Respawn and Relive
@thenightwolf51 who tagged me in this months ago, but I didn't know enough about Respawn to write something. I didn't forget! I just still haven't found much on him, so sorry if I get his character wrong.
They don't give him a name.
It's one of the first things he notices they do to dehumanize him. It's not like they see clones as humans- he's just a science experiment meant to keep the legacy of the League of Assassins alive, even at the cost of his life.
He is just there to be trained to follow commands, and if needed, he is spare parts for the Real Son. He is made from part of the same DNA as the Real Son, but that hardly matters to what should be his mother, as she does not feel anything for his biological father and thus feels nothing for the being created from the two DNAs.
He is the clone created by Slade Wilson- alias Deathstroke- and Talia al Ghul. She may not had a hand in his creation, as that was done by her father, but she had no issues using him.
Torment him. Rip him apart and put it back together just to see what happens.
She looks at him with the same gaze she would a sword. Valuating his worth by how well he can do in training, how healthy his organs are, and how he should be nothing but a loyal dog.
But he isn't. Not really.
If this was all he knew, maybe he would be the weapon they wanted, but he knows more. Remembers more. Yes, he doesn't have all his memories, but he has flashes- glimpses- of the life he had before the Leauge.
They would disapprove of the memories, which makes them all the more precious.
He can still clearly remember his mother- his real mother- a brilliant mind, his father's warm, solid hugs, and his sister's gentle eyes. He can recall his home's layout even if he can not remember the street or how far it was from his school. He can identify his two best friends' faces even if their names slip through his fingers like falling sand.
He also remembers his first name and the initials of his last.
Danny F.
He thinks he died before, waking up as the clone. He remembers standing inside a metallic cave- or a large hole in a machine?- and being electrocuted. He remembers the screams, the flashes of light, the pain, and even a glimpse of his best friends' horrified faces but not much else.
The next clear memory is looking in a mirror to see white hair and green eyes. The same combination he now sports as the Leguage's weapon and spare organ farm.
The memories after that are filled with harsh training, even more, brutal torture, and the reintegration that should his half-brother ever need them, he would give up his organs for the Real Son.
He is, after all, Damian Wayne's gift. He was created to harvest his super healing for the boy's body parts. Danny thinks he hates him, but he's not sure he can remember what hate is supposed to feel like.
He does remember what love is supposed to feel like.
Sometimes, when all he can do is lay in his cell, body aching as they test his healing factor beyond its limits- they cut off his left arm once, just to watch the tissue slowly regrow- he lets himself drown in his old memories, in the few dream-like sequences.
Some make sense, others don't. For some, he's a black-haired blue-eyed boy, and for others, he has white hair and green eyes.
Danny is sitting in class, eagerly taking notes on a topic he has been having trouble with-
-He's playing fetch with a small green dog, throwing snowballs into the air, flying after the excited creature-
-Danny is playing video games with a goth girl and a nerdy boy, laughing so hard he can't see the buttons on the control correctly-
-He's flaying alongside his sister, aiming his outstretched arm at a figure in the sky, shooting a green ray at the same time she does down below in her mechanical armor-
-Danny is helping his mother mix the dough for the cookies. He is swaying his hips to the song she has on the speaker. She's in her teal jumpsuit, having come up from the lab to do mother/son cookies as they do every Thanksgiving-
-He's testing the latest blaster with his father. They wanted to see if the auto-aiming feature was interfering with his flying. He flickers the white bangs out of his eyes as his father cheers from the roof while he takes aim-
Yes, Danny knows what love is supposed to feel like, even if he can't remember all the details, even if his full name evades him. He will escape the Leauage of Assiagins and find that feeling again.
Maybe he'll track down his biological father. Deathstroke does not know a clone was created by him, so maybe he will be willing to take him in.
It takes months, but eventually, they tell him Damian Wayne needs a kidney. Why? They don't say, but Talia knows her Beloved will donate his own, and she won't stand for it. She orders him to fulfill his duty as guards drag him to the operation table.
He grits his teeth as they strap him down and prep for surgery. Thankfully, they don't apply any anesthetics- they don't deem him worthy of a painless operation- so he has a clear head for escape.
The surgery has a thirty-window opening with no guards around. He waits until they are about to begin when he taps into the powers his memories tell him. He makes his limbs intangible, slipping through the restraints with great effort.
The medics only have a few seconds to be shocked before he is upon them. They lay in a pool of blood- not dead. His chest flares up in pain if he kills, so he tries to avoid it as much as his environment allows- as he flies through the walls. He has been planning here, so he knows what to do. Turning invisible, he passes under a helicopter scheduled for a month supply run.
By doing so, he does not appear on any radars using the large cargo as camouflage. Danny drops into the ocean as the alarms go off on that wrenched island, allowing his whole body to turn tangible. This way, the water does not slow him down as he flies deeper and deeper down, praying that they won't be able to track him the further he goes. When he gets to the part where everything is too dark to see- he picks a direction from where he came and hits top speed.
Traveling three hundred miles an hour, Danny escapes the League of Assians with all his organs intact, so take that Damian Wayne.
He has no real destination in mind but maybe, he can find the little town of his memories or maybe he'll find Deathstroke.
Maybe he will discover what the F. in his name stands for.
For now, he'll work under the name Respawn because that's a name he picked out for himself, and he'll do what he wants. He's no one's tool any longer.
(Miles away Tim Drake squints at the small dot darting from Nanda Parbat on his spying map. He's not sure what kind of misle Ra's just shot, but it's traveling fast, and he feels like he needs to phone this in.
"Hey B, we may have an issue." )
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"The reaper had a scythe. I have a combine harvester."
Arlach tapped his fingers nervously. He’d have gladly given up his life for the liberation of his people. A combine harvester (even a deluxe AI driven model) was a pittance compared to that. Still, he didn’t really understand what he was hearing.
“I uh… heard you’re hooking up my strawberry picker to an air defense cannon?”
The human technician assembling the gun held up a hand, finishing up some last tweaking of the wire harness. He touched two wires together carefully and swore when a shower of sparks shot out of the contact.
Set back, but not defeated, the man paused his task to answer the farmer’s question.
“See, you’re looking at this wrong. It’s an AI harvester, and it works great for strawberries, but machines don’t really see ‘strawberries’. They rate strawberry-ness. There’s a lot of ways to manage that, but it looks for a generally pointed shape, some seeds, and that nice red color. So your run of the mill strawberry generally receives an almost perfect strawberry-ness score, but something like this-”
His hands dug through all the pockets of his work suit before they finally found their target. He fished out what had been a standard ferroslug before it was painted bright red and smattered with a handful of black dots. He took a moment to admire it himself before tossing it to the farmer and continuing.
“Well, it’s not a strawberry, but it scores as one. Well enough that the machine gets positive feedback from its alignment unit every time it puts one of these babies where it's supposed to go.”
Arlach stared at him blankly.
“So what, you’re convincing it to fill a cargo container up with painted bullets?”
The technician grinned.
“There's no a limit to how fast it's allowed to fill that container up. At no point did the alignment protocol even consider that it'd be capable of throwing a 'strawberry' at mach nine. And the cargohold is important, but the rocket its attached to is more so. You know what looks a lot like a surface to orbit rocket?"
Arlach’s brain clicked.
“The hypersonic missiles they've been throwing at us.”
The grin widened. Arlach himself felt slightly awed to have found the connection.
“Will it work?”
The human nodded.
“It’s damn near the only thing that can. To shoot down something going that fast, that low, you either need a dummy missile that can brute force outrun it, or enough computing power to hack a station. The alliance is too chickenshit to send over their actual military AI's, but these myopic-type digibrains are supposed to be safe for civilian use because the idea of convincing your tractor that a bullet is a strawberry and a WMD is a cargo loader was a little too creative for the morons over at John Deere Galactic. And if that digibrain just so happens to function near the exoflop level, they're going to have a hard time sneaking anything larger than a bee through this airspace.”
The alien’s hands went over its crest as its mind reeled.
“They're not the only ones who would never think of this. It's brilliant. I never would've considered it.”
The tech shrugged good naturedly and went back to retrieve the two ends of wire that he’d dropped earlier.
“Eh, it's not coming from nowhere. There’s something of a human tradition about using farm equipment for war. I'm just lucky to be part of the next evolution in this. The reaper himself only used a scythe. Now I get to use a combine harvester.”
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