The Last Laugh
Chapter 6: Deathstroke
By, Frank Hunter

Bruce saw Robin react to the explosion from the corner of his eye, but could do nothing to help. By the time the nature of Deathstroke's attack had become clear, it was already too late to stop it. Such, he remembered coldly, would be the whole experience of Deathstroke.

He needed to hope that Tim would handle himself. He had no spare mental capacity to devote to compassion now. Fighting Deathstroke was like playing a game of chess where your life hung in the balance, and your opponent was always several moves ahead. If you failed to play at the same level, then it would be over before it even began.

The grapple line was propelling him straight up onto the shelving unit, straight at him. But Slade would have been prepared for that. If Bruce reached the top, he had no doubt there would be a blade or an explosive or any other number of lethal implements waiting for him in some violent fashion he couldn't expect. So he did the only thing he could do. A split second early, he released his line.

Instead of mounting the top of the unit, the Batman's body flew low, in through one of the openings between shelves. He straightened his body, arms overhead, to make it easier for him to fly through unhindered, but still, there was no way to know what would be waiting for him on the other side. Whether Slade had been ready for that as well. At the last moment, before passing clean through, he reached out his hand and caught the lip of the shelf. The momentum loaned to him from the grapple line, along with the mass of his armored body, worked against the shelving unit, and a tinge of satisfaction passed through Bruce as he felt the fixture begin to tip over when the jolt of impact shot up his arm.

He held on as the unit fell downward, waited until his feet, jutting out the side, hit the floor a second before the rest of the unit. When they did, he propelled himself back out the way he'd come, fired a new line at the rafters in the ceiling, and got himself clear of the wreck before he could be hurt.

As the rest of the shelving unit came down, Bruce saw the incendiary device on top of it detonate. A proximity mine, he guessed. The surprise that would have been waiting had he blindly attacked first. Deathstroke himself sprung himself in a graceful, spinning motion onto the next unit before he could be caught in the blast, but the collapse wasn't done. The first bunch of shelves hit the next bunch in line, creating a sort of domino effect. Slade jumped once more to the side, steering away from the rest of the calamity.

Bruce perched on the rafters, reached into his belt, and threw another quick hand of three batarangs down, leading the mercenary to where gravity dictated he would land. And though his accuracy was spot on, the attack was still ineffective.

Having dropped his staff somewhere in the confusion, Deathstroke pulled a machete blade, sheathed from God knew where. He spun in mid-air, and by the time he landed, three quick, concentrated slashes had knocked the Batman's projectiles harmlessly away.

Bruce had only a moment to reach his hand back into his belt and palm one other small object before Slade retaliated, throwing the machete with all the muscle he could put behind it up into the rafters at Bruce. Bruce dropped straight down to avoid the blade. As he dropped, Deathstroke himself jumped off the top of shelves and disappeared into the network of corridors between them.

Having lost track of Slade, Bruce only knew that he did not want to land exactly where the merc would have seen him falling. That would mean death. Instead, he spread the folds of his cape out to help catch his fall, and used the inertia to glide across the room. When he finally dropped, he had nearly reached the opposite wall and there was nothing around him but darkness. Line of sight was broken.

Next move. What was the next move? Bruce forced himself to think like a mercenary. To think like Slade. What would he do?

If he lost track of the primary target, he'd move in to ensure the secondary target was really down. He'd go for Robin.

Bruce turned back and darted in the direction he knew he'd left Tim. Toward Tim, though. Not to him. Slade could equally likely be using the boy as a trap to lure Batman back into the open. A disgusting and yet incredibly effective strategy. He needn't have worried, though. By the time he reached the room's entrance and chanced a glance toward the wall, he found that Tim was no longer there. The boy must have made use of Batman's first attack and vanished into the dark. Good. So it was still the two of them against Slade. The two of them together stood a chance.

Bruce tucked back into the darkness, ducked down, and climbed into the lowest shelf, at his feet. There, he tucked his cape around himself and waited. Given enough of a lull, maybe Deathstroke could be prompted to make the first move.

He couldn't tell how long he waited. It felt like forever. Usually he wasn't the one being hunted in the dark, and it was a role reversal that made him very uncomfortable. He considered for a moment turning on the infrared vision tucked into his cowl, but dismissed the thought immediately. He might be able to spot Slade with it, but the electronic mechanism made a soft humming noise when it was engaged. In a silent room like this one, it would be like advertising his position with a neon sign.

His eyes darted around the dark warehouse, watching, tracking for any sign of movement. At first, there was nothing. But then finally he heard a small, repetitive sound. It was soft, muffled, as though it were trying to be concealed, but that didn't matter. They were footsteps. And they were getting closer.

As Bruce waited he saw the pair of boots responsible turn a corner and move past him at decent speed. They were black, and he caught a brief glimpse of the red tights that were tucked into them too. That wasn't Slade. It was Tim.

Right behind him came another pair of boots. This pair moved at the same speed but with absolutely no audible sound. Bruce clenched his teeth. That was Slade. In a matter of seconds he'd have closed the distance between him and Robin, and anything he planned to do to the boy in close quarters would be lethal.

Batman didn't hesitate. He rolled out of the shelving unit behind Deathstroke, raised his grapple gun, and fired the claw directly at the mercenary's calf. It was all too quick and too close for Deathstroke to respond. The hook caught him up and he spilled over, collapsing to the floor. The noise warned Robin, who turned around with fists in the air, looking ready for a fight. And the grapple gun began to reel, pulling Slade back the way he'd come.

That part, unfortunately, was not instantaneous, and as soon as Deathstroke realized what had happened, he whipped around, spotted Batman, and angled a katana, the weapon he'd intended for Tim, to stab straight into Bruce once the claw had retracted.

The Batman didn't wait for that to happen. He'd known to expect the attack and instead of engaging Deathstroke, he chose to abandon the weapon and roll back under the shelving unit once more. But, before he did, right before Deathstroke was on top of him with that deadly blade, he closed his eyes, held his breath, and took the small object he'd palmed from his belt and smashed it into the ground.

Upon impact, concentrated tear gas exploded from the tiny canister, dispersing in the air for a few feet around the explosion. Bruce kept rolling and didn't stop until he came out the other side of the shelving unit. There, he pushed to his feet and shot a glance back at where he'd come from.

Slade had gotten hit with the gas head on and grunted in what Bruce supposed was pain. And though he'd also found his footing just as the whole thing had happened, he also made his first mistake of the night. In order to get away from the gas, he'd taken a hasty step backward. For the first time, he acted on uncalculated instinct. That made him predictable, and that's what they'd needed.

Tim was there, right behind him as soon as he darted backward. He punched the merc in the back, and Slade angled up, shouting with another cry of pain. When Robin pulled his hand back, Bruce thought he spotted blood, and the shiny silhouette of the boy's own shuriken palmed there to do extra damage.

Slade swung his sword backward at Robin, but Tim was a martial artist. In a stand-up fight like this, particularly where he had gotten the advantage of initiative, he could hold his own. He dodged Deathstroke's counterattack and gave Slade a knee to the gut and an additional fist to the chin. Still reeling from the tear gas, he was not on his A game right then.

Batman pressed the advantage. At Robin's first break, he dove back through the shelving, hands first. He grabbed Slade and shoved the man backwards, slamming first his body into a set of shelves, and then adjusting his grip and slamming his face into the lip of one of the steel fixtures. Deathstroke gave him a better-aimed counterattack than he'd offered the boy, one that Bruce caught on his gauntlet. He connected another armored fist to Slade's head in retaliation.

But Deathstroke was nothing if not resilient. His power, stemmed from some black-list redacted military experiment, was superhuman. It meant that he healed quickly, and by the next attack, he might as well have been completely fresh again.

Robin aimed a forceful kick at the mercenary's knee joint. It was the kind of kick designed to break bones, and if he'd connected, it might have been the kind of injury to put Slade down for the fight. But he didn't. Deathstroke saw it coming and shifted his leg out of the way. Bruce just had time to notice that Slade's leg still had his own claw and cord attached to it before Slade shot his shin out in such a way that wrapped the loose cord around Tim's kick.

The rope tightened and Deathstroke, with overbearing strength, pulled his own leg backward, throwing Tim off balance, onto the floor, and straight into Bruce's boots. Though it wasn't powerful enough to barrel the Dark Knight over, it was enough to force him to catch his balance, and the distraction was enough for Deathstroke to exploit it. He threw an elbow at Batman, which connected, loosening his grip. He then swiped his sword downward, cutting the cord around his ankle, and sprung backward, clearing his way out of the exchange and allowing him to orient himself once again.

"Impressive," Slade said, with no degree of sarcasm. He waited, watching as Tim got to his feet and struggled free of the line himself, and as he and Batman took up a formation side-by-side, preparing to challenge him in a real fight.

It was then, before they were able to clash again, that the first sound of a siren came from outside.

Deathstroke's eye shot over his shoulder for just an instant as he heard the sound. "Really?" he asked as incredulity seeped into his voice. "The police?"

"I might have made a quick call," Tim confessed.

The three held their ground, no one chancing a move. As more sirens added to the din outside, it became clear that the game here had changed.

"I didn't come here for the police, Batman," Deathstroke said. "I came here for you. It would have been better to get this out of the way now."

Bruce scowled at him from under the mask. "For the last time, Slade," he said. "Tell me who you're working for."

But Deathstroke utterly ignored the command. "Now we'll need to play this game again," he said. "And next time is for keeps. You won't get another warning from me beforehand."

In the blink of an eye, Slade had cast his free hand downward, and something that looked like a smoke pellet went off, clouding Bruce's vision. He was gonna run. Bruce quickly cycled on his infrared. If he could spot Deathstroke in the cloud of smoke he might be able to get a tracker on him, follow him back to his client. But as soon as the goggles kicked on, he realized it would be impossible.

The display screen before his eyes erupted into little more than bursts of red and static feedback. A quick cycle to the night vision option showed the same problem with green instead of red. Bruce sighed and shut the whole thing down. It was useless.

Robin had apparently tried the same thing, because Bruce heard him swear from where he'd known the boy had been standing. "Chaff?" Tim asked.

"Yeah," Bruce answered. Reflective magnetic strips of metallic fiber. Deathstroke must have inserted them into his smoke bomb. Not only would the smoke keep the naked eye from seeing anything, but the chaff would wreak havoc on any sort of light amplification or augmentation system used while they were still floating around in the air. In the time they'd wasted attempting to use the goggles, Bruce knew that Slade would already be gone.

"We shouldn't be here when the cops get in," he said to Tim. "Back door. Let's go."

"Right," Tim answered.

The two moved out of the cloud of smoke in the direction of the back door they'd avoided on the way in. When they reached it they found it was left open, either in Slade's haste to leave or just as a condescending final reminder that he had so easily gotten away from them. Bruce didn't know which. He didn't really care.

The door let out on an alley, and the pair made their way quickly out of the alley and onto the street. Bruce had the security measures disarming and the door to the Batmobile opened by the time they reached it. This was down to a practiced science, one they had undertaken hundreds if not thousands of times before. It was only a matter of seconds before they were in the car and the car was blasting down the street, away from the oncoming sirens of the GCPD.

Robin, who had watched the Life 2.0 building disappear through the back window, turned and slumped in his seat when it fell out of sight.

"I blew it, didn't I?" he asked.

Bruce took a breath and reminded himself of how the fight had started, with Deathstroke getting the drop on them and Tim taking an explosion at close range. A glance at Tim's face showed only a little bit of scorching and singed hair. No serious burns or injuries. He'd been incredibly lucky to escape with that little to show for it.

"We shouldn't be fighting Slade on his own terms," Bruce settled to say. "It was the smart move to get away from there."

"Is it what Batman would have done?"

Bruce didn't answer. He knew he'd struck an emotional chord with the boy the day Quinn was paroled. Tim had been trying to hold himself to a higher standard ever since. He didn't realize that that's not what Bruce had meant. He didn't want Tim trying to be the man that Bruce would have wanted him to be.

"What do you think he was even looking for, anyway?" Robin said into the lingering silence.

"I don't know," Bruce responded.

"Do you think he got it?"

"I don't know."

Bruce needed time to simmer. To figure out his next move. He guessed that publicly the break-in would be enough to justify Bruce Wayne requesting an expedited move for the rest of the equipment to the safety of Wayne Tower. But if Deathstroke had already made off with some prize, or if he'd really just been there to call Batman into a fight, then it would make no difference. They still didn't know what his endgame was.

A beeping noise rose from the car's onboard computer and shook him out of his contemplation. The screen on the dash had a little flashing red box on it. Bruce squinted down to read it.

It said "Foreign Object Detected."

"What the hell does that mean?" Tim asked apprehensively. As he did, the box changed over from the simple warning to something more ominous: a countdown timer. It started at "0:05." Five seconds.

The realization hit Bruce as the "5" switched to a "4." The empty building. The time it had taken for Deathstroke to reveal himself. Slade had spent the time they'd used searching the office to booby trap the car.

There was no time for anything. The bomb must have had some kind of shielding to remain undetected this long. With only seconds before detonation, there was nothing he could do to preserve the vehicle. A fast flurry of fingers over the touchscreen initiated the ejection program. He'd launch the seats away.

The panel accepted the command as the timer counted down to a "3" and then a "2." The expected sound and gust of wind came as the car jettisoned the plate glass window that curved up along its frame. But something was wrong. Only the window on Robin's side had jettisoned. The driver's side was still intact.

His gloved hand punched the ejection button once more. Twice. But nothing else happened. The clock struck "1."

"Bruce?!" Tim asked, nervously. But Bruce had no answer to give him. Deathstroke must have also sabotaged the driver's side defense mechanism.

The passenger seat alone shot up out of the car as the clock struck "0," and Tim screamed in rejection as he was propelled into the sky. An instant later, the world below him erupted into a sea of orange heat and flame, and the concussion wave echoed out into the night.