Endless Legacy Ch. 37 (DC Comics) (Patreon)

A/N: All's well that ends well amirite?

-x-X-x-

There’s an argument to be made for trying to restore Slade Wilson to life. Deathstroke is a very dangerous man, a mercenary said to have almost no peers. He’s got such a legendary reputation that even Lucien had heard of him after all. The man’s feats involve going toe to toe with some of the strongest people on the planet at times and still managing to come away alive if not always unscathed.

Having a man like that on Lucien’s side would certainly be a massive boon. Having Deathstroke owe him both his life and freedom would give Lucien an excellent tool…

… If the mercenary could actually be trusted to follow through on such a life debt. And there was the rub of it. Would Slade actually recognize what Lucien had done for him in not just bringing him back to life but also freeing him from Trigon’s influence? Or would he, mercenary that he was, just chalk it up to a run of good fortune and bail immediately?

If there were a contract involved, Lucien might have believed there to be a higher chance of entangling Deathstroke in his affairs but seeing as he’d had to lie to the undead mercenary just to get his hand on him, that wasn’t in play.

And more than that, the risk of trying to restore Slade to life while also cutting off Trigon’s influence was… substantial. He might draw the Demon Lord’s attention and ire, and then it was possible that all hell would break loose. Literally.

No, in the end… Lucien didn’t really have any other option. The best choice he could make was the path of least resistance.

It doesn’t take longer than a few seconds to prepare. He’s already spread his senses throughout Slade’s body, though now he does so more completely, until he’s literally feeling every cell in the walking, talking corpse in front of him.

“Well? I don’t feel any-!”

Just as Deathstroke begins to get impatient again, Lucien acts. The results are immediate. One moment, the undead mercenary is standing there, all mummified and rotting flesh… the next he’s gone. Lucien destroys every ounce of Slade’s body, completely annihilating it and turning it into so much dust. There’s a poof inside of his armor, and then the now empty armor crumples to Warehouse Floor.

That doesn’t mean it’s done, however. Even as Lucien’s hand is suddenly free, no longer having to hold onto the undead mercenary’s grotesque, bony, rotted fingers, he’s already moving forward. Letting go of a still-paralyzed Terra, Lucien brings both hands forward and for the first time summons the purple energy that Blackfire is so known for. They burn brightly just as the center of the empty armor begins to glow red… which is when Lucien brings his blazing fists down on top of the kernel of Trigon’s influence that remains behind.

His hands go right through the empty armor, only to encounter resistance for a moment. He can almost feel something malevolent reaching out, trying to fight back… but it all happens just quickly enough that he manages to succeed. The red gem that apparently represented Trigon’s hold over Slade Wilson’s soul shatters under Lucien’s fists and the ‘Blackbolts’ covering his hands.

After a moment of still glowing ominously, the shards of that red gem dim and turn dull and dark. At the same time, the glowing red symbol on the ‘forehead’ of a now empty mask fades away as well. He’s done it. It’s over. Or at least, he hopes it is. He’s not sure how exactly Trigon managed to possess Raven, but he knows for a fact that the Demon Lord wouldn’t have wasted so much energy on Deathstroke if he wasn’t integral to the plan.

With this, Lucien could hope that things would settle down… at least for now. Of course, just because he’d headed off a potential apocalypse, as well as a great amount of personal loss… didn’t mean he was fully out of the woods yet. First thing first, Lucien turns to regard Terra, who is staring at him with wide blue eyes.

To be fair, the blonde can’t do anything else. Her body is frozen in place, tense as can be due to his powers locking her up. She’s trembling, trying to move or speak or anything, but thanks to Lucien all she can do is breathe in and out through her nose. Her lungs expanding and collapsing over and over again are all the wiggle room he’s given her.

Stepping back up to Terra, Lucien sighs and tries to give her his most comforting smile.

“It’s alright, Terra. It’s over. I’m going to free you now, alright? All I ask is that you don’t attack me until I have a chance to explain myself. Is that understood?”

“M-Mm!”

That’s about the best he can expect, he supposes. Still, Lucien isn’t dumb enough to just assume that she’ll hear him out. That’s why, even as he reaches out to remove the paralysis, he also prepares himself in another way. And good that he does too, because the moment Terra is able to, she whips her arms, using her powers to try and lift up the concrete around him so she can capture him in it.

At the same time, she spins and tries to make a break for it. Of course, Lucien is on edge so he’s able to easily counter her powers, stopping the slabs of concrete from encasing him while at the same time liquefying the concrete under Terra’s feet so she begins to sink into it like quicksand. The geokinetic yelps, trying in a panic and also in vain to pull herself free, even as Lucien sighs.

“Terra… use your powers.”

Stopping, the blonde blinks, looks down at her legs encased in concrete, and after a long silent moment of embarrassment, frees herself from the trap. Fortunately, she doesn’t try to run again. Instead, she cautiously turns to face him, seemingly happy to have put some space between them.

“Y-You…”

“I asked for the chance to explain myself, didn’t I? That’s all I want, Terra. Slade Wilson was working for an extradimensional Demon Lord. I dare not say his name lest it draws his attention onto us even more than it probably already is.”

Terra gapes, looking to Slade’s empty armor and then back to Lucien. Disbelief and incredulity are writ large across her face, which honestly… it’s a little frustrating.

“Terra, you saw his hand. You saw the bones; I know you did. Slade Wilson was literally already dead. I didn’t kill him… I didn’t have to. I just put down a zombie who had sold his soul to a Demon Lord.”

Swallowing thickly, Terra evaluates his words, as well as what she saw. In the end, she squirms for a moment before responding.

“It just… seems ridiculous.”

Lucien raises an eyebrow at that.

“Ridiculous? Terra, you realize you’re on a team with a green-skinned shapeshifter, an alien princess, and a literal half-demon, while you yourself somehow have the ability to manipulate earth… right? And to top it all off, you all let yourself be led by a young man with no powers, just a whole lot of physical training. If you want to talk about ridiculous…”

Terra winces at that, looking away for a second as Lucien scores some very solid points. At least in his opinion anyways. Finally, she looks back at him, frowning.

“But you said you and Slade had the same boss!”

Seriously? Lucien resists the urge to facepalm, even as he plasters a smile on his face.

“I lied, Terra. Sorry about that, but it had to be done. Slade and his Demon Lord boss were planning to invade our world and I had to stop them, no matter what it cost. In comparison to losing everyone, lying to you in order to get us here so I could touch Slade was… well, it was a no brainer.”

Mulling over Lucien’s words, Terra bites her lower lip.

“Y-You… are you going to tell the Titans about Slade? About what I was doing for him?”

He’d already thought about this. The right thing to do would be to tell on Terra. That would be the heroic thing to do. But it was never his intention to become a hero. Truthfully, looking back on his time with the Titans, he really had let himself get caught up in their pace way too much. This reset… it was good for more than just a chance to stop the apocalypse and save their lives. It was a way for him to get back on task.

“No, Terra. I’m not going to tell them anything.”

Terra’s big blue eyes widen at that.

“Wha- why not?!”

And then she suddenly freezes in place, clearly coming to her own conclusion.

“Are you… planning on making me work for you instead? You and… your father?”

And there it was. To be fair, it wasn’t a bad assumption. Even if it was completely wrong. Lucien shakes his head.

“I doubt my father even knows who you are, Terra. He certainly doesn’t know who Remedy is or what I’ve been up to recently.”

Terra gapes, mouth opening and closing like a goldfish for a few seconds.

“W-What? How is that possible?”

Lucien shrugs his shoulders.

“If Lex Luthor knew what I was capable of, if he knew what I’d been up to, he would have sent teams of highly trained mercenaries to capture me and spirit me away to a research lab for testing and experimentation, Terra.”

His deadpan delivery causes Terra to blanch in response, the blonde blinking rapidly now. To really drive his point home, Lucien lets her in on another tidbit of his personal life.

“He’s literally dragged me to a laboratory every year on my birthday since I was little to test me and see how I’m developing, Terra. Obviously I’ve hidden my powers from him, I’d be an idiot not to.”

He leaves out the part about the tests having more to do with his sickliness than anything else. Terra doesn’t need to know that part. In the end… she finally seems to relax, the tension bleeding out of her as Lucien shares some tidbits about his awful relationship with his father.

“O-Oh. I… I guess… you saved the world just now, didn’t you?”

Grinning crookedly, Lucien shakes his head.

“No Terra. WE saved the world.”

That gets an owlish, wide-eyed look from the blue-eyed blonde. Gesturing around them, Lucien chuckles.

“Could I have found this place without you? Maybe. But could I have tricked Slade into letting me ‘help’ him without you? Doubtful. I know you didn’t know what was going on, but this… you deserve plenty of credit for helping to stop this particular demon invasion.”

As expected, hearing that from him does wonders for Terra’s self-esteem. She ducks her head and then tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear self-consciously.

“Do you… do you really think so?”

“I know so. Like I told you, Slade was already dead. He never would have believed I could bring him back to life without a proper ‘sacrifice’. That was where you came in. He was all too ready to give you up if it got him his life back.”

That might have been the wrong thing to say, because Terra shuts down a bit at the reminder that her ‘Mentor’ had been ready and willing to kill her. Still, she needed to know. She needed to understand that Slade wasn’t just a bad guy, he was a bad guy who would have turned on her at the drop of a hat and likely not even considered it a real betrayal. Judging by the look on her face as she processes his words, Lucien thinks she gets the idea.

“Would you… could you have done it? Used my life force to bring him back? Sacrificed me to resurrect him?”

Lucien scoffs, lying his ass off immediately.

“Of course not. My powers don’t work like that, Terra. You saw what happened when I tried to heal Slade. He turned to dust because he was already dead so there was nothing to heal. In this case, my power thought that the best way to ‘heal’ him was to help his body finish decomposing entirely, bones and all.”

Terra eats that right up, nodding along with wide eyes. The fact that she immediately believes him is nice, judging by the relief that wracks her frame. Though of course, that doesn’t mean the questions are done.

“What… how DO your powers work, Remedy? Because… w-well…”

Lucien smiles crookedly.

“Because I used Blackfire’s powers to destroy the gem, and I used your powers to trap your feet?”

Terra nods hesitantly.

“Healing is my base power. But when I heal people… I get copies of their powers as well.”

He can’t exactly put the cat back in the bag now that she’d seen what he was capable of. So better that she think she knew something everyone else didn’t, but without him revealing his true nature or the depths of his actual powers. Slowly, Terra nods again. She doesn’t raise a complaint, so he assumes she considers the tradeoff fair enough. Healing for powers isn’t so bad, really. Then, she looks back over at Slade’s empty armor.

“What… what now?”

Considering it for a moment, Lucien reaches out and twists his hand. The concrete under Deathstroke’s ‘remains’ liquefies and swallows the armor whole. Sending it down beneath the foundations of the warehouse, he nods to Terra.

“No one ever has to know we were here. So long as neither of us say anything, all of this can stay between us.”

Biting her lower lip again, Terra nods rapidly. It’s obvious she very much likes the sound of that. This time around, he’s preempted her guilty conscience. The likelihood of her ever exposing herself to the Titans had dropped to nearly zero now. After all, it was one thing to be spying on them for Slade. It was another entirely to find out she’d been spying on them for an undead Slade Wilson backed by an extradimensional Demon Lord.

Ultimately, with the problem resolved and Trigon’s plans derailed for the time being, Terra had no reason to ever tattle on herself… and therefore no reason to tattle on him either. All was well that ended well… at least where the apocalypse was concerned.

There was still the other issue as well. Blackfire and her memory loss. Lucien was still a little annoyed about the progress he’d lost on that subject. Sure, it hadn’t gone as well as he’d hoped what with Raven’s interruption and then the whole apocalypse kicking off just as he and Blackfire were coming to an understanding. But… oh. Now there was an idea.

As he and Terra leave the warehouse behind, with Lucien carrying the blonde back to Titan Tower, he realizes he doesn’t necessarily have to go through all of that again.

First and foremost, he won’t give Blackfire her memories back anywhere in the tower itself, to avoid Raven immediately detecting the change. But secondly… he doesn’t have to just give Blackfire her memories back. He could also give her his memories as well. Not the memories of Death of course, but he could show her what had happened in the future that never was.

It would involve bringing her further into his confidence, of course. She would find out about his immortality. But considering she was supposed to be his prime ‘henchwoman’, maybe that was alright. Maybe learning that he could turn back the clock when things went wrong would tie her all the closer to him.