Oh, wow… People like it! You really, really do! I'm so happy! Once again, to show my appreciation to all you who have reviewed, I dedicate this next chapter to you all; to Nannoch06 (I'm so glad you like my Titans/Gods collaboration, although I have since been snippily informed by my smart-ass friend that the Titans of myth weren't actually gods, apparently…); and to YamiTai (I love your pen name, it's really cute; also, I'm assuming that you liked my Who Killed Cock Robin?…); and to DarkMarkLv (again; glad it's sustaining you interest. As for your question about Robin/Slade, you'll find out the answer in this chapter…) and to Phoenix Skyborne (also again; I've just finished reading your Changes. It was awesome! I've left you some reviews, if you're interested…); and, once more again, to Quinn and his Quill, whose fan-fic, YamiParty 5, I still haven't got around to reading…

Enjoy! And I love you all! (Ok, don't take that literally… I mean the part about me loving you…)

Sins of the Fathers

Slade slowed his tread to a walk as he ventured further and further into the depths of Arkham Asylum. Down here it was almost completely dark and his penlight served its purpose again. This area was the "nutjob ward", where all of Gotham's most notorious criminals were locked away.

Or should have been. But instead all of the cells were lying empty, with only the little plaques on the lead doors telling of who their inhabitants should have been. Their names alone amused Slade; here they were, dangerous and deranged, and yet they had lame names like "the Riddler", "Killer Croc" and "the Mad Hatter".

All in all, he thought his little jail-break had gone rather successfully. From what the seer had told him, he figured that Arkham had pretty weak security, otherwise these wackos wouldn't keep getting out. His assumption had been correct and it had taken him very little time at all to hack into the system and shut everything down, causing a distraction. Now there were criminals running all over the place, some toting weapons of a various arsenal.

All except one. Slade knew who he was looking for and had deliberately kept the security on for that cell. Now all he had to do was find the only cell with a criminal in it.

He found it soon enough; to his annoyance there was an armed police officer with a badge stating "Gotham P.D" standing guard outside the cell. A mere distraction, but an unwelcome one. Sticking to the shadows he crept over to the police officer until he was behind him. The guard didn't seem to notice. With a single movement Slade snapped the officer's neck and kicked the corpse aside; the man didn't even have time to scream.

"Oh, Ricky! What's goin' on out there, pal! I heard a thud. Don't tell me you're having another of your little episodes."

The voice came from inside the cell, loud and mocking, the inhabitant's concern for "Ricky" completely fictional. Slade read the plaque on the door but already knew he had found who he was looking for; The Joker.

"I'm afraid your friend Ricky had an accident," Slade told the criminal through the single slot in the lead door.

"Yay! A visitor!" Was the Joker's response, his voice gleeful. "Did you bring me some candy?"

Slade could tell that his patience with this man was going to be put to the test, but ploughed on anyway, hoping to catch the Joker's interest.

"I have a preposition for you," he said levelly. "You want out of there?"

"Yay! Santa's answered my list this year!" The Joker shrieked. Slade scowled beneath his mask.

"Is that a yes or a no?" He asked coldly.

"What's the catch, bubbie?"

"There is no catch," Slade answered truthfully. "Only a minor requirement that will no doubt interest you."

"If it involves the Bat, you've got yourself a deal, bucko!"

Slade detested the way in which the Joker was speaking to him, calling him "bubbie" and "bucko", both of which, he was sure, weren't even real words. However, he let it pass, as his own interests relied heavily on the Joker's participation. And yes, it did involve the Bat, sort of. After all, from all that the seer had informed him, the Bat, or correctly titled "Batman", was a direct connection to the Teen Titans' leader. The old woman had told him many things about Batman and Robin, and indeed of the groundbreaking events that had taken place in Gotham City but a few weeks ago. He knew the Joker would have it in for the Boy Wonder now more than ever.

"Actually, it would involve his little sidekick," Slade corrected softly. Behind the lead sheet he heard the Joker shift and come closer to the slot.

"You know Batboy?" He asked, his surprise evident.

"It is my misfortune to know him very well," Slade replied bitterly.

"Pain in the backside, that kid," the Joker mused. "You want shot of him, eh?"

"Under normal circumstances I would get rid of him myself, but…" Slade trailed off.

"But?" The Joker prompted.

"This will take a great deal of explaining."

The Joker shrieked with laughter.

"Trust me, I'm not going anywhere, locked up in here." He paused. "Hey, you going to let me out or not!"

"Patience," Slade answered shortly. "I will. But first we must establish where we stand. You must understand why I have come to you, and then we may settle on an agreement."

"Ooh, a businessman," the Joker murmured in delight. "And with a story! It just gets better and better…"

Slade scowled again, intensely disliking the Joker more and more.

"It began," he started softly, chiding his anger, "many centuries ago, with a world named Azarath…"

OOOOO

What seemed like hours later, the two arch-villains – one the nemesis of Batman, the other the nemesis of the former's ex-sidekick – still stood there, on either side of a reinforced, riveted lead door, conversing in confidential whispers even though there was no-one around to hear their conversation.

"Ricky" still lay dead a few feet away, his corpse growing cold now.

The Joker let out a low whistle as Slade finished talking.

"Certainly got your priorities in order, haven't you?" He asked lightly.

"Hmm, well…" Slade's single grey eye narrowed. "What do you think?"

"I think you should let me out," the Joker replied simply.

"I mean about the prophecy. About… him."

"It seems like a fairytale to me," the Joker mused. "A nice big fairytale with frogs and princesses and bats…"

Slade sighed angrily and bit back the stream of expletives begging for release.

"Will you help me or not?" He asked, trying to keep his voice level. Behind the lead door the Joker stretched and yawned.

"Anything for a pal," he stated ironically. "On one condition though."

"Name it."

"This… "prophecy"… states that you have to kill him, but enlist my help, right?"

"Correct." Slade folded his arms impatiently.

"Alright, I'll get the brat for you; that'll be my contribution. You can kill him however you like. However…" The Joker's grotesque face broke into an ungodly grin. "…I want to torture the whereabouts of the Bat's hidey-hole out of him."

Slade raised his eyebrows beneath his mask.

"Torture?"

"I have some pretty gruesome little toys I haven't played with yet," the Joker said lightly. "And who better to play with than that horrible little brat?"

"Indeed." Slade was far from impressed. Torture wasn't his style; he was more in favour of trashing cities in a reckoning of fire and blood.

"Fine," he said finally. "Do what you will to him. But remember, I kill him."

"Capische."

Slade hesitated, realising that he should let his new "partner" out. He moved closer to the door, his handy pair of pliers at the ready to disable the electronic lock.

"We need a plan."

Slade stopped.

"Go on," he ordered.

"This will require thought," the Joker said, rephrasing his earlier statement. "What we need is a trap of some kind, one that is completely Bat-proof."

The Joker was right, Slade knew. Batman might prove to be a problem, especially now that Arkham was empty. They also had to come up with a way of luring Robin, alone of course, to wherever they were going to kill him.

"Here," he whispered, the idea suddenly dawning on him.

"Pardon?"

"We'll bring him here," Slade repeated more firmly. "The last place anyone would look for him; an empty prison. I took out all the security and the Titans… could track him, I suppose, but by the time they get here…"

"Batbrat will be sleeping in the ocean with the fishies," the Joker finished poetically. "Never mind; Bats'll get over it. He got over the last one I killed."

"But how to get him to come?" Slade questioned, talking more to himself than to the Joker.

"You leave him a rendezvous letter," the Joker contributed. "Tell him to get his little rear end over to Arkham Asylum or there'll be trouble."

"Right, and he'll turn up with the rest of the Titans in tow…" Slade started sarcastically.

"To kick our butts up around our ears," the Joker finished glumly. "Alright, maybe not."

"A "rendezvous letter" isn't a bad idea, though," Slade said thoughtfully. "But if we signed it from you or me, he would come, and probably alone in my case, but he'd be prepared for whatever we were going to do to him. We need to get him to drop his guard, we need to pose as someone he knows and trusts and would come to meet alone with the idea that he is safe."

He smiled behind his mask.

"We need to pretend that we are Batman."

The Joker shrieked with maniacal laughter.

"I love it!" He screeched. "I love how your mind works, Sladey!"

Slade scowled at the unwelcome familiar term of "Sladey", but said nothing.

"So we lure him here, kick him about a bit, then bump him off?" The Joker went on. "Sounds good. What do we do with the body? I usually arson mine…"

"Leave him for his friends to find," Slade said expressionlessly. "I've no doubt that they'll come to his aid eventually. Unfortunately he won't be able to thank them."

"Why are you so hung up on this, anyway?" The Joker asked. "Sure, I'm up for a little sport as much as the next guy, but you're really wired about killing this kid, and your reason doesn't even involve the Bat. If I kill him, as I have once before, I get to see that self-righteous smirk wiped off Batsy's smug mug; if you kill him, what will you gain? Surely his friends will only become more determined to kill you to avenge their murdered leader?"

"The prophecy," Slade murmured. "The seer told me about the prophecy, about how one would rise to claim the power of the Orb of Azarath, and about how another would rise from the flames of destruction to prevent the reckoning of the world from happening. It's him, and I have to kill him."

"And…?"

"And what?"

"There's something else, I can tell," the Joker smirked. Slade sighed.

"I don't know, I made her translate the whole thing for me and there was something about following the death of the Avenger – that would be Robin – the pillars of law and justice would crumble and the mortal gods who had once reigned would be rendered powerless. She said that these so-called mortal gods were named after those of classical mythology, namely the "Titans". She said that if the Avenger was killed the Titans would be stripped of their powers and so would the Justice League and any other super-powered being that fought for good. The Avenger is a mortal thread between the world as it is and the world as what it will become and it is only by possessing no power at all of his own that he is able to be the nerve centre of the power of the mortal gods."

"That's a pretty long-winded way of saying "The kid's trouble; get rid of him"," the Joker mused. "Basically by killing Batboy the world will be rendered powerless to stop you from taking over. The superheroes will become superzeroes."

"It does seem farfetched," Slade agreed. "How likely is it that a masked vigilante's sidekick and teen super-team leader is actually some kind of warrior born to prevent the apocalypse from happening?"

"I think you've been had," the Joker sniggered. "This "seer" of yours is playing a joke on you, and it's a damn good joke too."

Slade took a few seconds to consider the possibility.

"But she knew so much," he argued. "Things that she couldn't possibly have known. She knew I was going to steal the orb, she knew my name. She knew everything."

"Oh, come on," the Joker said snippily. "All these weird superheroes flying around with their snazzy capes and masks; they all come from different places and backgrounds, some are even aliens like Superman, and they all acquired their powers in different conditions; some were born with them, some got them in freak accidents. It's ludicrous to even consider that they would all be linked to some scrawny teenage brat named after a Christmas bird!"

Slade frowned. The Joker was speaking sense, a rarity in itself as far as he could tell, and yet he couldn't see what the old woman would gain by lying to him. Somehow, despite everything that Joker had just said… he still believed in the prophecy.

And that meant killing Robin, whether the Joker helped him or not. If the prophecy was true, then he would harness power beyond his wildest dreams, and not even the Teen Titans would be of any threat to him. And if it was all a hoax, then Robin's death was a thorn out of Slade's side at least; the other Titans may have been more powerful than their leader, but Robin was the cleverest, a born detective, and in that way the biggest threat to Slade. There was a chance, then, that the Titans would go to pieces in the face of their leader's murder, and instead of avenging his death as the Joker perceived, they would instead fall apart at the seams and the Teen Titans would be no more.

However, there was one other thing that bothered him, another thing concerning the prophecy. The first of the two conditions Robin had to die under; he couldn't be a virgin at the time of his death. When Slade had inquired why, the seer had responded that virginity was a sign of purity, and to completely destroy the bind between the Avenger and the prevention of the reckoning this purity had to be tainted by sexual desire. And while she seemed to know everything else, Slade had noted, she couldn't tell him whether or not this factor was his problem. She had seemed almost… evasive, as though she had an idea but was reluctant to part with the information.

As though she knew what he was going to do and got some kind of kick from letting him do it, regardless of whether he needed to.

It was ironic that this should turn out to be the most complicated factor of all. It wasn't like he could lock Robin in a strip club and hope that nature would take its course.

So he had no choice. He couldn't just gamble on it, take a chance and hope for the best. Apparently he only had one shot at this murder-thing and he couldn't afford to let Robin slip out of his grasp.

But hell, he didn't want to do it. Every time he thought about it his flesh crawled and he asked himself if he was really being serious about it all. If he really wanted power that badly.

Because he really didn't want to lower himself to homosexual rape.

He thought about that time now, when, following his blackmailing of Robin into being his apprentice, he had stated that over time he might have become something of a father to the boy. He had been slightly, admittedly, disappointed when Robin had icily responded that he already had a father. He had been referring to this "Batman", no doubt, unbeknownst to Slade then, and hadn't exactly warmed to the idea of Slade taking the Dark Knight's place as father-figure. Slade hadn't pursued the subject, hoping that in time Robin would perhaps come to see him as a father anyway, but even so he had found himself slightly irritated at the manner in which Robin had snubbed him; it had been painfully clear then more so than ever that Robin, however similar he and Slade were, wanted nothing to do with Jump's most notorious villain. It hadn't upset him, obviously; nothing upset him, as he was past such emotion. He could hate Robin now all too easily, seeing him as a treacherous, goody-two-shoes little traitor, but then he hadn't hated him. On the contrary, he had rather liked the Boy Wonder after seeing how devious and under-handed he was capable of being, noting that they were indeed very similar in certain assets, having many characteristics in common. Robin was good, Slade was bad, but somehow they were still two of a kind. He had wanted Robin to accept him as a father, so that he could teach him the savage joy of succumbing to the darkness within, so that he could take pride in watching him grow into something more terrible than even Slade himself. So far Robin was in a state of equilibrium, fighting for good but with a dark side that sometimes caused him to overbalance and go off the rails; Slade had wanted to tip that balance beyond retrieval.

In fact, maybe he still did. Maybe… it was a waste to kill Robin, when instead he could be transformed into everything he had ever hated, into an incarnation of what he fought against.

He had an apprentice, of course; he had Terra. At the moment she was training in the woodlands on the outskirts of Jump, honing her abilities. But something made him want Robin as well, maybe even more so than Terra. Terra was formidable, but Robin had the potential to be more dangerous than she could ever be.

And in concern of his meditation of rape, if he had truly desired for Robin to see him as a father, no matter how much he hated him, could he really go through with it? What kind of father committed such a sin against their son?...

"Not getting cold feet, are you?"

The Joker's mocking voice cut into his thoughts and brought him back to Earth. He scowled.

"Of course not," he responded coolly. "I never get cold feet."

"I do," the Joker said happily. "The floors here are flipping freezing!"

Slade's scowl deepened; he hated jokes, especially bad ones.

"We'll bring him here," he reinstated sharply, "do what needs to be done and kill him."

"Right," agreed the Joker. "Job done; roll on the apocalypse."

"We need to do it soon."

"I'm ready whenever you are, bubbie, but I want my cut."

"You'll have your cut," Slade replied icily. "And then this partnership is finished."

"Hold your horses," the Joker grinned. "It hasn't even begun yet. You haven't let me out."

"Right." Slade moved to the doorway and pulled off the plastic case to the electronic lock.

"I'll handle the rendezvous note," the Joker went on as Slade worked on freeing him. "I know the Bat better than you."

"Yes, you do that," Slade answered vaguely, somewhat distracted by the intricacy of the technology. He cut a few wires and sparks exploded from the circuit box.

"Electrocute me and you die," the Joker warned. Slade didn't answer, instead cutting another wire, yellow and black-striped. No sparks this time, and a faint bleep issued as the system was severed.

"Beautiful," the Joker hissed as the lead door swung slowly open, revealing him in all his hideous glory.

And revealing a grin so grotesque that behind his mask even Slade had to gasp…

Ooh, the Joker and Slade working together… That's gotta be a bad combo, at least in the eyes of B-Man and the Boy Wonder. Ok, so this is where the "M" rating begins to become apparent, but hopefully I haven't scared you off… Drop me a review, tell me what you think, and I'll get the next chapter (maybe two, I haven't decided) up ASAP! Hopefully you're all still captivated…

Is that another of those damn tumbleweeds?…