Who am I? The answer to that question is both very simple and very complicated at the same time. Simple version first: I'm Shado. Or, rather, I am the woman on whom the character 'Shado' was based. Shado is not my actual name. None of the names you know from that television show are the real names. But you'll be more comfortable if I use those names, so I'll use Slade, Oliver, etc.

Obviously I am alive, but that's not the only difference. That's where it gets complicated. I want to set the record straight about a number of things, and this is how I've chosen to do it.

Imagine that you're a woman stranded on an island with two men. One of them is still wet behind the ears, barely knows the rudiments of self-defense and combat, dropped out of several colleges, has no more meat on him than you'd find at the end of a fork, and he was sleeping with his girlfriend's sister. He has never had to work a single day in his life. He can't hunt. He can't cook. He can't even clean his own kills.

Okay, he is kind of pretty and he's young, but still, he needs babysitting or he does things like eat strange berries off a bush—berries even the birds won't touch—without wondering why. He spent the night being sick in both directions, by the way, and groaning in agony. No, that didn't make it on the TV show. Wonder why not, huh? He is also firmly convinced the world revolves around him.

Then there is the other man. Granted, he is older, but he's still in his prime. He knows how to fight, how to survive, how to hunt, and he has years of experience under his belt. Ex-military, special services—so what if he never went to college? He's been too busy. His biceps are so big you couldn't get both hands around them, and his voice is like smoke and gravel.

So, which of these men would you choose, if you were to pick one? Please. The first time Slade and I grappled I made up my mind—with Oliver off to the side whining that, yeah, Slade and I were badass, now pay attention to him.

Of course, there was a downside. Slade was married, out in the Real World, and had a son with special needs. Joey is autistic, you see. But that was out there in the Real World, where Oliver was rich and I was a premed student. The island was not the world. It was Purgatory.

So for several weeks Slade and I sort of carefully skirted around our attraction to each other, while Oliver, who was kind of oblivious, tried courting me himself. Don't get me wrong, I liked him well enough, kind of like a kid brother, but nothing more than that. He wasn't in love with me, either—not really. I was just there, and I was the right age and the right shape with a pretty enough face, and he was a horny young guy who had never been denied anything he wanted before. So when he realized I had chosen Slade, he was inclined to sulk and pout. He made more out of his attraction to me than there really was.

But how did I survive that fateful moment when what's-his-face—Ivor? had a gun at my head and was telling Oliver to choose? Were you not paying attention to the fact that, hello, I am a fighter? A better fighter than Oliver, to say the least, since I helped train him. Plus I'm not exactly a wilting flower who has to be protected. I mean, at least the show established that. I kicked his legs out from under him, grappled with him for the gun, and he got shot. In the gut, as it so happens. He died of peritonitis and septicemia.

So what caused the breach between Oliver and Slade, if it wasn't my death?

I'm not going to tell you. Why not? Because you won't believe it. You'll think I'm badmouthing Oliver, making him the villain, because you know him as the hero, the good guy. And he's not a bad guy, deep down. He's not the deepest guy in the world or the smartest, and people are capable of making all sorts of decisions for all sorts of reasons. He made a decision that he didn't think through. It happened to leave Slade and me in the lurch, and Slade did not take it well. Mirakuru is real, and it does cause mood swings and irritability, but it's nothing like as bad as they made it out to be and there is no antidote for it.

So why did I disappear from the story, since I'm not dead?

I had my reasons. When we got back to the Real World, I told Slade that was it. He had a wife, he had a son, I had a career to think of. It was time to get back to our lives. I regretted nothing that happened between us, but we couldn't see each other again. No, not even if he got a divorce. I wasn't going to be the cause of it. But of course I wanted to say good bye properly, and that meant a hotel with an actual bed and a pack of condoms.

Although we had done many things to make each other happy on the island, we had done nothing that could result in a baby. If you don't know what those things might be, you have the internet. There was no contraception available. If I got pregnant, giving birth there would practically be a death sentence. But since we were back in civilization, I bought a pack of Trojans, and not until the next morning did I realize that although the box said 'Trojans', the individual wrappers said 'Trojens'. They were some off-brand in counterfeit wrappings, leaky as a sieve, and whatever that gel was that was in them, it wasn't spermicidal.

I didn't tell Slade. I was being good. I was doing the right thing. I was sending him home to his wife and his son. I was doing these things because I loved him.

So it came as no surprise a few weeks later when my breasts started getting tender and swelling up, and my stomach was iffy in the mornings. Not everybody actually throws up every morning—that's only on sitcoms. My periods were always like clockwork, and I'd missed two.

I could have gotten an abortion. But I didn't. I'd lost my father, my mother died years before, all I had in the way of family was a handful of distant cousins scattered through China and California—except for the one who was floating around somewhere under my heart. And whatever else one might say about it—that baby was conceived in love. I wanted it.

I named her Rose. It was Slade's mother's name. I wanted her to have something of his.

At that time, I had gone to some trouble to disappear—I had some money, and so I bought myself a new identity. But money runs out, especially when you're a single mother. I saw that Oliver had rejoined society, and so I wrote an account of our time on the island and sent it to him, along with a publishing contract in which I would sell him all rights to it, in every possible shape and form, for one-twentieth of his current gross worth. My father's life, the teaching Oliver got from both of us, which was to save his life—that was worth one-twentieth of his life, surely. I thought that was fair.

The contract made it a legal transaction and not blackmail, you see. If I broke the agreement, he could sue me. The money was to go to a numbered Swiss bank account.

But money always leaves a trail. Oliver's IT specialist had me the moment I transferred the money, even though I did it through a third party and went through several banks. Then when Slade showed up in Starling City, Oliver gave up the information to him.

So one fine day in late spring, when I was still in pajamas and hadn't showered yet, although it was one in the afternoon, with breast milk staining my top and fresh baby spit-up in my hair—someone rang my doorbell. I answered it with Rose still on my shoulder. I had only just burped her, and of course she missed the towel when she spit up.

It was Slade. We said, simultaneously, "What happened?", because the last time I'd seen him, he had two eyes and I did not have a Mini-Him—Rose looks a lot like her daddy.

"You better come in," I said. He nodded, and stepped past me into the living room. He had an envelope in his hand.

"I'm divorced," he said. "Got the papers right here." He brandished the envelope. "Nothing to do with you. Addie met someone else herself—I was missing for years, after all. He'd moved in. This happened when I let myself in," he said, indicating his eye. "They thought I was an intruder breaking in. I ought to have called first, let her know, but…" he shrugged, "I didn't want the fuss. There was plenty of fuss anyway, as it happened. Joey—he doesn't know me anymore. They have him in this program for autistic kids—he's making some progress, but he needs for things to be routine and stable. Between that and Addie's new man—I think he's a fortune hunter, but it's her life—there wasn't a place there for me anymore."

"Yes." I said.

"Yes, what?" he asked, which was sensible enough, because he hadn't asked a question.

"Yes. Everything yes. Yes, this is my baby. Our baby. Yes, I love you. Yes, there's a place for you here, if you want it. Everything yes."

He smiled, and it was a smile with some rue and regret in it. "Can I?" he asked, pointing to Rose.

Well, he had done this before, so I passed her to him, and he held her just the way he should, with support for her neck and head. She squinched her eyes at him, grabbed a fold of his jacket, brought it to her mouth, and started gumming it. "Her skin's like a peach. She looks like you—and like… like my mum. She has her eyebrows...What's her name?"

"Her name is Rose," I told him. "For your mother. And I disagree. She looks like a tiny girl you."

"Rose," he repeated, and this smile was real. His face lit up. "I like that. She's beautiful. Not as beautiful as you, though. Not yet, anyhow." He turned his gaze and his smile on me.

Never mind that I hadn't showered, that I was in pajamas stained with milk and baby spit in my hair. I'd often been worse on the island.

He went on, "Well. This answers a few questions. Joey's blond and white as milk. He looks nothing like me. No Maori showing at all. Addie's a ginger, though… I never doubted, until now."

"It doesn't mean he isn't yours," I said. "Genetics don't always work in straightforward ways."

"It doesn't matter," he said, "He's not mine anymore."

"So what happens now?" I asked.

That is where I choose to end my tale. I wanted to set the story straight, and I did. The TV show makes Oliver out to be the hero, and he's still at it in Starling City, which is still pretty much just as troubled as it was before he returned. You might think that doing something like, I don't know, starting a program to make sure all school-age kids have something nutritious to eat over the weekend, would at least do something, but apparently it's more fun to run around shooting people than do anything sensible like that. He's still single and still sleeping around, he still hasn't graduated college, and he's still not the deepest or smartest person in the world. I bear him no ill will for killing me off in whatever tale he told the people who created the show—however, if I ever find out who started the story that I'm actually a Cambodian prostitute who's raising her daughter in a brothel—they're in trouble!

A/N: I'm a tremendous Slade fan (check out my fic Cold-Blooded if you want proof) and given the situation on the island, Shado's choice left me scratching my head. This one shot is the result.

In the original run of Deathstroke comic books, Rose's mother is indeed a Cambodian princess turned prostitute who raises her daughter in a brothel without contact with the outside world. In newer runs, Rose is the youngest child of Adeline Kane Wilson, Slade's wife.

I've noticed that even though this is a one shot, it's still getting several hits a day. Don't know who's reading, but if you like it or you'd like to see more like this, I'd love it if you dropped me a line. Thanks!