didn't clone myself, Terra."

She turned at that, surprised.

"What? Then how'd you do… whatever you did?"

"After the Brotherhood fell, the city government didn't bother staffing a room full of frozen villains with an abundance of guards. It was an easy thing to sneak in, carve some skin off of Madame Rouge, and be gone before anyone noticed. You'd be amazed at the things her cells are capable of."

Terra shivered, and the wind had very little to do with it.

"So," she said at last, "you really are just you. Nothing's changed."

Slade smiled. His face was the same age as Terra's, but his eyes looked years older.

"Everything has changed, Terra. I have a new lease on life, and I plan to use it."

Rather than thinking about what Slade meant by that, Terra thought of another question to ask. After all, it was possible she would never see him again after this, and she wanted to make it count.

"Why did you help me? I stabbed you in the back."

Slade's smile deepened.

"Did you? There aren't that many ways to get an audience with an Elder Demon, Terra. I had to improvise."

He turned and began to walk away, only to call back to her as he left.

"By the way, did you see the green fly on the wall in the bar?"

Terra felt her heart clench in her chest, but shook it off. He was lying. Right? He always lied.

"Bastard," she whispered, a tear rolling down her cheek and dropping to christen the camouflaged grave on the sidewalk. A moment later, Terra had ripped a piece of pavement off the road and ridden it into the sky, flying away.

On top of a lamppost near where she'd been standing earlier, a dark green fly sat and stared at the moon hanging in the sky. Then it seemed to deflate, before beating its wings and rising into the evening air. It had seen enough, and it was time to go home. Whether it would tell its friends what it had seen and heard, even the fly didn't know. Perhaps it was best for the dead to stay buried, this time.


A/N: I wasn't expecting to write this so quickly, but I felt this thing needed a bit more closure than it currently had. So here we are.

I hope you enjoyed it, and thanks for reading!