Chapter Text
The station is a haphazard mess of a place, with parts clearly salvaged from various ships bolted together to make new additions as necessary, and Slade resigns himself to negotiating with amateurs the second it comes into view on his long range scanners. It was his expectation anyway, given the remote location, but there are occasionally remote outposts that manage to have some decent level of civilization to them. Even some that he might not be able to freely traverse while still dressed in his armor, or with his basic weaponry at hand. This place isn't one of them.
This also isn't the sort of place professionals of his level frequent, and frankly Slade wouldn't set foot on it either if he wasn't in need of a distraction to complete his current job. A living one, ideally, but he'll settle for the materials for a high-yield explosion if need be.
He can handle the assassination without a distraction, but men are always easiest to kill when distracted by something young and pretty. They get stupid. Careless. Ideal for his purposes, when the assassination is planned to take place in a larger crowd or his target is prone to having an actually decent level of security. Easier to put a bullet in the head of someone enticed by a firm ass and a pretty face than the head of someone on guard against such attempts.
A station like this isn't the first place that Slade would choose to find such a slave, but in this case he's rather short on time and this is one of the busiest places within reach within his allotted time frame. The most likely to have a decent selection of slaves to choose from, and guaranteed to have a mostly-illegal selection as well, which is what he'd prefer.
A legal slave means paperwork, a registry attached to his name and face that marks him as owner, in case of slave crimes or an escape. If an extraction isn't worth the risk, and he has to abandon the slave, he doesn't want that connection leading back to him. A black market slave is more likely to have behavioral problems, or other issues that make them impossible to sell through legal means, but purchasing is cleaner. A simple exchange of credits; easily hidden, if you know how. And once done, selling them back to someone interested is just as simple.
It's a tactic he's used more than a few times before.
Slade doesn't believe that whoever passes as a docking official on this piece of junk cares, but he forwards one of his faked sets of ship credentials to the station's docking platform as he draws close enough anyway. Common courtesy, really. His ship almost immediately picks up the response of a probably automatic ping, containing simple docking instructions and a port number to look for. The scan for a docking program pulls up nothing, and his ship informs him of the need for manual procedures, offering a prompt to take manual control.
No automatic docking here; a glance down at the platform tells him that the numbers are painted on top of the docking ports like this is a hundred years past and technology still relies primarily on the weakness of human ability. Not entirely unexpected, in a backwards corner of colonized space like this. This station likely only survives because it's the only place reachable by several equally pathetic colonies nearby. This must be the only point of trade between them.
With the enhancements built in underneath his skin, piloting the ship in by hand is simple enough. Though he rarely docks manually, his trade means that manually piloting his ship is a well-practiced skill. He can out-fly most people, especially since he's put quite a bit of wealth into his ship. It's small, but it's fast and it's sturdy.
It takes a few more seconds than he's expecting for his ship to tell him that the seal of the docking port is actually sealed, but that's not surprising either. This station clearly isn't the most well maintained collection of hardware; speed falls behind the more necessary requirement of 'it works.'
Slade shuts the engines down with easy familiarity, powering down everything but the basics of the ship; life support, security, etc. He changed into his armor on the way, so it's only a matter of donning a few basic weapons — a fold-out blade hooked to the back of each shoulder, and a simple pistol that hooks itself onto the built-in holster on his left thigh — and making sure that the tech hooked behind his ears is settled properly and working right. One tap to the bottom edge of the metal activates it, folding both sides out into the framework of his helmet with the whir and click of tech worth more than at least half this station. The force-field buzzes into place and completes it a half-second later, head-up display brightening to show him all the information associated with his surroundings.
Though he prefers not to use it, the force-field is enough to make him space-worthy for a time, if necessary. More importantly, it shows only an opaque, half-black, half-orange display to anyone looking at him. He isn't overly concerned with his face being known, but anonymity intimidates more effectively.
He leaves the ship with the helmet still in place, dismissing the heads-up display with a click of his tongue; he doesn't need the extra input in a place like this. No one will be stupid enough to try anything, and he trusts his reflex if anyone is.
There are eight other ships of various sizes docked, at least on this side of the station, and not counting those orbiting. There's a decent amount of activity to the docking platform, and Slade follows the flow of traffic into the marketplace. Vendors from local colonies, gathered to trade and sell whatever surplus they have to anyone passing through. Most of it is simple produce, or basic supplies. Things for survival; not specialized trades or labor.
Doubtful there's anything interesting here, but still he takes his time wandering through the market. His armor and weaponry grants him a wide berth from the rest of the people in the market, and wary looks from the vendors. Both things he's used to, and ignores with ease.
He purchases a decently-ripe fruit from one of the stalls, the scanner in his helmet telling him that it's edible, if apparently on the tart side of the scale. A snack for later, and for now, a distraction to his enhanced senses. Lightly tossing it in the air and then catching it again, as he moves through the crowd, is enough to keep him from focusing in on any of the dozens of small details that jump out at him.
He finds what he's looking for a minute later, and whether the ship the cloth curtain leads into is docked or has just become part of the station isn't clear, but the stylized slave-mark painted on the side of the archway is a clear enough statement of business. He brushes past it, and inside is the large, open area of a cargo hold. The sides have been converted into cells, the shine of force-fields blocking their entrances. Or, as so many other back-end slaver vessels, perhaps it was once a prison ship, and no conversion was necessary.
He tucks the fruit away into a storage compartment in his suit so he has his hands free once more, clicks his tongue to re-enable the heads-up in his helmet so he can absorb the information displaying on the inside of his helmet. Model of the ship, material, contents of nearby crates, etc.
"Greetings!" a man calls, striding out from inside one of the upper corridors, the door whirring shut behind him as he descends the stairs. "You've come at a good time, sir! We just docked today; slaves fresh from more than one system, all at excellent prices!"
The moment that the man first actually looks at him is clear. He gets to the bottom of the stairs, head lifting, and nearly misses a step. Grey eyes widen, gaze settling first on the hilts of his swords, over his shoulders, then sweeping over his armor. It takes a couple moments for the man's mouth to fully shut again, and for him to regain some level of professionalism. Not much, but some.
"Sir, welcome." This greeting is more restrained, and the approach of the seller much more wary. "May I help you find something?"
How quickly can I make you leave?
"I'm in search of a slave," Slade points out, resisting the urge to be any more sarcastic than that. He takes a glance at the cells; most of the occupants have shifted to stand or kneel in the centers, waiting for inspection. "The ones out here; your regular stock?"
"That's right, sir." The man clasps both hands before him. "We have a variety of slaves here; most trained for hard labor or hunting, but we have a handful of household slaves as well with softer conditioning. All with entirely legal registrations, of course."
"Mmhm," he hums, carelessly. "Show me the others."
There's a moment of hesitation, another glance at his weaponry, before the seller dips his head as obediently as one of his slaves. "As you wish, sir. Follow me, please."
Slade follows the man back across the hold, and back up the stairs to the corridor he originally came from. It looks like it was converted from what once were crew quarters' blank, empty rooms with the wall hacked off the front and retrofitted with the same force fields as the cells in the hold. Six of the eight are occupied, and Slade lets his gaze slide along them as he walks past, the seller stepping aside to be out of his way.
He considers and dismisses possibilities within moments, as he reads the brief information sheets posted outside their cells. The first three are runaways, wrists bound, two all but shaking at his look and the third streaked with the bruises of a beating. Neither terrified nor visibly injured will suit his needs. The fourth is closer to what he wants, a pale, pretty thing with large, round, green eyes with just enough of a sad edge to add to that appeal. The cost for her is high, rightfully so. Despite the lack of legal registration — this one is stolen — someone will still pay a good price for beauty.
The fifth draws his attention immediately, because the boy is kneeling in the center of the room, arms bound back behind him at the wrist, and the collar at his throat hooked to a chain that binds him to the floor, short enough that the boy can only just barely keep his back straight. Violent, perhaps?
The restraints themselves are interesting enough, but more so is the fact that despite the chain only barely allowing it, the boy still sits straight. At ease, as if the strain or the restraints are a familiar thing. Shoulders back, head tilted slightly down, breathing evenly. It's better posture than anything else he's seen in this place so far, legal or otherwise.
He pauses to look in, and the boy's eyes open, gaze flicking up to look at him. Golden eyes, with slanted pupils like a feline, and the way the pupils are shifting, reacting to the light as the boy's gaze flicks across his frame with an easy, assessing sweep, makes it clear they're not just for show. That gaze follows the pattern of his armor, picks out the shape of his gun and the built-in weaponry with unusual ease. Enhanced eyesight, or a familiarity with armor? Both options are different enough from regular slave behavior to make him curious.
The black sweep of the slave-mark on his face isn't a local design either, it's inner-circle. Elegant, thin black lines that sweep out from the corner of his left eye and turn into thicker, sweeping curls of black shadow, half-hidden by the curl of equally black hair, which is verging on slightly too long where it hangs at his jaw. Out here, most people wouldn't know the origin of a mark like that one; they'd see it as a custom job, which isn't uncommon, but wouldn't recognize it as a capital-planet style. You'd have to have come anywhere close to one of the capital planets to know that, and Slade has his doubts that these slavers have even left the outer ring.
Now how did a capital slave end up all the way out here, in some low-class slaver's ship?
The boy's gaze lifts to directly meet his, even hidden behind the helmet as it is. There's a flicker of something — recognition, it almost looks like — before the boy's gaze lowers and his eyes shut once more. Stunningly disobedient, for a capital-marked slave.
Hm.
Slade looks at the information sheet, as the seller steps up beside him. There's very little on the sheet. Height, weight, a brief description of his enhanced eyes, and a notation of a conspicuous lack of scars. Not that it's named as such, but very few slaves manage to get to this age — perhaps twenty — without earning a scar or two. Of course, a capital slave would likely have any disfiguring marks removed.
"Where did this one come from?" Slade asks, abandoning the mostly useless sheet.
The seller doesn't get too close, but his voice is a little bit less obviously wary. "He was impersonating a free man, sir. A hunter. One of those working with him reported him, the colony's militia caught him, and we bought him out of the prison. They had no information on where he came from before working there."
"And you've found out nothing?"
He pretends not to see the wince of the seller. "No, sir. His registration's valid, but it comes up blank. No registered owner, no information, just his picture. There must have been a glitch of some kind, or maybe some abolitionist hacked the system. Either way, we've found no information on him, and our tech couldn't pull anything off his registry."
Whether it's true that the colony militia had no idea of where this slave came from, Slade can't say, but this seller is too uneasy to lie to him. He believes it to be the truth, and Slade finds it plausible that a colony militia — often picked from men of the villages; barely paid, poorly trained apart from one commander — wouldn't spend much effort looking for the origin of some criminal slave. They have better things to do with their time.
So, a capital-made, blank-registry, slave. Pretty, undoubtedly. The lines of his jaw and cheekbones, and the sweep of his eyelashes, catch the eye in a clearly intentional way. Capital slaves serve a hundred purposes, but there aren't many that aren't designed to be pleasing to look at. Out here that isn't the practice, it would cost too much, so this one stands out against the rest of the chattel on display here.
"Disable the field," he orders, with a flick of his fingers that the seller quickly steps in to obey. The force field drops, and the slave's eyes flick open once more. "Any violent tendencies?" Slade asks, as he steps inside the cell, pacing a slow circle around the boy.
He has a lean, trim form. Slightly tanned and darker-shaded skin, though not enough to mark him as 'exotic' by any measure. Good posture, as he'd noted before, and the boy stays still beneath his assessment without even a hint of unease. This one isn't afraid of him; that could be useful.
"No, sir," the seller answers, standing off to the side, just inside the cell. "The militia said he surrendered without a fight, and he's been utterly obedient while here. But given that we don't know his history, and he posed as a freeman for a time without being caught, it seemed best to keep him somewhat restricted. Just in case."
Slade sinks down in front of the boy, resting in an easy crouch and balancing one arm over his knee. At that, the boy's gaze lifts to look directly at him again. At this range, his heads-up display focuses on the slave mark, starting to search databases for it.
"He seems to have some ignorance about protocol," is the quick explanation from behind him. "We think he may have been a company-owned hunter, given the enhanced eyes and his choice of occupation while free. They don't enforce protocol as stringently as trainers of more personally owned slaves, and they're granted somewhat more independence."
Sure. A fine assumption to make, if you don't recognize the capital-style mark, and if Slade hadn't caught that little flicker in his eyes, as if the boy had recognized the pattern of his suit. There’s no need for hunting in the capital like there is on outskirt planets; the population’s food isn’t reliant on what can be foraged from the wildlife. Though perhaps the largest clue is that the boy managed to successfully impersonate a freeman for some time. Capital slaves are mainly raised from childhood; they don't usually have the knowledge to fake being free, considering how deeply obedience is inscribed into their bones. If you didn't know that, you might believe that this slave is nothing but normal.
"What's your name, boy?" Slade asks, watching those golden eyes for reaction.
His head tilts slightly, gaze flicking up towards the seller, but there's no answer.
"He doesn't seem to speak, sir," the seller explains. "Our examination showed nothing physically wrong with him, but he hasn't said a word. It may be past training; many owners prefer silent slaves. Seen and not heard, and all that."
Or it's a subtle disobedience, like the direct gaze.
"You understand Common?"
This time, the boy inclines his head in a shallow nod.
"Alright, yes or no answers, boy." Slade waits for another small nod as understanding before he asks, "Did you run away from your last master?"
A pause, then a shake of the boy's head. The hesitance is interesting, but Slade doesn't see any signs that the negative is an outright lie. A… bending of the truth, maybe. Still a lie, by slave standards, but there's a lot of shades of grey that aren't represented in only yes or no answers.
"Are they looking for you?"
Another shake, more immediate this time.
Slade tilts his head a bit, narrowing his eyes. "Were you trained to hunt?" Nod. "Independently?" Another affirmative; he doesn't have to look to know that the seller must be pleased with himself for his 'correct' guess. "Do you know anything about why your registry is blank?" Yes. "An accident?" No. "Did you cause it?" No.
The boy's expression doesn't change while he answers. It stays neutral, relaxed; no real reaction to his questions except the answers themselves. As if it doesn't matter.
His helmet finally pings back a result on the search; Gotham. Inner-circle planet indeed. That's a long way to travel.
"Can you write?" The boy pauses for another moment, giving his first real reaction by a hint of confusion, and then inclining his head in another nod. "Good." Slade looks up to the seller, ordering, "Release his hands, and give him something to write on."
He stands as the seller approaches, stepping back to lean against one wall of the cell and watch the cuffs be disconnected. The boy's arms settle into a slightly more natural position, left hand curling around right wrist at the small of his back. Then the seller procures a small pad from inside his pocket, and offers it to the slave. He takes it; the automatic dip of his head before his fingers ever touch is taught gratitude, Slade's seen it enough to recognize it.
When the boy's gaze lifts once more, Slade tells him, "Write down the areas you've been trained in."
He wonders idly, as the boy starts to type in his list, whether the seller never considered this as an option, or just didn't get any real answers when he tried. He decides, after a couple moments, that he honestly doesn't care. The man is just a random encounter, and he doesn't particularly care how bad or good at his job he is, except for how that may influence prices or professionalism. Ideally the man can hold his tongue, but he'll keep his helmet on, just in case.
"Are you looking for a specifically trained slave?" he's asked, above the tap of the slave's fingers on the pad.
"In a manner of speaking," is all he'll commit to.
The fact that this particular boy isn't afraid of him is, honestly, a very tempting reason to buy him. Slade can work with slaves that are afraid of him, but it's easier to be sure they won't freeze up if they aren't scared right from the start, and most slaves are at least wary around mercenary types like him. He has just under a week to acclimate whatever slave he does get, but having somewhere good to start from would speed things along.
Not to mention that the boy is undoubtedly the prettiest thing here, assuming you can appreciate both genders. Assuming he has any sexual training, which Slade's about to find out, he'll serve the role of 'distraction' excellently.
The only question is whether he's obedient enough to be trusted to serve. Capital slaves only very rarely truly revolt. If this boy didn't run, and doesn't have anyone looking for him, then what's the story? Abandoned? Ordered to play this role, for whatever reason? It is true that capital slaves have a higher rate of abandonment, when their owners tire of them. There are penalties for abandoning a slave outside the proper channels; wiping a registry and then ferrying a slave out to some corner of the universe would be one way to avoid them.
The boy pauses, tilting his head down at the pad, and then turns to offer it up to him. Both hands, head bowed; more correct protocol mixed in with the disobedience.
Slade steps forward to take and read it; the boy slips back into an at-rest posture, hands behind his back once again.
Hunting is right at the top of the list, with an added notation of 'Sport.' Then labor, general use, acrobatics (that gets him to raise an eyebrow), and at the bottom of the list, sexual. It's a fairly generic list of skills, apart from the hunting and acrobatics, but Slade's seen nobles teach their pets stranger things than that in the name of 'entertainment.'
With a swipe of his hand he deletes the information, before offering it back to the seller. He gets a look for that move that is trying not to be nasty — and somewhat failing — but ignores it in favor of crouching back down in front of the boy. He lifts a hand to slip two fingers beneath the boy's chin, tilting it up so those eyes meet his again. Not that he has to prompt it, really.
He holds those eyes for a moment, and then keeps his voice quiet as he asks, "You'll obey, won't you, boy?"
The slave looks at him for another moment, then gives a very small nod, only barely pushing against the pressure of his fingers where they rest beneath his chin. Though Slade watches for it, he doesn't see any hint of a lie in his expression. There aren't that many that can lie to him given his enhanced senses; the chances that this slave would be one of them isn't at all high.
"How much for him?" He waits till he's asked before he looks over, letting his fingers fall away from the boy's chin.
There's a sharp sheen of greed that's all too easy to read before the man says, "Two-thousand credits. Clothes and collar included, of course."
Slade lets that price sit in the air for a moment, before he shifts to face the seller a bit more directly. His stare makes the man shift back an inch, in the three seconds he allows the silence to stretch on before he asks, "You're trying to charge me two-thousand for a mute, blank-registry slave who doesn't know basic protocol, that was impersonating a freeman when you found him?"
"There are many that would consider him being mute to be a benefit," the seller counters, bypassing the rest of the charges. "His looks and the enhancement of the eyes justify the cost; it's a fair price, sir."
That, he gives a low laugh for. "You have no idea what you have here, do you?"
Intimidation, then unpleasant honesty; not the cleanest negotiation tactics, but they'll work this time.
He turns back to the slave, lifting his hand to take the boy's jaw and tilt it to the side, showcasing the black sweep of his mark. "This is a capital pattern. Capital slaves aren't ignorant of basic protocol, no matter what role they were made to fill. What you have, is a high-price slave who is abusing your ignorance of his world to get away with blatant disrespect. Capital slaves almost never disobey or revolt to the extent of posing as freemen, which means that he'll need extensive reconditioning to fix whatever his behavioral faults end up being. A decent trainer will cost more than the entirety of your stock is worth."
As he's spoken, the seller's face has slipped from shock to unease; well-hidden at the end, but not enough to hide from him. "Sir, I—”
"His looks are the only reason I'm willing to take him off your hands at all," Slade interrupts. "Rethink that price before you say it again, or I'll walk out, and you'll be left with something you don't have the means to deal with or the connections to sell."
He waits then, keeping his gaze steady on the slowly tightening jaw of the man before him. He's waited out men much more intimidating than a back-end slave seller like this one, and very rarely has he ever met one able to stand against his focus. This encounter won't break the pattern; even if it weren't what he's pushing for, the seller's best move is to give him what he wants.
Sure enough, after a minute of staring, and several glances towards the slave that are distinctly displeased, the seller's expression slips into a slight grimace for a moment, before it evens out. Slade restrains any reaction to the imminent signs of his victory. He's been called unnervingly steady by some of the people he's intimidated in the past, and he'd like to keep that reputation (it's true; his enhancements let him stay still to a degree that most normal humans couldn’t manage).
"Seven-hundred," is the new offer, albeit with a pained edge.
"Done." He lets go of the boy's chin and reaches into one of the compartments of his suit, retrieving one of his more secure transfer chips. "Relax; I'd bet you didn't pay more than a hundred to get him out of that jail, and upkeep isn't nearly enough to offset that profit."
The seller clearly isn't pleased about it, but he doesn't verbally complain either. Slade stands, the money changes hands without a problem, and though there's the flicker of a frown he's also handed the control chip to the slim metal collar around the slave's throat. The seller disconnects the chain holding the collar hooked to the ground, and just like that, he's the 'owner' of the boy. At least as long as no one checks the registration.
"Good doing business with you," he offers, only somewhat sincerely. He pockets the chip to the collar and glances at the boy to crook his fingers. "With me, boy. Stand."
He strides out without another glance, and he hears the boy follow him. Two paces behind his left shoulder, if his ears are to be trusted, though the pad of his bare feet against the metal is quiet. When Slade does look back, just before he brushes out of the seller's ship, the boy's gaze is lowered to rest near the back of his calves, which is actually in line with that capital-perfect protocol he should be trained in. Slade lets his head dip in a small nod, mostly to himself, and returns his attention to making his way back to his ship.
Idly, he pulls the fruit back out of the compartment he stored it in, to distract himself from the hundreds of small details his senses want to fixate on as he makes his way through the station. Flashes of conversation, the slip of a child's hand into someone's pocket, the acrid smell of something burnt from the back of a food stall, and so on, and so forth. The enhancements beneath his skin are gifts, increasing his reflexes, senses, and strength among other things, but the sheer volume of input can get overwhelming when in crowds if he isn't careful. Better not to let his mind fixate.
The relative silence of his ship once he's passed the port's seal once more is a minor relief. He lets the fruit stay in his hand now, lowering it to hang at his side as he moves through the ship's airlock chamber and turns a left onto the bridge. His new boy follows, steps close to silent; his enhancements may be the only reason he can pick them up. Present, but unnoticeable unless called for; more of that capital training.
That style of movement lays to rest the small, lingering possibility that this is some low-class slave with a faked capital-style mark given to raise his price.
Slade takes the pilot's seat, and then flicks his hand towards the right corner beside his legs, just a couple feet away. "Sit down," he orders, watching as the boy folds neatly down into the space, kneeling, back touching but not resting against the base of the console. Slade lets the hand with the fruit rest on the arm of the chair, as he uses his other to start his ship back up.
He leans back into the chair, listening to the hum of engines and the distant sounds of his ship disconnecting from the port. Piloting it away is simpler than bringing it in, at least far enough that he can engage autopilot without the risk of hitting anything. That done, the ship settled into its course, and the console once more locked, he turns the chair to face his new slave.
Those interesting eyes are lowered to the ground just in front of the boy's knees; since it's private, he raises an eyebrow. Ah, now the boy is behaving like he should have. Well, some slaves do have bad habits of getting away with what disobedience they can, when under a master that lets them. Or doesn't know enough to stop them.
For a few moments, he just watches.
"Hungry, boy?" is what he eventually asks. When he gets a small nod in answer, he tilts his head and says, quieter, "Let's make something clear between us; I'm not that slave seller, and I'm not a back-end colonist like the people you've been surrounded with recently. The chances that an owner in the capital planets would have their slave permanently silenced, in any way that a medical scan wouldn't come up with, is even smaller than the chance that you'd end up alone out here. You can speak, and when I ask you a question, you'll answer. Clear?"
There's a flicker of that golden gaze towards his legs — high enough to get the measure of his body language, if not his still hidden expression — before the boy answers, "Yes, Master."
His voice is husky, likely from disuse, but the words are as smoothly enunciated as every other bit of training he's shown. The husky tint isn't a bad one either, per se; Slade does understand why some owners choose to keep their slaves silent most of the time, even if this is only a minor benefit to it.
"Good. So, are you hungry?"
A moment of pause. Then, "Yes, Master."
He sits forward, leaning his free arm across his knees and offering the fruit with the other. "My scanner said it was tart, though I can't say I've had one myself. Do you want it, boy?"
"Anything you give me is a gift, Master." A protocol answer, but there's no flicker or hint of distaste to his expression.
"Go ahead," he grants, and watches as the boy shifts forward, neck stretching out as he leans in and takes a small bite from the side, white teeth showing for just a moment. "Tell me your name," is his next order, once the boy's swallowed, licked his lips with a tongue that lingers just a fraction too long to not be trained.
He thinks it's a simple question, but the boy's gaze lowers, thoughtful, as if this requires a 'correct' answer.
It takes a couple moments, where he almost considers taking the question back, before the slave's gaze lifts back to his hand, and legs, and he answers, "Dick; Richard."
There’s something in the boy’s eyes that looks almost like the utterance of that name is a challenge, but what that challenge is, Slade isn’t sure. Perhaps it’s not his real name, or perhaps his last master called him something else. Hard to say, and Slade isn’t quite invested enough to waste time figuring it out.
“Dick, hm?”
He pauses for long enough to make it clear that he knows something isn’t right about that, then gives a tilt of his head towards the fruit. The boy takes another small bite; licks up a small trail of juice threatening to drip onto his fingers.
“Alright. Listen close, boy.” He offers the fruit again, while he speaks. “I’m not going to take you to be retrained. I bought you for a specific job, and as long as you’re obedient, and you don’t cause me any trouble, I’ll take care of you till it’s done. Then I’ll sell you to someone who can actually appreciate what you could be worth, and that will be that. I’m not cruel, but I expect obedience and there will be discipline if you can’t give me that, am I clear?”
The boy swallows his latest bite, then dips his head. “Yes, Master. I understand.”
“Good. Base rules; stay away from my possessions, keep out of my way unless I want you, and ask if you need something. It’ll be a week of travel before we get there; I think you can manage behaving for a week, can’t you, boy?”
“Yes, Master.”
Slade tosses the fruit in a low, underhanded arc, which the boy snatches out of the air with ease, golden eyes fixating on it before he actually grabs it. He nods his permission when the boy pauses, and then lets himself just watch him eat it with those small, lingering bites; more meant to be a show than actually efficient. It's not a bad show, even if it's not really to his taste. He's always been more hands-on than voyeuristic.
When the last bite vanishes, and after the boy's licked his fingers clean with slow, gliding sweeps of his tongue — that bit's a little more interesting — Slade taps his fingers against the chair, and gets the boy's instant attention once more. Both hands lower to rest against his knees, head dipping back down to the right angle for a more casual at-rest position.
He tilts his head a bit, and then reaches up and disables his helmet with two sharp taps to the base of the tech, behind his ear. The force field flicks off, a fraction of a second before the framework folds in on itself, becoming all but hidden once again. He sees the boy's gaze lift, but it doesn't lift far enough to actually look at him. Something he needs to remedy, for this next moment.
The boy offers no resistance when Slade reaches down, taking his chin in hand and pulling him to a high kneel. No wariness, either.
"Look me in the eye, boy," he orders, waiting until the golden eyes obey him and lift their gaze. There's a flicker to the look that suggests that the slave is taking in his entire face, but the eyes don't look away from his.
He focuses his senses in on the boy, lets himself pay attention to all those little details he usually does his best to block out. Heartbeat, breathing, the micro-expansion of pupils… Just to be sure.
"Are you going to obey me?" he asks, keeping his voice low, watching for any or all reactions.
There's an easy breath. Then the boy answers, just as steadily, "Yes, Master. I'm yours."
Nothing betrays those words.
"Good."
He lets go, before turning away and getting to his feet. A flick of his fingers has the boy follow him as he heads for the door, and makes his way back through his ship. Past the airlock and into the main space — kitchen, training area, and living room all in one — that makes up the bulk of his ship. On the far side of the room is a door that leads to the bathroom, and he keys open the lock on it and then leans against the frame to look back. Dick stands waiting, hands behind him once again.
"Get clean," Slade orders, "and come back to me when you're done. Take as much time as you need."
The boy's head dips, and there's a note of gratitude when he repeats, "Yes, Master."
Slade watches him slip past, eyeing the line of his back and then the tilt of his head as he studies the mechanics of the shower. He stays just long enough to watch the boy click the shower on, and strip unashamedly out of the small shorts the seller had him in — smooth, unmarked skin over lean muscle; tempting, certainly — before he turns to leave.
Tempting, yes, but Slade has too much work to do still to let himself indulge. His job still needs the specifics planned, now that he has his distraction, and a few backups created just in case the first one goes sour.
Maybe, when all that's done, he can take some time to explore whatever it is that he's bought.
The boy kneels by his side for the rest of his day, and despite Slade's wish not to be distracted from his plans, he finds himself not minding the gentle pressure of the boy's head against his hip. His breath is slow, even, and sinks into the background all too easily. Slade doesn't make him leave, and if his hand strays a time or two to brush through damp black hair, well, it's just an idle movement.
When Slade eventually retires, weariness nudging at the edge of his senses like a gentle reminder, he sets the boy up in the main room downstairs. His hold is locked, as is the hatch to the small 'attic' that he repurposed into a sleeping space, but Slade isn't interested in taking chances nor leaving a slave he doesn't know free to roam his ship. He pilfers a cot and a couple of extra blankets from his hold, from the last time he had a 'guest,' and a pair of sturdy cuffs from the same occasion.
He feeds the cuffs through a latch-point low on his wall (originally it was a spot to secure cargo; this isn't all that different), and locks the boy into them after ensuring that he's set to be caged for the night.
It might not be the most comfortable of sleeping arrangements, but it'll do until he knows a bit more about his new boy.
The boy tucked in on the cot, and his ship otherwise locked down, Slade climbs the ladder to his room and locks the hatch once again. The silence of the room, absent the background noise of another living, breathing human, is something he luxuriates in as he strips his suit off and stretches out the minor stiffness in his legs from sitting for so long. It's nothing that his healing won't fix within a minute or two, long before it ever starts to truly bother him. Still, he's getting older. No amount of tech can stave that off forever.
Settling down is easy, the hum of the ship around him the sort of familiar, comforting noise that allows him to slip right to sleep. The ship is in low power, everything is shut down and secure, and the stretch of space they're in is an empty one; nothing to interrupt the autopilot save for some unforeseen emergency.
Given all that, when an out-of-the-ordinary noise wakes Slade sometime in the 'night' it sets him instantly on alert.
His eyes stay closed and his breath even as he wakes; old, ingrained training from his black-ops days making him feign sleep even as his senses strain wide to catch the source of whatever noise pulled him out of rest. It's faint, but there's the soft scuff of something against metal, and it's close. In the room with him, far side, but nothing and no one should be in here except him.
If something is, then something is wrong, and either he's in danger or his ship is.
He happens to be lying on the right side to be facing the rest of the room, so he slowly lets his eyes slit open just enough to see through the fall of his lashes. There's a form across the room, human shaped, standing in front of his powered-down personal console. Pale skin colored odd shades by the dim lights, mostly exposed except for a patch of blackness that he quickly recognizes as small shorts. His new slave.
Apparently he was too quick to dismiss the possible dangers of this particular mystery. The boy slipped his cuffs, broke into the room, and most importantly was able to lie directly to his face without betraying it. Almost no one can do that.
Slade closes his eyes again when the boy starts to turn. The footsteps are very quiet, but the room is small and contained, and his hearing is enhanced enough to pick up the slight noises when they bounce off the walls. He keeps himself relaxed, tracking the sounds as the boy crosses the room to stand just before him. There's a faint shift of fabric, a disturbance of air against his face, and his mind puts the pieces together to paint a picture of the boy lowering himself down to either a kneel or a crouch.
The brush of air against his shoulder, an exhalation, confirms that mental picture. Slade strikes.
He snaps his eyes open as he lashes out, wrapping his hand around a throat all too close for comfort and rolling forward off his bed to slam the boy into the metal floor with all his weight. He drops his knees onto splayed out arms, pins them as he tightens his grip, fingers pressing the collar up against the boy's jaw. He hears him choke, feels the arms beneath his knees jerk.
"Lights," he snaps, his mouth curling to a small snarl as they flick on and he gets a real look at the boy pinned beneath him.
Golden eyes slam shut as the light turns on, pain showing clear for one moment before it's shut away. Slade braces himself to bear his weight down against any struggles, but somehow they don't come. The boy's mouth is partially open, throat working beneath Slade's hand as he tries to inhale, but he isn't outright fighting the grip. There could be hands clawing at his calves — they aren't fully pinned down — but there aren't.
The boy's eyes crack open, and Slade watches those large, black pupils shrink down until the eyes can fully open. Not surprising that enhancements like these are both liability and benefit.
Slade squeezes the boy's throat harder, sure to leave bruises, before he says, "I'm going to let go, and you're going to answer my questions. Do anything but answer me, truthfully, and I'll crush your trachea and let you suffocate. I am not to be crossed, boy."
He eases his grip.
The boy takes a measured breath, choking a bit but not coughing as most would. Slade watches, giving a couple moments as he feels the heightened pulse beneath his fingers, the slightly rough draw of breath. It gives him the time to consider exactly what he wants to ask, and what answers will be acceptable. It's a simple decision to start with the basics; he wants as much information as possible and basic questions are less likely to have unacceptable answers.
"You slipped my cuffs," he starts with. "How?"
The collar is still pressed up beneath the boy's jaw, so the answer is breathy, quiet thanks to the pressure there.
"Dislocated a thumb to slip one side." A convulsive swallow. Slade waits for the rest of the answer, which ends up being, "Pressed them against the communication hub on the bridge to swamp the lock's sensors; opened it for long enough to slip the other."
Interesting mix of new and old tactics. Slipping cuffs manually is a painful, but generally possible tactic depending on the style of cuff. Swamping the lock with enough data to make it think it's received the correct code is a much more technical trick, and only viable against the brands of cuffs whose locks work specifically like that. His do; it's not a well known weakness.
"And how you got up here?"
The arms pinned beneath his knees twist, he presses down harder on them.
"Watched you put in the code when you came up; reflection on the wall. Matched the movements to the worn numbers."
Clever; not the sort of thing you do without being trained for it, and a lot of practice. Slade can't quite help how his fingers flex, or his his brow draws together in a frown. He hates when things blindside him, and though he suspected there was something about 'Dick' that wasn't right, he thought he'd eliminated any chance of a real threat.
"You lied to me." It's not a question. "There aren't many people that can lie to me and get away with it, boy. Are you really a slave?"
"Yes, Master," the boy breathes, and after a moment of consideration — and despite the interesting skill set — Slade finds himself believing that.
Teaching a free man to behave, move, and respond like a slave is very, very difficult. Especially a capital slave. They're trained from childhood; obedience and certain specific traits and grace of movement all but branded into their bones. Imitating that isn't impossible, but it's beyond most people's abilities for more reasons than just the necessity of having to abandon all sense of pride or dignity. On the other hand, teaching a slave to have additional skills, or to go against some of their training on order of a master — because the ultimate, highest rule is simple obedience — is much easier. Slaves make excellent criminals; expendable, and who would believe that a slave had the capacity to pull off something like say, an assassination?
It's not so far fetched that one of his enemies might have 'hired' him for a job knowing his usual methods of distracting targets, planted a slave that matches his tastes (which apparently he's too obvious about), and set that slave to kill him at the first opportunity. He's never used an assassin slave himself, but he's run across more than a few before. Killed a couple, too.
"Back on the station, did you recognize me? Do you know who I am?"
The boy nods as much as possible, though it does make him choke a bit. "Y-Yes, Master. Slade Wilson. Deathstroke."
His mouth draws into a tight line.
"Were you sent to try and kill me, boy?" he asks next, keeping a careful eye on expression and body language. Though apparently he might not be able to tell if the boy is lying. What a nuisance.
There’s a hint of confusion and a pause; Slade flexes his fingers to prompt an answer of, “No, Master. I wasn’t sent by anyone. I swear.”
“Why should your word be worth anything?” he points out. “Tell me why you were up here, if that wasn’t the goal. Tell me why you’re on my ship.” When there’s another moment of pause and a frankly assessing sweep of golden eyes across his face, Slade tightens his grip and flashes his teeth as he reminds the boy, “If you try and play me, boy, I will kill you. If you doubt that, you shouldn’t.”
“I don’t,” is the gasp, after Slade loosens his grip again to allow it. “I was looking for information on your job. Bridge and your pad require biometrics to access; I thought there might be an unlocked access point up here.”
“You’re doing a poor job of convincing me that no one sent you.”
“I’m not a spy, Master; I’m only here because you bought me.” A tight breath, just enough to get him the air to speak again. “I wanted to know what you expect from me. My purpose.”
Another swallow, but the beat of the pulse beneath Slade’s hand is steady; either no lie, or a very good one. It’s irritating that he can’t trust his own senses to really know if it’s a lie, not when half of what the slave’s told him has already turned out to be, and he didn’t catch any of those.There's no weapon, as far as he can see, so it's possible that the boy is telling the truth and he was just here to look for information. Possible, but it's difficult to be absolutely sure of that. He doesn't like not being sure.
"I told you what you are," Slade snaps. "I bought you for my job. What that means and what it entails is not your place to question. Not unless I allow it."
"For you?" the boy asks, ignoring his reprimand. "Or for the people you're going to kill?"
He tightens his grip, narrows his eyes. “Careful, boy. What I plan on using you for doesn’t matter; you’ll do as ordered, or I’ll put you down and do this on my own. You’re not necessary or irreplaceable.” He pushes the collar a little higher into the boy’s jaw, forcing him to arch his throat to continue to breathe. “You’re rapidly approaching the point of being useless to me, ‘Richard.’ If you don’t fall in line—”
At the sound of his name there’s a flicker of something in the boy’s eyes, something hard, something that comes with the faint curl of what looks like a snarl and a gasped, “I will not kill for you,” that cuts Slade off.
Even setting aside that the slave spoke over him, which in itself is an offense most owners would punish heavily for, the outright refusal makes Slade pause. No slave, except a truly wild one, would ever so blatantly refuse to obey an order, and despite all of this the boy hasn’t struck him as ‘wild.’ Strange and possibly threatening, yes, and certainly with past training that would make him prone to independence, but truly wild slaves are rarely conditionally obedient. Generally, once they’ve gotten a taste of disobedience, and how it feels to disobey or go against a master, they never submit themselves to one again. The ones that are wild are raging, feral things that can't be retrained without being completely broken; this boy isn’t one of those. He's… something different.
“Why would you think I want you to kill?” Slade asks, loosening his grip just a touch. “Is that what you were used as, boy? An assassin?"
A repeat of, "Won't kill," is all the answer he gets. Stubborn, eyes still holding that hard edge that's so unlike a regular slave's behavior.
Slade settles his weight more firmly down on top of the boy's arms, until the stubbornness flickers into pain and he can feel the resistance where he's grinding the bone down into the ground. "You're going to tell me what you are, boy," he orders. "What were you made for? Who owns you?"
"You do," the boy breathes, dragging in a breath against the pressure of his hand. "I was— was taken into a facility when I was a child; I'm just a slave. Just—”
"Don't lie to me," he snaps, tightening his grip to hear the boy choke. "Normal slaves can't disable cuffs or bypass locked doors or get away with lying to me. You're going to tell me what you are, boy, now."
He loosens his grip to allow an answer, but instead the boy's mouth closes, teeth setting together. It doesn't look like hesitance, it looks like determination. Like refusal. (Facing punishment or death instead of naming his past role or trainers. Interesting. Foolish.)
The boy's jaw only tightens as Slade allows him a few moments to fully choose what path he's taking.
"Fine."
The strength given to him by his enhancements is nothing to be laughed at, and it's so, so easy to just clench his hand down on the boy's throat. Cartilage and bone snaps beneath his fingers, collapses inwards as he presses down. The boy seizes, hands finally clawing at the small bits of his calves that they can reach as his mouth parts again, seeking air and finding none. Slade sees a hint of blood at the boy's lip before he lets go, sitting back and straightening his spine to watch the slave suffocate.
It's not the first man that he's watched asphyxiate. It's an ugly way to go, crueler than he'd usually choose to employ unless he wanted the victim to suffer (or it was asked of him by an employer), and messier. He prefers a simple bullet to the head or severing of the spine. It's cleaner; leaves the mark with a bit of dignity and doesn't fill their last minute or so with sheer, instinctive terror.
Shame there are no weapons at hand apart from his own body.
He waits until the boy's thrashing has stilled, golden eyes dulling as the lids fall partially shut, hands lying limp on the ground. A sigh builds in his chest, but he bites it back with a frown as he climbs to his feet. His calves are stinging, and a glance down shows him shallow furrows raked into them from those last seconds of real struggle; nothing that won't heal soon enough. The boy didn't ever seem to be interested in fighting him.
He could have been a useful distraction if he'd just behaved, or if he'd given the information Slade wanted. Maybe he even would have kept the boy around for another job or two; a slave with that kind of a skill set, and those enhanced eyes, could have been useful. Not that there's any point considering potential situations; the boy's dead. End of story.
There were other slaves on the station that were possibilities, and he could turn around and pick one of them up. It's still close enough that he can make his deadline for the job, if he pushes the ship a bit. He could make the time up; space this one and move on to some other slave that will be better behaved and more reliable.
No. If he does that, he loses any extra time he has once he's arrived at the mark's planet of choice. If he runs into anything unexpected, or there are any complications, he could fail. He hasn't failed a job in a long time. The lack of a distraction will make things a bit harder, but he'll work around it. He can handle almost any complications that come his way, with a bit of effort. He'll handle this one too.
Slade gets as far as stepping away, heading to his closet to don a fresh set of clothing, before there's a faint crack that yanks his attention back.
He turns to look, head tilting to listen to the quiet, faint cracking sounds. His eye narrows as he realizes it's coming from the slave; the noises would be indiscernible to anyone without enhanced senses unless they were pressed right up close, but they are there. He retraces the few steps he'd gotten and kneels down, tracking the sound down to its origin in the boy's crushed throat, which he pinpoints just in time to see a portion of it suddenly and sharply push back into position.
Is it… healing?
A second, smaller piece pushing back up gets Slade to move. He retrieves one of his belts, flipping the boy over with a shove of his foot and then pulling both arms behind his back to bind his wrists together. It isn't a very good restraint, especially not against a boy who can slip cuffs, but it will work long enough for his purposes. When Slade puts the boy face up once more his throat is close to restored, and a more normal color is returning to his lips and cheeks.
Slade kneels down over the boy's waist once more, watching carefully as his mind flicks through possibilities and settles down onto the only truly viable one. There are only so many types of slaves that are capable of the skills the boy's shown, and very, very few of those are valuable enough to be worth spending the small fortunes it takes to enable this sort of after-death healing. At this point simple 'enhancements' don't cut it; to heal fatal injury and resurrect after death requires something a lot more intensive, and advanced.
The boy suddenly jerks, gasping in a deep breath as his eyes fly wide. It would be startling, if Slade wasn't waiting for it. He shifts, putting one knee in the boy's stomach and leaning into it until he gets a breathless grunt and earns the focus of those wide golden eyes. There's a wildness to them, but not the confusion you might expect from someone returning to life.
"I know exactly one type of slave specialized and valuable enough to their owners to be fitted with the tech to heal from fatal injuries," he comments. "So, Talon, why don't you answer my questions honestly this time?"
Chapter Text
There’s a shift to the boy when Slade says that name, Talon.
His eyes narrow, all trace of wild disorientation vanishing as his expression sets into something flat and hard. His head tilts slightly to the side, shoulders shifting as he undoubtedly discovers and tests the strength of the belt around his arms. It won’t hold long, but that’s fine. Talons are deadly, but Slade trusts in his own ability to deliver a fatal blow before the boy can work free and strike in return. With his strength, fatal blows are easy to come by.
“Slip that,” he starts, “and I’ll kill you again, boy. I can keep doing this until you decide you want to answer my questions honestly; and I don’t think you really want to suffer through that. You still feel pain, don’t you?”
He isn’t actually expecting an answer, but the boy gives a low, “Yes,” and then glances to the side and around the room before coming back to rest on him. “I’ll answer whatever you want to know.”
“With the truth?”
There’s no hesitation in the repeat of, “Yes.”
Slade wishes, again, that he could tell whether the boy is actually lying. He supposes he’ll have to judge the answers by himself and decide whether he wants to believe them based on their own merit. Irritating, but he holds the power in this scenario regardless. If he decides the boy is lying, he’ll toss him out an airlock; he hasn’t had an opportunity to test it, but he doubts even the expensive tech written into the boy’s bones can keep him alive through a journey in space.
“What are you doing on my ship, Talon?”
The slit pupils of the replaced eyes — yes, he remembers the Talons he’s heard reports of having those as well — watch him, blank even as the boy gives a small shrug. “You bought me. I could have convinced you not to, but I’d seen your face in reports and I was curious. The rest was you.”
Possible enough. He needs more context, and he wants more information in general, but he does remember that the boy didn't make any attempt to convince him to purchase him. In fact, the shows of slight disobedience were a deterrent, to anyone who would care about something like that. Unless the idea was to catch his interest by intriguing him.
He shifts to pull his knee from the Talon’s stomach, letting it slide to the side so he straddles the lean hips instead and can rest his weight on them without compromising the boy’s ability to speak. “Then what are you doing out here in the slums of space? I didn’t think the Court cared much what happened on the outer fringe colonies.”
There’s a tiny flicker of something in that cool expression, something like wariness though it’s gone too fast for Slade to be sure. “Escaping. Starting new.”
Slade tilts his head, drawing together theories as he studies the boy. “Escaping the Court? I’m pretty sure that tech inside you makes that just about impossible; they wouldn’t let something like that go.”
“No,” the boy agrees, more quietly than he’s spoken so far. “Not unless they were distracted, and I was lost in the confusion.”
“And you made that happen?” A small nod, and Slade lifts an eyebrow. “How, boy?”
That draws a moment of hesitation, but then the golden eyes harden once again to steel. “I killed them.”
Slade blinks. “You killed the Court?”
“Not all of them, but enough to drive them into a panic.” Steel sharpens, and the boy’s mouth lifts into a faint curl that isn’t nearly warm enough to be a smile. “Enough to get them to send the Talons hunting, and assume one was killed if it vanished.”
A plan that’s intelligent, vicious, and presumably well executed if he’s the first to find the slave. A journey to this corner of civilized space, from the inner circle itself, would take a long time. Long enough for the Court to find him if they really were looking. Killing a Talon, permanently, is no doubt more effort than most people would know to expend, but Slade’s fairly certain that it’s far from impossible. He doubts the boy would survive being decapitated, for one. Or spaced. If some ‘mystery killer’ slaughtered enough of the Court to make them panic, it might be an easy leap of logic to assume that the killer might know enough to kill a Talon as well.
Not bad at all.
“Why do that?” he asks, watching the ‘smile’ vanish. “Why turn on your masters, Talon?”
The boy’s brow draws together in a slight frown, eyes narrowing. “I don’t want to be a Talon. I want to do more than just kill and then get stored away in a corner till the next time. I remember—” He shakes his head, a sharp little movement that seems agitated. “I was more, before they took me. I… flew. I was… It felt good. I want to be that again. They were never going to let me.”
He crooks an eyebrow. “You flew? Sure you aren’t imagining things, boy?”
In a moment, the Talon goes from thoughtful and slightly lost looking to snapping teeth at him, eyes lighting with something like fury. “It was real,” he snarls. “Richard Grayson; no-enhancement acrobatics in a traveling show. Haly’s Circus with Mary and John Grayson. One of the last shows to keep performers natural; no tricks.” It has the rote of memorized facts; nothing personal to the words except the intensity they’re said with and how the boy — Richard, he supposes — squeezes his eyes shut and twists beneath him, insisting, “It was real. I was real.”
Slade considers the boy beneath him, meeting the golden eyes when they open again, looking up at him with a wild edge that still manages to look nearly… lost. Well, whether or not it’s actually true, ‘Richard’ believes it is. It’s plausible enough to be possible. From what little Slade was able to learn when he looked into the technology that makes Talons all but indestructible, the side effects were… concerning. Enough to drive him off even considering getting something similar for himself, on top of the enhancements he already has.
A very low success rate that gets even lower as age increases, to the point of nearly certain death before a subject even hits twenty years, and — most importantly for this context — a nearly complete loss of prior memory. He never looked into the details past finding that out. He’s run across Talons once or twice before, during his years as a mercenary, but he’s never fought one so he never had the need to hunt down the more specific details of what makes them. He doesn’t think it’s impossible that they might retain impressions or vague memories about their youngest years, and if a slave had the right underlying nature and the right memory impressions to haunt them? Theoretically, it could happen.
"Alright," Slade agrees, leaving the issue behind for now. "So you run to the edges of civilized space to make sure the remains of the Court don't realize you're alive. You pose as a freeman, but you get caught and picked up by the local guard. Then you're sold to that slave trader, and you choose not to dissuade me from buying you." Richard's gaze stays steady on him, wild edge fading some with every breath. "But you knew who I was, which means I was a risk to the new start you've been trying for. 'Curious' doesn't cut it, boy. Why did you come with me?"
"I thought…” The boy's eyes narrow, head tilting slightly to the side. "I thought I could escape. The cell was harder to get out of; he didn't know what I was but he knew something wasn't right. The chance of getting free from you was better than staying there."
“The chance of getting free from a well known mercenary and assassin was better than escaping a slum space station?” His tone is dry, and as far as Slade is concerned that’s more than deserved. He’s aware of his own reputation; none of it implies that getting away from him will be an easy task.
The boy stares up at him with a thoughtful look for a few moments, studying him with sharp flicks of his eyes as if reweighing the choices. “Yes,” is the simple answer. When he raises an eyebrow, the boy elaborates. “He kept me restrained almost all the time; you weren’t likely to if I was going to serve. Escaping the station would have required stealing or stowing away on a ship; you travel already, so I could try for an escape at any port you stopped in. Harder to track me down on a planet than a station. It was a better chance.”
Fair reasons. Slade can see the logic in it, even though it didn’t go the way the boy planned. It isn’t entirely common knowledge that he’s enhanced himself over the years; he’d appear as less of a risk than he actually is if Richard didn’t know that. He believes it.
“Alright then. So what now, boy?”
The Talon only blinks up at him, not quite showing confusion but not answering him either.
“I know what you are,” Slade expands. “You’re trapped here on my ship, more or less. What you’ve told me says that you don’t have any problem killing if it suits you, or if people are in your way, and your intention was to escape me as soon as possible. None of that makes me real keen to have you traveling with me; I don’t like having to watch my back in my own home. My safest bet is to put you out an airlock and go on my way. Have you got a different idea?”
Of all the responses he considered, it catches him by surprise when the boy shudders, eyes flickering wide with fear for a moment. He watches teeth grit together, watches the boy take a sharp breath, shoulders curling a little as his gaze flicks sideways.
“If you’re going to kill me,” he says, chin tilting up and back to bare his throat, “cut my head off. It’ll sever the signal; I won’t come back.” His voice is trembling slightly when he adds, almost like a plea, “Not space. Don’t throw me out there.”
That’s real fear.
“Why not?”
Another shudder; the boy’s eyes flicker closed with a flash of an expression that looks pained. “It’s like… drowning. Like suffocation. I’ll come back just long enough to die, over and over. Not again. Not— Please.”
That 'please' pauses him for a moment. Slade's no stranger to begging, but very rarely has he been begged to end someone's life, at least by the person he's being asked to kill. To volunteer information like that, the boy really must be desperate not to be subjected to what he's talking about. Reviving just long enough to be aware of dying again; it sounds like agony.
"That's happened to you before?" he asks, watching the boy's expression. It sets a bit, teeth flashing, so Slade murmurs, "You told me that you would answer any questions I had, boy." Does he need to know? No. But he thinks… he wants to. He'd like to be able to paint a clearer picture of this deadly, runaway thing.
"I…” The boy's eyes don't open, don't look at him. He takes a sharp breath, the edge of pain returning in the furrow of his brow. "Yes. It's how the Court punishes… mistakes. There's a room; they drain the air out of it and leave us for however many times they think we deserve."
Sounds like a pleasant organization. Maybe it's best he's never personally run across them before. "And did you deserve it?"
Now the boy looks at him. Eyes narrowed, examining his face with the hesitation of someone who believes they may be falling into a trap. "I made a mistake," is the answer he gets. "A sloppy execution; had to kill a witness too."
"What did that earn you?"
Slade watches the boy swallow, the collar moving slightly with the lift of his Adam's apple. "They told me twenty-six, one for every year he'd lived. I lost count of them."
Well, that seems like an exaggerated response to a slightly messed up kill. He still killed the target, after all. Presumably a second kill could be covered up, or excused away. Slade doesn't believe he's ever had an employer be displeased that he killed too many people. Then again, he's never been the killing machine of a secret organization. Not precisely, anyway. He always had the option of leaving the service, and they never had the right to torture him. Well… he supposes that qualifies under 'not precisely' as well.
It seems unfair to draw parallels between his service in the military and the conditioning of a killer slave, but Slade can't quite deny that the sound of 'stolen from his life, brainwashed, and tortured' has a familiar sound to it. His was legal, at least, even if most of his service skirted the edges of that legality. Some of his mercenary work has been more legal than a few of the shadier missions under his government's purview.
"Alright," Slade agrees, not quite sure whether it's against his better judgement or not. "If I kill you, I'll do it cleanly."
The gratitude in how the boy looks at him is clearer than most other expressions he's seen. "Thank you."
It's almost a guarantee that the Court teaches their Talons to fake emotion, to better pass as normal slaves, and yet Slade finds himself believing those simple words. Making up all of this, just to get out of a losing situation? There are much better lies. Much more believable lies. What the boy, Richard — no, he wanted to be called 'Dick,' didn't he? — has told him feels like truth, and that opens up an interesting new set of possibilities. Everything else aside, Slade is fairly certain he believes that Dick will do what he sees as being the best option. For now, maybe behaving is the best option.
That, he can test.
"Stay right there," he orders, and waits for the small nod of consent before he pushes back, getting to his feet in careful, wary motions.
He crosses the room to the locker that contains his gear, keeping an eye on the boy as he unlocks it with a press of his palm and then reaches in to collect his sword. Pulling it free from its sheath activates the energy edge to it, and the nearly inaudible buzz is as familiar to him as the sound of the ship's engine in the background. It will cut clean, even without his added strength, and the energy edge makes sure it goes through bone or anything else in its way. It's his favorite way to kill; clean, simple, and quiet.
The boy watches him, gaze focusing on his sword for a moment. He doesn't move. Doesn't move even when Slade returns, except to shift his head back a couple inches when the blade comes to rest just above his throat to provide a clearer target. The golden gaze is turned his direction, ignoring the sword and the imminent death it implies. There's an eased acceptance in his expression that Slade only sees very rarely. Most of his marks die desperate or terrified; it's a rare person that welcomes death without struggle.
"You're not going to fight me?" he questions, tilting his head a bit and studying the relaxation he's being greeted with.
He gets a small shrug in answer. "Your ship is bio-locked," the boy says, quietly. "Even if I could kill you, I couldn't pilot your ship. I don't know how to break one. The sword will be clean, and quick. It's not a bad way to die."
All true.
Slade studies the boy for a few moments, verifying the truth of those words for himself, before he speaks again. "Do you think you can behave for me, boy?"
Confusion. The boy hesitates, eyes narrowing. "Sir?"
"My needs haven't changed. I still have a job to do, and that job goes easiest with a pretty face at my side." He lowers the sword a fraction, lets it split the skin just above the collar, the blood sizzling away underneath the energy. There's not even a flinch. "If you're planning on behaving, I'll set you free as soon as my work's done. You can go wherever you want; I don't care and I won't report you to anyone. If you do your part in my job."
"Really?" Dick sounds surprised, almost hopeful.
Slade dips his head in a shallow nod, and then expands. "If you can't, say no and I'll cut your head off here and end it. Clean, nearly painless. Like you said, not a bad way to go. But be perfectly clear about this. If you agree, and then threaten or disobey me again? I will throw you out into space without blinking. I don't give third chances, boy; is that clear?"
"Yes." The boy's gaze stays fixed on him through several moments of silence, and Slade starts to consider prompting an answer, before he asks, "What would my part be?"
A question he is perfectly willing to answer when it comes from an ex-Talon, instead of a disobeying, belligerent, random slave.
"Look pretty, be distracting, and walk back out with me." He lifts the sword an inch or so, enough to neutralize the immediate threat and give the boy a little room to breathe. "You're a beautiful, capital-planet slave. With you at my side, I don't need to do anything particularly complicated; people are easily distracted by beauty and I can handle all the rest by myself." He gives it another couple moments, then asks, "So? What's your decision, boy?"
There's another second spent on hesitation, on the flicker of gold eyes across his frame and his face, before the boy gives just the slightest nod. "Yes. I'll do it."
No hint of deception. No lie. Good.
"Alright." He pulls the sword away in a flick of motion, stepping back. "It's a deal. You can slip that belt now, boy, if you haven't already."
The boy starts to sit up as Slade crosses the room to put his sword away. By the time he's shut the locker and turned back, the belt is on the ground and Dick is wiping the faint trace of blood away from his throat, then the corner of his mouth. The way he stands is still just as graceful as all the rest of his movements, the belt held in one hand at first and then transferred to both once he's standing. Slade turns to fully face the boy, watching him approach. Gaze down, sinking to kneeling in front of him when he's just a couple feet away.
When he's presented with the belt, it's with the bowed head and raised hands that he'd expect to see on any highly trained slave. He takes it with only a bit of wariness; that might take some time to fade, if he lets it. But then, maybe it's best he holds onto that wariness until the boy is off his ship.
"Thank you," he says, and it's idle habit more than anything that makes him drop a hand as he steps past and ruffle the boy's hair. He doesn't think any more of the movement until he looks back from putting his belt away and the boy is watching him with something like surprise.
He can't quite decipher whether the look is for that single, gentle touch, or because the boy expected something to happen with the belt. Either way, he brushes the reaction aside and leans back against the wall, crossing his arms as he considers what to do. This truce aside, he doesn't trust the boy to be loose while he sleeps. The restraints can't be trusted to hold him, clearly, so he has to find a better way of keeping the boy away from anything important. He has… a solution, but it's a crude one.
"You understand that you need to be restrained?"
The boy's head tilts. Slowly, he answers, "I know you'll be more comfortable with me restrained, yes."
Slade gives the boy a sharp look. It's not disobedience. Technically. "You've slipped the cuffs already; I don't have any more thorough restraints currently on board, and I don't trust you to stay locked in any room I put you in." There's no indication of guilt or wariness, but Slade didn't really expect to see any of that. "I have a couple of bio-locking crates in my hold," he continues, continuing to watch for any reaction, "the same technology as what locks my ship. I'm going to put some holes in one for oxygen flow, and you can sleep there. Will that be a problem?"
"No, sir."
The answer comes faster than he expected, and Slade finds himself not quite satisfied with it. "Really?"
Dick shifts to face him more directly, still on his knees. "I don't have any issue with small spaces. If there's airflow, what would be the problem?"
Fair enough.
"Good. Then that's what we'll do." Slade pushes off the wall, and nods towards the hatch that leads back down to the rest of his ship. "Why don't you go first, boy?"
"Yes, sir."
"We're coming close to the station," Slade comments, tilting his head back to look at Dick, who's just sliding through the door of the cabin. "Are you ready?"
The, "Yes, sir," he gets is much more casual than it would have been a week ago. More like a subordinate than a slave, but that seems to be what they've settled into. The boy's gaze meets his directly, and Slade takes a look at how he's made himself up as he comes to stand beside him.
Black hair curling just slightly in, dried from the shower and falling artfully to partially obscure the slave mark curling out from the corner of his eye. It's matched on the other side by a sweep of black eyeliner, and the way it's lined along both lids makes the golden eyes look larger than they are and makes the color and the unusual pupils stand out more. He's wearing a matching set of slave clothes that Slade had in storage; intelligent fabric built to shrink to anything under its design limits. They're a very dark black with undertones of blue, with large bronze lines forming an interrupted V across both back and front, from each shoulder down to where the end suitably meets at his crotch.
The shirt has a high collar, the slim silver slave collar over it a counterpoint, and is sleeveless and short, clinging tight to his skin and leaving both his arms and midsection bare. The bottom is a small skirt, going barely halfway down his thighs and accentuating more than it hides, especially with the slit up one side that gives a couple more inches. Slade's aware that there's a pair of briefs on beneath the skirt, matching the color, but unless you were looking directly up beneath it you wouldn't know. Matching the outfit is a small collection of gold-colored jewelry. Hanging, disk-shaped earrings, a pair of tight cuffs, and the glint of a piercing in his navel with a simple ball at the top.
When Dick comes to stand beside him, hips cocking smoothly to one side, Slade sees the flash of gold-painted nails as well. Eye-catching.
"Well done," he praises, with an appreciative nod. "That should do nicely."
It's not quite a smile that he gets — though he had made sure the boy could smile, for when they get down there — but it's a slight curl at one corner that gives him enough information to see it as a smile. He's gotten a few of those over the past week. It's been easier than he thought it might be to have the boy on his ship. After that first night, there have been no other problems; Dick seems to have taken their deal seriously. And, apparently in response to his lack of violence, punishment, or real demands, Dick seems to have gotten comfortable. No more careful obedience, or deference, when Slade knows it isn't fully true. No, the boy meets his gaze, moves without fear, and does as he asks with simple obedience.
Slade finds it… refreshing, honestly. A slave that isn't afraid of him, or bowing and scraping at his heel every time he turns around. It doesn't hurt that Dick is easy on the eyes, and as lacking in self-conscious behavior as any normal slave would be.
"You're clear on your part?" he asks, just to be sure.
Dick gives an inclination of his head, shifting down to a high kneel. Just the right angle for his face to be visible when Slade puts the call through to his mark's orbiting station. The planet’s populated, but this one likes to stay somewhat removed, apparently. "Yes, sir. I remember."
Slade resists reaching over and sliding his fingers through Dick's hair, to pet his scalp. The boy enjoys it, and leans into him every time, but the hair is styled just so; wouldn't do to disturb it. "Good. Alright, boy. Let's get this done."
He pings the station with a request to dock, and just a few moments later is notified of the station's attempt to call through to him. He lets it sit for a moment, and then accepts it with a tap of his fingers on the screen. The hologram is clear when it comes up above his screen, colors just slightly off to his eye but not enough for anyone normal to really notice. It's not his mark's face. A guard, perhaps? Assistant?
"State your business," the man demands, gaze sweeping over what's visible of his armor; his shoulders and up.
"I'm escorting a gift for your lord," Slade drawls, with a small tilt of his chin in the direction of Dick. "In honor of his upcoming election; my employer wants to show his gratitude. I can forward the registration and his accompanying letter, if you want to see those first." All forged, of course, but there aren't many people that would recognize that.
"Send them." The man is still squinting at him, edges of recognition starting to show in his expression. Yes, Slade expected that. "Keep your distance until docking has been approved."
"Sure."
The connection is cut, and Slade forwards the two forged documents before he tilts his head back and waits. Review of both of them will take a bit of time, probably more for the man to consult with his actual mark… He's in no rush. His employer's deadline for this is still several days away, when the mark is supposed to officially take office. He isn't cutting it close enough to be concerned about mere minutes.
Dick stays silent at his side, expression slipped away from his usual impassiveness to something more on the edge of sultry. Lips wet from the swipe of a tongue, something relaxed and soft about his whole look. It's a good look, and Slade didn't truly believe he could look that appealing until Dick demonstrated for him, a few days ago. If the boy wasn't a highly trained, deadly ex-Talon, Slade might have been tempted to take advantage at that demonstration. Luckily, his common sense won out.
He waits, and eventually the console pings at him with the notification of the returned signal. He accepts it with a tap and returns his gaze to the hologram that filters back into place. Different man this time, dressed richer and with sharper eyes. Well, isn’t that nice confirmation that his mark is currently around. How polite.
“Sir,” he offers, with a slight inclination of his head.
His mark squints at him; he’s got more recognition in his eyes than the guard did. Confirmed when he says, “Deathstroke,” instead of any other greeting. ”What are you doing here?”
“He didn’t tell you?” Slade asks, tilting his head. “Alright. Well as I told your guard, I’m escorting an election gift.” He flicks one hand just far enough to indicate Dick, gives a thin smile. “Soon as registration transfers I get the rest of my payment, so if you wouldn’t mind giving me authorization to dock we can make that official and I can be on my way.”
He can see the interest as the man looks at Dick, and then a second time, lingering. But he pulls his attention far enough away to still sound wary pointing out, “Deathstroke, escorting a slave? Isn’t that beneath your pay grade?”
A less blatant way to say ‘I don’t trust you.’
“I take most easy jobs that are good pay, and my rates are lower when assassination isn’t part of the package.” It’s really just a matter of time; he’s never failed to sweet-talk someone into letting him close enough to end them. “People hire me as an escort, sir, because I’m a professional.” He offers a wicked-sharp smirk, and a drawled, “I don’t sample what I’m escorting. This—” a tilt of his chin towards Dick “—is a capital-planet slave. Not many people would keep their hands off one during a trip with no real oversight. Did your guard pass on the letter and registration information?”
“Yes.”
Another look at Dick, and hesitation so potent Slade can almost taste it. He waits.
“No weapons,” his mark eventually says, gaze ripping away from Dick to meet his look, “and no armor. I’ll send the authorization to dock.”
“I’ll be in shortly.”
The hologram cuts out, and Slade waits till the console pings at him again, offering both authorization to dock and the automated docking procedure that goes with it. He approves, and then gets to work taking off the armor over his left arm. His weapons are already stored; these caveats are almost universal when it comes to people allowing him close to them and he expected them. Decent precautions against a well-known mercenary; most of them don’t know (at least for sure) that he’s been enhanced and the weapons themselves are just a luxury. Wearing the armor wasn’t for anything but showcasing who he is; better to have them know now rather than suddenly realize once he’s on the station.
A couple moments after he starts Dick reaches forward, starting to work on his right leg. Slade watches for a moment, considering, but ultimately decides not to stop him. He certainly never taught Dick any of the latches or seal-points that allow his armor to be removed, and he doesn’t believe he’s ever taken it off or on while he’s in the room (he’s spent most of this week in more casual wear, or just his plain black, skintight suit of under-armor), but it isn’t really surprising that the boy knows anyway. Whether it’s past experience or eyes that are both enhanced and prone to picking out details he’s not sure, and for the moment he doesn’t care enough to ask.
He’s faster at it than Dick is, but not by much. With both of them working at it it doesn’t take long before he’s stripped down to just the under-armor. It’s just a few moments before there’s the slight rock of the ship and the more cheery-sounding ping from his console that lets them know that they’ve docked, seal active and secure.
“Ready, boy?” he asks, offering a hand out of idle habit to ‘help’ Dick to his feet. He takes it, but there’s barely any weight rested on that hand as he rises.
“Yes, sir.”
There’s a certain sort of muted anticipation in his voice, and Slade gives a small smirk as he heads for the airlock. “Interested in all this?”
He doesn’t look back to catch Dick’s expression, but he does get a slightly slow answer of, “Interested in seeing what you’re capable of, yes.”
Slade chuckles, pressing his hand to the airlock's control and looking back to wait for Dick to come up beside him. This time, he lets his hand rise to brush the side of Dick's shoulder, as the airlock opens. "These people won't need half of what I'm capable of."
Dick stays just behind and to the side of him as he strides through, passing from his ship and through the second airlock door into the station itself. A glance around the docking area tells him most of what he needs to know. Clean place, minus the usual scuffs of wear and tear, fairly good technology for being this far out into the outer circles, and two uniformed guards with hands on holstered guns. Neither one is the one he spoke to.
Slade doesn't let any of that slow him. The guards clutch harder at their guns, but don't outright draw them. He doesn't press the distance too far, just enough that he can come to a stop and arch an eyebrow as he watches them and they watch him in turn. He hears Dick's footsteps behind him, the soft pad of the delicately clothed feet as he comes up a bit further to the side. Slade restrains a smirk as he watches the guards' eyes flicker that direction.
"Are we just going to be waiting here?" he asks in a drawl, crossing his arms and shifting his weight towards the side with Dick on it.
One guard jerks his gaze away, standing a little straighter. "No. Come with us, sir."
That one leads the way, and the other guard flanks Slade as he follows, Dick maintaining that position just behind and to the side of him. Correct protocol, if a little bit closer than standard.
It's easy enough to memorize the route back out as the guards lead them into the station, through wider-than-strictly-practical steel corridors and past open arches that lead to larger rooms. It's a pretty station clearly built to display relative wealth, but the place is a design nightmare. One good shot through the hull would depressurize half the place, unless it happens to all be fitted with force fields. Even then, it would be a fairly enormous power drain. Slade's never been fond of displays of wealth when they outstrip functionality.
Where they do eventually stop is in front of a door, with one other guard beside it who's holding a portable scanner. Old-fashioned; metal focused. Easy enough to fool if he cared to, but he won't need any weapons but whatever he can get a hold of in that room. Anything else is just bonus.
"Arms up and out," the guard orders. Slade obeys, resisting the urge to roll his eye at the way the man cautiously approaches. He's holding the scanner like it's going to protect him.
His sweep comes up clean, and no one bothers to run it over Dick. Maybe because of the excess of skin exposed and otherwise skintight clothing, but more likely because people have this terrible habit of not looking at the lower classes as possible of posing a threat. Especially when they have a pretty face.
The door is keyed open, and they're motioned through. Their two original guards stay at their back as they head in, flanking them on each side and staying just out of sight of Slade's range of vision. Not an issue; he can hear them.
Slade glances around the room, scanning for potential weapons at the same time as he catalogs positions of furniture and then, lastly, the man standing from the desk right at the center. The room can't decide whether it wants to be an office or some sort of greeting room, and it doesn't do all that good a job of mixing the two. The office is the clear centerpiece, with empty space ahead of it and then chairs set diagonally facing the desk, all too far away to have any sort of comfortable conversation. A blatant power play, if it's intentional and not just incompetence.
The man himself, Slade's mark, is taller than average and slender. He's on the younger side of politicians, pretty; that combined with the charming smile he's giving makes it easy to see how he would win any popular-vote contest. Dark brown hair is cut close, a plain backdrop to unusually green eyes. Altered; Slade would bet on it. That's a common, subtle surgery for anyone that wants to look a little eye-catching and has the money to have it done. Slade sees it most commonly in politicians and high-class escorts.
The smile holds as Slade comes closer, stepping into that clear space before the desk. Apparently the removal of his armor was enough to put this one more or less at ease; that's handy.
"Delivery," he says, skipping the small talk and tilting his head towards Dick. "As contracted. If you wouldn't mind putting a signature on that letter and sending it back to my ship?"
Those too-green eyes turn towards Dick, and Slade can see exactly what he was planning for. Interest, lust, and what's certainly going to be an unhealthy amount of greed. "You won't mind if I inspect it first, would you, Deathstroke? Just to be sure there weren't any accidents and that there are no surprises waiting?"
Slade scoffs to show what he thinks of the idea, but shrugs and steps off to the side. "Be my guest."
He makes it look like the steps he takes towards the side of the office are for the mark's comfort, widening the distance between them out of consideration instead of the desire to get a closer look at some of the potential weapons he's seen. He glances back to see how Dick is reacting to the inspection, finding him smiling and coy in a way that sets every sense Slade has on edge. Then again, he's aware that beneath all those looks there's a trained killer with probably a very skewed moral code if one even really exists. (Not wanting to kill is not the same as thinking it's wrong, and Dick hasn't made even one mention about disapproving of his own intent to murder.)
A hand slides over Dick's cheek, a thumb brushing lips that immediately part, back arching to curve into the touch with his whole body. Slade's fingers find the weight of one of the two heavy crystal deposits sitting among other items on the man's shelves. Yes, that should do nicely.
The crystal cracks into the first guard's head before anyone has even begun to notice what he's doing. The guard crumples, and Slade grabs the other crystal chunk and chucks that one too. The second guard has his gun partly drawn, but not enough to stop the crystal from slamming right into his face and breaking his nose with a sound barely audible underneath his shout and the sound of the first one toppling to the floor. The mark is slightly slower to react, eyes widening and then he finally shouts too, backpedaling across the room and towards his desk instead of the door. Hidden weapon.
Sure enough, as Slade rounds the other side of the desk the man pulls a gun from a flung-open drawer, firing off a wild shot that he barely even has to duck for. The second comes closer, but he drops low and shoves forward on his toes into a lunge and that's more than enough to get him into range. One of his hands closes on the wrist of the hand with the gun in it, clenching down hard enough that the bones snap underneath his fingers like brittle wood.
His other hand, slapped over the man's mouth, muffles the scream. Slamming his head into the desk hard enough that his skull caves in puts a permanent end to any chance of struggle, and fulfills the job he took.
Slade lets the body fall to the floor, kneeling down just long enough to collect the gun before heading back around. Not bad. Limited shot capacity before energy drain, but steady aim and good power. He's worked with worse; this should be plenty to allow him to get back out of the station without a problem.
Dick is watching him, head tilted a bit to one side, looking utterly unaffected by the violence of the encounter. In fact, there's the same sort of muted interest that Slade noted back on the ship. It doesn't change at all when Slade takes two shots into the heads of the partially downed guards; Dick barely even looks at the two of them, even as Slade dips to collect one of the other guns as well.
"Still have what I gave you?" Slade asks, checking the capacity of the second gun. Less power than the mark's private one, but a greater energy store.
Dick nods, stepping over the legs of the second guard to get closer to him. "Yes, sir. Want it now?"
He grunts, shakes his head. "No. Keep it till we're back near the hangar. Don't get shot on the way out, boy; I'd rather not have to carry you."
"Understood."
Slade moves for the door, trusting Dick to stay at his back and keep pace. The door doesn't have a keypad on the inner side so it opens at a tap of his hand, and he steps out in a rapid burst of movement. The guard with the scanner is still standing just where he was, and his eyes have barely widened before Slade gets the shot off into the side of his skull. No alarms, no shouting; good. Maybe whoever's monitoring security cameras will pick them up, but otherwise they should be fine. There weren't any other guards on the route they took in, after all, and the people in the rooms they passed weren't paying attention to passerby.
He keeps his walk to a steady pace; slightly above average, but head held high and with no real rush to it all. No quicker way to get caught than to look like you're running.
There’s only one stretch of corridor left before the hangar when the alarm does go off, a high siren of a sound that Slade endures with a clench of his jaw. Red lights flash in the corners of the ceiling, and a glance backwards sees people starting to come spilling out of the rooms, looking around with confusion and maybe a bit of panic. He keeps his pace steady. At worst the station will have some kind of security lock on the ship, but he's yet to run into a security system his ship's computer can't override.
Despite the alarm, and the people's reaction to it (or possibly because of them), no guards show up. Slade steps up to the computer bank, and when he turns back to Dick the boy is already holding his palm out, the slim drive resting in the center of it.
"Good," he praises, as he takes it. He plugs it into one of the ports near the base, and then waits just long enough to watch the screen begin to flicker through images and folders faster than any human could.
He heads for the airlock to his ship, opening it with a simple tap and striding through, Dick at his heels. The door closes, and Slade works his jaw loose in the relative silence, the alarm now muted behind the door's thickness. When he steps into his own ship, he can't hear it at all.
"What will that do?" Dick asks, as he follows Slade back to the cockpit.
Slade waits to answer until he's dropping into the chair. "Wipe all mention or image of me from their system and, ideally, disable any external weapons the station might have. Any security feed that caught my face, or any note of me boarding the station should be deleted, and you were next to me so it should catch everything of you as well."
Dick slips into the space beside him, watching out the window as they disconnect from the station with a slightly heavy thunk and turn away. He stays silent.
"So?" Slade prompts, finishing turning the systems of the ship on. "Where on the planet would you like to be dropped off?"
The planet is visible through the window; on the smaller side but fairly well populated for its distance from the core systems. Actual cities on this planet instead of just towns and villages. Dick looks at it, and when Slade looks up at the lack of an answer there's something on his face that looks almost like worry.
"Boy?" he asks, a bit softer.
Dick shifts, looking down at him. There's a flicker of his gaze downwards, then out towards the planet again. "I… With the assassination, the planet's security will probably be more alert. There's a higher chance of being caught if I go down there now."
Slade pauses, giving the boy a little bit closer to his full attention. "That's true," he agrees, otherwise noncommittally. "I thought you wanted to go free. Start a life as a normal person."
"I do." It's a quick response, but not as firm as Slade's used to hearing from him. "But… would you be willing to keep me on board, until the next planet? Somewhere more suitable?" Dick's gaze turns to Slade as he watches, examining the angles of that request. "I can earn it, sir. However you want."
He's not blind to the implications of that; they're as tempting now as they were when he first picked the boy up.
"The next planet, hm?" Dick holds his gaze, silently confirming that question, and Slade turns back to the controls. "I'm heading closer in towards the center to meet with a potential client, and get within signal range to pick up payment for this job. That alright with you?"
"Yes, sir."
Slade gives a shallow nod, programming the course in and flaring the engines to loop them around and away from the planet. "Alright, boy. The next planet."
"Suitable planet," Dick comments. Slade looks up. "The next suitable planet, sir. That's what I said."
Slade finds his mouth curling in a small smile. "You didn't, really, but that's alright. Sure, the next 'suitable' planet." He leans back in the chair, turning the autopilot on as the ship picks up speed. "So," he starts, a theory starting to spin in his mind, "you were free for awhile, on that backwater planet. How was it?"
Dick doesn't answer for a moment, then he shifts into motion, kneeling down in the empty space that's somehow become his regular spot. "Strange," is the soft admission. "There's so much free time; what do all of you do with it?"
"Whatever you want."
Dick doesn't quite make a face, but the feeling is clear all the same.
Slade laughs, reaching out to run his fingers through Dick's hair. "Sometimes it takes time for people to figure out what that is. Many people read, play games, watch various forms of entertainment. Or you could put that time into learning something; a language, or a skill that seems interesting. You'll have to decide for yourself."
The tilt of Dick's head into his hand is nearly expected, face tilting up to brush a nose along the base of his wrist. He can't feel any of it through the gloves he still has on, but he remembers the feeling from previous occurrences. His golden eyes slide shut, weight leaning into the side of the chair and body pressing close to his knee. He doesn't quite go as far as laying his head on Slade's thigh, but Slade thinks that's probably only because the fingers in his scalp are more interesting. It's been a common theme this last week; honestly he isn't surprised the boy likes gentle contact so much.
He chews over his theory, sinking his teeth into it and testing the edges, tilting his head back against the chair to look out the window and let his thoughts drift inwards.
"It's unsettling for you, isn't it?" Slade asks, pausing the motion of his fingers as he looks down. "To have that much control, and no one telling you what to do with any of it?" Dick looks up at him, and Slade traces fingers down the side of his face, following the curl of one part of the slave mark. "Being controlled is what you were conditioned for; having the security of that taken away must be strange to get used to."
The way that Dick studies him makes him think that he's trying to pinpoint the reason behind the words, but all he says is, "Yes."
"Then, is the only reason you're staying on my ship because you don't want to be on that specific planet?" He tilts his head, holds Dick's gaze. "Or are there other reasons?"
There's silence for a couple moments. Then, "Like what?"
Slade gives a small shrug. "That you might feel comfortable here, in a way. Not having to pretend you're something that you're not, at least around me." Dick only watches him, not offering a response or any real reaction, and Slade gives a small hum of sound, looking up through the window again. "When we get to that next planet, are you going to find some reason to not want to be there either?"
Dick shifts then, pulling away from his touch and straightening up, looking slightly on guard. "What are you asking?"
He turns his chair to face Dick a bit more directly. He takes a couple moments just to look at him, at the sweep of the eyeliner and the line of his neck, sloping into a shoulder. "You're useful to me," he admits, quietly. "You're not afraid of me or what I do, you don't need frequent direction, and you can handle yourself and stay out of my way when you need to. Also handy that a stray shot won't kill you." He gives a small curl of one side of his mouth, and a huff of amusement. "I'm not stupid enough to try and force you into what you don't want. But if you did want to stay… I might not be opposed to that."
"You… want me to stay?" Dick asks, staring up at him.
"It would be useful," is as far as Slade's willing to go. "If that's something you were interested in. It would probably be safer to stay with me, instead of trying to hide on a planet."
"As your slave?"
Slade huffs out an amused breath. "Has our relationship so far felt like that normal of a dynamic to you? Even legally, I don't own you. You don't have a valid registration."
Dick hesitates, watching him with a slight frown, clearly studying his expression and body language with quick flicks of his eyes. Slade holds it steadily, letting the boy think and come to his own conclusion, whatever that is. He thinks it will be agreement. The boy likes to be touched and appreciated, and hiding on a planet won't afford him any of that. Staying distant from anyone who might pose a threat doesn't leave room for casual touch or kindness. He'll be lonely; probably was lonely, back on that planet.
Slade isn't lonely, but he will admit that the company of someone who doesn't make constant demands on his time or attention is pleasant enough. Even books and whatever entertainment he can dredge up gets boring after awhile.
"Why don't you think about it?" he suggests, taking an entirely unnecessary glance at the console. "It's roughly two and a half weeks to the planet we're heading for, with a stop at a station along the way to get supplies. Plenty of time for you to consider if you might be interested. If not, you can leave whenever you like."
Dick stays still for another moment, but then gives a slow nod. "Alright. I will."
Slade echoes the nod. "Alright." He takes a look at the clothes Dick is still in, the bared skin and jewelry. "Why don't you get changed? I'd like to see what sort of combat training you have, if you're up for some sparring?"
Interest sharpens Dick's gaze, straightens his spine a little more. "With you?"
"Yeah," Slade drawls, lifting an eyebrow. "With me. Go on, boy; get into something more practical."
Dick smiles. "Yes, sir."
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