A/N: My real life schedule is absurd and has been for a long time. I can't make any promises as far as added chapters go, but I do work on the story when I can. In addition to writing new chapters, I frequently edit old ones with the aim of correcting grammatical mistakes and improving the flow of my writing. Thanks for your continued support.
To Tara, the walk felt like it lasted for years. Even carrying a backpack and two briefcases, Slade was able to walk at a normal pace, a feat that amazed and bewildered the poor girl. She was unburdened, but aching joints slowed her. Retarded speed aside, Tara's anxieties and Slade's watchful gaze were suffocating.
Every time a person walked by, she wanted to reach out and grab them and scream, "Help me, please, you don't know what he's done to me!" but she knew that she would inevitably fail to save herself.
It was getting dark by the time they reached a fenced-off alleyway. The illumination from the streetlights failed to penetrate the depths of the alley, but Tara thought she could make out a set of stairs descending into the ground. Slade paused in front of the locked gate and pulled a device seemingly from nowhere—it looked like a paperclip, but his hands moved too quickly for her to get a good look before the lock popped open and Slade pocketed the tool. The gate swung open, lopsided.
"You first," he said. Tara did as she had been commanded.
Her blue eyes began adjusting to the dark and she could see that she had been correct. There were stairs set up in the ground.
"This subway has been abandoned for several years now," Slade explained as he locked the gate behind them. "The tunnels collapsed after Doctor Light had a run-in with the Titans down there. It was cheaper for the city to build tunnels around rather than to repair, so they left it busted. Doctor Light went back to prison. I watched it for a few months and decided to keep it as a spare base of operations. It's been outfitted to be livable, do not worry yourself."
Yeah, that's what I'm worried about, she thought.
He began descending the stairs and Tara followed him after a moment of indecision and a fretful glance back at the locked gate.
Two flights of stairs later, they emerged into a large chamber. Tara, still clutching a handrail in the dark, could not tell exactly how large it was, but the echoes of their footsteps made her imagine a football stadium. She heard Slade walk farther away and set down the suitcases. He went even farther, and Tara heard metal clanging and scratching sounds.
Dim lights kicked on overhead, buzzing with the force of a thousand bees. Tara got her first look at the old station. It wasn't as huge as she had thought, but it was still bigger than the house. She walked away from the stairs and out onto the platform where Slade approached her.
"This is where we will be living and working," he explained. He did not gesture grandly or give any indication to Tara how he felt about the place—was he happy to be living in an abandoned subway station? Content, even? She didn't think so. Slade struck her as a man with greater plans for himself than a subway.
"Why didn't we just use my—your—house?" She asked.
He stared at her with his one good eye hard enough to make cold adrenaline shoot through the girl's body. "My dear, the next time you ask a stupid question without trying to answer it yourself first, I will hurt you."
Having said that, he deadbolted the double doors that sealed them off from the stairs with a two-by-four and used a loose chain and padlock to close them up. After rattling the doors to be certain they were secured, he crossed to a dilapidated table and put his bag there. The girl glanced back at the doors and her skin crawled when she thought of how she didn't have a key to that lock. Even if she could bypass those doors, she'd still have to sprint up the stairs and get past the wire fence outside to get away. He'd be able to catch her before she was up ten stairs.
Tara looked from Slade back to the door and back to Slade. He was taking an array of complex-looking tools from his backpack and laying them out on a table. She approached cautiously, curious. She made sure to stay on his left side so that he would see her and not think she was sneaking up. Tara didn't want to give the man any reason to be angry or frustrated—his fuse was short enough as it was. "What are they for?" she inquired.
"A variety of things," he began to explain, pausing to hold a tool close to his eye to examine it. "Quite a few are for mechanical things. I have surgical tools as well."
He placed a scalpel on the table. The girl moved to reach for it but Slade grabbed her already-bruised wrist and squeezed hard. "Don't touch. You were quite happy to make yourself at home in my house with my things, but you will not do the same here. Do you understand me, Terra?" The entire time Slade spoke, his head did not turn and he did not look at her. He kept his voice flat and Tara would have bet money that his heart rate hadn't changed at all.
She whimpered in assent and he released her. The girl took a step back.
"You're a different girl than you were before, Terra," Slade said passively. Tara almost believe there was disappointment in the man's voice.
She felt obliged to ask, "How so?"
"Well," he began, "I've been watching you for a while now. You're slower than you were—mentally, I mean, you're still a good runner and your reflexes are decent. You're less chatty, too, except for when you're talking with those two girls you always hang out with at school."
"I don't like that you were watching me," she said quietly, feeling violated not for the first time today. She chose not to argue his point about her being stupid. She felt stupid, and decided there were worse things than being dumb.
"You used to love attention," Slade said pointedly. He finished laying out his tools and tossed the now empty bag to the side. "You didn't like letting people know, but you absolutely loved it when someone would single you out and compliment you on something."
An image of a silver butterfly came to Tara's mind, but she was unsure what to make of it.
Slade continued his story, "After you moved in with me, we would train for hours and hours a day. I had to make sure you could control your powers, after all, but you used to ask the stupidest questions. 'Is this right, Slade?' you would ask, 'Am I doing a good job?'" he mocked her as he went to the suitcases.
The one he opened appeared to contain his costume and its armor plates, plus some things that Tara couldn't identify from across the old subway station.
"How long did we live together?" She asked. What she meant was, 'How long was I your prisoner?' because she could not imagine that she had ever trusted this horrible man well enough to live with him.
"We lived together for a few months the first time, then you went undercover for me. Then we lived together for several more months. Most of the time was spent training. That's what we'll be doing here. Mostly."
Too many questions swam behind her eyes and all of them had the potential for terrible answers. Most of all, she wanted to ask him what he'd meant when he had told her that he'd seen her in her underwear and that he expected to see her in her underwear again. She found that she could not come up with a possible explanation that didn't make her want to peel her skin away in discomfort.
"You're welcome to explore the tunnels, my dear," Slade told her. He was removing pieces of metal from one suitcase and carrying them to the table with the tools. "I have no use for you right now."
Tara jumped from the platform onto the tracks and ran into the poorly lit tunnels without a second thought. She would rather be in the deep, dark Jump City subway system than be with Slade! She found herself practically sprinting away from him into the blackness. She was exhausted from her injuries and from the long walk but none of that mattered to her when danger was behind her.
Alas, she could not run forever. Soon it became too dark to see anything except a faint gray dot of light where Slade waited. Tara slowed her pace because she felt like her heart would pop like a maraschino cherry under a boot if she kept going at her old gait. She trudged farther from the light until one of her shoes hit a large rock.
The girl felt around with her hands. There was a large pile of rocks blocking the tunnel. She groped through the darkness thoroughly and could find no way to bypass the boulders. No doubt her tormentor knew that the boulders were there; that was why this subway station was abandoned in the first place. She felt for a place to sit and couldn't find one. Frustrated with herself, outraged at Slade, and indignant about not having a place to rest, she threw her arms in the air.
Yellow light almost blinded her and she froze with her arms up like she was in the middle of dancing the YMCA. A boulder, highlighted like her hands, hovered a few feet off the ground. Despite herself, a grin flashed across Tara's bruised face. She lowered her hands slowly, and the boulder set itself down almost noiselessly. The light faded from both the rock and from Tara's hands, and she sat on the new seat she had made for herself.
Slade saw the telltale glow of his apprentice's powers. He kept calm and decided not to punish her this time. Why? He wanted to let her think she had a chance of outwitting him. He wanted her to think that she had some way to affect her life. Then, on another day when he hadn't already beaten her bloody like a red-headed stepchild, he would dash those hopes with an unheard-of display of violence.
He had no doubt that working for Trigon had made him much more brutal than he had once been. Outwardly he was able to remain the calm and collected mercenary he had always been, but now there was a part of him that craved the destruction that he had been able to cause while in Trigon's employ. Most of all he had enjoyed terrorizing Raven, and he had always regretted that her father had forbade him from truly breaking her. As a result, Slade had set aside a number of things that he had wanted to do, and it was looking like Terra would be a vessel for his fantasies once again.
The mercenary went back to his work—he was making communicators that would be inaccessible to the Titans' equipment. He'd made things like these before, but he suspected that the Titans updated their technology frequently and that his old inventions would be useless now. He was almost finished with his half of the communicator, a hands-free device that would connect to the inside of his mask. He would work on Terra's part next, the simpler of the two halves. Terra's was to be a simple earbud from which he could give her orders. It would be sensitive enough that Slade would be able to hear her talk to him and he'd be able to pick up most of the sound around her. All the better to spy upon you, my dear, he thought. When he finished the communicators, he planned to make a GPS tracker that he would surgically implant in the girl's skin. He suspected that, like the neural interface he'd previously installed in her body, the last tracking chip he'd given her had vanished.
The work was frustrating, as the creations were very small and required good depth perception, an area in which he was deficient for obvious reasons. In fights, he could gauge depth without trouble because everything was moving and he had plenty of reference points, but when he was alone and everything was still, his partial blindness was infuriating. It was a cruel trick of nature that Addie's bullet had taken all the fun from him one of Slade's favorite hobbies—inventing.
From the tunnel came a ghastly roar. The villain could not identify it at first, but eventually recognized it as Tara's snores amplified by echoes. He relaxed and tried to return to his work, but was annoyed by the sound. He put his tools down on the table.