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Life comes back all at once, a wretched burning thing forcing its way back into the world. Fire in lungs struggling to fill again; the searing itch of flesh as it knits back together. Neurons and matter and connections explode back into function, dragging consciousness with it.
His senses sharpen, that constant underwhelming dullness of a quiet peaceful world settling back in with a kind of agony that lingers. It sits in that spot under his ribs, inside his soul that’s been hollowed out just for it. He blinks at the soft rays of light through the branches, clenches the pistol in his hand. His ears are still ringing, and he separates it from the sharp tone of the current burner.
Hair pulls when he sits up entirely, caught in the bark and coagulated matter of his own skull spattered across the stump. It’s a different kind of pain, something sharp and attention seeking and not enough. The phone’s ring stops and starts again, insistent.
He shoves three fingers in his mouth; gags around them and the slimy feeling as he scrapes out flesh that hadn’t been attached after the trauma, never reconnected with the rest of his tissue. He scrapes at the flesh, bone fragments, chin and teeth, and the migrated fluids of his skull mixed into the mess as he drags it all out. His phone stops ringing and he breathes in, that burning in his lungs hitting a peak and he doubles forward on a cough that turns into dry heaving.
What a mess.
The pistol gets shoved back into its holster. He combs the brain matter and bits of skull from his hair. The momentary bliss of that empty place he’d been lingers, it always does, like some kind of high. His mind fights the bodies rush of endorphins as it heals, ecstatic to be alive.
The dullness of the world is broken up by footsteps in the underbrush. Purposeful in warning. Riley shatters the quiet, cuts through the ringing in his ears with words and meaning and something but all he catches is, “-Slade.” He turns in a bit of a daze, and Riley repeats himself, “are you done, Slade?”
He supposes he is, so he gets up, meets Riley head on. The red lenses don’t block Slade’s sight and the pinched look to Riley’s eyes registers somewhere, but more pressingly, “we have a job?”
There’s a pause, too long, and then a sigh. “Yeah, if you could answer your phone I could have told you an hour ago.” His eyes rake over Slade’s face and chest, distaste tainting his voice, “I guess you were occupied.”
Slade just nods, starts walking back toward where he left his car. There’s a second car next to his own, and he feels an undercurrent of amusement at that. Riley gets into the driver’s seat of Slade’s car, and Slade doesn’t argue it. They leave the stolen vehicle behind. It’ll be an interesting trail to follow for whoever has to investigate it. Stolen car, two tracks into the forest, brain and meat all over, two tracks back out.
The job is easy, really. They’re being paid to execute an American POW in Federation custody. He knows too much, and he can’t be allowed to live. The Americans can’t find him, they aren’t even sure he’s alive, but they’re paying a lot of money for Ghost and Deathstroke to ensure that he isn’t anyway. It’s hush hush in a way that screams of internal politics at play. Slade is used to being a pawn, a very well-paid pawn.
While Riley fills him in on the details, he’s distracted. Eye’s lingering on the back of Slade’s head and he fights off the desire to make Riley stop looking at him. Riley keeps talking though, goes over the details while Slade scrubs blood from his armor.
He’s not really sure why Riley lingers. Or why he lets him. It’d been a few months, the man is free to go. Hell, Slade had tried. That first week Riley had followed Slade south into Guatemala, he’d drugged the man and left him in an alley and doubled back that night into Mexico. Riley was back though, angry, shaky, but there knocking on the door of his safehouse within 48 hours anyway. The man is relentless. Slade doesn’t know what he wants from him.
It’d been a lot of jobs. A blur of them back to back to *back to back,* and Slade-
He broke contract.
Not the first time, but by far the most impulsive. No plan, no thought, just a red bloody writhing need sparked and let run its course. An excitement, a desire. Slade cuts his way through men all the time, but it’d not been satisfying in a long time either. When Riley had stumbled from his shackles, dropped to his hands and knees to stare into the blood of his torturers, Slade thinks something had felt that spark of satisfaction. Just a blip in the timeline of jobs. Riley had followed, Slade hadn’t even known he could walk, let alone track and follow Slade, but he had.
Now he’s just there, a constant presence at Slade’s back, inviting himself into Slade’s business. It makes the ache left by Wintergreen rear its head and Slade wants… something. Wants Riley gone above all.
Riley shuts up when Slade finally strips bare and slams the bathroom door shut between them.