Archive of Our Own ^beta

Slade was awoken from gentle sleep by the feeling of something touching his wings. That was weird for several reasons, most of all being that he never slept in his dragon form, let alone around anyone else. But as he slowly became more awake, he started remembering the last few days.

He shot up, swinging his head around to locate his little tag along, finding the tiny drake, about the size of a horse, trying to tuck themself under one of his wings. The little drake looked up to him and blinked, on eye at a time. They were doing better, Slade could see, but they were still wobbly on their legs, unsteady on their feet. Their eyes were half-closed, unused to the slight bit of light that shone through into the crag Slade had found for them.

He stretched his long neck, gently sniffing the drake's face. The drake's fuzzy little feelers reached out and tickled his snout. They were built somewhat like Toothless from that one dragon movie his kids made him watch all the time, but without wings, and they had those feelers, and two blue fins down their chest and underside. Their scales are a deep blue-green, and their eyes are piercing silver, with dark sclera, making the pale grey of their irises stand out tenfold.

Slade usually wouldn't be so... soft? Tender? Whatever it is, it's unlike him. But he remembers seeing his draconic kin be slaughtered, a single man that brought the species to its knees, it's been years since he's encountered another dragon, and this one has to be young.

He tucks his wing over the little drake - Sardonyx, he'd started to mentally call them, knowing the little thing probably never got a draconic name and well damn Slade wants to share some of the culture he remembers from when he was a hatchling - and settles back down again. He can feel a little lump moving under his wing, and the little drake is wobbling over to his head.

Slade's roughly the size of your average house in this form, which was historically small for dragons, his own mother was the size of a mansion, but his uncle had been this size, so he figured that dragons had just been getting smaller over the years.

Sardonyx makes a little mewling sound, and Slade finds them by his head, settling down next to Slade's mouth, breathing out hot air indicative of fire, meanwhile the little drake's breath was cold, ice burning in their chest.

They mewl at him again, putting their stubby little paws up on his snout. They look at him in the same way Rose would when she was little, the only one of his children to inherit his draconic nature. His little winged lindwurm, who once looked at him like he was the sun. She didn't look at him like that anymore, but here was this young drake, with that same look on their face.

Slade used his neck to pull the drake up against his chest. He wrapped his wings around the little beast as they tried to gnaw at his legs - the poor thing was currently missing their teeth, Joker had pulled them all, and they'd yet to grow back, which just made the attempt pitiful and gummy. It's sweet, and it reminds Slade of when Rose was a hatchling.

He has to hold the little drake still, they're a wriggly little fucker, but he gets a good enough grip on them, wrapping his front legs around their body and holding them against his chest. Sardonyx stops struggling when Slade starts to groom him, running his rough tongue across the back of the drake's head.

The drake starts purring, and when Slade's satisfied, he curls up around the little drake and warms up internally to keep the drake comfy. The drake seems happy, settling down in the little nest of Slade's heating up scales. When Slade's sure the drake has drifted off, when his purrs turn to gentle snores, he finally allows his eye to fall shut and his drowsiness to overcome him.

The Joker's guiding him through the basement of the defunct asylum, on hand on his back, and Slade has to bite his tongue so he doesn't flame the inside of his helmet.

He's got a bad feeling. He's here to "guard one of your own," as Joker said. Until now, he thought he was one of the last dragons, him and his daughter. He remembers when there were more of them - of course, by the time he came around, they were mostly in hiding from centuries of hunting, their population wasn't exactly booming - but he also remembers when the Huntsman came around, he remembers how he barely got away with just a new scar over one of his nostrils. He was lucky that Huntsman thought he'd died.

Joker leads him to a large door, like a garage shutter, and gestures widely.

"Show your scales, for the little one," Joker says, and Slade can't miss the logic in it - besides, he's mastered his forms, he can shapeshift perfectly, and he made sure Rose could too. Joker would be a fool to try something against Slade when Slade's dragon form is almost the same height and length as the room they're in.

His fiery blood runs cold when the shutter slides open and he lays his single blue eye on the tiny battered body. He growls, rounding on Joker. If he could talk in that form, he would be asking what the clown did to put the little dragon in that state.

He pushes forward, leaning down to sniff the little dragon. They can barely lift their head, and gently, he licks the wound across their snout. He cranes his neck, turning his head to look at Joker.

"Since when did you get a heart?" The clown had the audacity to ask.

Since you brought a dragon into this, Slade thinks, and Joker doesn't even notice Slade begin to swing his tail. One of the spikes on his tail pierces straight through the clown's skull. He's almost disappointed that he doesn't have time to let the Joker suffer for his crime against Slade's people.

They're a drake, he can see, covered in scars and open wounds. Before Slade tries to move them, he licks their wounds, remembering his mother telling him their saliva had healing properties. He carefully turns the drake to get each wound, and only when he's sure he's got them all does he lift up the little drake and carry them out into the open air. Once outside the asylum, he spreads his wings and takes to the sky.

It takes embarrassingly long for him to realize that the drake was not a drake. Sardonyx is watching him groom his wings, and he whines. Slade stops gnawing at his wings, and he looks at the little drake, and finally his eye is drawn to the two long scars down the drake's side.

Oh.

He pulls the little dragon closer to him with one paw, and he starts to inspect the scars. He can only assume that the Joker took their wings as some sick joke. Cruelly, their tail fins are completely unmarred. If Joker hadn't wanted them to fly, taking the tail fins would've been easier and accomplished the same thing. No, taking the wings had been symbolic. Slade was once again wishing he could have drawn out the Joker's death.

He grooms the skin around the scars as a stand in for their wings themselves.

It's an interesting day when he wakes up and doesn't feel Sardonyx tucked away under his wing. He shoots up, panicking, and he starts to call for the little dragon with long howling roars.

And then, much to his suprise, he sees a human, toddling over from his blind side. They're hunched, with shaggy dark hair that had a shock of white in the front, and has scarred skin, pale as snow. They're wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, a shade that matches Slade's primary scale colour.

They pat his leg reassuringly, and say, "calm down, big guy, I just needed to stretch my flesh legs."

Slade was fuming, and shifted back to his human form. He grabs the tiny little figure by the jumpsuit and hoists them up so they're eye level with him.

"What the fuck was that about? You scared me half to death. Are you proud of yourself?"

Ah, shit, he was still in his full Deathstoke get-up, mask and all. The kid, because there's no way they were older than eighteen, looked terrified, and part of Slade was glad that the kid knew how he'd felt just before, but then the neglected parental side of him, a side of him he forgot he had, reared its loving head, and he took a moment to calm down, setting the kid down.

"Sorry, sorry," he apologised (who was he right now?), and he pulled off his helmet so the kid could see the earnest expression on his face, "I thought you'd been hurt or taken away or something bad like that. I overreacted, my bad, I'm sorry."

The kid narrowed their lifeless grey eyes.

"Deathstroke? When did you get a heart?" The kid asked.

"When I realized my family isn't the last of the dragons," he grumbled. "What's your name, kid?"

"Why do you care?"

"Because I'd like to know your human name so I don't have to keep calling you the dragon name I gave you."

The kid blinked.

"You gave me a name?"

"Well I couldn't just call call you little dragon, now could I? What's your name, kid? I know you already know my alias, but my real name is Slade."

"I know that," the kid scoffed. "Slade - Joseph - Wilson, Deathstroke, the Terminator, Deathstroke the Terminator. FBI most wanted, infamous mercanary, general asshole and bad parent."

Ouch. Well, it was true, he hadn't been the best for Grant and Joey, even before Joey's... incident. He'd tried a little harder for Rose when she came into his life, because Grant and Joey didn't need to be taught how to be humans, but Rose needed to learn how to be a dragon. In doing that, he learned he had to be there for Grant and Joey more, even if he had to be extremely careful about not giving his ex-wife a reason to take his remaining eye.

But then Grant... and then Joey... and he didn't really know how to process losing his kids like this. And here was a kid right here, a young dragon, not even close to the age Grant was, and Grant hadn't gotten the chance to be anything more. He could damn well be one of his own.

"Jason," he finally relents, "my name is Jason."

"Jason," Slade repeats. "It suits you. Come on Jason, let's go home."

He pulls Jason through the shift with him, and when they're both dragons again, he bundles the little artificial drake up in his front paws, holding him to his chest, as he stretched out his wings. He takes one more look to the kid, who meets his eye with that look he always gave him, and Slade takes to the sky once more.

The Knight was a menace, Slade had grown to accept. Once Jason had fully recovered and settled into their little thunder, he revealed to them his past, that he was born in Crime Alley, never taught how to be a dragon, never even knew which one of his parents he got his draconic nature, and had been adopted by Batman, thus leading to him becoming the second Robin.

He then went on to explain that the Joker had slaughtered a schoolfull of children, and Jason had had enough, turned off his tracker, and went to kill Joker. Needless to say, it didn't go well, and the Joker incapacitated him, drugged him, and kidnapped him, spiriting him away to Arkham Asylum.

He'd been down there for two years. He was fifteen years old. Slade really wanted to go back in time and make sure Joker suffered as Jason had before he died. Joker did what Slade considered the unspeakable to Jason, which really put in picture how fucked it had been for the little dragon.

And then, he said something Slade hadn't expected from him: "Bruce abandoned me. He didn't even look. How many times has he followed Joker into Arkham Asylum? Exactly, and the abandoned wing wasn't hard to find. He never looked. I hate him for it. I hate him so much. He didn't bother looking for me and then he immediately got a different Robin. He left me to die, with no care in the world. And I hate him, I hate him, I-" his voice cracked, and he descended into sobs. Slade let him get it out his system, awkwardly rubbing circles on the kid's back.

"I want him dead."

Slade jolted, the confession shocking him right to his core because he remembers hearing of the second Robin, a sarcastic little brat that danced around Batman's enemies and charmed half the rogues with how he backtalked to them. That same kid, a lifetime of abuse and hatred later, wanted the man who he once thought of as a father dead.

"Do you think that will help?" Slade asked earnestly. Jason's silent for a moment.

"Yes," he finally answers. "I want him dead, Slade, I want him to suffer, I want him to see that he can't save everyone, I want him to lose so thoroughly that he begs for mercy. I want to take Gotham from it and sink it into the damned swamp it was built on. I don't care what I have to do."

"You'll need a lot of hands."

"I will."

"And a lot of firepower."

"I will."

"And we'll need a good plan."

"We will- wait, we?"

Jason turns to look at him, and he's got that look on his face.

"You don't think we'll let you do this alone, do you?"

So now they had a militia, a pretty good one at that, training to face Gotham and the big bad Batman. Jason's new mercanary persona, the Arkham Knight, is a terrifying and formidable leader, one of the strongest fighters Slade's ever had the pleasure to train - he was more than proud on the day that the Knight won against Deathstroke in a spar.

The only issue was that the Knight lacked everything that kept Jason feral behaviour in line, so half of Slade's job was keeping the Knight on track. (Though it wasn't really a job, he'd refused to accept payment from his sort-of son, instead tucking it away for Jason's future, whatever he wanted to do. The militia didn't need to know that though.)

Another thing Slade had to admit, the Knight was a good boss, though he seemed cold (no pun intended), the ice-breather made sure his mercs were doing alright. He kept them all in line, but treated them with respect - aside from the beatings that came with training, but in that case the Knight's harshness was out of concern - and so they looked to him as a boss they could follow. He had to admire the Knight for being able to build such a relationship with his employees.

(Some of the mercs were talking about nominating him for some most amazing boss award. Slade doubted the militia would be counted as proper work by the award organisers, but he relayed it to Rose, who told the Knight. The little dragon had been horrified that doing the bare minimum of making sure his guys weren't on the verge of death counted towards him being a most amazing boss.)

Though, Slade did have his concerns when it came to the Knight, most of all that Jason was less Jason and more the Knight. He'd started refering to his helmet as his face too. He was clearly working through something, but the last time Slade had dared suggest a therapist, the kid had bitten him - and fuck, those teeth had grown in strong and sharp.

Slade sighed, carefully approaching the Knight from behind. He lets a low grumble reverberate from under his helmet to let Knight know he was approached. The Knight responds appropriately, his voice modulator distorting it further.

Slade checks to make sure no one's looking, then reaches over and jabbed the hidden button on the Knight's helmet that raises the faceplate. He looked at Slade, mortified, and Slade has a feeling that he's not lifted the faceplate in a few days. Slade rolled his eye, and before the Knight could object, he pulled the kid through the shift to dragon form with him.

Jason doesn't shift back, doesn't try to escape, just lets Slade wrap a paw around his chest and hold him close. He growls when Slade goes for the helmet - how he managed to get it so it would change forms with him Slade would love to know - but doesn't do anything when Slade pinches it between two talons and removes it.

Jason looks up, squinting at Slade unhappily, but he doesn't bother to partially shift his vocal chords - another thing Slade would like to know how he did it - to admonish his sort-of dad. In fact, when Slade starts to wash his face, Jason starts to purr, though he looks upset that the rumble was slipping out because he was probably trying to be in a huff.

It's endearing, and Slade barks out a laugh. The moment he stops washing Jason's face, the little dragon is on his back legs and leaning up to Slade's snout, his little feelers outstretched. They tickle his chin, and then Jason cranes his neck out and licks the little scar on Slade's nostril.

Slade curls up, tucking Jason safely into the middle of his usual sleeping position, where Jason's fully surrounded by Slade's warm scales and can be blanketed by one wing. He can feel Jason nosing and pawing around until he finds a comfortable spot in the creases of Slade's side, and when Jason's settled down, Slade lowers his wing over the little dragon.

There's a little face peaking out at him, eyes pleading, and Slade reaches his neck and bumps his snout against Jason's. The little dragon, satisfied, curls up proper with his paws over his head and his tail fins in front of his face. Slade fully covers him with his wing, before lowering his head and letting the little dragon's soft snores lull him to sleep.