Slade and the Funny Story

This, ladies and gentlemen is what happen when you try writing an introduction to something and it takes over your mind. Don't let it happen to you.

There's an anecdote somewhere in Slade Wilson's life that he's sure is very funny to most people. When he was around eighteen, he was shipped of to a your of duty in Laos, mainly to make sure the Cong presence was being properly perforated. Slade, who most people knew as "Lieutenant" or, (after five PM and happy hour at the Lantern) "Dickhead", was a very driven individual who didn't so much socialize with others as privately count the number of ways to kill them.

So the whole affair of Emily Lenore came as a bit of a surprise. She was a well-bred and seemingly intelligent reporter, a tactful combination of sharp angles and supple curves barely hidden by faded khaki and an old-fashioned vest for keeping pencils and breath mints in. She had come representing a newspaper that had printed a prideful and semi-nationalistic send of to the boys in green when they went to do their job in that god forsaken country full of commies. It was a few years later and now she was here asking why these barbarous soldiers were propagating bloodshed and hate in a place we didn't belong in, and just how bad a criminal did each man think he was, anyway?

She went from barrack to barrack, asking the men who hadn't had pieces of them ripped off that day very clever and very loaded questions, and left with the parts she would use underlined in red ink. Then she made the tragic mistake of entering Slade's room.

She looked at him with the same half-lidded glare she used on everybody to assure them that, yes, she was smarter than them. Slade, unlike his fellow soldiers, looked right back at her, revealing a flinty gaze that, unlike his fellow soldiers, wasn't dulled by high school football or a keg too many of beer. She and him had a long conversation, eating up time that would have been used on the soldiers she hadn't talked to yet. She jabbed and thrusted with the most innocent-sounding, poison-laced words she could find, and he responded in kind, never using the words "murder", "hate", "Nixon" or even "Charlie" in way that were of any use to her.

Then Slade said something to her about how her father's combination of patriotism and alcohol had made her suspicious of anything with a flag, which she wasn't even aware of, and then he mixed a drink of his own creation, which he called "Victory", from his mini-bar, and began reciting poetry he had memorized that made her feel proud and ashamed all at once, and them they had sex about five times, which required her to leave in a rush, her shirt on backwards, as her helicopter took off.

The article was replaced by something about the fact that the average soldier was ten times better that the average politician.

Over the course of Slade's mission, Emily kept returning, kept acting very smart, kept having sex with Slade, and kept writing things that had nothing to do with what she had come there to write about.

Eventually the bureaucrats won out and America lost its first war, and Slade had to go back to life that involved less killing and more promotions for things that he found boring. Somewhere in that time, Emily managed to find him and decided it would be a very feminist thing to insist they start a relationship, and Slade agreed if for no other reason than nobody else even tried to be smart, and she was passable even if it was only pretending.

They carried on for a respectable amount of time, she always rushing off to her job and pretending she was revolutionizing the world by saying Mao Zedong was a bad man and that the Beatles were good men, and he refining the art of getting a bullet to where you wanted it to go and how to do the same job better than the hunk of lead even could.

Eventually, Emily noticed that Slade didn't argue with her not because of her staggering brilliance, but because he didn't give a damn. It might have been after she said she'd written an expose on Carter administration and he pointed out that one of her facts was wrong, something he'd never done before. She pieced together, after only three days, that there were several glaring issues in her articles, mostly owing to lack of sleep, and he'd never pointed them out, even though he could've.

She yelled at him one night, saying e treated her like a piece of meat and he didn't respect her, all of which Slade reacted to in a manner of having a record of pre-existing facts read to him in court. She slapped him a few times, which didn't hurt anything except her fingers, and ran out screaming that he wasn't better than her.

A few years later, Slade got kicked out of the military for doing something very stupid and tactical to a commanding officer, and did not have the financial fortitude to get any plans off the ground outside of getting drunk. It was in a bar, after his fifth G&G, that Emily spotted him from across the room and strutted up to him in her bob-cut and green bomber jacket that he supposed was ironic. She laughed right in his ear and cackled "Oh, how the mighty have fallen", and than pulled up the stool next to him and started talking about how wonderful life had been for her, how she nearly won the Pulitzer twice, had alerted the worlds to the evils of a place called Corto Malteze, and was now next in line to be EIC of a very respected news magazine.

Then she asked him in sincere tones if he thought she'd been right all those years ago. She asked him "So am I better than you?"

Slade thought about it for ten seconds exactly.

Then he broke Emily's neck with one hand, an easy twist of the wrist.

He picked her up on his shoulder in a way that looked exactly like a drunk person being walked out by a friend.

He threw her body on a stack of garbage bags in an alley with nobody looking, and then drove home thinking of a Swiss bank account he could unfreeze.

The next day, there was an article in the paper about an obscure writer who had been found dead and a little rat-eaten. There was a smaller article in the magazine about how one of the staff had been raped and mugged.

There was no national day of mourning.

Years later, Slade bent two superheroes to his will, terrorized and overran a city, became a name whispered among criminal and crime fighter alike, and returned from the dead by beating the devil to a pulp wit ha flaming axe made of hellfire and rage.

Slade Wilson was sure someone found this funny.

He himself laughed about it to this day.