Work Text:
The newbies always get the scut work, in any organization. League of Assassins Trainee #322 (he hasn’t got enough rank to apply for an individual name) felt he was fortunate not to have to clean the torture cells. You can’t get blood out of a stone- that is, bloodstains in granite are SET.
He pushed his cart of scrub brushes, mops, jugs of bleach and Eau de Mort air freshener to his assigned location. He’d been told it was an honor to be allowed to clean the Demon Head’s Head. He figured that was about on a par of the joke they’d pulled on him in Basic Training in the army— ‘volunteer to drive the general’s jeep’ and you wind up pushing a wheelbarrow full of garbage.
It didn’t seem too bad at first. Flush, scrub, bleach, scrub, flush again. Mop the floor. Wipe down blood splatter off the tile walls, clear the bits of… whatever… clogging the shower drain. Use the end of the scrub brush handle to close the ‘Deathstroke Does Dallas’ magazine which #322 sincerely hoped was photoshopped. For the sake of Dallas, if nothing else.
But then. Sitting on the shower shelf there was this jar. Bath salts might clump and turn odd colors, but this… this was gross, a whole big lump of yuck. He opened it and took a sniff. Wow, definitely that had gone bad. He considered tipping it down the toilet, but he remembered what happened when he did that to Goldie his prize winning goldfish after it went belly up. Plumbers aren’t cheap.
The industrial size pool of green stuff isn’t too far away. Green is ecological, right? It’ll break this stuff down harmlessly.
#322 finished the bathroom, admired the shine for a moment, and then carried the jar of rotten bath salts to the pool, opened the jar and poured it in. The pool bubbled, like hydrogen peroxide when he cleaned out his ears. Satisfied by his clever work, he left to turn in his cart and sign up for the poetry slam night.
Behind him, the pool continued to bubble. The ‘bath salts’ broke up all right, into tinier and tinier and tinier pieces…
And then they grew.
And grew.
Until the entire pool looked like it was covered in black water lilies. Fluffy black water lilies… hairy black water lilies.
“NO! NO! NO!” Ra’s screamed when he went down in his Speedo and flip flops for his afternoon dip in the Lazarus pool only to find it drained absolutely dry.
“Yes, yes, yes,” the thousands of black haired, blue eyed, naked, Tim Drakes replied as they marched over Ra’s writhing body. “This is great!” The lead Tim said, “we can split up the work load, and actually get to eat and sleep and have vacations!”
“YAY!” All the Tims replied, as they crushed assassins underfoot on their way to the fleet of jet aircraft. “CLONE POWER FOR THE WIN!”