Chapter 17: The Devil in the Dark
"Serving the Greater Jump City area since 1972, this is Action 5 News at 11 from the KJCN news center. Bringing you all the news, all the time."
The dignified news anchor sat in his chair in front of a broad desk on which neat stacks of paper were arranged in rows. Behind him was a sprawling newsroom filled with what were apparently bustling reporters, all banging away on computers or rushing from one desk to another with what was no-doubt vital work and information. The anchorman took no notice of this, smoothing out his silver hair for a moment before facing the camera with a serious expression, befitting someone of his stature, or so he imagined.
"Good evening," said the anchor, "and welcome to Action 5 News. Our top story for this evening, The Battle of Battery Street: Fallout and Reaction. One week later, and still no answers have been provided to the media or to the public concerning the pitched battle that erupted last Saturday on the waterfront of Jump City Bay on Battery Street between the notorious rogue construct known as Cinderblock, and an as-yet unidentified metahuman teenager, known only at present as "Devastator", the term used to describe him by Cinderblock, overheard by eyewitnesses to the engagement only moments before the battle began. For the third day in a row, Jump City Police Chief Amos Brown refused to answer reporters' questions today regarding the identity of this 'Devastator' as well what events might have lead to the confrontation on Battery Street, and Cinderblock's subsequent death in the Jump City municipal jail under circumstances that are, to say the least, unclear."
The camera switched to a recording of a massive black man in a senior Police Officer's dress uniform, standing at a podium hastily erected in front of the Jump City Police headquarters and addressing the collected media. The police chief looked as though there were few places on earth he wished to be less than this one, but with a scowl and a deep, gravelly voice, he spoke quickly and to the point.
"At this time, the investigation into what took place on Battery Street last Saturday afternoon is ongoing. We are presently working with the Teen Titans to ensure that no danger remains to the public at large. I am not going to comment now on the status of our investigation."
The reporters exploded, piling their questions atop one another in a cacophony of noise.
"Chief Brown, what of the reports that Jump City Jail suffered a breakout attempt shortly after the conclusion of the fight?"
"Why were the Teen Titans not on hand to apprehend Cinderblock when the attack broke out?"
"Are the police treating Cinderblock's death as a murder case?"
"Has there been any confirmation of the rumors that this "Devastator" has been sighted around the city on other occasions?"
"When can we speak to the Titans?!"
None of these questions were answered, and Chief Brown let the reporters howl only for a few seconds before throwing up his hands and turning away from the podium with a low "No comment," leaving the rest of the questions to drown in the general din that ensued. The camera cut back to the news anchor.
"No comment," said the anchor, "and thus, no answers for us, nor for the people of Jump City concerning this latest and potentially most deadly attack on our families, children, and well-being. For more on this story, we now take you live to KJCN reporter Talia Conrade on Battery Street itself, where cleanup and repairs are still underway."
The scene shifted to a young woman standing in front of a huge hole gouged into the street, with earth-moving equipment scattered around it and large cranes lifting sections of pipe into the depths of the crater.
"Tom, I'm standing here at the corner of Battery and Plymouth streets where a week ago the notorious wanted criminal Cinderblock was apparently defeated by a teenaged metahuman he identified only as 'Devastator'. While the public have still not been told anything regarding the identity, nature, or whereabouts of this unknown metahuman, we spent the day looking for witnesses who could corroborate any of the many rumors floating around the city concerning the incident, and asking residents of Jump City what their opinion was on being caught in the cross-fire of yet another metahuman incident."
The television feed switched from live to recorded as a cavalcade of assorted civilians began voicing their views and opinions on what had happened.
"All I'm saying is, if we're gonna live here, we should have some kinda say about who gets to come in here and start tearing up the neighborhood. I'm not trying to sound ungrateful, but come on, don't these guys have anywhere better to do this sorta thing? Someone could've been hurt, you know?"
"So I heard this big 'bang' sound, right? And I turned back up the street to look, and there's this... kid... standing in the middle of the road there, and the big guy just stares at him and calls him "Devastator", so then I run behind the car and..."
"... knocked the power and the gas out to half the goddamn waterfront! They're all menaces, you ask me? How'm I s'possed to run my business with these kids thinking they can just bring the power lines down any time they want to?"
"... threw it right at me! I thought I was gonna die, but then the boy just reached back and sort of waved his hand at it, and part of the hood blew up and the rest went flying off into the bay. I don't know if he can hear this, but thank you! And if you're ever in Fresno look up Joe MacLaughlin and I'll buy you a..."
"That wasn't just some kid there, youknowwhatI'msayin? This guy takes a *BLEEP*-in' telephone pole to the face and just keeps on tickin', you know? And then he blows the *BLEEP*-in' street out from under the mother *BLEEP*. Like he's orderin' *BLEEP*-in' pizza. I don't know if it was him that killed the rat bastard, but if he was, I say good *BLEEP*-in' riddance. About time we got someone in here who knows how to put these sons of *BLEEP*-es down for good. Cuz' I'll ask you one question missy, are you losin' any sleep over that concrete *BLEEP*-er' gettin' what he deserved? You better *BLEEP*-in' believe I ain't!"
"Hero my ass, that kid didn't care one bit about the rest of us or he wouldn't have fought it there in the middle of the street with a thousand people around. Now the Titans, they would have done this the right way, without putting all of us in danger. In fact I bet the reason we haven't seen that kid around since the battle is because they locked him up in that Tower of theirs where he belongs."
"This is all a confirmation of what I've been saying for years. With the culture of violence that we've allowed to fester in this society, is it any surprise that metahumans feel that they have no choice but to settle their differences with a public battle? I'm not saying that it couldn't have been worse, certainly, but surely with a little more attention from the authorities we could resolve these kinds of confrontations without the need for violent displays..."
"Oh please, one little fight and we're all supposed to care about some new metahuman running around? Sweetheart, there's dozens of these guys show up every other week. And 'Devastator'? Give me a goddamn break here. These names just get worse and worse. What's next, 'Big-gun-man'?"
"I was there, lady. I saw that kid take down something that would've had the SWAT team running for cover. This pox-on-both-their-houses crap is just that. Those two blew half the roadway to pieces trying to kill one another in the middle of a crowded street, but there was what? Two dozen people hurt, and only one killed? You think that's because Cinderblock held back or something? The Titans do this stuff all the time, and nobody thinks twice about it, but this kid shows up and pulls off a stunt like this by himself and suddenly you people are running around like it's all some hidden mystery and he could be out to kill us all. There's no mystery here. The Titans couldn't handle this one for some damn reason, so this kid did. And as for anyone who still wants to whine about what happened last year..."
The camera finally flashed back to the reporter, who continued to look stoically out at the viewers.
"As you can see, the events of last Saturday have engendered great differences of opinion within the community, both as to the meaning behind the battle itself, and its implications for the future of our city. However, as of this time, pending further revelations by either the Teen Titans, the Jump City Police Department, or other city officials, it appears that the questions surrounding the Battle of Battery Street will remain unanswered for the present. For KJCN 5 News, I'm Talia Conrade. Back to you Tom."
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The wind was stiff and fresh as it blew across the Tower's roof, gathering up the innumerable tiny pebbles that were scattered across it and rolling them around and over one another, creating, along with the howls and wails of the air itself, plenty of noise to mask even Cyborg's footprints, with a little help from his auditory dampeners. It blew the smell of the stankball in Cyborg's hand back into his face, which wasn't exactly ideal, but then the alternative was to alert his intended target ahead of time, and he couldn't permit that.
The target in question was about a dozen paces ahead, seated near the edge of the tower, leaning against a vent and staring off at the city, apparently oblivious to the world around him. Cyborg smirked as he carefully made his approach like a hunter stalking a deer, relying on his dampeners, on the wind, on David's distraction, all to get him within range. The flight characteristics of a Stankball were bad even in calm air, let alone in high wind, and so he had to get close enough to make sure that -
"Did Raven throw you out too?"
Cyborg froze in mid-step as David, suddenly much less oblivious than he had thought, addressed him without turning his head. He considered for a second if he should go ahead with the shot anyway, but without the element of surprise, and thus the hilarity of ambushing him out of nowhere with the dreaded stankball, it no longer seemed as good an idea...
... plus he knew Robin and David had been working on mid-air interceptions for a while, and he did not need the stankball splattered all over himself by an impromptu blast.
"You hear me comin'?" he asked. Even if he couldn't score a point today, he might as well learn what he'd done wrong.
David shook his head slowly. "Sensed you," he said, "or whatever you call it. I was just watching the air."
"Watching the air?" asked Cyborg, lowering the stankball and walking over to the edge of the rooftop as David stood back up, still leaning against the vent.
"Watching the air currents move. The molecules. I noticed a bunch of titanium alloy coming up the stairs inside the tower and..." David trailed off, then looked furtively up at Cyborg with that horrified and startled look that he got whenever he realized he had said something he maybe shouldn't have. "Sorry..."
Cyborg just laughed. "Man, it's not like you're the first one to notice I'm half-metal. You don't gotta keep pretending like I ain't."
David let out a nervous laugh of his own. "Yeah..." he said with a smile and a sigh. "Anyway we've been working with titanium a lot, so it sorta stood out."
"Well that's good, isn't it?" said Cyborg, "Means you're gettin' this stuff down, right?"
"I guess..." said David, who sounded rather unsure, but then when didn't he? He shook his head slowly and chuckled. "I'm starting to see this stuff in my sleep at any rate. Lead, uranium, granite - "
Cyborg raised his sole remaining eyebrow. "Since when does Robin let you sleep?"
David looked back up at Cyborg in confusion for a second, and only then seemed to perceive that the question had been a joke. He laughed, but only halfheartedly, his mind plainly elsewhere. It wasn't hard to figure out where.
"So... did she?" David asked, as Cyborg sat down on the edge of the roof.
"Yep," said Cyborg, "said she couldn't concentrate with me running the power tools, and that BB needed to sleep some more. Figured I'd see if you were up for a round or two. What 'bout you?"
David smiled sheepishly. "She caught me sneaking him his pocket gamestation."
Cyborg winced. "What'd she do?"
"Nothing," insisted David. "She just asked if my arm was feeling better, and when I said it was, she said that if I wanted to keep it that way, I should probably let him rest." He smiled and seemed to shudder a bit. "It didn't sound like a suggestion," he said.
"Don't take it personal," said Cyborg. "She's been really going all out with her powers to help fix up BB."
"How is he?"
Cyborg took a deep breath and let it out very slowly. "He looks like he's gonna be all right," he said finally, but he was unable to keep the doubt out of his voice, and he saw that David could tell. He tried to explain further, provide some re-assurance for his own sake as much as David's. "I mean, last time I was down there he was drivin' Raven crazy with those jokes of his, and trying to make sure I remembered to tape his shows. Kid's been out of it for a week, and I've already got like four and a half solid days of cartoons on the DVR. I dunno where he gets the time to watch that stuff..."
David was watching Cyborg as though looking for some kind of sign, and Cyborg noticed that his hands were held tensely behind him, tightly enough to leech the color from his fingers. "So he's... gonna be all right then?"
The question had been on everyone's mind all week. Cyborg, Starfire, and Robin had been asking it of Raven so much that she threatened to send the next person to do so on a one-way trip to another dimension. David had, to Cyborg's knowledge, been avoiding doing the same, if only because he was clearly still more than a bit scared of Raven.
'Gonna have to teach him the difference between bark and bite', he thought as he did his best to answer the question. "Raven's not saying just yet, but I think so. He's doin' a lot better than he was at least, don't you think? I mean you'd know better'n I would probably. Raven won't let me talk to him for more than half an hour or so. Least you get to watch him while we're out doin' our thing."
David nodded in agreement. Since the events of last Saturday, the Titans had been called upon three times to deal with fresh 'incidents' in the city, and all three times, David had stayed behind (as he would have anyway) to make sure Beast Boy was all right in their absence, enabling Robin to field all four remaining Titans against whatever the threat was, and thus take it down quickly so that they could return to the Tower.
"Yeah," he said, "but I don't know what's normal for him. Star said she'd never seen him that bad off before."
"BB's tougher'n he looks, man," said Cyborg, doing his best imitation of Robin at his most unwavering. "He'll be all right. Might take him another week or two, but he'll be all right. Try not to worry about him too much." The brave front was mostly for David's benefit. Mostly. "'Sides," he said, cracking a grin and lightly (very lightly) punching David on the arm, "way I hear it, you got enough to worry about today, least that's what Robin says. Did I hear right?"
Despite Cyborg's best efforts at being gentle, David still was shoved half a pace or so back by the mock punch, and rubbed his arm a bit as he blushed lightly and nodded. Cyborg laughed aloud and clapped him on the back. "Don't worry, we'll go easy on you for your first run through. It prob'lly won't be too much different from what you've been doing with bird-boy." This much might have been a lie for all Cyborg knew, but he thought it might help to try and calm David down before his first session with the full team (well almost full). "Group training's all finesse. No sweat."
"... yeah," said David uneasily, sounding exceedingly unconvinced, and he rubbed the back of his head absent-mindedly with one hand as he returned his gaze to the bay and the city beyond, not volunteering anything else for the time being. Cyborg let it go. Something else was bothering the kineticist, but it could have been any one of a hundred things. Starfire or Beast Boy might have tried to pry it out of him, but Cyborg was more of a fan of letting people work out their own issues when they seemed disinclined to talk about them.
"Nice spot up here," said Cyborg after a minute or so had passed. All of the Titans had their own little personal 'spots', from the garage to the evidence room to the rocks on the shore of the island. The roof was Starfire's, typically, but David borrowed it on the occasions when she wasn't using it. "I thought you weren't big on heights."
"I'm not," responded David, not changing his gaze. "I don't know why I come up here really, I just like the view I guess."
Cyborg nodded. "Well," he said, standing back up slowly. "I guess I'll see you this afternoon, man. Lemme know if you wanna try a round of Gamestation or somethin' before we get started." He turned to leave, but hadn't gotten more than half a dozen paces before David stopped him.
"Hey, Cyborg?"
Cyborg stopped and half-turned back. "Yeah?"
David looked like he wanted to say something, but the words were apparently not forthcoming. He stammered the beginnings to a sentence for a second or so, then finally shook his head. "Nevermind," he said, and he turned back to the cityscape with a soft sigh. Cyborg paused for a beat or two, then fully turned around.
"Hey, David, you all right?"
"Yeah," said David, turning his head back, "why?"
"Because you don't look it," he said, "something botherin' you?"
"It's nothing, really," insisted David, which of course gave Cyborg the exact opposite impression. "Just some... stupid stuff."
"Hey, man, after what happened on Saturday, I think anybody'd be a little wierded out." He almost left it at that, but David's entire stance was tense, and he looked paler than usual. Something was wrong, and he thought he had an idea as to what. "If you're still upset about what happened with Blockhead..."
"It's not Cinderblock," said David, and he leaned back against the vent as he rubbed his eyes and shook his head. "It's not anything really... I'm just..."
Despite everything, Cyborg couldn't help but smile as what David was talking about clicked in his mind. "You're scared."
David glanced up at Cyborg at the word 'scared', but did not deny it, not that it would have helped to.
"You're scared half to death and you don't even know what you're scared of, but it's got you wound up like a clockwork toy. And it ain't about Cinderblock or BB or what happened on Saturday, because it's really about all of them mashed up together, plus all the stuff you don't even know yet, but you know enough to be scared of." Cyborg smirked at David's stare. "What? You think I don't know how it is? I wasn't born with circuits and armor. We all went through this, one way or another."
David made several attempts at replying, and then finally had to settle for a nervous laugh as he slid his back down the vent until he was sitting on the gravel-covered roof again. "I must sound pretty pathetic..." he said with a chuckle.
"Nah, like I said, I know how it is. After that thing on Saturday, I figured you'd need a while."
"You guys had it even worse though..."
"That don't make what you had to do a walk in the park. Besides, you've seen how everyone's been this week. Don't worry about it."
David didn't respond for a few moments, and Cyborg decided to press him.
"So if it wasn't Blockhead, then what was it?"
"Everything," responded David with an exasperated sigh. He let it stand for a little bit, then continued. "It was that bus driver that got killed, and Beast Boy, and Cinderblock, and me being dumb enough to go out there in the first - "
"Hey, I saw the recording," interrupted Cyborg. "That wasn't your fault and you know it. Don't tell me Robin's been giving you a hard time about that."
"No," said David. "And yeah, I know it wasn't, but it's all of those things... and on top of it, back there when it was just me and Cinderblock I had this moment where... it just sorta hit me that I was it. I was the only one who could stop Cinderblock from killing all those people. The SWAT team wasn't coming, and I didn't know where you guys were, and... I know that this is the sort of thing Robin and the rest of you all are trying to get me ready to do, but it... it just sorta..."
"It just hits you all of a sudden that you're it. You're the backup. You're the guy who's supposed to know what to do, and you don't have a damn clue in the world what the hell to do. Am I close?"
David nodded, still looking at Cyborg. "And I still kept... I never really thought about it that way. I mean I did, but not really, you know? I sort of expected that by the time I got to the point where I was trying to do what you guys do, I'd be... different or something. I dunno what. But I wasn't."
"So you just gotta react, and the whole time you're thinkin' 'holy shit, I can't be the one to do this. There's gotta be somebody else.'"
"But there wasn't, and I knew that really, but all the same, it was just total chaos, and I mean I got through it, I guess. Nobody else died besides the bus driver, just a bunch of property damage, but ever since then..."
"You've been thinking about how close it was?"
David sighed. "Yeah."
"Well what do you think all of us have been thinking about all week? You think it never crossed my mind that if whoever sold those shells hadn't decided to cheat, Star and I'd both be toast? Or if Raven hadn't done... whatever she did, those things would have torn BB apart?" David gave a visible shudder as he pulled his knees up against his chest, and Cyborg stepped over to him. "Look, I'm not trying to freak you out even more, but sometimes that's how it is, man. We're the last line, and there ain't one of us, superheros I mean, who don't sometimes stand there thinking 'Damn, how the hell did I wind up being the guy on the spot? Someone call the army, I can't do it!' I guarantee you even the Justice League gets that sometimes. It's totally normal."
"So what do you do about it?" asked David sincerely.
Cyborg shrugged. "Everybody deals with it differently. Some people just shrug it off. Some people totally go nuts and burn themselves out trying to be the best they can because they're so scared of being the one responsible. Robin still does that a little bit. I think most of us just deal with it. Me, whenever I get to thinkin' that way, I have to start doin' things. Work on the T-car, upgrade my systems, build something new, go to the training room and smash some drones, whoop Beast Boy at Ninja Racer. Helps me get my mind off of it, and helps me remember the most important thing."
"And what's that?"
Cyborg grinned. "That I'm damn good at what I do, and so far, nobody's been able to beat us. Brother Blood, Slade, Ternion... if those guys couldn't kill us, then there ain't no way I'm gonna let some punk with a pipe bomb or a turbocharger do it. And if I can't handle it for some reason, then the others have got my back. Period."
David watched the display with a begrudged smile, and finally Cyborg extended a hand to help him to his feet.
"Besides, man," said Cyborg, "you did pretty good yourself out there. I had to take Cinderblock down once by myself, and it wasn't easy. And other than the one civilian he killed before you could stop him, you did it without anybody else getting hurt, and by yourself. I'd call that a big win. Hell, you should see what the TV's been sayin' about you."
"I caught some of it," said David. "Half of them want to lock me up, and the other half think I'm in hiding to avoid you guys."
Cyborg elected to say nothing on that score. The joys of dealing with the media were something better saved for another time. Accordingly, he changed the subject. "Hey, what happened to that girl you told us all about? The one you were hanging with when Blockhead decided to crash the party?"
"Carrie?" asked David. "I... I dunno what happened to her. She was there after the fight ended, but... I lost track of her afterwards and I don't know how to check up on her."
"She didn't give you her number?" asked Cyborg, and he smiled as David completely missed his implication.
"I don't even know her last name. To be honest, I've been pretty worried."
"Well if she was bad off, missing persons or the hospitals woulda reported it, so don't worry so much. Jump ain't that big, and you're gonna be pretty high profile before too long. You'll run into her again. And we'll all have to go meet her. She your first girlfriend?"
"Yeah, that'd be... wait, what?! Cyborg, she is not my..."
"Suuuure she ain't," said Cyborg in a mock-understanding tone. "Just like you're not a superhero?" David took this indignantly, which of course was the whole point, and Cyborg laughed at his discomfort.
"She is not... Cyborg, I've only met her twice! I don't even know which school she goes to!"
"You saved her both times, right? Adonis and Cinderblock and some drunk? That stuff works wonders. Take it from me, what you wanna do now is..."
Cyborg unfortunately was not given the chance to impart his wisdom onto David, as his communicator chose that moment to go off. Ignoring David's look of relief, Cyborg picked it up. Robin was on the screen.
"Yo, Rob, what's up?"
"Have you seen David," asked Robin.
"He's right here with me."
"We're thinking of starting the session early. Can you two come down to the training room and we'll get it going?"
Instantly, David became very still, but he said nothing and Cyborg watched him for a second before speaking back into the communicator.
"Sure thing, Robin, we'll be down in a minute." He closed the communicator, turning back to David. "You ready?"
David shrugged uneasily. "I'm not sure."
"You'll do fine," said Cyborg, as they both walked towards the stairs. "Besides. It's just practice, and there'll be three of us there. What's the worst that could happen?"
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"Course commencing in three. Two. One. Go."
The lights came up flashing black and white strobe, a dazzling sight that made it very hard to figure out what was going on, or so David thought, not that it seemed to phase the other three Titans, who immediately dashed off towards their targets like bullets from a gun. Squinting his eyes and forcing his perception to shift from light to matter, David tried to emulate them. A trio of pop-up drones loomed before him, and he paused momentarily to identify their makeup. It was obvious enough at first glance, an iron-carbon-chromium alloy... stainless steel. He tried to remember the hundreds and thousands of repetitions he had done on stainless steel, tried to let himself fall into the muscle memory and mental habit that Robin kept insisting he build up. He saw the external molecules dim as the internal ones brightened, and shoved the energy inwards to the tipping point. The first drone exploded. He repeated the process as quickly as he could, causing the second one to burst into fragments that rained down onto the ground. His hand shifted to point to the third as he pressed the energy...
A loud buzzer sounded and the room flashed red again, followed by solid bright white light. "Time expired," said the computer in a maddeningly clinical voice, and David angrily kicked a piece of one of the destroyed drones, sending it bouncing across the room, before clenching his fists tightly and turning back to Robin, Raven, and Cyborg, all of whom were standing amongst the smashed remains of their three drones. Just like the last five times. By now he couldn't bear to look any of them in the eye, so he fixed his gaze on a piece of debris near his foot as he shook his head and heard Robin pronounce, once again, the obvious verdict.
"You're still not getting them fast enough," said Robin, as though David were somehow unaware of this... as though any of them were. David lifted his eyes furtively. Cyborg and Raven were politely trying not to stare at him... okay Cyborg was... but it wasn't like he needed their stares to tell him that he wasn't getting the job done. He was only glad that Starfire and Beast Boy weren't here, the latter because of his injuries, the former because it was her turn to look after him during practice.
"I'll reset em," said Cyborg with the hints of a sigh behind his voice, but Robin stopped him before he could do so
"No, Cy. Hold on," said Robin as he walked over to David. David didn't look up until Robin was right on top of him practically, his head beginning to throb again, his face flushed red, and not simply with the exertion of blowing things up.
Robin got straight to the point. "You keep hesitating," he said. "You're taking too long to focus. What's the matter?"
"I can't..." stammered David between breaths, painfully conscious of Raven and Cyborg watching him. "I can't... do it any faster..."
"You have to do it faster than that," responded Robin. "You managed it in solo practice. What's different?"
'What isn't?' thought David, but he knew better than to say that. Instead he tried to explain. "I go into... I try to ID the target, like you said, but... with the shooting and everyone else moving, it takes longer to focus on it. I can't concentrate fast enough. It's like I'm trying to push through everything else before I can get at the targets, and by then..."
Robin narrowed his mask-covered eyes. "This is the slowest setting we have for our trial runs," he said. "If you can't do it in this amount of time, you won't be able to do it at all. If we're out there and someone pulls a gun on you, you have to be able to blow it out of their hands, or blow the street out from under them, before they get a chance to fire it. Do you understand me?"
David nodded furtively. "I'm trying," was all he could come up with, a lame excuse even to his ears.
"All right," said Robin, stepping back. "We'll try some freeform co-op for a while. Cyborg, we need to talk about this. Raven, take David through some tandem exercises."
Robin and Cyborg stepped to the side of the room, as Raven moved over to where David was. She said nothing regarding his inability to complete his assigned task in the allotted time, but merely explained what they were going to do. 'Freeform co-op' was essentially unstructured training, where the object was to figure out new ways for the Titans' powers and abilities to synergize, and apparently Raven had an idea or two for that.
"I'm going to levitate these girders," she said, pointing to a large stack of steel railroad-gauge I-beams sitting on one side of the room, "and throw them at the targets on the other end. Your job is to make them explode when they're near the targets. Can you do that?"
Even-toned as ever, Raven still never failed to give David the creeps, but he swallowed them and nodded. "I'll try," he said, trying desperately to block out the sounds of Cyborg and Robin whispering in the corner, evidently having some kind of disagreement about something. He could guess what.
Raven evidently noticed his preoccupation, and she reached over and smacked him lightly on the back of the head with her open palm. It did the trick. "Pay attention," she said. "You're getting way too distracted by everything around you. A real battle is going to be even worse. Now let's try it."
David nodded, and Raven waved one hand towards the girders. Both her hand and the closest girder were instantly swathed in black energy, and she lifted the multi-ton piece of steel into the air with no more effort than if she had been lifting a sheet of paper.
"Your powers are based on concentration," she said. "So are mine. You need to learn how to concentrate even while other things are happening, like I do. Now get ready."
Raven waited another second or so, and then tossed the girder across the room with a flick of her wrist. David followed it with his hand outstretched, fingers tightly clenched in a fist, before releasing them along with the pent up energy just as the girder was approaching the targets. Instantly the girder snapped in half like a twig, scattering a half dozen of the targets as first one piece, then the other, exploded into shrapnel and fragments. The echoing boom briefly drowned out Robin and Cyborg's conversation, and helped to steady his nerves a bit. He could at least do that much. Raven looked unimpressed of course, but that was nothing new. Still, she did not offer criticism, but a question.
"How come you point at it?"
David opened his mouth to answer, and then realized he had no idea at all. "I... dunno... he said with confusion as he scratched the back of his head where Raven had hit him. "It... makes it easier to push the energy in. I'm not sure why."
Raven considered this a moment. "Try it again," she said, lifting another girder, "and this time, don't move at all."
The girder was tossed as before, and David, with his hands stuck firmly in his pockets, wrinkled his brow and narrowed his eyes and clenched his teeth and forced the energy in, but this time, the energy refused to go without a fight. The girder sailed well over the heads of the pop-up targets, before colliding with the back wall and falling down it onto the ground. Only then did David finally manage to compress the energy to the tipping point, and the girder exploded, causing no damage whatsoever to the intended targets. David sheepishly turned back to Raven to apologize, but Raven wasn't looking at him, but instead at the remains of the girder, and, for once, did not seem disappointed.
"All right," she said, not giving a hint of what she was thinking, "you can use your hands again. Let's keep going."
Repetition after repetition they went through, blasting construction material to scraps of steel and bits of flying shrapnel as the pop-up targets recycled themselves, to the point where David had to wonder just how this place got cleaned up after a given "session"? The whole time, Robin and Cyborg watched, occasionally making comments to one another. David tried, he actively tried not to overhear what they were saying, but inevitably a few stilted soundbites would filter through.
"... holding back."
"... reconsider..."
"... no idea how they work..."
It didn't take much imagination to envision what they were actually saying, but try as he might, he could not cause the detonations fast enough to apparently satisfy them. Raven talked him through clearing his mind through brief mental exercises, adjusting his stance and the way he pointed at the targets (he had no idea how that had anything to do with it, but did as she said). Nothing helped. They even switched back to a few more time trials, but the result was the same as it had been before, and the more adjustments he made, the worse his headache got, to the point where the explosions themselves were thundering inside his skull like a rubber ball being bounced around inside.
"All right, that's enough for now," said Robin finally, and Raven put down the latest girder and turned towards Robin. "We're gonna try one more routine, and then we'll call it for today. He turned to Cyborg and nodded, and Cyborg walked over to the stack of girders, and began to effortlessly (or so it appeared) gather them up in his arms. Robin meanwhile explained the exercise to David.
"We're gonna try a different sort of timing," he said. "I want you to get all of those girders ready to explode, push the energy to just below the tipping point, or however you call it. Once they're ready, I want you to hold them there. Then Cyborg and Raven are going to throw them at individual targets. Your job is to push each one over the edge and blow it up just as it hits the target. Can you do that?"
There was no answer to give but yes.
David took a deep breath and tried to clear his mind as Raven had indicated he should. He extended first one hand, then the other, closing his eyes and relying on his power to show him what was going on. The mass of steel molecules awaited him, and one by one he began to corral them, forcing the energy inwards towards the center, as always. Frost formed out of frozen condensation on the surface of each girder as he prepared it, chilling its exterior down towards the freezing point and beyond. Gritting his teeth, he pressed and pressed, and juggled his attention, until all of the girders were frozen, all awaiting his command. Barely able to squeak now for fear of setting them off prematurely, he gave the slightest nod towards the mass of carbon and organic molecules that represented Robin, and Cyborg and Raven began to open fire. One after another, the girders flew like gigantic javelins at targets that appeared on the other side of the room, and one after another, David blasted them to bits with a final tap of his mind. Sweat beaded on his brow, his arms felt like lead, his teeth were clenched tightly enough to hurt, but slowly he was getting the upper hand. Each girder that exploded was one less that needed to be maintained, and with the girders pre-prepared for detonation, he was able to time the explosions far more accurately. Several targets were atomized by direct air-bursts as David set the explosions off while the missiles were mere centimeters from their intended receptacles, and most of the others were mangled by blast waves and shrapnel. David even managed to glimpse a small smirk of satisfaction on Robin's face out of the corner of his eye. At last, he was finally getting it done right. At last he was -
... and then his world exploded.
A spike of pain more intense than anything he had ever experienced in his life suddenly drove into his brain like an icepick, choking off his breath, shattering his concentration, and blinding his vision over in red. He gave an aborted, amorphous cry of pain and pitched forward as though he had been shot, turning as he did so and seeing Cyborg let out an alarmed yelp as the remaining girders in his arms began to explode, seemingly on their own accord. The blasts knocked Cyborg back, and the last thing David saw before he hit the ground was the girders spinning and twisting as they floated gently through the air towards him, flying to pieces and exploding as they flew. And as a familiar black shield materialized around him, his eyes rolled back into his head and he slammed down limply onto the floor of the training room, and heard and saw no more.
The Measure of a Titan (NEW ch.38 added)
Moderator: LadyTevar
Chapter 17, con't
"What could possibly have triggered such a thing?"
Cyborg shook his head, and as he did he saw Raven and Robin do the same thing. "You got me, Star. I've never seen anything like it. I thought he'd had a damn stroke or somethin'."
"So you're saying he didn't have a stroke?" asked Raven with admirable calm, as ever. Beast Boy sat up a bit straighter in his bed as Cyborg shook his head, glancing over at the other bed, upon which David was laying still, electrodes and other monitors hooked up to him.
"I don't know what happened, but it doesn't look like anything that bad. I gave him a sedative. He should be out of it in a half hour or so. I can't tell without a lot more tests, or Raven doin' her thing, but I think he'll be all right."
"Um... dudes, what about this...?" asked Beast Boy in a raspy voice, gesturing at David. David's eyes were shut now, but Beast Boy leaned over and gently opened one with one hand. Normally light brown, similar in color to his hair, David's eye was now a sickening bloodshot red, the whites of his eyes tinged purple and crimson, as though someone had injected them with food coloring.
"He popped a blood vessel in his eye," said Cyborg. "Don't ask me how. When we picked him up off the floor he had a nosebleed and his eyes were turning that color. It looks like something blew out part of his circulatory system. Some kind of massive blood pressure spike. If I'm right, he'll have bruises all over by the time he wakes up."
"But what caused it?" asked Robin, getting back to the matter at hand, as usual. "Did he overtax himself? Tense up too much?"
"You can't tense up enough to blow blood vessels in your eyes," said Raven sharply. "It's not even possible. Not for a human. He didn't do this to himself, something happened, and we all know what caused it."
Nobody else said a word until Starfire pitched in with a question. "Raven, I do not know why such a thing would have happened. Is there something I am missing?"
"His powers, Star," said Cyborg. "His powers did this."
"Wait a minute," said Robin. "We don't know that his powers did it.
"We don't know anything about his powers one way or the other," said Raven. "They don't work the way that other kinetic powers do. We don't even know if he is kinetic, or if he's something else. But he was using his powers when he collapsed, so I'm betting they had something to do with it."
"But he used 'em pretty hard against Cinderblock, didn't he?" asked Beast Boy. "How come it didn't happen then?"
Nobody had an answer.
"But even if this was due to his abilities, if we do not understand them, how are we to prevent it from occurring again? It would be most... unfortunate for it to happen in the midst of a confrontation with a villain, no?"
"Unless he manages to improve his reaction times, there's no way we can let him at a supervillain anyway," said Robin, frustration beginning to ooze from his voice. "And if we don't know what happened, then we can't risk putting him back into intensive training."
"So... what do we do?" asked Beast Boy. Starfire, Robin, and Cyborg all looked at one another and slowly, one by one, shook their heads. Raven remained unmoving, not looking at anyone, but instead looking down at the young kineticist, or what they were all assuming was a kineticist, as though trying to make her mind up about something.
"Well, I'll take the watch down here I guess," said Cyborg. "The rest of y'all can go back up and - "
"Wait,"
Everyone slowly turned to Raven, who was slowly drawing the hood of her cloak back, and tightening the obsidian guards around her wrists.
"There's something I can try."
Starfire and Beast Boy looked at one another in puzzlement, and Cyborg fell silent, but Robin apparently deduced what Raven was talking about, and his eyes widened. "Wait a minute Raven... you said that was dangerous."
"It's dangerous doing it to an unwilling subject. All I'd be doing is looking for the source of his powers, and trying to find out more about them. As long as he doesn't resist me, I shouldn't have any trouble."
"But you don't know if he's going to resist you or not," said Robin. "What happens if he does?"
"Robin, you know I'm don't read people's minds without permission. I'm going to wait until he wakes up, and then I'm going to ask him, If he says yes, then I'll do it."
"Hang on," said Cyborg. "Are you talkin' about what I think you're talkin' about? You're gonna go into his head?"
"Like I said, just to find his power source. Nothing more. I won't be trying to find out who he's working for if that's what you're worried about. This isn't an interrogation."
"It's too risky," said Robin, crossing his arms, "even if he does agree. You don't know what you're going to find in there. I can't allow - "
"It's not your decision," said Raven. "It's his decision and mine. Besides, you're the one who's been so insistent that we get him ready. If we don't do this, then we'll never know how to help him."
Beast Boy remained silent, as did Starfire, but both turned to Robin to see what he would say. Cyborg folded his arms in mirror of Robin, and waited for the Boy Wonder's verdict. It was not long in coming. After a few more moments of thought, Robin gave an exasperated sigh.
"All right," he said, "if he agrees, go for it. But I want to be here when - "
"No," said Raven emphatically. "I need it to be just him and me. Anyone else's thoughts might get in the way and interfere."
Robin looked unhappy, but didn't say anything, leaving Cyborg a moment to ask. "So where are you gonna do it then?"
"We'll do it in his room."
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"You want to do what?"
Raven tried to force herself to be patient. She was asking quite a lot, she knew, but still a large part of her just wanted to get this over and done with and not have to explain everything to someone who had no experience with psychic links. Accordingly she counted backwards from ten once again in Azarathian in her head, and then explained as carefully as she could.
"I wouldn't be actually entering your head. I'd be projecting myself into your mind with my powers. Once I was in there, I could look around and try to locate the source of your abilities. If I could find them, then I might be able to figure out what happened to you this afternoon, and also figure out why you can't seem to react as fast as most kinetics are able to react with them. There's still a lot we don't know about your powers, and this would clear a lot of that up."
"I... get that," said David, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Cyborg had been right after all. David looked like he was the victim of some kind of hemorrhagic fever, his face and hands and presumably the rest of him covered with red and blue splotches, both eyes blackened as though he had been hit with baseballs in the face. The redness in his eyes was still terribly pronounced, and Cyborg had said that he'd likely be unable to see very well for a day or so at least. "But… I mean… no offence but what else would you be looking for if you went in there?"
"Nothing else," said Raven. "Not without your permission. You could resist me if I tried, and that would be very dangerous for both of us. That's why I wouldn't read your mind before."
"But you will now?"
"What I'd be doing isn't mind-reading, it's more like looking for anything in you that isn't… normal. Powers stand out when you're inside someone's head, like a skyscraper in the middle of a forest. I should be able to find them pretty easily."
"And…" David leaned forward and shifted his weight again. "and you're… you're really not gonna try to read my mind?"
"No," she said. "You'd know if I did, anyhow."
"Oh," said David, considering the matter for a moment. Raven waited while he squirmed and thought, all the time wishing he would hurry up and say yes or no so that she could –
"What about my memory?"
That was not the question she expected. "What about it?"
"Could you read that while you were in there?"
Puzzled, Raven raised an eyebrow. "Not without your permission, like I said, or else things could go very bad. Don't worry about it."
"What if I gave you permission?"
This one stopped Raven in her tracks. "What?"
"To… look into my memories. If I gave you permission to do that, could you?"
"In… theory…" she said guardedly. "But… why would you give me permission to go into your memories? Aren't you worried that I might see something you don't want me to?"
David didn't answer immediately, taking a long slow breath and wincing as it made his bruises ache. "I don't… remember my real name, or who my parents were, or even how old I am. I was… I was thinking maybe… if you can go inside my memory, maybe you could find something out?"
Now it was Raven's turn to not answer immediately. She had assumed that David would react with great skepticism to her offer to enter his mind. Indeed she had not expected him to grant her permission. That he might see this as an opportunity was not a thought that had crossed her mind at all.
"I'm… really not sure," she said. This much at least was true. "I've never tried to do that before. I wouldn't… feel right about it." A cop-out perhaps, but in a split second on that night when Robin believed he was fighting the re-incarnation of Slade, Raven had learned more than she found she had ever wanted to know about Robin's past and memories. It hadn't been… terrible certainly, embarrassing though it was to know more about Robin than the others, but it was not something she was eager to repeat without proper preparation.
David seemed to shrink a bit as Raven said no. "Oh," he said, "okay then."
Raven's eyebrow raised a little higher. "Okay?"
"Go ahead," said David. "If you think it'll work… I wanna know what these powers are too. What do I have to do?"
Raven felt like laughing. After all this setup, he had agreed to it without a second thought. She was reminded of the tracer bug that Robin had given David at the very beginning of his stay at the tower, the one he still carried on him, and had accepted without complaint, unlike what pretty much every other teenager in the universe would have done.
"Just lay down and try to relax," said Raven, sliding her chair over towards David's bed. David obediently laid down on his back, hissing as his bruises protested, before leaning his head back and closing his eyes. An instant later he cracked one of them open again.
"This… it doesn't like… hurt does it? This mind-entering thing?"
"You shouldn't even notice anything happening," said Raven. "Now breathe slowly, try to concentrate on your breathing, and just… relax…"
Slowly, David's breathing became more regular and he closed his eyes once again, folding his hands on top of his chest. Raven took a deep breath and composed herself, crossing her legs into a lotus position, draping her cloak over herself, and repeating her mantra slowly.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…"
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…"
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…"
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Raven opened her eyes, and found herself in a forest.
Warm air floated about her, the sun beamed down upon her face, and the fleeting sounds of birds and insects flickered about from every direction. The ground was covered with a thick, soft loam of grass, and all around her stood trees. Raven was no expert, she could not tell an oak from an ash, but the forest was plainly comprised of all manner of trees, including ones that had no relation geographically to one another, tropical ironwoods and Californian redwoods next to arctic evergreens and giant bonsais. Glancing around, Raven looked for any obvious signs of direction, but there were none. The sun was directly overhead, the trees seemed to stretch off on all sides, and while she could plainly hear birds, bugs, and other animals, she could not actually see any, which would have been strange for a normal forest, but in this place, was far from the strangest thing she expected to see.
Unable to see above the forest canopy, Raven levitated up into the air to get a better look around. Once above the canopy, she could see that the forest stretched on and on and on in every direction, apparently to infinity. No feature or mountain disturbed the flat and endless woodland, or rather none, save for the most glaringly obvious one.
Less than a mile away from Raven , towering over the forest below, sat a massive hemispherical dome. The dome was colored like bronze, and looked almost liquid, its surface rippling and shimmering in the everlasting sunlight. Trees were sticking half-through the dome, as if it had materialized around them, but it stretched taller than the tallest of the trees, the sole landmark in this featureless scene. Raven was frankly surprised by how jarring it was. Most of the time a meta-human's powers stood out by themselves but… not like this…
Still there was nothing for it. She turned towards the dome and flew at it, full speed, hoping to find a way inside when she got closer. No sooner had she arrived next to it though, than she realized she was to be disappointed in this hope. No door or window appeared within the dome, nor any other blemish to indicate a portal. A quick tour of the entire periphery revealed only the same, glistening surface. After several minutes, Raven simply landed next to the dome, and gently but firmly pushed on it with her hand. With only the barest pressure, she felt her hand pass right through the dome's surface. Quickly she withdrew her hand, and the liquid released her arm cleanly.
"Well, why not," she muttered to herself, and then she closed her eyes and stepped into and through the side of the dome."
She emerged inside a wasteland.
No sooner had Raven opened her eyes than she caught the smell of cordite and brimstone, rich and thick, a smell to assault the nose and bring stinging tears to the eyes. Her boots stood upon sand, or what looked like sand, but it was blasted, rocky, ash-mixed sand, like the fallout from some terrible nuclear war. Though only a moment ago she had passed through a glistening bronze barrier, she now found herself on a moonscape plain, with no barriers around her whatsoever, and no end to the moonscape that lay before her. Moonscape it reminded her of because the sky was pitch dark, yet the ground was somehow illuminated. Craters and jagged rocks lay scattered about in every direction, as well as small bits of objects that looked very vaguely artificial, but worn as if blasted by blowing sand for a hundred years, the bare skeletons of what might once have been buildings or vehicles or Azar-knew what else. The entire area looked like the deserted aftermath of a planetary catastrophe, a ruined, and terrible place, that caused a knot to form in her stomach, built of unease and deja-vu.
There, ahead of her, the sole object of note in this battered ruin of a place, sat a large red satin plush armchair, facing her. And in the chair sat a figure dressed in clothing that looked like it had once been rich and expensive, but was now completely washed out by the ash and dust, such that not even the color could be determined with any accuracy. The figure's face was invisible, a swirling mass of dusty-grey features that seemed to change faster than the eye could follow, and it sat in its chair and surveyed the dead landscape around it, and did not stir or react to Raven in any way.
This, to be frank, was not what Raven had expected to encounter.
She walked slowly towards the figure in the armchair, largely without any idea of what else she might do. She had expected to find some evidence that would point her towards the nature of the powers she was looking for, but this… this was something else altogether. The forest from before had felt 100% different from this wrecked landscape. For a moment she wondered if David might be schizophrenic or something. It took one to know one. Most mindscapes were not fragmented like this, not to such a violent extent, not even her own, strange as Nevermore was. This place felt like a whole different mind than the place she had first entered.
And who the hell was the person in the chair?
As Raven got within a dozen paces of the chair, the figure raised its head slowly. Its face was still inscrutable, a swirling combination of a thousand faces, human and otherwise, but as Raven watched, the swirling, changing features began to settle, and the figure seemed to shrink a bit. When at last the features arranged themselves into a coherent face, Raven found herself staring at who else but David.
Sort of.
The figure was the right size and age for David, had the right features, the right appearance, but even accounting for the heavy dusting of volcanic ash it had taken on, its gaze was far too direct, far too unflinching for it to have been David, who usually looked at Raven for exactly the amount of time necessary to determine that they were not about to collide, and otherwise averted his eyes as though trying not to draw down the wrath of a dangerous predator. This David's gaze was focused, calm, revealing nothing, as cool a poker face as anything Robin had ever deployed. The gaze was not particularly malevolent, nor anything else for that matter, but something about this figure made Raven extremely uneasy, moreso than she should have been given the circumstances. None of this was real after all. This was just visions conjured up by her and David's minds. Nothing to be afraid of.
"I'd wondered if his new friends would come."
Raven almost (but not quite) gave a start at that, so still had been the figure before it spoke. The voice was not David's, not even close. This was a much richer, deeper voice, seeded with various quasi-detectable sounds that gave it resonance and power, and Raven couldn't help but wonder if this was one of the facets of David's personality, like her emotions were inside her mind… and if so which one?
"Are you his power?" she asked, directly. For whatever the movies would have one believe, direct speech often worked well in these sorts of places.
"I am the source for his power," said the figure, and it stood up and slowly walked towards Raven. It, like David, was considerably smaller than she was. She stood her ground as it approached. "And you must be Raven."
Raven had expected it to know her name. It was a part of David's mind after all, albeit an exceedingly weird part, so logically it knew everything David knew. But still something was off here. She had never heard of someone's kinetic powers manifesting themselves as a personality side. Then again, it wasn't like she'd been inside too many other kinetics' minds. Perhaps there was nothing odd about this at all, other than the obvious.
"I expected you to come earlier," it said to her, and smiled a vaguely predatory smile. "You are suspicious of his motives."
"I was," she said. "I'm not anymore."
"Liar," chided the figure with a smile. "You're suspicious of everyone's motives, if perhaps not David's any more than others now. But I thank you nonetheless."
"Why?" asked Raven, willing to play along if it meant getting some answers.
"He's never been a very social boy," said the figure with a slightly warmer smile. "You five will do him a great deal of good, not just as teammates. I hope he can return the favor of course, but I don't know you all. This is a rather new thing for me as well."
"And who are you?" It seemed the obvious question.
The figure was now standing before Raven. "I'm the reason you came," it said. "You wished to know how he might wield me more effectively and safely?"
"I wanted to know how they worked."
"I'm afraid that's a bit complicated," said the figure. "But… for the trouble he had today, I think you suspect already what the issue is…"
Raven lifted an eyebrow. "Somatics?"
The figure nodded. "Exactly," it said, as it extended its hand to Raven. Not usually given to such gestures, Raven thought in this case, it might be best to try and be polite, and shook the figure's hand.
And that's when everything went straight to hell.
With a loud gasping cry, the figure recoiled from Raven as though repelled by some kind of aura about her, its eyes flying open and dust cascading off of its clothes like a petrified waterfall. It staggered backwards in obvious horror, mouth agape, features twisted, breath coming in ragged gasps. Raven had no idea what had just happened, but the figure stumbled backwards towards its chair.
"No…" it said, a hollow whisper of a voice that knew itself to be lying. "No, it can't be, it can't be!"
"What can't be?" asked Raven, now beginning to become truly worried. "What are you talking about?"
The figure took no notice of her words, but threw its hands out as if defending itself. "Stay away!" it shouted. "I won't permit it!"
Things were making less sense by the minute. "What won't you permit?" Raven asked, already preparing her defenses in case the figure attacked – "
"Demonspawn!" screamed the figure, "Begone from this place!"
Raven froze.
"… What?" She had heard him perfectly well, but… he couldn't possibly know that! David couldn't possibly know that! Nobody knew that! How in the world could -
"Gem of Trigon!" shouted the David-like figure. "Portal of darkness, I will not permit it! Go tell your master to leave this one alone! He is not for your filth! Begone!"
Raven staggered backwards as if she had been punched in the chest. Her head swam, her blood chilled to ice water, as the words poured forth unbidden from the figure before her. An urge to run, to flee as fast as she could came over her, but before she could make good on the urge or decide if it was worth obeying, the figure raised its hands, and the entire mindscape blew up.
Raven's shield erupted into being around her, strong, inflexible, powered by every ounce of will and energy that she had to draw upon. Nothing, not even her own limitless rage, had been able to tear through such a shield, not in mental combat, not here. And yet the figure that was David and at the same time was not him conjured forth a power that Raven had never in her life even imagined before. The equivalent force of a thousand burning suns consumed the entire scene in fire. There was no more ground, no more air, merely fire, and a bubble of black energy protecting her from it. The threat galvanized her attention, and she fought back with everything she had, for nothing else would suffice, and yet the shield began to warp and crack and through the roar of the firestorm around her, she could hear the words of the figure who had done this, screaming like a damned soul, words packed with fear and rage.
"SPAWN OF TRIGON, YOU WILL LEAVE THIS ONE ALONE!"
With a thunderous crash, the shield gave way, and Raven felt the flames boring into her and felt herself screaming even as she released her concentration all at once.
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"Raven? Raven?! Raven can you hear me?! Raven?!"
"Dude, what happened?" yelled Beast Boy, crouching over Raven's fallen form, holding her head gently in his lap, even as David sat on the floor opposite her,
"I don't know what happened. I was just lying there and all of a sudden she screams and falls out of the air."
Beast Boy grabbed the communicator off his belt. "Beast Boy calling Robin, Starfire, Cyborg. It's an emergency! Raven's – "
Raven suddenly gave a loud gasp and sat bolt upright, nearly knocking Beast Boy over in the process, and causing David to jump back in surprise nearly half a foot. Beast Boy stopped in mid-sentence as the faces of all three of the other Titans stared back at him from the communicator screen. "Um… hold on," he said, and he closed the screen again. "Raven? Are you okay? What happened?"
Raven for her part looked almost unsure of where she was for a moment. She looked around for a second or two, before focusing on Beast Boy and David, and only then did the understanding return to her gaze. "Beast Boy?" she asked, the meaning of the question being left sufficiently ambiguous.
"Dude, Raven, are you all right? You look like someone just stuffed a rhinoceros beetle up your nose." Such was the situation that neither David nor Raven commented on Beast Boy's choice of imagery.
"I'm… I'm okay…" said Raven, still sounding confused.
"What happened in there?" asked David. "You just started screaming all of a sudden."
"You didn't… you didn't see what happened?"
"No," insisted David, "it was like you said. I never even felt anything. Did you go inside my mind?"
Raven nodded slowly, as both boys stared at her as though half expecting her to grow wings. "It was…" she started, then stopped and started over. "It was just some mental feedback. I'm all right, I think."
Beast Boy looked considerably relieved, David a bit less so, but still somewhat better. "Well, did you go into his head?" asked Beast Boy. "Did you find anything there?"
Raven had by now recovered to ask an obvious question of her own. "Beast Boy, what are you doing here? You're supposed to be down in the infirmary, asleep."
"Oh," said Beast Boy. He rubbed the back of his head and grinned. "I um… just thought I'd come up and make sure everything was going okay."
"Even though you heard me say that I didn't want anyone else here because their emotions might interfere with the procedure?" said Raven, her angry tone beginning to re-assert itself. "Get back down to the infirmary right now, or I'll make sure whoever attacks us next doesn't have to kill you."
"Right!" said Beast Boy in an overly cheery fashion as he got up and slowly backed towards the door. "So… um… glad… everything went… okay!" he said, and with that, he bolted out the door as fast as he could, and could be heard scampering down the hallway in some quadruped form or another.
Raven slowly stood up, and David did the same. "So… did you find anything?" he asked hesitantly.
Raven looked back at David with a look that was almost frightened herself, but it lasted only an instant before her professional gaze took back over. "I… need to think about what I saw for a while. I need to… interpret it right…"
"Oh," said David, obviously expecting a bit more. "All right then... I guess… just let me know if you come up with anything, okay?"
"I'll be sure to do that," said Raven as she slipped out the door. David couldn't tell, but t took every ounce of self-control she had not to run down the hallway. She needed to get back to her room. She needed to meditate. She needed to look at her books, but most of all, she needed to figure out what she was going to tell everyone else.
But that much she already had an idea on…
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"So after all that," said Cyborg, leaning against the doorframe, "he's just a normal kinetic after all?"
"Looks that way to me," said Raven, as she watched Robin shuffle through a sheaf of papers in the evidence room filing cabinet. "A somatic-based kineticist. I should have thought of it before."
"But you don't know why he had that attack this afternoon? Or how to improve his speed?"
"I don't know… exactly yet," said Raven, "but I think I can make sure it doesn't happen again."
"How?" asked Robin. Raven was prepared for such a question.
"Somatic-based kinetics have what's called a psychosomatic trigger. Certain gestures, certain objects, are what let them unleash their powers. That's why he keeps pointing at whatever he's blowing up. His powers are mental, but he has an easier time with them if he's got some kind of focus."
Robin and Cyborg both nodded, either understanding, or pretending to. "So you're willing to work with him on this?" asked Robin. "That's… pretty generous of you."
Raven shrugged. "Like you said, we might need him to be ready soon, and I'm the only one who knows what I saw inside his mind."
"Yeah, BB said something about you screamin'?" asked Cyborg. "What did you find in there?"
"Just a standard mindspace. His was a giant forest with a big golden dome in the middle of it. Nothing too interesting for a mindspace, but I was able to figure out that the somatics should help him a lot."
"So you gonna go back in? If he lets you that is?"
Raven shook her head. "No. No need to. I don't have anything more to find out there." Her face remained her usual emotionless mask, and neither Cyborg nor Robin noticed her bunching a handful of her cape up in one of her fists as she said it.
Robin finally found what he was looking for, and stood up from the cabinet, walking over to Raven and handing it over.
"You sure you want him to use this," Robin asked.
"It's just temporary," she said. "I think it'll do…"
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"David? You up here?"
There was a soft cough followed by the sound of footsteps in the gravel, and slowly, David appeared out of the darkness of the Tower's roof. His gate and posture were even more subdued than usual, his hands stuffed in his pockets and white condensation coming off his breath as he walked over. The tracer logs showed that he'd been up here for at least an hour or more, and he looked frankly, half-frozen. Jump got pretty cold at night.
"It's like five degrees up here man, what're you doin'?"
David shrugged. "Nothing," he said. "Just… trying to stay out of the way."
"Yeah, well, c'mere. We got somethin' for you."
Cyborg stepped aside and allowed Raven to climb up the steps behind him and onto the roof. Reaching into her cloak, she drew out a small metal stick about eighteen inches long, and handed it to David, who gently took it, turning it over in his hands, clearly unsure as to what it was or what it's purpose was.
"What's… this?" he asked.
"That's your magic wand," said Raven deadpan. From anyone else, it would have sounded like a joke, but not from Raven.
"What do you mean my magic wand?" he asked. "I don't do magic."
"It's a figure of speech," said Raven. "Your powers are tied to somatics. You want to blow something up, you point at it. Pointing at it doesn't really do anything, but it makes it easier for you to focus on it." She gestured at the small metal bar. "That's your new focus. It's something for you to concentrate on, and get your powers into the right mindset. I think it'll help."
"How… how do I use it?" asked David, who seemed to be unsure of how even to hold the thing.
"You start by concentrating on it. It's made of steel, so that shouldn't be too hard. Don't try to blow it up though, just focus on the molecules, and then when the target shows up, point the bar at it, and let your mind slide from one object right into the other."
David looked rather suspicious of all this, but did not attempt to argue. Cyborg lifted the small bag of horseshoes he had brought up to the roof with him. "What do you say man, you wanna give it a shot?"
Nervously, David nodded, and Cyborg took one of the horseshoes out of the bag. Not sure of what else to do, David held the bar like the aforementioned magic wand, and nodded to Cyborg, who threw the horseshoe into the air. David, looking more self-conscious than he normally did, and obviously trying desperately to look like something other than a ripoff from a renaissance fair or a Harry Potter convention, pointed the metal bar at the horseshoe, and opened his mind.
"BAM!"
The horseshoe blew up as if blasted out of the air with a shotgun. Bits and fragments pinged back to earth like rain, as Cyborg smiled and Raven smirked and David stared, thunderstruck, at the puff of smoke drifting off into the inky night that the explosion had left behind. What was amazing was not the explosion itself, for he had done that before a thousand times. What was amazing was that for the first time, the blast had occurred while the Horseshoe was still rising.
"I think he likes it," said Cyborg to Raven, who did not respond. "Wanna give it another go, man?"
David seemed almost past the point of words, but he simply nodded, and Cyborg tossed another horseshoe into the air. If anything, this one exploded even faster than the first had, not quite fast enough to qualify as a snapshot perhaps, but close, damned close, closer by far than anything David had done before. What's more, Cyborg could see (for Raven had mentioned he should look) that David didn't flinch at all when he blew up either horseshoe. It meant nothing official of course, but it indicated at least that the process was both much faster, and much less painful.
"Raven, I think we're gonna go through this bag," said Cyborg, judging from David's look, which was passing from astonishment into wonder and even joy. "You're welcome to stay up here and give us some tips…"
"That's okay…" she said. "I've got to go and watch Beast Boy again. Let me know if anything goes wrong. I'll let Robin know it seems to be working."
"Way I heard it," commented Cyborg. "Beast Boy thought you needed some watching instead."
"Which is why I'm going to duct tape him to the bed," said Raven, leaving it an open question of whether or not she was joking.
Raven vanished down the stairs, and Cyborg turned back to David and began tossing more horseshoes into the air. Already Cyborg could see a sea-change in David's demeanor. Perhaps it was relief at (apparently) having found the breakthrough they needed, or perhaps, for once, he could let himself get caught up in the sheer wonder of what he was able to do (something he tended to lack), but David was smiling, laughing even as he shot horseshoe after iron horseshoe out of the sky, sometimes taking two at once, like a skeet shooter who had finally learned how to aim. At this rate, David would be ready for the final tests soon. This was a welcome change, certainly, but coming on top of everything that had happened last week, it was, at least to Cyborg, a symbol that some things were finally going their way.
'And the best part was', he thought to himself, 'that for once, we figured something out with no extra mysteries popping up. For once we can just sit back, enjoy this one, and not have to worry.'
And fifteen stories below him, in the elevator on its way back down to the basement, Raven was doing the closest thing she knew how to do to praying, whispering her mantra to herself as she sought inner wisdom from within her own soul.
And words came back, dredged up from her memory like spirits of the restless dead.
"Demonspawn begone," came the words, "you will leave this one alone."
"Great Azar," she whispered to herself, "now what?"
But for this question she could find no answer, save for the silence that wrapped around her as the elevator plunged down into the depths of Titans Tower.
"What could possibly have triggered such a thing?"
Cyborg shook his head, and as he did he saw Raven and Robin do the same thing. "You got me, Star. I've never seen anything like it. I thought he'd had a damn stroke or somethin'."
"So you're saying he didn't have a stroke?" asked Raven with admirable calm, as ever. Beast Boy sat up a bit straighter in his bed as Cyborg shook his head, glancing over at the other bed, upon which David was laying still, electrodes and other monitors hooked up to him.
"I don't know what happened, but it doesn't look like anything that bad. I gave him a sedative. He should be out of it in a half hour or so. I can't tell without a lot more tests, or Raven doin' her thing, but I think he'll be all right."
"Um... dudes, what about this...?" asked Beast Boy in a raspy voice, gesturing at David. David's eyes were shut now, but Beast Boy leaned over and gently opened one with one hand. Normally light brown, similar in color to his hair, David's eye was now a sickening bloodshot red, the whites of his eyes tinged purple and crimson, as though someone had injected them with food coloring.
"He popped a blood vessel in his eye," said Cyborg. "Don't ask me how. When we picked him up off the floor he had a nosebleed and his eyes were turning that color. It looks like something blew out part of his circulatory system. Some kind of massive blood pressure spike. If I'm right, he'll have bruises all over by the time he wakes up."
"But what caused it?" asked Robin, getting back to the matter at hand, as usual. "Did he overtax himself? Tense up too much?"
"You can't tense up enough to blow blood vessels in your eyes," said Raven sharply. "It's not even possible. Not for a human. He didn't do this to himself, something happened, and we all know what caused it."
Nobody else said a word until Starfire pitched in with a question. "Raven, I do not know why such a thing would have happened. Is there something I am missing?"
"His powers, Star," said Cyborg. "His powers did this."
"Wait a minute," said Robin. "We don't know that his powers did it.
"We don't know anything about his powers one way or the other," said Raven. "They don't work the way that other kinetic powers do. We don't even know if he is kinetic, or if he's something else. But he was using his powers when he collapsed, so I'm betting they had something to do with it."
"But he used 'em pretty hard against Cinderblock, didn't he?" asked Beast Boy. "How come it didn't happen then?"
Nobody had an answer.
"But even if this was due to his abilities, if we do not understand them, how are we to prevent it from occurring again? It would be most... unfortunate for it to happen in the midst of a confrontation with a villain, no?"
"Unless he manages to improve his reaction times, there's no way we can let him at a supervillain anyway," said Robin, frustration beginning to ooze from his voice. "And if we don't know what happened, then we can't risk putting him back into intensive training."
"So... what do we do?" asked Beast Boy. Starfire, Robin, and Cyborg all looked at one another and slowly, one by one, shook their heads. Raven remained unmoving, not looking at anyone, but instead looking down at the young kineticist, or what they were all assuming was a kineticist, as though trying to make her mind up about something.
"Well, I'll take the watch down here I guess," said Cyborg. "The rest of y'all can go back up and - "
"Wait,"
Everyone slowly turned to Raven, who was slowly drawing the hood of her cloak back, and tightening the obsidian guards around her wrists.
"There's something I can try."
Starfire and Beast Boy looked at one another in puzzlement, and Cyborg fell silent, but Robin apparently deduced what Raven was talking about, and his eyes widened. "Wait a minute Raven... you said that was dangerous."
"It's dangerous doing it to an unwilling subject. All I'd be doing is looking for the source of his powers, and trying to find out more about them. As long as he doesn't resist me, I shouldn't have any trouble."
"But you don't know if he's going to resist you or not," said Robin. "What happens if he does?"
"Robin, you know I'm don't read people's minds without permission. I'm going to wait until he wakes up, and then I'm going to ask him, If he says yes, then I'll do it."
"Hang on," said Cyborg. "Are you talkin' about what I think you're talkin' about? You're gonna go into his head?"
"Like I said, just to find his power source. Nothing more. I won't be trying to find out who he's working for if that's what you're worried about. This isn't an interrogation."
"It's too risky," said Robin, crossing his arms, "even if he does agree. You don't know what you're going to find in there. I can't allow - "
"It's not your decision," said Raven. "It's his decision and mine. Besides, you're the one who's been so insistent that we get him ready. If we don't do this, then we'll never know how to help him."
Beast Boy remained silent, as did Starfire, but both turned to Robin to see what he would say. Cyborg folded his arms in mirror of Robin, and waited for the Boy Wonder's verdict. It was not long in coming. After a few more moments of thought, Robin gave an exasperated sigh.
"All right," he said, "if he agrees, go for it. But I want to be here when - "
"No," said Raven emphatically. "I need it to be just him and me. Anyone else's thoughts might get in the way and interfere."
Robin looked unhappy, but didn't say anything, leaving Cyborg a moment to ask. "So where are you gonna do it then?"
"We'll do it in his room."
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"You want to do what?"
Raven tried to force herself to be patient. She was asking quite a lot, she knew, but still a large part of her just wanted to get this over and done with and not have to explain everything to someone who had no experience with psychic links. Accordingly she counted backwards from ten once again in Azarathian in her head, and then explained as carefully as she could.
"I wouldn't be actually entering your head. I'd be projecting myself into your mind with my powers. Once I was in there, I could look around and try to locate the source of your abilities. If I could find them, then I might be able to figure out what happened to you this afternoon, and also figure out why you can't seem to react as fast as most kinetics are able to react with them. There's still a lot we don't know about your powers, and this would clear a lot of that up."
"I... get that," said David, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. Cyborg had been right after all. David looked like he was the victim of some kind of hemorrhagic fever, his face and hands and presumably the rest of him covered with red and blue splotches, both eyes blackened as though he had been hit with baseballs in the face. The redness in his eyes was still terribly pronounced, and Cyborg had said that he'd likely be unable to see very well for a day or so at least. "But… I mean… no offence but what else would you be looking for if you went in there?"
"Nothing else," said Raven. "Not without your permission. You could resist me if I tried, and that would be very dangerous for both of us. That's why I wouldn't read your mind before."
"But you will now?"
"What I'd be doing isn't mind-reading, it's more like looking for anything in you that isn't… normal. Powers stand out when you're inside someone's head, like a skyscraper in the middle of a forest. I should be able to find them pretty easily."
"And…" David leaned forward and shifted his weight again. "and you're… you're really not gonna try to read my mind?"
"No," she said. "You'd know if I did, anyhow."
"Oh," said David, considering the matter for a moment. Raven waited while he squirmed and thought, all the time wishing he would hurry up and say yes or no so that she could –
"What about my memory?"
That was not the question she expected. "What about it?"
"Could you read that while you were in there?"
Puzzled, Raven raised an eyebrow. "Not without your permission, like I said, or else things could go very bad. Don't worry about it."
"What if I gave you permission?"
This one stopped Raven in her tracks. "What?"
"To… look into my memories. If I gave you permission to do that, could you?"
"In… theory…" she said guardedly. "But… why would you give me permission to go into your memories? Aren't you worried that I might see something you don't want me to?"
David didn't answer immediately, taking a long slow breath and wincing as it made his bruises ache. "I don't… remember my real name, or who my parents were, or even how old I am. I was… I was thinking maybe… if you can go inside my memory, maybe you could find something out?"
Now it was Raven's turn to not answer immediately. She had assumed that David would react with great skepticism to her offer to enter his mind. Indeed she had not expected him to grant her permission. That he might see this as an opportunity was not a thought that had crossed her mind at all.
"I'm… really not sure," she said. This much at least was true. "I've never tried to do that before. I wouldn't… feel right about it." A cop-out perhaps, but in a split second on that night when Robin believed he was fighting the re-incarnation of Slade, Raven had learned more than she found she had ever wanted to know about Robin's past and memories. It hadn't been… terrible certainly, embarrassing though it was to know more about Robin than the others, but it was not something she was eager to repeat without proper preparation.
David seemed to shrink a bit as Raven said no. "Oh," he said, "okay then."
Raven's eyebrow raised a little higher. "Okay?"
"Go ahead," said David. "If you think it'll work… I wanna know what these powers are too. What do I have to do?"
Raven felt like laughing. After all this setup, he had agreed to it without a second thought. She was reminded of the tracer bug that Robin had given David at the very beginning of his stay at the tower, the one he still carried on him, and had accepted without complaint, unlike what pretty much every other teenager in the universe would have done.
"Just lay down and try to relax," said Raven, sliding her chair over towards David's bed. David obediently laid down on his back, hissing as his bruises protested, before leaning his head back and closing his eyes. An instant later he cracked one of them open again.
"This… it doesn't like… hurt does it? This mind-entering thing?"
"You shouldn't even notice anything happening," said Raven. "Now breathe slowly, try to concentrate on your breathing, and just… relax…"
Slowly, David's breathing became more regular and he closed his eyes once again, folding his hands on top of his chest. Raven took a deep breath and composed herself, crossing her legs into a lotus position, draping her cloak over herself, and repeating her mantra slowly.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…"
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…"
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos…"
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Raven opened her eyes, and found herself in a forest.
Warm air floated about her, the sun beamed down upon her face, and the fleeting sounds of birds and insects flickered about from every direction. The ground was covered with a thick, soft loam of grass, and all around her stood trees. Raven was no expert, she could not tell an oak from an ash, but the forest was plainly comprised of all manner of trees, including ones that had no relation geographically to one another, tropical ironwoods and Californian redwoods next to arctic evergreens and giant bonsais. Glancing around, Raven looked for any obvious signs of direction, but there were none. The sun was directly overhead, the trees seemed to stretch off on all sides, and while she could plainly hear birds, bugs, and other animals, she could not actually see any, which would have been strange for a normal forest, but in this place, was far from the strangest thing she expected to see.
Unable to see above the forest canopy, Raven levitated up into the air to get a better look around. Once above the canopy, she could see that the forest stretched on and on and on in every direction, apparently to infinity. No feature or mountain disturbed the flat and endless woodland, or rather none, save for the most glaringly obvious one.
Less than a mile away from Raven , towering over the forest below, sat a massive hemispherical dome. The dome was colored like bronze, and looked almost liquid, its surface rippling and shimmering in the everlasting sunlight. Trees were sticking half-through the dome, as if it had materialized around them, but it stretched taller than the tallest of the trees, the sole landmark in this featureless scene. Raven was frankly surprised by how jarring it was. Most of the time a meta-human's powers stood out by themselves but… not like this…
Still there was nothing for it. She turned towards the dome and flew at it, full speed, hoping to find a way inside when she got closer. No sooner had she arrived next to it though, than she realized she was to be disappointed in this hope. No door or window appeared within the dome, nor any other blemish to indicate a portal. A quick tour of the entire periphery revealed only the same, glistening surface. After several minutes, Raven simply landed next to the dome, and gently but firmly pushed on it with her hand. With only the barest pressure, she felt her hand pass right through the dome's surface. Quickly she withdrew her hand, and the liquid released her arm cleanly.
"Well, why not," she muttered to herself, and then she closed her eyes and stepped into and through the side of the dome."
She emerged inside a wasteland.
No sooner had Raven opened her eyes than she caught the smell of cordite and brimstone, rich and thick, a smell to assault the nose and bring stinging tears to the eyes. Her boots stood upon sand, or what looked like sand, but it was blasted, rocky, ash-mixed sand, like the fallout from some terrible nuclear war. Though only a moment ago she had passed through a glistening bronze barrier, she now found herself on a moonscape plain, with no barriers around her whatsoever, and no end to the moonscape that lay before her. Moonscape it reminded her of because the sky was pitch dark, yet the ground was somehow illuminated. Craters and jagged rocks lay scattered about in every direction, as well as small bits of objects that looked very vaguely artificial, but worn as if blasted by blowing sand for a hundred years, the bare skeletons of what might once have been buildings or vehicles or Azar-knew what else. The entire area looked like the deserted aftermath of a planetary catastrophe, a ruined, and terrible place, that caused a knot to form in her stomach, built of unease and deja-vu.
There, ahead of her, the sole object of note in this battered ruin of a place, sat a large red satin plush armchair, facing her. And in the chair sat a figure dressed in clothing that looked like it had once been rich and expensive, but was now completely washed out by the ash and dust, such that not even the color could be determined with any accuracy. The figure's face was invisible, a swirling mass of dusty-grey features that seemed to change faster than the eye could follow, and it sat in its chair and surveyed the dead landscape around it, and did not stir or react to Raven in any way.
This, to be frank, was not what Raven had expected to encounter.
She walked slowly towards the figure in the armchair, largely without any idea of what else she might do. She had expected to find some evidence that would point her towards the nature of the powers she was looking for, but this… this was something else altogether. The forest from before had felt 100% different from this wrecked landscape. For a moment she wondered if David might be schizophrenic or something. It took one to know one. Most mindscapes were not fragmented like this, not to such a violent extent, not even her own, strange as Nevermore was. This place felt like a whole different mind than the place she had first entered.
And who the hell was the person in the chair?
As Raven got within a dozen paces of the chair, the figure raised its head slowly. Its face was still inscrutable, a swirling combination of a thousand faces, human and otherwise, but as Raven watched, the swirling, changing features began to settle, and the figure seemed to shrink a bit. When at last the features arranged themselves into a coherent face, Raven found herself staring at who else but David.
Sort of.
The figure was the right size and age for David, had the right features, the right appearance, but even accounting for the heavy dusting of volcanic ash it had taken on, its gaze was far too direct, far too unflinching for it to have been David, who usually looked at Raven for exactly the amount of time necessary to determine that they were not about to collide, and otherwise averted his eyes as though trying not to draw down the wrath of a dangerous predator. This David's gaze was focused, calm, revealing nothing, as cool a poker face as anything Robin had ever deployed. The gaze was not particularly malevolent, nor anything else for that matter, but something about this figure made Raven extremely uneasy, moreso than she should have been given the circumstances. None of this was real after all. This was just visions conjured up by her and David's minds. Nothing to be afraid of.
"I'd wondered if his new friends would come."
Raven almost (but not quite) gave a start at that, so still had been the figure before it spoke. The voice was not David's, not even close. This was a much richer, deeper voice, seeded with various quasi-detectable sounds that gave it resonance and power, and Raven couldn't help but wonder if this was one of the facets of David's personality, like her emotions were inside her mind… and if so which one?
"Are you his power?" she asked, directly. For whatever the movies would have one believe, direct speech often worked well in these sorts of places.
"I am the source for his power," said the figure, and it stood up and slowly walked towards Raven. It, like David, was considerably smaller than she was. She stood her ground as it approached. "And you must be Raven."
Raven had expected it to know her name. It was a part of David's mind after all, albeit an exceedingly weird part, so logically it knew everything David knew. But still something was off here. She had never heard of someone's kinetic powers manifesting themselves as a personality side. Then again, it wasn't like she'd been inside too many other kinetics' minds. Perhaps there was nothing odd about this at all, other than the obvious.
"I expected you to come earlier," it said to her, and smiled a vaguely predatory smile. "You are suspicious of his motives."
"I was," she said. "I'm not anymore."
"Liar," chided the figure with a smile. "You're suspicious of everyone's motives, if perhaps not David's any more than others now. But I thank you nonetheless."
"Why?" asked Raven, willing to play along if it meant getting some answers.
"He's never been a very social boy," said the figure with a slightly warmer smile. "You five will do him a great deal of good, not just as teammates. I hope he can return the favor of course, but I don't know you all. This is a rather new thing for me as well."
"And who are you?" It seemed the obvious question.
The figure was now standing before Raven. "I'm the reason you came," it said. "You wished to know how he might wield me more effectively and safely?"
"I wanted to know how they worked."
"I'm afraid that's a bit complicated," said the figure. "But… for the trouble he had today, I think you suspect already what the issue is…"
Raven lifted an eyebrow. "Somatics?"
The figure nodded. "Exactly," it said, as it extended its hand to Raven. Not usually given to such gestures, Raven thought in this case, it might be best to try and be polite, and shook the figure's hand.
And that's when everything went straight to hell.
With a loud gasping cry, the figure recoiled from Raven as though repelled by some kind of aura about her, its eyes flying open and dust cascading off of its clothes like a petrified waterfall. It staggered backwards in obvious horror, mouth agape, features twisted, breath coming in ragged gasps. Raven had no idea what had just happened, but the figure stumbled backwards towards its chair.
"No…" it said, a hollow whisper of a voice that knew itself to be lying. "No, it can't be, it can't be!"
"What can't be?" asked Raven, now beginning to become truly worried. "What are you talking about?"
The figure took no notice of her words, but threw its hands out as if defending itself. "Stay away!" it shouted. "I won't permit it!"
Things were making less sense by the minute. "What won't you permit?" Raven asked, already preparing her defenses in case the figure attacked – "
"Demonspawn!" screamed the figure, "Begone from this place!"
Raven froze.
"… What?" She had heard him perfectly well, but… he couldn't possibly know that! David couldn't possibly know that! Nobody knew that! How in the world could -
"Gem of Trigon!" shouted the David-like figure. "Portal of darkness, I will not permit it! Go tell your master to leave this one alone! He is not for your filth! Begone!"
Raven staggered backwards as if she had been punched in the chest. Her head swam, her blood chilled to ice water, as the words poured forth unbidden from the figure before her. An urge to run, to flee as fast as she could came over her, but before she could make good on the urge or decide if it was worth obeying, the figure raised its hands, and the entire mindscape blew up.
Raven's shield erupted into being around her, strong, inflexible, powered by every ounce of will and energy that she had to draw upon. Nothing, not even her own limitless rage, had been able to tear through such a shield, not in mental combat, not here. And yet the figure that was David and at the same time was not him conjured forth a power that Raven had never in her life even imagined before. The equivalent force of a thousand burning suns consumed the entire scene in fire. There was no more ground, no more air, merely fire, and a bubble of black energy protecting her from it. The threat galvanized her attention, and she fought back with everything she had, for nothing else would suffice, and yet the shield began to warp and crack and through the roar of the firestorm around her, she could hear the words of the figure who had done this, screaming like a damned soul, words packed with fear and rage.
"SPAWN OF TRIGON, YOU WILL LEAVE THIS ONE ALONE!"
With a thunderous crash, the shield gave way, and Raven felt the flames boring into her and felt herself screaming even as she released her concentration all at once.
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"Raven? Raven?! Raven can you hear me?! Raven?!"
"Dude, what happened?" yelled Beast Boy, crouching over Raven's fallen form, holding her head gently in his lap, even as David sat on the floor opposite her,
"I don't know what happened. I was just lying there and all of a sudden she screams and falls out of the air."
Beast Boy grabbed the communicator off his belt. "Beast Boy calling Robin, Starfire, Cyborg. It's an emergency! Raven's – "
Raven suddenly gave a loud gasp and sat bolt upright, nearly knocking Beast Boy over in the process, and causing David to jump back in surprise nearly half a foot. Beast Boy stopped in mid-sentence as the faces of all three of the other Titans stared back at him from the communicator screen. "Um… hold on," he said, and he closed the screen again. "Raven? Are you okay? What happened?"
Raven for her part looked almost unsure of where she was for a moment. She looked around for a second or two, before focusing on Beast Boy and David, and only then did the understanding return to her gaze. "Beast Boy?" she asked, the meaning of the question being left sufficiently ambiguous.
"Dude, Raven, are you all right? You look like someone just stuffed a rhinoceros beetle up your nose." Such was the situation that neither David nor Raven commented on Beast Boy's choice of imagery.
"I'm… I'm okay…" said Raven, still sounding confused.
"What happened in there?" asked David. "You just started screaming all of a sudden."
"You didn't… you didn't see what happened?"
"No," insisted David, "it was like you said. I never even felt anything. Did you go inside my mind?"
Raven nodded slowly, as both boys stared at her as though half expecting her to grow wings. "It was…" she started, then stopped and started over. "It was just some mental feedback. I'm all right, I think."
Beast Boy looked considerably relieved, David a bit less so, but still somewhat better. "Well, did you go into his head?" asked Beast Boy. "Did you find anything there?"
Raven had by now recovered to ask an obvious question of her own. "Beast Boy, what are you doing here? You're supposed to be down in the infirmary, asleep."
"Oh," said Beast Boy. He rubbed the back of his head and grinned. "I um… just thought I'd come up and make sure everything was going okay."
"Even though you heard me say that I didn't want anyone else here because their emotions might interfere with the procedure?" said Raven, her angry tone beginning to re-assert itself. "Get back down to the infirmary right now, or I'll make sure whoever attacks us next doesn't have to kill you."
"Right!" said Beast Boy in an overly cheery fashion as he got up and slowly backed towards the door. "So… um… glad… everything went… okay!" he said, and with that, he bolted out the door as fast as he could, and could be heard scampering down the hallway in some quadruped form or another.
Raven slowly stood up, and David did the same. "So… did you find anything?" he asked hesitantly.
Raven looked back at David with a look that was almost frightened herself, but it lasted only an instant before her professional gaze took back over. "I… need to think about what I saw for a while. I need to… interpret it right…"
"Oh," said David, obviously expecting a bit more. "All right then... I guess… just let me know if you come up with anything, okay?"
"I'll be sure to do that," said Raven as she slipped out the door. David couldn't tell, but t took every ounce of self-control she had not to run down the hallway. She needed to get back to her room. She needed to meditate. She needed to look at her books, but most of all, she needed to figure out what she was going to tell everyone else.
But that much she already had an idea on…
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"So after all that," said Cyborg, leaning against the doorframe, "he's just a normal kinetic after all?"
"Looks that way to me," said Raven, as she watched Robin shuffle through a sheaf of papers in the evidence room filing cabinet. "A somatic-based kineticist. I should have thought of it before."
"But you don't know why he had that attack this afternoon? Or how to improve his speed?"
"I don't know… exactly yet," said Raven, "but I think I can make sure it doesn't happen again."
"How?" asked Robin. Raven was prepared for such a question.
"Somatic-based kinetics have what's called a psychosomatic trigger. Certain gestures, certain objects, are what let them unleash their powers. That's why he keeps pointing at whatever he's blowing up. His powers are mental, but he has an easier time with them if he's got some kind of focus."
Robin and Cyborg both nodded, either understanding, or pretending to. "So you're willing to work with him on this?" asked Robin. "That's… pretty generous of you."
Raven shrugged. "Like you said, we might need him to be ready soon, and I'm the only one who knows what I saw inside his mind."
"Yeah, BB said something about you screamin'?" asked Cyborg. "What did you find in there?"
"Just a standard mindspace. His was a giant forest with a big golden dome in the middle of it. Nothing too interesting for a mindspace, but I was able to figure out that the somatics should help him a lot."
"So you gonna go back in? If he lets you that is?"
Raven shook her head. "No. No need to. I don't have anything more to find out there." Her face remained her usual emotionless mask, and neither Cyborg nor Robin noticed her bunching a handful of her cape up in one of her fists as she said it.
Robin finally found what he was looking for, and stood up from the cabinet, walking over to Raven and handing it over.
"You sure you want him to use this," Robin asked.
"It's just temporary," she said. "I think it'll do…"
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"David? You up here?"
There was a soft cough followed by the sound of footsteps in the gravel, and slowly, David appeared out of the darkness of the Tower's roof. His gate and posture were even more subdued than usual, his hands stuffed in his pockets and white condensation coming off his breath as he walked over. The tracer logs showed that he'd been up here for at least an hour or more, and he looked frankly, half-frozen. Jump got pretty cold at night.
"It's like five degrees up here man, what're you doin'?"
David shrugged. "Nothing," he said. "Just… trying to stay out of the way."
"Yeah, well, c'mere. We got somethin' for you."
Cyborg stepped aside and allowed Raven to climb up the steps behind him and onto the roof. Reaching into her cloak, she drew out a small metal stick about eighteen inches long, and handed it to David, who gently took it, turning it over in his hands, clearly unsure as to what it was or what it's purpose was.
"What's… this?" he asked.
"That's your magic wand," said Raven deadpan. From anyone else, it would have sounded like a joke, but not from Raven.
"What do you mean my magic wand?" he asked. "I don't do magic."
"It's a figure of speech," said Raven. "Your powers are tied to somatics. You want to blow something up, you point at it. Pointing at it doesn't really do anything, but it makes it easier for you to focus on it." She gestured at the small metal bar. "That's your new focus. It's something for you to concentrate on, and get your powers into the right mindset. I think it'll help."
"How… how do I use it?" asked David, who seemed to be unsure of how even to hold the thing.
"You start by concentrating on it. It's made of steel, so that shouldn't be too hard. Don't try to blow it up though, just focus on the molecules, and then when the target shows up, point the bar at it, and let your mind slide from one object right into the other."
David looked rather suspicious of all this, but did not attempt to argue. Cyborg lifted the small bag of horseshoes he had brought up to the roof with him. "What do you say man, you wanna give it a shot?"
Nervously, David nodded, and Cyborg took one of the horseshoes out of the bag. Not sure of what else to do, David held the bar like the aforementioned magic wand, and nodded to Cyborg, who threw the horseshoe into the air. David, looking more self-conscious than he normally did, and obviously trying desperately to look like something other than a ripoff from a renaissance fair or a Harry Potter convention, pointed the metal bar at the horseshoe, and opened his mind.
"BAM!"
The horseshoe blew up as if blasted out of the air with a shotgun. Bits and fragments pinged back to earth like rain, as Cyborg smiled and Raven smirked and David stared, thunderstruck, at the puff of smoke drifting off into the inky night that the explosion had left behind. What was amazing was not the explosion itself, for he had done that before a thousand times. What was amazing was that for the first time, the blast had occurred while the Horseshoe was still rising.
"I think he likes it," said Cyborg to Raven, who did not respond. "Wanna give it another go, man?"
David seemed almost past the point of words, but he simply nodded, and Cyborg tossed another horseshoe into the air. If anything, this one exploded even faster than the first had, not quite fast enough to qualify as a snapshot perhaps, but close, damned close, closer by far than anything David had done before. What's more, Cyborg could see (for Raven had mentioned he should look) that David didn't flinch at all when he blew up either horseshoe. It meant nothing official of course, but it indicated at least that the process was both much faster, and much less painful.
"Raven, I think we're gonna go through this bag," said Cyborg, judging from David's look, which was passing from astonishment into wonder and even joy. "You're welcome to stay up here and give us some tips…"
"That's okay…" she said. "I've got to go and watch Beast Boy again. Let me know if anything goes wrong. I'll let Robin know it seems to be working."
"Way I heard it," commented Cyborg. "Beast Boy thought you needed some watching instead."
"Which is why I'm going to duct tape him to the bed," said Raven, leaving it an open question of whether or not she was joking.
Raven vanished down the stairs, and Cyborg turned back to David and began tossing more horseshoes into the air. Already Cyborg could see a sea-change in David's demeanor. Perhaps it was relief at (apparently) having found the breakthrough they needed, or perhaps, for once, he could let himself get caught up in the sheer wonder of what he was able to do (something he tended to lack), but David was smiling, laughing even as he shot horseshoe after iron horseshoe out of the sky, sometimes taking two at once, like a skeet shooter who had finally learned how to aim. At this rate, David would be ready for the final tests soon. This was a welcome change, certainly, but coming on top of everything that had happened last week, it was, at least to Cyborg, a symbol that some things were finally going their way.
'And the best part was', he thought to himself, 'that for once, we figured something out with no extra mysteries popping up. For once we can just sit back, enjoy this one, and not have to worry.'
And fifteen stories below him, in the elevator on its way back down to the basement, Raven was doing the closest thing she knew how to do to praying, whispering her mantra to herself as she sought inner wisdom from within her own soul.
And words came back, dredged up from her memory like spirits of the restless dead.
"Demonspawn begone," came the words, "you will leave this one alone."
"Great Azar," she whispered to herself, "now what?"
But for this question she could find no answer, save for the silence that wrapped around her as the elevator plunged down into the depths of Titans Tower.
Re: The Measure of a Titan (Ch.18 added)
Chapter 18: The Tools of the Trade
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle
***
Day 1
“I think he likes it...”
Robin said nothing, as usual, simply crossing his arms and watching Raven and Cyborg run David through another round of blowing things to pieces, giving no sign of whether or not he was pleased, or displeased, or if he even thought anything of the proceedings. Beast Boy imagined, not for the first time, that Robin had missed his calling in life, and should have become one of those guards in front of the Queen's house in England that wasn't allowed to move. He certainly had the fixed stare down.
“Indeed, he does appear to be enjoying himself much more than the last time,” said Starfire.
“Star, last time he had a stroke and collapsed on the floor,” said Beast Boy.
“And this time, he has not done so,” replied the Tamaranean with a smile. “Is that not a good thing?”
“It's a very good thing,” said Robin, who as always could be counted on to break his strong-and-silent routine for a question from Starfire. “I just want to make sure that Raven knows what she's doing.”
“Dude, it'sRaven,” said Beast Boy, “she always knows what she's doing. 'Sides, without her, we wouldn't even know what had happened, or about the whole somawhatsit thing.” Robin and Starfire both cast confused glances over at Beast Boy, who blinked for a second before explaining. “The 'wand'?”
All three turned back to the training room below, where David was presently pointing the metal pipe in his hand at a stack of bricks. One by one, the bricks began to explode, fragments of them hopping up into the air like popcorn.
“I do not understand,” confessed Starfire after a moment or two. “That is not a... 'wand', not such as the one Mumbo uses whenever he is committing crimes. Has Raven trained David in the use of magic?”
“It's not a real wand,” said Robin. “It's just one of my old training batons. Raven said that what he needed was an external focus to trigger his powers more rapidly. She's offered to work with him in figuring out how to use it with his powers.”
“So,” said Beast Boy, “he's just gonna use it like... wait, she did what?”
“I know,” said Robin. “I was surprised too, but she's the one who went into his head, and of all of us, her powers are the most like his. It makes sense to let her try.”
“It is very kind of Raven to offer to assist him in such a way, do you not think?” said Starfire, but her voice revealed that even she thought this was strange. Raven didn't exactly 'bond' with people easily, and while she had willingly done everything Robin asked her to do concerning David, she had not volunteered any further assistance. It just didn't seem her sort of 'thing'.
Apparently looks were deceiving.
“It makes sense for her to do it,” said Robin, his voice as impassive as ever. “In fact, I'd like to have all of us take a turn in the next couple of weeks. We all have things to show him, things he's gonna need when the time comes. And we should think about getting everything else ready for when it does.”
Starfire raised one of the small spots that served as eyebrows for her. “Is... there some need for haste?” she asked. “Cinderblock has been destroyed, as has the army of robots we were assailed by, and there has been no further sign of danger to him or us, has there?”
“With Cinderblock dead, we have no idea who was behind all this, or why. Each attempt they've made has been stronger and more destructive than the last. Since we can't find them, we need to be prepared for when they make their next move. That means he has to be ready as soon as he can.”
“Relax, dude,” said Beast Boy, “Cinderblock's dead because David trashed him, and Raven smashed all the robots that they sent. If they know what's good for them, they'll be hiding where nobody - “
“Cinderblock's dead, Beast Boy,” said Robin, cutting Beast Boy off, “because 'they' infiltrated a maximum security meta-prison and killed him without leaving a trace. If they can do that, then there's no telling what else they can do.”
“Robin, if they could just warp into the tower and kill anybody they wanted, why would they even bother with Cinderblock? Wouldn't we all be dead or captured or whatever already?”
“I don't know,” said Robin, still refusing to turn his head away from the scene below, “but the longer he's not ready to face whatever's coming, the bigger the chance that it'll arrive before he's prepared for it. He can't take that risk, and neither can we.”
As though to signal that the discussion was closed, Robin turned away from the window. “We need to finish showing him the ropes,” he said as he walked towards the door, “and we need to do it fast. I don't think we have any more time to lose.”
“How much longer do you believe we should spend preparing him?” asked Starfire. “He is... improving, but he still requires much work. Perhaps we should - “
“Two weeks,” said Robin, pausing before the door. “I think if he works hard at it, and we all do our part... he should be ready for a real test in about two weeks. That'll make it almost exactly three months since he started training.”
“But... dude, is that gonna be enough time?” asked Beast Boy.
“It was for me,” said Robin as he opened the door with the push of a button, “and I think it will be for him too. Either way, we're going to find out.”
***
Day 3
“Let's just try it again,”
Raven sounded annoyed, but then Raven always sounded more or less annoyed, and David simply tried to ignore it and focus on the matter at hand. Slowly, he picked the metal baton up from off the ground, and held it in one hand again, breathing carefully as he cleared his mind in the manner Raven had explained to him. The sorceress was standing opposite him, arms crossed like a disappointed schoolteacher, with her cloak wrapped around her like a winter coat.
“Ready? Now do it slowly. I'll talk you through it, and try not to drop it this time unless you have to.”
David nodded, and slowly closed his eyes, focusing on Raven's words as they filtered in through the back of his mind.
“Clear your mind of all distractions,” she said. Much easier said than done, but he did his best. “Concentrate on the air around you. What do you see?”
David ignored the urge to complain that this was the twentieth time he had done this today, and slowly opened his eyes, the lights around him dimming into nothingness, replaced by a swirling mass of glowing dots, infinitely small, yet each distinguishable as they lazily moved about.
“Nitrogen and Oxygen,” he said, identifying the two most common types of dots. The others existed only as occasional glimpses within the sea of blue and red gas (why those elements appeared blue and red was a question he could not answer).
“Good,” said Raven. “Now, concentrate on the baton itself.”
David looked down at the metal stick in his hand, now an indistinct hazy mass of iron, carbon, and chromium molecules. Though the metal rod wasn't moving, the molecules comprising it were, vibrating in place like little engines, so small as to be invisible to anything save for an electron microscope, yet somehow visible to him here and now.
“You're seeing it?”
David nodded slowly, took a deep breath and held it, knowing what was going to come next.
“All right, now I want you to use your mind to take control of the baton like you normally do. Don't try to blow it up, just keep it as it is right now.
This was the hard part.
He focused on the baton, extending his mental control over it bit by bit. It was partly like trying to hold one's hand perfectly still in mid-air, and partly like a juggling act, constantly having to release some parts of the baton, and compress some others. Bit by bit, he took control over more and more of the molecules, and soon he began to feel the baton start to shiver in his hands, as bits of it would warm up suddenly, then chill down far below room temperature, only to warm up again.
“Raven...”
“I know, just keep going.”
Very very carefully he walked the mental tightrope, trying to ignore the wild shifts in the temperature of the baton, which seemed to be trying periodically to scald or freeze his fingers off. He clutched it tightly, trying to force the baton to return to equilibrium, having little success.
“You're choking up on it too much. Relax and it will stop trying to burn you. Take it easily and you'll get it to calm down.”
David might have commented that this was a lot easier to say when you weren't the one holding onto the alternately burning/freezing baton, but he had too much to do already. He physically forced his fingers to relax their grip somewhat on the shaking, fluctuating baton, and tried to do the same with the grip his mind had on the baton. It took some effort, but as it turned out, Raven was right, and no sooner had he done so than the fluctuations began to taper off. The temperature still shifted, but the shifts came slower, more regularly, a rhythmic pulse not unlike a heartbeat...
In fact...
“There,” said Raven, and David let his breath out slowly, still staring at the mass of metallic molecules that comprised the baton, rather than the baton itself. Raven let him catch his breath for a second, before giving him his next instruction.
“Now, I want you to adjust your vision back to normal, without letting go of the baton in any way, and see what you've done.”
David hesitated. “You want... what?”
“You can keep hold of the baton with your mind while looking at it normally, can't you?”
“I... yeah... I think so...”
“So then do it, and don't let go of it this time. It's going to look a little weird, but don't worry.”
David instantly began to worry, if only at the thought of what grotesque mockeries of nature Raven would call weird. Still he took and released another deep breath, and then closed his eyes, paused, and opened them again, looking down at the stick in his hand, and no sooner had he done this than he gasped and choked up on the baton with both mind and fingers, for the metal stick was on fire.
“Easy! Easy!” insisted Raven, and it was that sharp command that made him hesitate long enough for his nerves to realize that the baton wasn't burning his hand, and that what he had taken for flames was actually...
... well... what was it?
The baton was apparently not on fire after all, as it was still pulsating from warm to cool in tune with the beating of an invisible heart (his own?). However a reddish-orange aura was spilling off of it in waves, like the flames of a soft candle, licking into the air before fading out, bright enough to cast a soft light around the baton even though the room itself was well-lit. Gently, he raised the baton up, staring at it closely, expecting at any moment to feel the heat of the 'flames' licking his face and searing his hand, but they never did, though the pulsing temperature shifts became a bit more pronounced as his heart rate increased, and he forced himself to take a few deep breaths to still it. The aura ringed the entire baton, making it look as though it were merrily burning, the aura filtering through between his fingers and licking at the air around it, leaving a trail of orange-red energy as he gently moved it through the air. By now he was no longer afraid, merely confused, and he looked up at Raven for a moment.
“What the...?”
Raven shrugged. “It's your power,” she said, “how should I know?”
“Raven,” said David, beginning to feel the fear building in his chest “seriously, what is this?”
“Probably just a side-effect,” said Raven. “Most kinetic powers have them. T... a kinetic I used to know would encase everything she affected in a yellow aura. I wrap everything in dark energy. It happens.”
“But then why haven't I seen it before?”
“Probably because you've never tried to use a somatic focus before,” said Raven, with a note in her voice that indicated a rapidly draining reserve of patience. “Now pay attention. Point the baton at your target and get to work.”
David extended his hand with the still-glowing baton held tightly, towards a series of bricks lined up in a row like dominoes.
“Ready?” said Raven, “all right, slide your focus from the baton to the target... and... now.”
David flicked his wrist, gesturing with the baton as though it were a magic wand, and the first brick detonated an instant after the word 'now'. The aura around the baton flickered for a moment, but came back to full strength after a fluctuation or two between hot and cold and back again.
“Good,” said Raven, “but remember to make a loop. Push with your mind out of the baton, through the target, and back into the baton.”
David nodded, and gestured with his baton at the second brick, which exploded with just as much vivacity as the first. The baton quivered once more as he returned his full attention to it, but not as violently, and the reddish aura barely flickered. He continued to move down the line of bricks, one after the next, and with each explosion, both he and the baton recovered more quickly. Raven said nothing as he obliterated the line of targets brick by brick, breaking in only at the end to check that everything was still in order.
“No headache?” she asked.
David blasted the last target to pieces before responding, turning the still glowing baton over in his hand. “No,” he said with a nervous smile, as though to say this was to tempt fate. “No, I feel... I feel fine... I think.”
“Good,” said Raven, crossing her arms. “You can let go of the baton now. We'll take a break, then try some directional explosions.”
David nodded, and slowly released the baton with his mind. The red aura extinguished itself like a campfire quenched by a sudden downpour, and the alternately hot and cold metal returned to room temperature without so much as another twinge of motion.
“Hey um... Raven?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for... for helping me figure this stuff out.”
Raven turned away, walking towards the side of the training room, where she had left a thermos filled with the herbal tea that she drank practically to the exclusion of all else (or so at least it seemed). “Don't mention it,” she said without turning around.
David normally would not have mentioned it, but... perhaps because they were finally making some progress, perhaps because of what had happened last week, perhaps simply because Raven had offered to give him a hand, and David knew how little she was wont to do that, he felt like making such an explanation as he could.
“Look,” he said, “I'm... I'm just... I just wanted to say that...” why did these conversations always wind up with him sounding like an idiot? He took a breath and restarted. “I know this... this whole thing's been kinda weird for you guys too, and... I wanted to say, thanks. Thanks for... for helping me anyway.”
“Whoever's after you tried to kill us as well,” said Raven. “We tend to take that sort of thing personally.”
“They only tried to kill you guys because you were helping me,” replied David. “You didn't have to - “
“You don't know that,” said Raven, and even so, whatever they want with you isn't likely to be good news for us or for the city, even if we hadn't gotten involved. That makes it our business.”
David had heard this before, and so he simply nodded. “Even so,” he said, “thanks.”
“What part of 'don't mention it' didn't you get?” she asked, and unlike most people who used those words, Raven actually seemed quite willing to let the matter drop. “Let's try directional explosions,” she said, walking over to the control panel and summoning another three dozen bricks for target practice. “I'll levitate some targets, and you fire the bricks into them. And try to pay closer attention to where you're aiming this time. Hit me by accident, and you'll wish Robin had broken your neck last combat training session.”
David couldn't resist. “And what happens if I hit you on purpose?”
Raven smirked. “You'd have a better chance of beating Robin in a stick fight.”
***
Day 6
As he contemplated the training mat from his present position laying face-down atop it, David decided then and there that if he lived to be a thousand years old, he would never ever ever actually attempt to fight Robin for real. In fact, he wasn't so certain that this wasn't the point of the present lesson.
“How did I do that?” asked Robin rhetorically.
“You hit me in the head with a stick,” replied David after a moment's thought. It seemed obvious enough to him.
Robin did not seem to appreciate the wry remark. “That's right,” he said, “and how did I manage to do that?”
David tried to think of something reasonably competent, witty, or even coherent to say, but finally had to give up the effort in exhaustion. “You swung it at me?”
“So when someone swings a baton at your head, do you usually just stand there and get hit with it?”
“I don't usually havepeople swinging batons at my head,” said David with just a touch more frustration than he intended. Robin however refused to be baited.
“No,” said the Boy Wonder. “I think your specialty is telephone poles, isn't it? I can have Cyborg go get a couple and we can try it with those instead if you want.”
David groaned as he slowly peeled himself up off the mat, his head pounding like a snare drum, and for once from the perfectly natural causes of having been hit with a stick repeatedly over the course of the last hour. His head was not the only thing aching for that reason. Worse, in some ways, than the physical beating he had taken (which was at least mitigated somewhat in that Robin was not actually trying to cripple him) was the fact that so far he had not managed once to score a single hit, to evade a single strike, or to otherwise in any way prevent Robin from doing exactly and precisely whatever he wanted in their little sparring match.
And on top of that, he knew Robin was going easy on him.
Robin watched as David got up, his eyes hidden as ever behind the latex mask he wore at all times (or at least at all times David recalled seeing him). Mask or no however, David had no trouble reading Robin's gaze this time. It was a look he disliked more every time he saw it, the look of Robin trying to figure out why it was that, despite his best efforts, David still wasn't getting it right. Nevermind that Bruce Lee would have been hard pressed to go toe to toe with Robin for any length of time.
David stood there silently for a few moments, regaining his breath, expecting Robin to tell him to try it once more. His right arm felt like a dead weight from swinging the baton around in every direction except (obviously) the correct one, and his balance was off after having been thrown to the mat at least fifty times in the last hour. Still, there was no way around it, so he simply waited for Robin to tell him to attack, or to prepare to receive an attack, so that he could miss, or fail to block, and wind up on the mat for the fifty-first time.
But instead of attacking or ordering David to attack, Robin took a step back, lowering his baton to his side and rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “You're not trying to hit me,” he said finally.
David blinked. “... what?” he asked, semi-incredulously. Trying to hit Robin was literally all he had been doing for the last hour, not that there had been much to show for it.
“You're not trying to hit me,” repeated Robin, “you're trying to attack so that when I hit you, you don't get hurt.”
This was a bit too fine a point for David to grasp, given his present circumstance. “It hasn't been working,” he commented.
“Pain in training saves it in the field,” said Robin, another one of the catchphrases that David assumed he was getting out of a booklet somewhere. Robin however had already moved on. “Why do you think we're doing this?”
“What... training?” asked David. He could think of several reasons that were unlikely to win him any points with Robin, but opted for the safe route. “So that I'll be ready for whatever happens.” He'd said and heard it so many times by now that came out automatically.
“No, not training in general, melee training. Why do you think we're working on this?”
'Because you like to show off how you can beat the stuffing out of me,' thought David, though he opted instead to go with a reply that was slightly less inflammatory. “I have no idea,”
He expected to receive a lecture about the importance of hand-to-hand combat training for a superhero. It would not have been the first time Robin had given it to him, nor the fifth, but that was not what Robin said. Instead Robin made a fairly unexpected remark.
“You're terrible at this,” he said. “The melee fighting. I know it, you know it, so you've got to be wondering why I keep insisting on it. It's not just about learning how to defend yourself at this range, though you will need that. So do you know what it's really about?” David shook his head, and Robin folded his arms in front of his chest. “It's about learning how to hurt people.”
David felt like he had missed a punch line somewhere. “What?”
“Hurting people. That's what a fight is. Two people trying to hurt one another bad enough that one of them stops fighting and gives up. You need to learn how to do that.”
“I know how to do that,” insisted David.
“No,” said Robin, “you don't. You've been holding back with that baton all day. I was hoping I could make you angry enough to really start swinging at me by tapping you a few times, but it didn't work. You're not a natural fighter, and you're going to need to learn how to become one.”
“What are you talking about?” asked David, who was getting sick of having to repeat that question. “You just said I was terrible at this stuff.”
“When you meet an enemy, everything you can do, talk, hit them, shoot them, call for help, hide, everything boils down to two options. You can try to fight, or you can try to run. Most people try to run, unless they don't have any other choice. We're heroes, we don't run. We fight. Sometimes we fight with our weapons and our powers, and sometimes with our words, and sometimes just by being an example to everyone else, but that's what we do.”
Robin retracted his baton and clipped it back onto his back. “You're not a natural fighter, David. Someone comes after you, you run away. And normally that's fine. Not a lot of people like you get into this sort of thing, but sometimes it happens. What I'm worried about is if you come up against someone who's trying to kill you, that you're going to hold back and give them a chance.”
David shook his head, as though trying to ward something off. “This is crazy,” he said, “I wasn't holding back against Cinderblock, was I?”
“Cinderblock was a walking monster made of solid rock the size of a house. It's easy to go all out against something inhuman and giant and scary. But most of the people we fight are just that, people. Bank robbers, terrorists, other meta-humans. Are you gonna be able to go all out against people like that, or are you gonna hesitate, and let them get a shot off on you?”
David opened his mouth to answer 'no', but stopped before he did so, for Robin's gaze was unwavering, and as always, he knew that Robin already knew the answer.
“I'm not trying to say you're a coward,” said Robin, “But the first time we talked about doing this, you told me you didn't want to get killed, and you didn't want to kill anyone.”
“I thought Titans didn't kill?” asked David, his hands slowly falling back to his side. His eyes darted down to the floor, suddenly unwilling to meet Robin's gaze.
“We don't,” said Robin as he approached, “but that's not the point. You were afraid of even showing us your powers the first time you got here. You never used them much at all before coming here, at least that's what you claimed, and I believe it.”
Robin walked up to David and re-extended his baton, holding it up in front of David's face. “You need to be able to face someone this close, where you can look them straight in the eye, and hit them with everything you've got. Your baton, your fist, your powers, everything. You need to be able to hurt a psycho or a supervillain bad enough to make them want to stop fighting you and give up. You've got the weapons to do that, even if you're bad at hand-to-hand fighting, but you need to be willing to hurt them.”
All thoughts of sarcasm and wit had long since fled, and David's shoulders drooped as he shook his head. “How?” he asked without looking up. “How can... How do you learn how to do that?”
“I don't know,” said Robin. “I didn't need to, and neither did any of the others. We're not crazy, we don't like hurting people, but none of us ever had to learn how to not hold back when the time came. Some of us needed to learn how to restrain ourselves, we're just like that. You're not. It's not about being afraid or a coward or not understanding the stakes. You were right before, you didn't hold back against Cinderblock, but you only turned on him after he chased you all the way to Battery Street. Why was that?”
“I was... I was scared, all right?” said David defensively. “He was gonna kill me!”
“And what?” asked Robin, “you weren't scared after he did corner you? Of course you were scared, but that's not why you ran away from him. If it was, you wouldn't have stopped running when you saw all those people.”
David rubbed his eyes with his free hand, lowering his head back down to face the floor. “You think I didn't want to hurt Cinderblock, even after everything he did?”
“I think you didn't want to get into a fight,” said Robin, “with him or anyone else, and so you only fought because you absolutely had to.” He reached over with the baton and laid the tip of it on David's shoulder, like a knight dubbing a squire with a sword. “And there's nothing wrong with that for a civilian, but you're not a civilian anymore. I'm not saying you should ever enjoy it, or that you can't ever try to get around it, but you're going to have to hurt people in this line of work, and you need to learn how. Because we almost never have to fight. We choose to fight because if we don't, then innocent people get hurt. You've got the tools to do that, but you need the will.”
David raised his eyes again. “So how do I learn that?”
Robin smirked as he backed away to engagement range once again. “You can start with actually trying to hit me with the baton,” he said, “but we'll do that next time.”
David shook his head, chuckling at the absurdity of it all as Robin turned away and walked towards the door. “You know that I'm never gonna be able to actually hit you, right?”
“Of course not,” said Robin without breaking stride, “I was an acrobat when I was three. I had to start military-grade combat training when I turned eight. You don't need to be good enough to hit me. You just need to be good enough to hit everyone else.”
The baton fell out of David's hand as a horrified look crossed his face. “You did... what?” he asked, “Good God, why? What psycho made you do that?”
Robin paused at the exit to the room as the door slid open to let him leave. He did not turn back as he replied, his voice in a flat tone that was far too even for it to be anything but strictly controlled.
“My father,” said Robin, and with that, he walked out of the door, letting it slide shut behind him, leaving David to curse himself for a fool...
Again.
***
Day 7
Cyborg whistled approvingly. “Nice, man... real nice...”
“Yeah, I know” said David with a groan, “just pull a couple, eh?” Cyborg chuckled and pulled three baseball-sized metal spheres from out of the barrel next to him. David stared at them intently for a few seconds before taking his guess.
“Bauxite, cadmium, and... is that tungsten?”
Cyborg grinned and shook his head no, making a buzzer sound as he did so. “Close. Molybdenum.”
“Mo... mowhat?”
“Molybdenum. It's a metal used in high-temperature alloys. Car engines, machine tools, that kinda thing. Same properties as Tungsten though, so don't worry about it.” David shrugged, and Cyborg put the spheres back into the barrel and rummaged around for three more random substances. “Anyway, I'm sure he won't take it personal,”
“Right,” said David, “because nobody takes it personal when you call their parents psychos.”
“Way I hear it, you weren't all that far off,” said Cyborg, pulling three more spheres out. “Easy ones this time.”
“Malachite, bronze, and kerosene,” said David with barely a glance. “What do you mean I wasn't far off?”
“I mean, I've heard him call his dad a lot worse than that,” said Cyborg offhandedly as he began to pick out three more.
“I didn't even know he had any parents,” said David. “So who is this military psycho?”
Cyborg raised an eyebrow at David. “Batman,” he said, as though stating the obvious.
David's eyes widened in shock. “Wait a minute,” he said, “Batman's his father?!”
Cyborg laughed loudly, dropping one of the spheres which went up in a roar and a flash of flame, leaving a burn mark on the floor. “How do you not know that Robin was with Batman before he came here?”
“I knew that,“ protested David, “but... I thought they just worked together! I didn't know they were related!”
“He's Robin's adopted father,” said Cyborg. “Rob lost his real parents before he started training with the Bat. I don't know what happened exactly, but Batman's the one that taught him all that kung-fu stuff, how to solve crimes, pretty much everything.”
David collapsed into the folding chair that had been set up in the middle of the training room. “I didn't know any of that.”
“He doesn't talk about it a whole lot. 'Fact, he doesn't talk about it ever really. Raven and Starfire prob'ly know more'n I do, but I think something happened between him and Batman 'fore he came out here to Jump. Don't bother asking though. He won't tell you.”
David sighed slowly. “I get the feeling he doesn't tell anybody much of anything about himself.”
“Yeah,” said Cyborg, “him and Raven are both pretty private 'bout everything. Like I said, Star might know more, but I doubt it. All I know's he left Gotham to come here and try to work it out on his own.” The half-metal Titan laughed as he rummaged around for more spheres. “First time I met him, he was all 'I work alone'. You can guess how long that lasted. Anyhow, try these.”
David took only a couple of seconds. “Ammonia, Pyrite, and...” he blinked and squinted at the last sphere, solid metal on the outside, just like the others, but containing something he did not recognize. “What is that?”
Cyborg smirked. “Bacon grease.”
“... bacon grease?”
“Hey man, Robin said to make sure you could ID anything that came your way.”
“... bacon grease?”
“You never know what you might run into doin' this!” protested Cyborg. “We fought a tofu monster once! 'Sides, bacon grease is good stuff. You can use it in everything. I even use it sometimes to lubricate the...”
“Okay... that's... I... really don't want to know... thanks,” said David, which elicited a victorious laugh from Cyborg, who set the bacon grease container down on the table next to him, and hunted for some more spheres to test David on. As he searched through the container, David suddenly decided to ask a more direct question.
“So how'd... you get into this?”
“Hrm?” asked Cyborg, his head still shoved inside the barrel next to the table.
“The Titans, the superhero business. If Robin moved here after he stopped working with Batman, how'd you get into it?”
“Oh, I grew up here,” said Cyborg. “Jump's my city. All the others just sorta showed up here one day, and Star was bein' chased by this huge spaceship full'a aliens. We all happened to be in the same place, so when they showed up to tear the city apart and take her back to their planet, we all got together and gave 'em a whoopin'. We built the tower on the framework of the landing ship they put down. That's why it's shaped so weird.”
David didn't say anything for a second, until Cyborg pulled his head back up to look at him. “You all right?”
“Um... yeah,” said David, “I just... I meant... how did you get... you know...” he gestured a bit incoherently at Cyborg, “... your metal?”
Cyborg's smile faded quickly. “Oh, that...” he said in a hollow voice, prompting David to worry that he had just said something he shouldn't have.
“I'm... sorry, I... I didn't mean...”
“No man, it's... it's all right. I had an accident.”
“An accident?”
“Yeah,” said Cyborg. “My... dad worked at this big science lab downtown. It's closed down now. There was a... an experiment they were runnin' one day. It didn't work. Some big teleporter thing. The whole lab got blown apart. A lot of people got killed...” Cyborg closed his remaining human eye, pausing just for a fraction of a second. “I got messed up real bad, shoulda died even, but... my dad decided to fix me up with a bunch of experimental technology. He was big into robotics and biomechanics...”
David didn't say anything, and Cyborg shook his head finally and stuck his arm back in the barrel of spheres. “Anyway, that's how I got turned into a cyborg. I was about your age.”
David decided to go out a bit on a limb. “So then... why'd you become a superhero?”
Cyborg shrugged. “Because I could. Wasn't like I could do that much else. 'Sides, it beats sittin' around feeling sorry for yourself. Mostly though...” he stopped rummaging for a second, looking almost wistful, “people like us, people who do this, we don't have anything else. Not just us five, I mean all of us superheroes, and probably most of the bad guys too. We don't got families, jobs, even our own homes, so we make our own. I really don't know what I'd do without the others, man, and I don't think any of them would know what to do without the rest of us either. I mean... it's different for me or BB, we couldn't pass for normal even if we tried.”
Shaking his head and chuckling, Cyborg resumed searching for more spheres to test David on. “Anyway man, the short answer is that I don't rightly know how I got into this business. I had the skills, and the rest just sorta fell into place. I don't know why I became a hero, but I sure as hell know why I still am one. Try not to worry too much about the 'whys' of everything. You just do what you gotta do, and see where it takes you.” He held up a trio of new spheres. “What do you got?”
“Let's see,” said David, focusing on the spheres. “Granite... cement... and...”
Cyborg suddenly tossed the third sphere towards David, who gave a shout of alarm and fell backwards, overturning his chair. The sphere landed harmlessly next to him, and Cyborg burst out laughing.
“Man... you are tooeasy to spook,” said Cyborg as he walked over to help David up. “You just wait 'till BB really gives you the works. He'll have you up half the night looking for the cherry bombs he hid in...”
As Cyborg bent down to offer David a hand, the sphere he had tossed suddenly exploded into his face. Cyborg had enough time to shout as a white cloud enveloped him, dusting him, the floor, the chair, and everything else within ten feet in a snowy white - everything, that is, except David, who had scrambled back out of range as the cloud blew up into the air.
“... powdered sugar,” said David, trying and failing to contain his laughter as he climbed back to his feet. Cyborg looked rather like the Pillsbury Dough Boy's older cousin.
“Oh, that's it,” said Cyborg climbing to his feet with a fiendish grin on his face. “You are so dead.”
***
“What did you guys do in there?!” asked Robin, pacing back and forth in front of them, while he waited for the automated cleaning system to finish with the practice room. It estimated that it would require most of the night.
“Uh, nothing,” said Cyborg, casually brushing the tar, powdered sulfur, and charcoal mixture off of his shoulders as he did so, letting it drip to the floor to join the cocktail of some eighty other substances that were pooled there. “Just um... a little ID practice, right?”
David blinked the apple juice out of his eyes and brushed the iron filings off his shirt even as the gobs of asphalt stuck to his shoes no matter how much he shook them. “Er... yeah,” he said. “That's about it. Just... practice.”
Getting the glue out of his hair that evening in the shower was a bit of a pain, but the look on Robin's face nearly made it worth it.
***
Day 10
“There's no way.”
“It's not that bad.”
“It is that bad, just look at it.”
Beast Boy stood back and considered the radioactive green-and-orange uniform on the computer screen with a connoisseur's eye. “Seriously, I think it's fine.”
“This coming from a guy who wears purple.”
“What's wrong with purple?”
David hesitated. “Um... nothing... except...”
“Dude, you know how hard it was to find something that actually goes well with green?” asked the changeling. “Besides, this is the uniform of the Doom Patrol. Only the best of the best get to wear this.”
“As punishment for what?”
“As... dude! This like the most awesome uniform in the world.” The green titan jumped up to his feet and began showing off the 'features' of his uniform. “It's got a kevlar-teflon polymer weave, steel-threaded semi-pressurized battle gloves, re-enforced titanium-plated combat boots - “
“... with velcro straps?”
Beast Boy halted in mid-sentence. “What? It's easier to get them on is all.”
“Sure...” said David, going back to the screen. He blinked at the computer a few times, tilting his head, trying to imagine himself actually wearing something that... ridiculous. “I dunno about this, Beast Boy...”
“Dude, you've gotta have a uniform. It's like a law or something. Everyone does it. Trust me, you'd look even more crazy without one. Imagine the five of us going out to thrash some bad guy, and you coming along looking like that.”
“... what's wrong with how I look?”
“Nothing, but you look like a civilian, and bad guys aren't scared of civilians, or else they wouldn't be bad guys.”
“Come on, nobody's scared of Robin because of his uniform.”
“Are you kidding? He's totally intimidating!”
David blinked incredulously, glancing around to ensure that Robin wasn't standing behind him. “Beast Boy, he looks like a hot dog stand threw up on him.”
“Yeah, so? How do you think people recognize him? They take one look at him, and they know who it is, and then they know that they're in for a world of butt-kicking if they don't back down right now. It's the same with all the rest of us... well except Cyborg, but he kinda stands out by himself.”
“... says the guy with green skin and pointed ears.”
“Dude,” said Beast Boy, crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair with a knowing smile, “chicks dig the ears.”
“I'll take your word for it.”
The computer flipped through a few more color combinations and styles, none of which seemed to offer anything but public humiliation. David shook his head as he stood up and walked back and forth for a few moments, trying to force the image of being laughed at by everyone within eye-shot out of his head.
“Come on,” said Beast Boy, “we'll figure something out, you won't look that bad. We'll find something that goes with the rest of us... maybe red?”
“Maybe,” said David with a shrug. “I dunno,” he sat down again, hesitating before turning back to Beast Boy. “I mean... I know you've been doing this forever and all but... doesn't that getup ever make you feel kinda...”
“Kinda what?”
David thought better of the word he was going to use, but a replacement did not immediately appear. “Never mind,” he said, but Beast Boy apparently had divined what he had meant, and, to his surprise, started to laugh.
“What?” asked David.
“Dude, you don't know this yet, but... once we find you a uniform, and you actually go out and use it, you're never gonna want to take it off again.”
Several seconds of silence followed this remark, as David slowly turned his head to look quizzically at Beast Boy, who had a grin on his face that betrayed total confidence in what he had just said.
“I... sort of doubt that.”
“That's only because you've never worn one. Trust me, you will.”
“I wore a couple of different ones for Halloween once or twice. I never had any trouble getting rid of them afterwards.”
“Yeah, because they weren't yours. Your own costume... it's totally different than anything else you've ever worn.”
David watched Beast Boy in silence as the Changeling's voice took on an almost venerating tone. “You put it on, and you actuallyfeel different. You feel better, stronger, like you're ready to take on the universe, because you're a superhero, and this is your costume. Everyone knows who you are, what you are. Not just bad guys, everybody. Without my costume, I'd just be some green kid with fangs walking down the street, but with it, I'm Beast Boy, and everybody in the whole city knows who I am. Just putting it on is like some announcer saying 'Bad guys, beware. There's a hero in town.'“ Beast Boy's gestures became more and more animated, and the glow in his eyes increased to an almost fever pitch as he tried to explain the feeling he was talking about. “I... I totally can't even describe it, but you get a uniform of your own, and put it on, even for the first time, and I guarantee you dude, you'll get such a rush that you'll wanna start kicking bad guy butt right then and there. I know it looks stupid when you sit back and think about it, but when you put it on, and you get ready to roll, looking bad will be the last thing on your mind.”
The cynic in David wanted to respond with the comment that it would indeed be the last thing on his mind, due to the fact that he would be more worried about getting pounded into red jelly, but despite the changeling's less than oratorical words, David felt for a second like he could see what Beast Boy was talking about. Always he had sought to go un-noticed, of course, and the idea that he had to transition into a role where he was expected to be a public spectacle was one that worried him as well as made him feel inadequate and self-conscious. None of this was anything new.
The idea that this might prove a way around that feeling... well...
Beast Boy had by now noticed David's silence, and turned back to him. “So what do you think?”
David waited a moment or two before replying. “Can... you go back to that red one again?”
A broad grin crossed Beast Boy's face as he punched a command into the computer. “Robin's got a red tunic, but none of us really go all out with red,” he said. The red uniform template appeared on the computer, and Beast Boy handed David the keyboard to control it. “I figured since you blow stuff up, it might be a good match. Look kinda like an explosion, you know? See what you can do.”
David slowly began to make the computer lighten or darken the various parts of the uniform, adding and removing various accessories to it. Even simply staring at an image on a screen, it was barely twenty seconds before he was no longer thinking about how foolish he would look wearing the uniform, and instead imagining what it would be like to run, move, and fight with it on. He barely noticed Beast Boy sitting back in the chair next to him and setting his feet up on the desk. Beast Boy didn't say 'told you so.' He didn't need to.
Ten minutes and more passed as David continued to fiddle with the computer's controls, occasionally asking Beast Boy a question or two about the finer points. Beast Boy never hesitated to give his opinion on everything from what material to use (“Mylar itches really bad. Go with Nomex.”), to what sorts of additions to make (“Trust me, dude, pockets don't cut it. You're gonna want a belt.”). With Beast Boy treating this so matter-of-fact, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to be doing, David didn't need too long before he was totally immersed in trying to find a proper setup. They went on this way for at least another half-hour, before Beast Boy finally changed the subject.
“So, you thought of a name yet?”
David hesitated at this unexpected comment. “What... what do you mean?” he asked.
“A superhero name?”
David let out a small groan. “Oh,” he said, “that...”
“I know it's a big deal,” said Beast Boy with a laugh, setting his feet up on the desk and putting his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his chair, “ but it's not that hard to come up with, just think about whatever you think fits the best. 'Sides, you get to change it if you want. So, any ideas?”
David shook his head, staring down at the keyboard. “Not really,” he said, leaving it at that.
“Well...” said Beast Boy in a tone David had by now learned to watch out for. “I mean, if you want, I could think up some. Maybe... 'Bombardier'?”
David shook his head, “Really, you don't have to...”
“How about, 'Dynamite'?”
This one generated a wince. “I mean it... I... thanks but...”
“No! No, wait! I know! You can be 'Master Blaster'!”
David had no reply to that suggestion save for a blank stare. “What?” asked Beast Boy, sitting up again, “those are good ones!”
“... yeah,” said David, and he turned back to the computer slowly, trying not to roll his eyes. “Anyway, I don't have one yet. I'm not even sure why I need one...”
“It's so you can have a secret identity!”
“A what?”
“You know, a secret identity! Like how nobody knows who Superman or Batman is when they're not being Superman or Batman? That sort of thing!”
“But... why do I... why do any of us need that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well it's not like you're ever 'not' Beast Boy, right? I mean you guys are always in your uniforms, you only ever call each other 'Cyborg' or 'Raven' or whatever, and except for Robin, none of you have masks or disguises or anything.”
For a moment, David worried that he had said something he shouldn't have, as Beast Boy suddenly became far more quiet than he was normally wont to, and instead of answering back, lowered his eyes a bit as he took his feet down from the desk and put them on the edge of the chair, tucking his knees in under his chin.
“I'm... I'm sorry,” said David, certain he had done something he shouldn't have. “Did I... say something I shouldn't - “
“No, dude, don't worry,” said Beast Boy, “it's just... it's like you said. I'm green, so I'd stand out whatever I called myself, so I guessreally there's no reason not to use my real name...” he turned to David and flashed another grin, “you know, except that 'Beast Boy' is really cool.”
David breathed a silent sigh of relief and smiled, and Beast Boy continued. “But, I mean, you could pass for normal if you wanted to, you know? Prob'ly better'n any of us could, cause you've been doing it for so long. You're not green or a space alien, or made of metal or whatever. So for you, if you use a superhero name, it means that if... something goes wrong, or if you wanna make a fresh start as another hero, or if you decide one day that you don't wanna do this anymore, you can just... stop. And if you do, then you'll still have your real name to use if you want.”
David sat there for a moment or two, considering what Beast Boy had said. “Stop?”
“Well, you know, not stop stop, because being a superhero is the coolest thing ever and all, but like, it's just sort of so that if you ever need to for some reason, you can go back and be David again, instead of being 'Bomb Squad', which, incidentally, is a totally cool name that you oughta use.” Beast Boy crossed his arms and nodded professorially.
“There's no way I'm using 'Bomb Squad', said David. “But hang on a second,”
“Yeah?”
“So... you guys all have real names then?”
“Of course, dude! What, did you think my parents called me 'Beast Boy'? I mean, it's an awesome name, but that'd be really weird.”
“No,” said David, “no... I just... never really thought about it. I mean, you guys go by 'Cyborg' or whatever even with each other... so...” He let his sentence peter out as he considered what Beast Boy had been saying. He still had no idea what he was going to take as a name of course, but... even so... it was nice to think that whatever or whoever he would become in a few weeks or days or whatever, he wouldn't totally be leaving David Foster behind.
Made-up name or not, it was still one he didn't relish losing.
“So what is it?” he asked after another few moments.
“What's what?”
“Your real name,” asked David, and to his surprise, Beast Boy's eyes widened and he sat up quickly.
“No way,” he said, “no way I'm telling anyone that.”
“What? Why not?”
“My name's Beast Boy,” said the changeling with emphasis. “That's my real name now.”
“But you just said that...”
“Dude, if I tell you, then you're gonna tell Cyborg, and then he's gonna make fun of me for it for like six weeks. There's no way I'm letting that happen.”
“Wait, you mean Cyborg doesn't know your real name?”
Beast Boy shook his head and smiled. “We don't know each other's real names,” he said, shrugging “except yours I guess. It's just... we just don't. Our superhero names are way cooler anyhow, so why not just use those. Oh... by the way, when you do pick a name, do you want us to keep calling you David or calling you the new name?”
“I er...” said David, not sure at all of what to answer with, “I'll... have to let you guys know, I guess.”
“It's up to you dude, but as for the rest of us, we never tell anyone any names except the ones we go by outside. Trust me, you'll never get any of the others to tell you their real names either.”
“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, rather we have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
- Aristotle
***
Day 1
“I think he likes it...”
Robin said nothing, as usual, simply crossing his arms and watching Raven and Cyborg run David through another round of blowing things to pieces, giving no sign of whether or not he was pleased, or displeased, or if he even thought anything of the proceedings. Beast Boy imagined, not for the first time, that Robin had missed his calling in life, and should have become one of those guards in front of the Queen's house in England that wasn't allowed to move. He certainly had the fixed stare down.
“Indeed, he does appear to be enjoying himself much more than the last time,” said Starfire.
“Star, last time he had a stroke and collapsed on the floor,” said Beast Boy.
“And this time, he has not done so,” replied the Tamaranean with a smile. “Is that not a good thing?”
“It's a very good thing,” said Robin, who as always could be counted on to break his strong-and-silent routine for a question from Starfire. “I just want to make sure that Raven knows what she's doing.”
“Dude, it'sRaven,” said Beast Boy, “she always knows what she's doing. 'Sides, without her, we wouldn't even know what had happened, or about the whole somawhatsit thing.” Robin and Starfire both cast confused glances over at Beast Boy, who blinked for a second before explaining. “The 'wand'?”
All three turned back to the training room below, where David was presently pointing the metal pipe in his hand at a stack of bricks. One by one, the bricks began to explode, fragments of them hopping up into the air like popcorn.
“I do not understand,” confessed Starfire after a moment or two. “That is not a... 'wand', not such as the one Mumbo uses whenever he is committing crimes. Has Raven trained David in the use of magic?”
“It's not a real wand,” said Robin. “It's just one of my old training batons. Raven said that what he needed was an external focus to trigger his powers more rapidly. She's offered to work with him in figuring out how to use it with his powers.”
“So,” said Beast Boy, “he's just gonna use it like... wait, she did what?”
“I know,” said Robin. “I was surprised too, but she's the one who went into his head, and of all of us, her powers are the most like his. It makes sense to let her try.”
“It is very kind of Raven to offer to assist him in such a way, do you not think?” said Starfire, but her voice revealed that even she thought this was strange. Raven didn't exactly 'bond' with people easily, and while she had willingly done everything Robin asked her to do concerning David, she had not volunteered any further assistance. It just didn't seem her sort of 'thing'.
Apparently looks were deceiving.
“It makes sense for her to do it,” said Robin, his voice as impassive as ever. “In fact, I'd like to have all of us take a turn in the next couple of weeks. We all have things to show him, things he's gonna need when the time comes. And we should think about getting everything else ready for when it does.”
Starfire raised one of the small spots that served as eyebrows for her. “Is... there some need for haste?” she asked. “Cinderblock has been destroyed, as has the army of robots we were assailed by, and there has been no further sign of danger to him or us, has there?”
“With Cinderblock dead, we have no idea who was behind all this, or why. Each attempt they've made has been stronger and more destructive than the last. Since we can't find them, we need to be prepared for when they make their next move. That means he has to be ready as soon as he can.”
“Relax, dude,” said Beast Boy, “Cinderblock's dead because David trashed him, and Raven smashed all the robots that they sent. If they know what's good for them, they'll be hiding where nobody - “
“Cinderblock's dead, Beast Boy,” said Robin, cutting Beast Boy off, “because 'they' infiltrated a maximum security meta-prison and killed him without leaving a trace. If they can do that, then there's no telling what else they can do.”
“Robin, if they could just warp into the tower and kill anybody they wanted, why would they even bother with Cinderblock? Wouldn't we all be dead or captured or whatever already?”
“I don't know,” said Robin, still refusing to turn his head away from the scene below, “but the longer he's not ready to face whatever's coming, the bigger the chance that it'll arrive before he's prepared for it. He can't take that risk, and neither can we.”
As though to signal that the discussion was closed, Robin turned away from the window. “We need to finish showing him the ropes,” he said as he walked towards the door, “and we need to do it fast. I don't think we have any more time to lose.”
“How much longer do you believe we should spend preparing him?” asked Starfire. “He is... improving, but he still requires much work. Perhaps we should - “
“Two weeks,” said Robin, pausing before the door. “I think if he works hard at it, and we all do our part... he should be ready for a real test in about two weeks. That'll make it almost exactly three months since he started training.”
“But... dude, is that gonna be enough time?” asked Beast Boy.
“It was for me,” said Robin as he opened the door with the push of a button, “and I think it will be for him too. Either way, we're going to find out.”
***
Day 3
“Let's just try it again,”
Raven sounded annoyed, but then Raven always sounded more or less annoyed, and David simply tried to ignore it and focus on the matter at hand. Slowly, he picked the metal baton up from off the ground, and held it in one hand again, breathing carefully as he cleared his mind in the manner Raven had explained to him. The sorceress was standing opposite him, arms crossed like a disappointed schoolteacher, with her cloak wrapped around her like a winter coat.
“Ready? Now do it slowly. I'll talk you through it, and try not to drop it this time unless you have to.”
David nodded, and slowly closed his eyes, focusing on Raven's words as they filtered in through the back of his mind.
“Clear your mind of all distractions,” she said. Much easier said than done, but he did his best. “Concentrate on the air around you. What do you see?”
David ignored the urge to complain that this was the twentieth time he had done this today, and slowly opened his eyes, the lights around him dimming into nothingness, replaced by a swirling mass of glowing dots, infinitely small, yet each distinguishable as they lazily moved about.
“Nitrogen and Oxygen,” he said, identifying the two most common types of dots. The others existed only as occasional glimpses within the sea of blue and red gas (why those elements appeared blue and red was a question he could not answer).
“Good,” said Raven. “Now, concentrate on the baton itself.”
David looked down at the metal stick in his hand, now an indistinct hazy mass of iron, carbon, and chromium molecules. Though the metal rod wasn't moving, the molecules comprising it were, vibrating in place like little engines, so small as to be invisible to anything save for an electron microscope, yet somehow visible to him here and now.
“You're seeing it?”
David nodded slowly, took a deep breath and held it, knowing what was going to come next.
“All right, now I want you to use your mind to take control of the baton like you normally do. Don't try to blow it up, just keep it as it is right now.
This was the hard part.
He focused on the baton, extending his mental control over it bit by bit. It was partly like trying to hold one's hand perfectly still in mid-air, and partly like a juggling act, constantly having to release some parts of the baton, and compress some others. Bit by bit, he took control over more and more of the molecules, and soon he began to feel the baton start to shiver in his hands, as bits of it would warm up suddenly, then chill down far below room temperature, only to warm up again.
“Raven...”
“I know, just keep going.”
Very very carefully he walked the mental tightrope, trying to ignore the wild shifts in the temperature of the baton, which seemed to be trying periodically to scald or freeze his fingers off. He clutched it tightly, trying to force the baton to return to equilibrium, having little success.
“You're choking up on it too much. Relax and it will stop trying to burn you. Take it easily and you'll get it to calm down.”
David might have commented that this was a lot easier to say when you weren't the one holding onto the alternately burning/freezing baton, but he had too much to do already. He physically forced his fingers to relax their grip somewhat on the shaking, fluctuating baton, and tried to do the same with the grip his mind had on the baton. It took some effort, but as it turned out, Raven was right, and no sooner had he done so than the fluctuations began to taper off. The temperature still shifted, but the shifts came slower, more regularly, a rhythmic pulse not unlike a heartbeat...
In fact...
“There,” said Raven, and David let his breath out slowly, still staring at the mass of metallic molecules that comprised the baton, rather than the baton itself. Raven let him catch his breath for a second, before giving him his next instruction.
“Now, I want you to adjust your vision back to normal, without letting go of the baton in any way, and see what you've done.”
David hesitated. “You want... what?”
“You can keep hold of the baton with your mind while looking at it normally, can't you?”
“I... yeah... I think so...”
“So then do it, and don't let go of it this time. It's going to look a little weird, but don't worry.”
David instantly began to worry, if only at the thought of what grotesque mockeries of nature Raven would call weird. Still he took and released another deep breath, and then closed his eyes, paused, and opened them again, looking down at the stick in his hand, and no sooner had he done this than he gasped and choked up on the baton with both mind and fingers, for the metal stick was on fire.
“Easy! Easy!” insisted Raven, and it was that sharp command that made him hesitate long enough for his nerves to realize that the baton wasn't burning his hand, and that what he had taken for flames was actually...
... well... what was it?
The baton was apparently not on fire after all, as it was still pulsating from warm to cool in tune with the beating of an invisible heart (his own?). However a reddish-orange aura was spilling off of it in waves, like the flames of a soft candle, licking into the air before fading out, bright enough to cast a soft light around the baton even though the room itself was well-lit. Gently, he raised the baton up, staring at it closely, expecting at any moment to feel the heat of the 'flames' licking his face and searing his hand, but they never did, though the pulsing temperature shifts became a bit more pronounced as his heart rate increased, and he forced himself to take a few deep breaths to still it. The aura ringed the entire baton, making it look as though it were merrily burning, the aura filtering through between his fingers and licking at the air around it, leaving a trail of orange-red energy as he gently moved it through the air. By now he was no longer afraid, merely confused, and he looked up at Raven for a moment.
“What the...?”
Raven shrugged. “It's your power,” she said, “how should I know?”
“Raven,” said David, beginning to feel the fear building in his chest “seriously, what is this?”
“Probably just a side-effect,” said Raven. “Most kinetic powers have them. T... a kinetic I used to know would encase everything she affected in a yellow aura. I wrap everything in dark energy. It happens.”
“But then why haven't I seen it before?”
“Probably because you've never tried to use a somatic focus before,” said Raven, with a note in her voice that indicated a rapidly draining reserve of patience. “Now pay attention. Point the baton at your target and get to work.”
David extended his hand with the still-glowing baton held tightly, towards a series of bricks lined up in a row like dominoes.
“Ready?” said Raven, “all right, slide your focus from the baton to the target... and... now.”
David flicked his wrist, gesturing with the baton as though it were a magic wand, and the first brick detonated an instant after the word 'now'. The aura around the baton flickered for a moment, but came back to full strength after a fluctuation or two between hot and cold and back again.
“Good,” said Raven, “but remember to make a loop. Push with your mind out of the baton, through the target, and back into the baton.”
David nodded, and gestured with his baton at the second brick, which exploded with just as much vivacity as the first. The baton quivered once more as he returned his full attention to it, but not as violently, and the reddish aura barely flickered. He continued to move down the line of bricks, one after the next, and with each explosion, both he and the baton recovered more quickly. Raven said nothing as he obliterated the line of targets brick by brick, breaking in only at the end to check that everything was still in order.
“No headache?” she asked.
David blasted the last target to pieces before responding, turning the still glowing baton over in his hand. “No,” he said with a nervous smile, as though to say this was to tempt fate. “No, I feel... I feel fine... I think.”
“Good,” said Raven, crossing her arms. “You can let go of the baton now. We'll take a break, then try some directional explosions.”
David nodded, and slowly released the baton with his mind. The red aura extinguished itself like a campfire quenched by a sudden downpour, and the alternately hot and cold metal returned to room temperature without so much as another twinge of motion.
“Hey um... Raven?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks for... for helping me figure this stuff out.”
Raven turned away, walking towards the side of the training room, where she had left a thermos filled with the herbal tea that she drank practically to the exclusion of all else (or so at least it seemed). “Don't mention it,” she said without turning around.
David normally would not have mentioned it, but... perhaps because they were finally making some progress, perhaps because of what had happened last week, perhaps simply because Raven had offered to give him a hand, and David knew how little she was wont to do that, he felt like making such an explanation as he could.
“Look,” he said, “I'm... I'm just... I just wanted to say that...” why did these conversations always wind up with him sounding like an idiot? He took a breath and restarted. “I know this... this whole thing's been kinda weird for you guys too, and... I wanted to say, thanks. Thanks for... for helping me anyway.”
“Whoever's after you tried to kill us as well,” said Raven. “We tend to take that sort of thing personally.”
“They only tried to kill you guys because you were helping me,” replied David. “You didn't have to - “
“You don't know that,” said Raven, and even so, whatever they want with you isn't likely to be good news for us or for the city, even if we hadn't gotten involved. That makes it our business.”
David had heard this before, and so he simply nodded. “Even so,” he said, “thanks.”
“What part of 'don't mention it' didn't you get?” she asked, and unlike most people who used those words, Raven actually seemed quite willing to let the matter drop. “Let's try directional explosions,” she said, walking over to the control panel and summoning another three dozen bricks for target practice. “I'll levitate some targets, and you fire the bricks into them. And try to pay closer attention to where you're aiming this time. Hit me by accident, and you'll wish Robin had broken your neck last combat training session.”
David couldn't resist. “And what happens if I hit you on purpose?”
Raven smirked. “You'd have a better chance of beating Robin in a stick fight.”
***
Day 6
As he contemplated the training mat from his present position laying face-down atop it, David decided then and there that if he lived to be a thousand years old, he would never ever ever actually attempt to fight Robin for real. In fact, he wasn't so certain that this wasn't the point of the present lesson.
“How did I do that?” asked Robin rhetorically.
“You hit me in the head with a stick,” replied David after a moment's thought. It seemed obvious enough to him.
Robin did not seem to appreciate the wry remark. “That's right,” he said, “and how did I manage to do that?”
David tried to think of something reasonably competent, witty, or even coherent to say, but finally had to give up the effort in exhaustion. “You swung it at me?”
“So when someone swings a baton at your head, do you usually just stand there and get hit with it?”
“I don't usually havepeople swinging batons at my head,” said David with just a touch more frustration than he intended. Robin however refused to be baited.
“No,” said the Boy Wonder. “I think your specialty is telephone poles, isn't it? I can have Cyborg go get a couple and we can try it with those instead if you want.”
David groaned as he slowly peeled himself up off the mat, his head pounding like a snare drum, and for once from the perfectly natural causes of having been hit with a stick repeatedly over the course of the last hour. His head was not the only thing aching for that reason. Worse, in some ways, than the physical beating he had taken (which was at least mitigated somewhat in that Robin was not actually trying to cripple him) was the fact that so far he had not managed once to score a single hit, to evade a single strike, or to otherwise in any way prevent Robin from doing exactly and precisely whatever he wanted in their little sparring match.
And on top of that, he knew Robin was going easy on him.
Robin watched as David got up, his eyes hidden as ever behind the latex mask he wore at all times (or at least at all times David recalled seeing him). Mask or no however, David had no trouble reading Robin's gaze this time. It was a look he disliked more every time he saw it, the look of Robin trying to figure out why it was that, despite his best efforts, David still wasn't getting it right. Nevermind that Bruce Lee would have been hard pressed to go toe to toe with Robin for any length of time.
David stood there silently for a few moments, regaining his breath, expecting Robin to tell him to try it once more. His right arm felt like a dead weight from swinging the baton around in every direction except (obviously) the correct one, and his balance was off after having been thrown to the mat at least fifty times in the last hour. Still, there was no way around it, so he simply waited for Robin to tell him to attack, or to prepare to receive an attack, so that he could miss, or fail to block, and wind up on the mat for the fifty-first time.
But instead of attacking or ordering David to attack, Robin took a step back, lowering his baton to his side and rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “You're not trying to hit me,” he said finally.
David blinked. “... what?” he asked, semi-incredulously. Trying to hit Robin was literally all he had been doing for the last hour, not that there had been much to show for it.
“You're not trying to hit me,” repeated Robin, “you're trying to attack so that when I hit you, you don't get hurt.”
This was a bit too fine a point for David to grasp, given his present circumstance. “It hasn't been working,” he commented.
“Pain in training saves it in the field,” said Robin, another one of the catchphrases that David assumed he was getting out of a booklet somewhere. Robin however had already moved on. “Why do you think we're doing this?”
“What... training?” asked David. He could think of several reasons that were unlikely to win him any points with Robin, but opted for the safe route. “So that I'll be ready for whatever happens.” He'd said and heard it so many times by now that came out automatically.
“No, not training in general, melee training. Why do you think we're working on this?”
'Because you like to show off how you can beat the stuffing out of me,' thought David, though he opted instead to go with a reply that was slightly less inflammatory. “I have no idea,”
He expected to receive a lecture about the importance of hand-to-hand combat training for a superhero. It would not have been the first time Robin had given it to him, nor the fifth, but that was not what Robin said. Instead Robin made a fairly unexpected remark.
“You're terrible at this,” he said. “The melee fighting. I know it, you know it, so you've got to be wondering why I keep insisting on it. It's not just about learning how to defend yourself at this range, though you will need that. So do you know what it's really about?” David shook his head, and Robin folded his arms in front of his chest. “It's about learning how to hurt people.”
David felt like he had missed a punch line somewhere. “What?”
“Hurting people. That's what a fight is. Two people trying to hurt one another bad enough that one of them stops fighting and gives up. You need to learn how to do that.”
“I know how to do that,” insisted David.
“No,” said Robin, “you don't. You've been holding back with that baton all day. I was hoping I could make you angry enough to really start swinging at me by tapping you a few times, but it didn't work. You're not a natural fighter, and you're going to need to learn how to become one.”
“What are you talking about?” asked David, who was getting sick of having to repeat that question. “You just said I was terrible at this stuff.”
“When you meet an enemy, everything you can do, talk, hit them, shoot them, call for help, hide, everything boils down to two options. You can try to fight, or you can try to run. Most people try to run, unless they don't have any other choice. We're heroes, we don't run. We fight. Sometimes we fight with our weapons and our powers, and sometimes with our words, and sometimes just by being an example to everyone else, but that's what we do.”
Robin retracted his baton and clipped it back onto his back. “You're not a natural fighter, David. Someone comes after you, you run away. And normally that's fine. Not a lot of people like you get into this sort of thing, but sometimes it happens. What I'm worried about is if you come up against someone who's trying to kill you, that you're going to hold back and give them a chance.”
David shook his head, as though trying to ward something off. “This is crazy,” he said, “I wasn't holding back against Cinderblock, was I?”
“Cinderblock was a walking monster made of solid rock the size of a house. It's easy to go all out against something inhuman and giant and scary. But most of the people we fight are just that, people. Bank robbers, terrorists, other meta-humans. Are you gonna be able to go all out against people like that, or are you gonna hesitate, and let them get a shot off on you?”
David opened his mouth to answer 'no', but stopped before he did so, for Robin's gaze was unwavering, and as always, he knew that Robin already knew the answer.
“I'm not trying to say you're a coward,” said Robin, “But the first time we talked about doing this, you told me you didn't want to get killed, and you didn't want to kill anyone.”
“I thought Titans didn't kill?” asked David, his hands slowly falling back to his side. His eyes darted down to the floor, suddenly unwilling to meet Robin's gaze.
“We don't,” said Robin as he approached, “but that's not the point. You were afraid of even showing us your powers the first time you got here. You never used them much at all before coming here, at least that's what you claimed, and I believe it.”
Robin walked up to David and re-extended his baton, holding it up in front of David's face. “You need to be able to face someone this close, where you can look them straight in the eye, and hit them with everything you've got. Your baton, your fist, your powers, everything. You need to be able to hurt a psycho or a supervillain bad enough to make them want to stop fighting you and give up. You've got the weapons to do that, even if you're bad at hand-to-hand fighting, but you need to be willing to hurt them.”
All thoughts of sarcasm and wit had long since fled, and David's shoulders drooped as he shook his head. “How?” he asked without looking up. “How can... How do you learn how to do that?”
“I don't know,” said Robin. “I didn't need to, and neither did any of the others. We're not crazy, we don't like hurting people, but none of us ever had to learn how to not hold back when the time came. Some of us needed to learn how to restrain ourselves, we're just like that. You're not. It's not about being afraid or a coward or not understanding the stakes. You were right before, you didn't hold back against Cinderblock, but you only turned on him after he chased you all the way to Battery Street. Why was that?”
“I was... I was scared, all right?” said David defensively. “He was gonna kill me!”
“And what?” asked Robin, “you weren't scared after he did corner you? Of course you were scared, but that's not why you ran away from him. If it was, you wouldn't have stopped running when you saw all those people.”
David rubbed his eyes with his free hand, lowering his head back down to face the floor. “You think I didn't want to hurt Cinderblock, even after everything he did?”
“I think you didn't want to get into a fight,” said Robin, “with him or anyone else, and so you only fought because you absolutely had to.” He reached over with the baton and laid the tip of it on David's shoulder, like a knight dubbing a squire with a sword. “And there's nothing wrong with that for a civilian, but you're not a civilian anymore. I'm not saying you should ever enjoy it, or that you can't ever try to get around it, but you're going to have to hurt people in this line of work, and you need to learn how. Because we almost never have to fight. We choose to fight because if we don't, then innocent people get hurt. You've got the tools to do that, but you need the will.”
David raised his eyes again. “So how do I learn that?”
Robin smirked as he backed away to engagement range once again. “You can start with actually trying to hit me with the baton,” he said, “but we'll do that next time.”
David shook his head, chuckling at the absurdity of it all as Robin turned away and walked towards the door. “You know that I'm never gonna be able to actually hit you, right?”
“Of course not,” said Robin without breaking stride, “I was an acrobat when I was three. I had to start military-grade combat training when I turned eight. You don't need to be good enough to hit me. You just need to be good enough to hit everyone else.”
The baton fell out of David's hand as a horrified look crossed his face. “You did... what?” he asked, “Good God, why? What psycho made you do that?”
Robin paused at the exit to the room as the door slid open to let him leave. He did not turn back as he replied, his voice in a flat tone that was far too even for it to be anything but strictly controlled.
“My father,” said Robin, and with that, he walked out of the door, letting it slide shut behind him, leaving David to curse himself for a fool...
Again.
***
Day 7
Cyborg whistled approvingly. “Nice, man... real nice...”
“Yeah, I know” said David with a groan, “just pull a couple, eh?” Cyborg chuckled and pulled three baseball-sized metal spheres from out of the barrel next to him. David stared at them intently for a few seconds before taking his guess.
“Bauxite, cadmium, and... is that tungsten?”
Cyborg grinned and shook his head no, making a buzzer sound as he did so. “Close. Molybdenum.”
“Mo... mowhat?”
“Molybdenum. It's a metal used in high-temperature alloys. Car engines, machine tools, that kinda thing. Same properties as Tungsten though, so don't worry about it.” David shrugged, and Cyborg put the spheres back into the barrel and rummaged around for three more random substances. “Anyway, I'm sure he won't take it personal,”
“Right,” said David, “because nobody takes it personal when you call their parents psychos.”
“Way I hear it, you weren't all that far off,” said Cyborg, pulling three more spheres out. “Easy ones this time.”
“Malachite, bronze, and kerosene,” said David with barely a glance. “What do you mean I wasn't far off?”
“I mean, I've heard him call his dad a lot worse than that,” said Cyborg offhandedly as he began to pick out three more.
“I didn't even know he had any parents,” said David. “So who is this military psycho?”
Cyborg raised an eyebrow at David. “Batman,” he said, as though stating the obvious.
David's eyes widened in shock. “Wait a minute,” he said, “Batman's his father?!”
Cyborg laughed loudly, dropping one of the spheres which went up in a roar and a flash of flame, leaving a burn mark on the floor. “How do you not know that Robin was with Batman before he came here?”
“I knew that,“ protested David, “but... I thought they just worked together! I didn't know they were related!”
“He's Robin's adopted father,” said Cyborg. “Rob lost his real parents before he started training with the Bat. I don't know what happened exactly, but Batman's the one that taught him all that kung-fu stuff, how to solve crimes, pretty much everything.”
David collapsed into the folding chair that had been set up in the middle of the training room. “I didn't know any of that.”
“He doesn't talk about it a whole lot. 'Fact, he doesn't talk about it ever really. Raven and Starfire prob'ly know more'n I do, but I think something happened between him and Batman 'fore he came out here to Jump. Don't bother asking though. He won't tell you.”
David sighed slowly. “I get the feeling he doesn't tell anybody much of anything about himself.”
“Yeah,” said Cyborg, “him and Raven are both pretty private 'bout everything. Like I said, Star might know more, but I doubt it. All I know's he left Gotham to come here and try to work it out on his own.” The half-metal Titan laughed as he rummaged around for more spheres. “First time I met him, he was all 'I work alone'. You can guess how long that lasted. Anyhow, try these.”
David took only a couple of seconds. “Ammonia, Pyrite, and...” he blinked and squinted at the last sphere, solid metal on the outside, just like the others, but containing something he did not recognize. “What is that?”
Cyborg smirked. “Bacon grease.”
“... bacon grease?”
“Hey man, Robin said to make sure you could ID anything that came your way.”
“... bacon grease?”
“You never know what you might run into doin' this!” protested Cyborg. “We fought a tofu monster once! 'Sides, bacon grease is good stuff. You can use it in everything. I even use it sometimes to lubricate the...”
“Okay... that's... I... really don't want to know... thanks,” said David, which elicited a victorious laugh from Cyborg, who set the bacon grease container down on the table next to him, and hunted for some more spheres to test David on. As he searched through the container, David suddenly decided to ask a more direct question.
“So how'd... you get into this?”
“Hrm?” asked Cyborg, his head still shoved inside the barrel next to the table.
“The Titans, the superhero business. If Robin moved here after he stopped working with Batman, how'd you get into it?”
“Oh, I grew up here,” said Cyborg. “Jump's my city. All the others just sorta showed up here one day, and Star was bein' chased by this huge spaceship full'a aliens. We all happened to be in the same place, so when they showed up to tear the city apart and take her back to their planet, we all got together and gave 'em a whoopin'. We built the tower on the framework of the landing ship they put down. That's why it's shaped so weird.”
David didn't say anything for a second, until Cyborg pulled his head back up to look at him. “You all right?”
“Um... yeah,” said David, “I just... I meant... how did you get... you know...” he gestured a bit incoherently at Cyborg, “... your metal?”
Cyborg's smile faded quickly. “Oh, that...” he said in a hollow voice, prompting David to worry that he had just said something he shouldn't have.
“I'm... sorry, I... I didn't mean...”
“No man, it's... it's all right. I had an accident.”
“An accident?”
“Yeah,” said Cyborg. “My... dad worked at this big science lab downtown. It's closed down now. There was a... an experiment they were runnin' one day. It didn't work. Some big teleporter thing. The whole lab got blown apart. A lot of people got killed...” Cyborg closed his remaining human eye, pausing just for a fraction of a second. “I got messed up real bad, shoulda died even, but... my dad decided to fix me up with a bunch of experimental technology. He was big into robotics and biomechanics...”
David didn't say anything, and Cyborg shook his head finally and stuck his arm back in the barrel of spheres. “Anyway, that's how I got turned into a cyborg. I was about your age.”
David decided to go out a bit on a limb. “So then... why'd you become a superhero?”
Cyborg shrugged. “Because I could. Wasn't like I could do that much else. 'Sides, it beats sittin' around feeling sorry for yourself. Mostly though...” he stopped rummaging for a second, looking almost wistful, “people like us, people who do this, we don't have anything else. Not just us five, I mean all of us superheroes, and probably most of the bad guys too. We don't got families, jobs, even our own homes, so we make our own. I really don't know what I'd do without the others, man, and I don't think any of them would know what to do without the rest of us either. I mean... it's different for me or BB, we couldn't pass for normal even if we tried.”
Shaking his head and chuckling, Cyborg resumed searching for more spheres to test David on. “Anyway man, the short answer is that I don't rightly know how I got into this business. I had the skills, and the rest just sorta fell into place. I don't know why I became a hero, but I sure as hell know why I still am one. Try not to worry too much about the 'whys' of everything. You just do what you gotta do, and see where it takes you.” He held up a trio of new spheres. “What do you got?”
“Let's see,” said David, focusing on the spheres. “Granite... cement... and...”
Cyborg suddenly tossed the third sphere towards David, who gave a shout of alarm and fell backwards, overturning his chair. The sphere landed harmlessly next to him, and Cyborg burst out laughing.
“Man... you are tooeasy to spook,” said Cyborg as he walked over to help David up. “You just wait 'till BB really gives you the works. He'll have you up half the night looking for the cherry bombs he hid in...”
As Cyborg bent down to offer David a hand, the sphere he had tossed suddenly exploded into his face. Cyborg had enough time to shout as a white cloud enveloped him, dusting him, the floor, the chair, and everything else within ten feet in a snowy white - everything, that is, except David, who had scrambled back out of range as the cloud blew up into the air.
“... powdered sugar,” said David, trying and failing to contain his laughter as he climbed back to his feet. Cyborg looked rather like the Pillsbury Dough Boy's older cousin.
“Oh, that's it,” said Cyborg climbing to his feet with a fiendish grin on his face. “You are so dead.”
***
“What did you guys do in there?!” asked Robin, pacing back and forth in front of them, while he waited for the automated cleaning system to finish with the practice room. It estimated that it would require most of the night.
“Uh, nothing,” said Cyborg, casually brushing the tar, powdered sulfur, and charcoal mixture off of his shoulders as he did so, letting it drip to the floor to join the cocktail of some eighty other substances that were pooled there. “Just um... a little ID practice, right?”
David blinked the apple juice out of his eyes and brushed the iron filings off his shirt even as the gobs of asphalt stuck to his shoes no matter how much he shook them. “Er... yeah,” he said. “That's about it. Just... practice.”
Getting the glue out of his hair that evening in the shower was a bit of a pain, but the look on Robin's face nearly made it worth it.
***
Day 10
“There's no way.”
“It's not that bad.”
“It is that bad, just look at it.”
Beast Boy stood back and considered the radioactive green-and-orange uniform on the computer screen with a connoisseur's eye. “Seriously, I think it's fine.”
“This coming from a guy who wears purple.”
“What's wrong with purple?”
David hesitated. “Um... nothing... except...”
“Dude, you know how hard it was to find something that actually goes well with green?” asked the changeling. “Besides, this is the uniform of the Doom Patrol. Only the best of the best get to wear this.”
“As punishment for what?”
“As... dude! This like the most awesome uniform in the world.” The green titan jumped up to his feet and began showing off the 'features' of his uniform. “It's got a kevlar-teflon polymer weave, steel-threaded semi-pressurized battle gloves, re-enforced titanium-plated combat boots - “
“... with velcro straps?”
Beast Boy halted in mid-sentence. “What? It's easier to get them on is all.”
“Sure...” said David, going back to the screen. He blinked at the computer a few times, tilting his head, trying to imagine himself actually wearing something that... ridiculous. “I dunno about this, Beast Boy...”
“Dude, you've gotta have a uniform. It's like a law or something. Everyone does it. Trust me, you'd look even more crazy without one. Imagine the five of us going out to thrash some bad guy, and you coming along looking like that.”
“... what's wrong with how I look?”
“Nothing, but you look like a civilian, and bad guys aren't scared of civilians, or else they wouldn't be bad guys.”
“Come on, nobody's scared of Robin because of his uniform.”
“Are you kidding? He's totally intimidating!”
David blinked incredulously, glancing around to ensure that Robin wasn't standing behind him. “Beast Boy, he looks like a hot dog stand threw up on him.”
“Yeah, so? How do you think people recognize him? They take one look at him, and they know who it is, and then they know that they're in for a world of butt-kicking if they don't back down right now. It's the same with all the rest of us... well except Cyborg, but he kinda stands out by himself.”
“... says the guy with green skin and pointed ears.”
“Dude,” said Beast Boy, crossing his arms and leaning back in his chair with a knowing smile, “chicks dig the ears.”
“I'll take your word for it.”
The computer flipped through a few more color combinations and styles, none of which seemed to offer anything but public humiliation. David shook his head as he stood up and walked back and forth for a few moments, trying to force the image of being laughed at by everyone within eye-shot out of his head.
“Come on,” said Beast Boy, “we'll figure something out, you won't look that bad. We'll find something that goes with the rest of us... maybe red?”
“Maybe,” said David with a shrug. “I dunno,” he sat down again, hesitating before turning back to Beast Boy. “I mean... I know you've been doing this forever and all but... doesn't that getup ever make you feel kinda...”
“Kinda what?”
David thought better of the word he was going to use, but a replacement did not immediately appear. “Never mind,” he said, but Beast Boy apparently had divined what he had meant, and, to his surprise, started to laugh.
“What?” asked David.
“Dude, you don't know this yet, but... once we find you a uniform, and you actually go out and use it, you're never gonna want to take it off again.”
Several seconds of silence followed this remark, as David slowly turned his head to look quizzically at Beast Boy, who had a grin on his face that betrayed total confidence in what he had just said.
“I... sort of doubt that.”
“That's only because you've never worn one. Trust me, you will.”
“I wore a couple of different ones for Halloween once or twice. I never had any trouble getting rid of them afterwards.”
“Yeah, because they weren't yours. Your own costume... it's totally different than anything else you've ever worn.”
David watched Beast Boy in silence as the Changeling's voice took on an almost venerating tone. “You put it on, and you actuallyfeel different. You feel better, stronger, like you're ready to take on the universe, because you're a superhero, and this is your costume. Everyone knows who you are, what you are. Not just bad guys, everybody. Without my costume, I'd just be some green kid with fangs walking down the street, but with it, I'm Beast Boy, and everybody in the whole city knows who I am. Just putting it on is like some announcer saying 'Bad guys, beware. There's a hero in town.'“ Beast Boy's gestures became more and more animated, and the glow in his eyes increased to an almost fever pitch as he tried to explain the feeling he was talking about. “I... I totally can't even describe it, but you get a uniform of your own, and put it on, even for the first time, and I guarantee you dude, you'll get such a rush that you'll wanna start kicking bad guy butt right then and there. I know it looks stupid when you sit back and think about it, but when you put it on, and you get ready to roll, looking bad will be the last thing on your mind.”
The cynic in David wanted to respond with the comment that it would indeed be the last thing on his mind, due to the fact that he would be more worried about getting pounded into red jelly, but despite the changeling's less than oratorical words, David felt for a second like he could see what Beast Boy was talking about. Always he had sought to go un-noticed, of course, and the idea that he had to transition into a role where he was expected to be a public spectacle was one that worried him as well as made him feel inadequate and self-conscious. None of this was anything new.
The idea that this might prove a way around that feeling... well...
Beast Boy had by now noticed David's silence, and turned back to him. “So what do you think?”
David waited a moment or two before replying. “Can... you go back to that red one again?”
A broad grin crossed Beast Boy's face as he punched a command into the computer. “Robin's got a red tunic, but none of us really go all out with red,” he said. The red uniform template appeared on the computer, and Beast Boy handed David the keyboard to control it. “I figured since you blow stuff up, it might be a good match. Look kinda like an explosion, you know? See what you can do.”
David slowly began to make the computer lighten or darken the various parts of the uniform, adding and removing various accessories to it. Even simply staring at an image on a screen, it was barely twenty seconds before he was no longer thinking about how foolish he would look wearing the uniform, and instead imagining what it would be like to run, move, and fight with it on. He barely noticed Beast Boy sitting back in the chair next to him and setting his feet up on the desk. Beast Boy didn't say 'told you so.' He didn't need to.
Ten minutes and more passed as David continued to fiddle with the computer's controls, occasionally asking Beast Boy a question or two about the finer points. Beast Boy never hesitated to give his opinion on everything from what material to use (“Mylar itches really bad. Go with Nomex.”), to what sorts of additions to make (“Trust me, dude, pockets don't cut it. You're gonna want a belt.”). With Beast Boy treating this so matter-of-fact, as though it were the most normal thing in the world to be doing, David didn't need too long before he was totally immersed in trying to find a proper setup. They went on this way for at least another half-hour, before Beast Boy finally changed the subject.
“So, you thought of a name yet?”
David hesitated at this unexpected comment. “What... what do you mean?” he asked.
“A superhero name?”
David let out a small groan. “Oh,” he said, “that...”
“I know it's a big deal,” said Beast Boy with a laugh, setting his feet up on the desk and putting his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his chair, “ but it's not that hard to come up with, just think about whatever you think fits the best. 'Sides, you get to change it if you want. So, any ideas?”
David shook his head, staring down at the keyboard. “Not really,” he said, leaving it at that.
“Well...” said Beast Boy in a tone David had by now learned to watch out for. “I mean, if you want, I could think up some. Maybe... 'Bombardier'?”
David shook his head, “Really, you don't have to...”
“How about, 'Dynamite'?”
This one generated a wince. “I mean it... I... thanks but...”
“No! No, wait! I know! You can be 'Master Blaster'!”
David had no reply to that suggestion save for a blank stare. “What?” asked Beast Boy, sitting up again, “those are good ones!”
“... yeah,” said David, and he turned back to the computer slowly, trying not to roll his eyes. “Anyway, I don't have one yet. I'm not even sure why I need one...”
“It's so you can have a secret identity!”
“A what?”
“You know, a secret identity! Like how nobody knows who Superman or Batman is when they're not being Superman or Batman? That sort of thing!”
“But... why do I... why do any of us need that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well it's not like you're ever 'not' Beast Boy, right? I mean you guys are always in your uniforms, you only ever call each other 'Cyborg' or 'Raven' or whatever, and except for Robin, none of you have masks or disguises or anything.”
For a moment, David worried that he had said something he shouldn't have, as Beast Boy suddenly became far more quiet than he was normally wont to, and instead of answering back, lowered his eyes a bit as he took his feet down from the desk and put them on the edge of the chair, tucking his knees in under his chin.
“I'm... I'm sorry,” said David, certain he had done something he shouldn't have. “Did I... say something I shouldn't - “
“No, dude, don't worry,” said Beast Boy, “it's just... it's like you said. I'm green, so I'd stand out whatever I called myself, so I guessreally there's no reason not to use my real name...” he turned to David and flashed another grin, “you know, except that 'Beast Boy' is really cool.”
David breathed a silent sigh of relief and smiled, and Beast Boy continued. “But, I mean, you could pass for normal if you wanted to, you know? Prob'ly better'n any of us could, cause you've been doing it for so long. You're not green or a space alien, or made of metal or whatever. So for you, if you use a superhero name, it means that if... something goes wrong, or if you wanna make a fresh start as another hero, or if you decide one day that you don't wanna do this anymore, you can just... stop. And if you do, then you'll still have your real name to use if you want.”
David sat there for a moment or two, considering what Beast Boy had said. “Stop?”
“Well, you know, not stop stop, because being a superhero is the coolest thing ever and all, but like, it's just sort of so that if you ever need to for some reason, you can go back and be David again, instead of being 'Bomb Squad', which, incidentally, is a totally cool name that you oughta use.” Beast Boy crossed his arms and nodded professorially.
“There's no way I'm using 'Bomb Squad', said David. “But hang on a second,”
“Yeah?”
“So... you guys all have real names then?”
“Of course, dude! What, did you think my parents called me 'Beast Boy'? I mean, it's an awesome name, but that'd be really weird.”
“No,” said David, “no... I just... never really thought about it. I mean, you guys go by 'Cyborg' or whatever even with each other... so...” He let his sentence peter out as he considered what Beast Boy had been saying. He still had no idea what he was going to take as a name of course, but... even so... it was nice to think that whatever or whoever he would become in a few weeks or days or whatever, he wouldn't totally be leaving David Foster behind.
Made-up name or not, it was still one he didn't relish losing.
“So what is it?” he asked after another few moments.
“What's what?”
“Your real name,” asked David, and to his surprise, Beast Boy's eyes widened and he sat up quickly.
“No way,” he said, “no way I'm telling anyone that.”
“What? Why not?”
“My name's Beast Boy,” said the changeling with emphasis. “That's my real name now.”
“But you just said that...”
“Dude, if I tell you, then you're gonna tell Cyborg, and then he's gonna make fun of me for it for like six weeks. There's no way I'm letting that happen.”
“Wait, you mean Cyborg doesn't know your real name?”
Beast Boy shook his head and smiled. “We don't know each other's real names,” he said, shrugging “except yours I guess. It's just... we just don't. Our superhero names are way cooler anyhow, so why not just use those. Oh... by the way, when you do pick a name, do you want us to keep calling you David or calling you the new name?”
“I er...” said David, not sure at all of what to answer with, “I'll... have to let you guys know, I guess.”
“It's up to you dude, but as for the rest of us, we never tell anyone any names except the ones we go by outside. Trust me, you'll never get any of the others to tell you their real names either.”
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
**
Day 12
“Koriand'r”,
David blinked. “Seriously?”
Starfire returned the puzzled blink. “Of... course,” she said, “why would I speak of such a thing in jest?”
“No!” stumbled David quickly, “no, I just was surprised sort of... I didn't think you'd tell me.”
Starfire laughed. “Why would I refrain from answering such a question?”
“Beast Boy said you guys never told each other your real names,”
“I do not believe Beast Boy has ever asked it of me,” said Starfire, looking a bit bemused, “but surely there is no secret as to my proper mode of address, for you see, 'Starfire' is simply the translation of 'Koriand'r' in your language.”
“Isn't that... isn't there a spice or something called 'Coriander'?”
“Oh yes,” said Starfire with another grin, “it is most delicious when added to mustard pudding. Robin claims that it was not named for me, but I find it difficult to imagine otherwise, given the co-incidence, do you not agree?”
David decided it was best to simply smile and nod. He often found himself deciding this when talking to Starfire.
“Please, friend,” asked Starfire in her own inimitable way, “what is the reason for your query? Have you succeeded in selecting a name for yourself for when you aid us in defeating the doers of evil?”
“Not... so much,” admitted David, worried that Starfire was going to take this as permission to give him another host of suggestions. Fortunately, she did not.
“I understand that selecting such a thing can be most difficult. None of the others were made to do so themselves. Do you wish for aid in choosing the title you shall carry?”
David shrugged. “Thanks,” he said, “but... wait... none of the others had to pick one?”
“To my knowledge, no,” said Starfire, “Beast Boy and Robin both had their titles selected by those that trained them for battle. Cyborg took his when we all first met, at Beast Boy's true suggestion that there was no shame in being comprised partially of metal. And Raven...” Starfire trailed off for a second, and her expression turned to a puzzled frown. “... I do not know where Raven acquired her name, but she had it before we met. I believe the monks of her home world may have given it to her.”
David didn't know what to say to that, and Starfire simply proceeded. “Regardless,” she said, “I would be most honored to assist you in choosing an appellation that will strike fear into the doers of evil everywhere...” she smiled and actually blushed a bit, “... but I confess... I do not know what sorts of names would be... appropriate for such a thing on your planet.”
Every once in a while, David had to admit, it was refreshing to speak with someone who also didn't quite understand everything that was going on around here. “Thanks,” he said, “but I'll think of something.”
Now if only he could be sure that were so.
“Well, shall we resume the activities of the day then, friend David?” she asked with a sweet smile that almost distracted one from the fact that as she was saying it, she was casually lifting a half ton piece of equipment up and depositing it on the ground next to her. “The launcher of discusses is in place and ready.”
“Erm... sure...” said David, reaching down to his side and unclipping the metal stick that Raven had been training him with. As he lifted it, it began to emit a red aura like the flickering flames of a candle. Neither he nor Starfire paid it any mind.
“Then let us commence...”
Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly, the discuss launcher began to fling small plastic disks at David, who dug his feet in, crouched into a ready stance, and prepared to deflect them. As they approached, he lifted the baton carefully, and then swung it violently down, as though clubbing something or someone directly in front of him. The baton bit into nothing but the air, but the nearest discus disintegrated and crashed to the ground with a puff of smoke. Quickly he brought the baton back up again and swung once more, this time to his right and left, and as though in mimicry of his motions, two more discuses exploded. Again and again he swung, and again and again the discusses flew off course, broke into pieces, or simply exploded and vanished into nothingness. After a few more seconds, the pace increased, and David turned to one side, crouching even lower to present a smaller target, letting several of the discusses fly past as he concentrated on the ones that -
The buzzer sounded as one of the discusses that had missed him by more than a foot slammed into the wall behind him. David was instantly knocked out of his concentration with a gasp of surprise, for he had yet to be hit by one of the flying targets, and in fact had been doing just as Robin had trained him to do, or so he thought.
“What... what'd I do?” he asked Starfire, who was watching him carefully.
“Forgive me,” she said, a preface that accompanied a good half of everything Starfire ever said, “you have been performing admirably, but... perhaps you have not understood the purpose of this exercise?”
David hesitated. “I... thought I was supposed to blow the targets out of the air?”
“You were,” said Starfire, “but... perhaps I should demonstrate...”
As quickly as she could, Starfire suddenly snatched one of the discuses up from the launcher next to her and hurled it at David. Thin and fragile plastic though it was, David had no time to react with anything but instinct, and he dove to the ground as it passed overhead and shattered on the wall behind him. Only after the discus had already shattered did David slowly recover his wits and start to get back up, only to find Starfire already standing over him with a smile on her face, extending a hand to help. He accepted it, and after she helped him to his feet, she asked him an odd question, the applicability of which he could not discern.
“Do you possess faith in your own abilities?”
David blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Your... powers,” asked Starfire. “Have you ever felt that there has been a time where they did not behave as you desired them to? Do they not always function in the same manner?”
“Um... no...” said David, now completely lost. “I don't think so... I mean... I have to concentrate and maybe use these psychosomatic aids to get them to - “
“Splendid!” exclaimed Starfire, “Then we may commence the teaching of having faith within them.”
“I don't understand,” said David. “Faith?”
“Allow me to attempt to explain,” said Starfire. “In order to fly, or to utilize the starbolts, I must feel certain emotions. For flight, I must experience the joy that is flying within my head. For a starbolt, I must invoke a righteous fury at the doings and actions of my enemies. This is how Tamaraneans control their powers. However, when I am fighting with an enemy, I may at times be feeling other things, such as fear, or concern, or pain, or simply anything else. And so, even though I do not at that moment feel the boundless joy or the unquenched fury that is necessary to utilize my powers, I will sometimes leap from a tall building, or step out in front of a monstrous creature anyway.”
David nodded slowly, only half-understanding what Starfire was saying, as she continued. “I am able to do this,” she said, “because I trust that before I fall to the ground, or before the monster is able to crush me, I will be able to marshal the appropriate feeling and begin either to fly or to fire the starbolts. I have faith that my powers, which have never failed me before, will manifest themselves in time to prevent an... unfortunate occurrence. All of us do this to some extent. For example, Beast Boy will allow Raven to push him off of buildings because he has faith that he will be able, as he always is, to transform into a creature of flight, and avoid impacting with the rocks below.”
And often, this alone is what permits all of us to defeat whatever foes we are summoned to combat, for if we did not have faith in our powers, we would hesitate whenever we were called to make use of them, and instead attempt to rely on more... normal... actions. When I flung the plastic discuss at you, you evaded it through diving to the ground. What you must learn to do instead, is to evade it not by doing as you would if you had no powers, but by trusting that your powers will protect you as they have always done.”
As though to punctuate her last statement, the discus launcher suddenly fired a trio of discuses at both David and Starfire. With one graceful action, Starfire spun around and launched three starbolts that intercepted the discuses in mid-air, reducing all three to heaps of smoldering ash. She allowed her momentum to complete her spin, rotating back around to face David, who had barely had a chance to blink.
“Had I not reacted in such a fashion,” said Starfire, “they would likely have struck you, would they not?”
David was forced to concede that they would, for he could not possibly have reacted in time.
“It is for this reason that you must learn to trust in your powers, for they provide the best means for you to defeat an enemy before they can harm innocent citizens of Jump City.”
“How... how do I do that?” asked David. “I... I didn't think when I duck, I just... did it...”
“Of course,” said Starfire, “but with practice, you may learn to do otherwise, even without thinking. It is not at all difficult to learn.”
“It's... it's not?”
Starfire giggled and flew up into the air. “Certainly not,” she said, “once you begin to trust your powers a small amount, you will automatically begin to do so more and more. They are your powers, and you know that you may always rely on them, as you may always rely on your friends, though that may take some time longer to learn.”
The last statement caused David to hesitate. “What do you mean?”
Starfire landed once more and smiled. “Sometimes it is not simply I who must jump from the tall building,” she said. “Sometimes Robin must also do so, and he must trust that I shall use my powers to catch him before he strikes the ground. He must trust that I trust my powers enough to save him, and he must do so without thinking twice.”
David had seen them do this exact thing before of course, in person as well as on the television, but he had never thought about it in terms of the trust that was required for such a thing. “Wow...” was all he could say.
“It is perhaps the greatest thing in the universe, such trust,” said Starfire. “You will see,”
“Even so,” said David, “I... I don't know if I could really jump off a building and expect someone else to catch me, you know?”
“It is not an easy thing to do,” said Starfire, “but that was not what I meant.”
“What... what did you mean?”
“Incredible though it is,” said Starfire, as she walked over to David, “the greatest thing in the world is not jumping off a building and knowing that your friends will catch you. The greatest thing is to have friends who will jump off a building without hesitation, because they trust that you will catch them.”
David's eyes widened and he had difficulty for a moment forming a coherent sentence. “Star... that... that sounds terrifying, not great,” he finally said, not sure why he had said it, but very sure that he meant every word. Starfire however merely smiled, as she extended one hand and placed it gently on David's shoulder, a gesture of re-assurance and understanding.
“You will find, Friend David,” she said, “that it is both.”
***
Day 14
“Come on man, we're waitin'. Let's see it.”
David's voice filtered out through the bathroom door. “Almost done,” he said, “just one second,”
“Did I get the sizes right? Nomex shrinks when you dry it, so I had to compensate by eye.”
“I think it's fine,” called David from within, “I just... give me one minute.”
“Hurry up, dude,” yelled Beast Boy, “Cyborg wants to see how good a seamstress he is!”
“I told you already, grass stain,” yelled Cyborg back angrily, “nobody sewed anything! This stuff's polymerized and pieced together with a nano-lathe. Don't be tryin' to call me a - “
Beast Boy cut him off. “Hey, Cy, when we're done here, I think Starfire could use a new dress, maybe you could make her something with ruffles? Since you're so good with a needle and thread...”
“Oh, would you be willing to provide me with such a thing, Cyborg? I do not know what the 'ruffles' are which Beast Boy speaks of, but if you are willing, there was a lovely picture I saw in a magazine of... is something the matter with Beast Boy's neck? Is it necessary that you squeeze it in such a manner?”
“Both of you, knock it off,” said Robin, with no apparent effect, as Beast Boy became a hummingbird, and flew around teasing Cyborg and deftly evading the metallic teen's swipes. Raven looked like she was rapidly approaching the point of flinging both Cyborg and Beast Boy out the nearest window, but fortunately for all concerned, a moment later, David's voice filtered back through the door.
“Okay... I... I think I've got it all set.”
“Well then let's see it, dude, come on out,” came Beast Boy's reply as he resumed normal form. There was a moment's shuffling from behind the door, the soft sound of a deep breath being taken, and then suddenly it slid aside, and David gingerly stepped out into the hallway, where the overhead light revealed the uniform he was wearing.
The two-piece uniform was red, red like a fire engine, similar to Robin's tunic's color, but several shades lighter, and unlike Robin, David's uniform was predominantly-so. Only on the sleeves and the pant legs did the color change, tapering slowly from a still solid red at the knees and elbows to a yellowish orange at the wrists and ankles. The pant legs were bloused over the tops of David's orange boots, like those of a paratrooper, and the soft 'clink' as David stepped into the hallway revealed the ferro-ceramic shock absorbers built into the soles. Coupled with a pair of fiery-orange fingerless gloves made of polymerized titanium, the suit had the appearance of... of all things... a freeze-framed explosion, with a dark core and a brighter periphery. The suit moved and looked like normal cloth, but looks were deceiving. Partly nomex, partly kevlar, partly other polymers woven together like threads and attached via a process few people could pronounce much less understand, the suit was connected at the waist by a small locking belt of a brass-colored metal, with several clips on it, all presently empty. Neither hat, nor mask, nor other head covering did David wear, but standing there in the hallway in front of everyone in his brand new uniform, his face was rapidly turning the color of the rest of his suit, and his eyes were fixed on the ground, darting back and forth as he awaited judgment, as self-conscious at present as if afflicted with stage fright.
For a few moments, nobody said anything, long enough for curiosity to overcome embarrassment, and slowly David lifted his head, hesitantly at first, then finally fully, to try and gauge the reaction he was about to get. It took him several times cycling through looking from Titan to Titan to realize that nobody was laughing.
It took him several more to realize that everyone was smiling.
Cyborg was the first to break the silence. “Damn, man,” he said, “I didn't know any better, I'd think you were ready to go kick some bad guy butt!”
“You... really?” A lame reply, but the best David could conjure given everything. He was still half-convinced that he looked absolutely ridiculous.
“A most excellent costume with which to kick the butt!” agreed Starfire. “It reminds me of the royal guard of the court of the emperor at Yereslass III.” David resolved to simply take her word for it.
“Not bad,” admitted Raven, which was among the more expressive forms of approval David had ever recalled hearing Raven use. “But is it gonna hold up?”
“A polymer weave like that is solid as a rock,” said Cyborg. “I based it on Robin's cloak, actually. It's completely fireproof, five times tougher than steel wool, and it'll hold up against anything short of a high powered rifle.”
“It'll protect him if he gets knocked around then,” asked Robin, and David guessed it was more for his benefit than Robin's edification.
“I figured he's gonna be dealin' with plenty of shrapnel once he starts mixing it up,” said Cyborg confidently, “so I double-plaited the weave. You could take a belt sander to that thing and not tear it. It'll hold up against a spill or two.”
“And you're not having any trouble moving?”
David rotated his arms a few times and moved his shoulders and legs. “No...” he said, “it feels... it feels pretty good.” To be frank, his relief at not looking like a complete idiot was such that he almost felt like he could do cartwheels in this suit... not that he could do cartwheels generally...
Robin stepped back and nodded. “Then I'd say,” said Robin, “you're ready for your big test.”
David took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I guess we'll find out,” he said, and he turned to walk off towards the training room. He had not made more than half a pace, when Robin unexpectedly turned to all the others, and said something David did not expect to hear.
“All right,” said Robin, “let's all go get lunch.”
David paused in mid-stride. “Lunch?” he asked, puzzled, “I thought I was supposed to do this... test?”
“Well we just go and do it right now,” said Beast Boy with a grin. “We've gotta wait for the next alert.”
David felt a chill run down his spine, “... a... alert?”
There were several glances back and forth between several of the Titans, coupled with grins David might have called mischievous had he not suddenly lost the capacity to think straight. Robin turned back to him to explain.
“Of course,” said Robin with a soft smirk that was his trademark, or one of them. “It's afield test, David, not a training exercise. It's time to use you've learned in the real world.”
The temperature in the hallway seemed to lower as Robin said that, and David felt his hands starting to shake, but he somehow managed to find the courage (and Lord-knew-how) to give Robin a slight nod, as though he had somehow known this all along.
He fooled nobody.
“Come on,” said Cyborg, putting a massive hand on David's shoulder, “you're gonna want to eat somethin' before we go out, and I wanna make sure that uniform of yours gives you totally free movement. Can't have it gettin' in your way when it's bad guy butt kicking time, can we?”
Eating was, perhaps, the last thing in the universe David wanted to do just now, but there was nothing for it, and slowly, he and the five Titans made their way towards the common room to get lunch, and to await for the alert that would no doubt arrive soon. Murphy's Law dictated that much. To David, it did not however feel like grabbing a bit of lunch before going out to save the universe. It felt far more like a last meal for a condemned prisoner. Such at least was what his emotions were telling him, while his intellect was trying to argue that with the five other Titans there, that everything would be fine, that he had handled Cinderblock alone, and that it would turn out to be easy, just like the others said it was.
He just hoped that part of him was the one that was right.
Day 12
“Koriand'r”,
David blinked. “Seriously?”
Starfire returned the puzzled blink. “Of... course,” she said, “why would I speak of such a thing in jest?”
“No!” stumbled David quickly, “no, I just was surprised sort of... I didn't think you'd tell me.”
Starfire laughed. “Why would I refrain from answering such a question?”
“Beast Boy said you guys never told each other your real names,”
“I do not believe Beast Boy has ever asked it of me,” said Starfire, looking a bit bemused, “but surely there is no secret as to my proper mode of address, for you see, 'Starfire' is simply the translation of 'Koriand'r' in your language.”
“Isn't that... isn't there a spice or something called 'Coriander'?”
“Oh yes,” said Starfire with another grin, “it is most delicious when added to mustard pudding. Robin claims that it was not named for me, but I find it difficult to imagine otherwise, given the co-incidence, do you not agree?”
David decided it was best to simply smile and nod. He often found himself deciding this when talking to Starfire.
“Please, friend,” asked Starfire in her own inimitable way, “what is the reason for your query? Have you succeeded in selecting a name for yourself for when you aid us in defeating the doers of evil?”
“Not... so much,” admitted David, worried that Starfire was going to take this as permission to give him another host of suggestions. Fortunately, she did not.
“I understand that selecting such a thing can be most difficult. None of the others were made to do so themselves. Do you wish for aid in choosing the title you shall carry?”
David shrugged. “Thanks,” he said, “but... wait... none of the others had to pick one?”
“To my knowledge, no,” said Starfire, “Beast Boy and Robin both had their titles selected by those that trained them for battle. Cyborg took his when we all first met, at Beast Boy's true suggestion that there was no shame in being comprised partially of metal. And Raven...” Starfire trailed off for a second, and her expression turned to a puzzled frown. “... I do not know where Raven acquired her name, but she had it before we met. I believe the monks of her home world may have given it to her.”
David didn't know what to say to that, and Starfire simply proceeded. “Regardless,” she said, “I would be most honored to assist you in choosing an appellation that will strike fear into the doers of evil everywhere...” she smiled and actually blushed a bit, “... but I confess... I do not know what sorts of names would be... appropriate for such a thing on your planet.”
Every once in a while, David had to admit, it was refreshing to speak with someone who also didn't quite understand everything that was going on around here. “Thanks,” he said, “but I'll think of something.”
Now if only he could be sure that were so.
“Well, shall we resume the activities of the day then, friend David?” she asked with a sweet smile that almost distracted one from the fact that as she was saying it, she was casually lifting a half ton piece of equipment up and depositing it on the ground next to her. “The launcher of discusses is in place and ready.”
“Erm... sure...” said David, reaching down to his side and unclipping the metal stick that Raven had been training him with. As he lifted it, it began to emit a red aura like the flickering flames of a candle. Neither he nor Starfire paid it any mind.
“Then let us commence...”
Slowly at first, then more and more rapidly, the discuss launcher began to fling small plastic disks at David, who dug his feet in, crouched into a ready stance, and prepared to deflect them. As they approached, he lifted the baton carefully, and then swung it violently down, as though clubbing something or someone directly in front of him. The baton bit into nothing but the air, but the nearest discus disintegrated and crashed to the ground with a puff of smoke. Quickly he brought the baton back up again and swung once more, this time to his right and left, and as though in mimicry of his motions, two more discuses exploded. Again and again he swung, and again and again the discusses flew off course, broke into pieces, or simply exploded and vanished into nothingness. After a few more seconds, the pace increased, and David turned to one side, crouching even lower to present a smaller target, letting several of the discusses fly past as he concentrated on the ones that -
The buzzer sounded as one of the discusses that had missed him by more than a foot slammed into the wall behind him. David was instantly knocked out of his concentration with a gasp of surprise, for he had yet to be hit by one of the flying targets, and in fact had been doing just as Robin had trained him to do, or so he thought.
“What... what'd I do?” he asked Starfire, who was watching him carefully.
“Forgive me,” she said, a preface that accompanied a good half of everything Starfire ever said, “you have been performing admirably, but... perhaps you have not understood the purpose of this exercise?”
David hesitated. “I... thought I was supposed to blow the targets out of the air?”
“You were,” said Starfire, “but... perhaps I should demonstrate...”
As quickly as she could, Starfire suddenly snatched one of the discuses up from the launcher next to her and hurled it at David. Thin and fragile plastic though it was, David had no time to react with anything but instinct, and he dove to the ground as it passed overhead and shattered on the wall behind him. Only after the discus had already shattered did David slowly recover his wits and start to get back up, only to find Starfire already standing over him with a smile on her face, extending a hand to help. He accepted it, and after she helped him to his feet, she asked him an odd question, the applicability of which he could not discern.
“Do you possess faith in your own abilities?”
David blinked. “Excuse me?”
“Your... powers,” asked Starfire. “Have you ever felt that there has been a time where they did not behave as you desired them to? Do they not always function in the same manner?”
“Um... no...” said David, now completely lost. “I don't think so... I mean... I have to concentrate and maybe use these psychosomatic aids to get them to - “
“Splendid!” exclaimed Starfire, “Then we may commence the teaching of having faith within them.”
“I don't understand,” said David. “Faith?”
“Allow me to attempt to explain,” said Starfire. “In order to fly, or to utilize the starbolts, I must feel certain emotions. For flight, I must experience the joy that is flying within my head. For a starbolt, I must invoke a righteous fury at the doings and actions of my enemies. This is how Tamaraneans control their powers. However, when I am fighting with an enemy, I may at times be feeling other things, such as fear, or concern, or pain, or simply anything else. And so, even though I do not at that moment feel the boundless joy or the unquenched fury that is necessary to utilize my powers, I will sometimes leap from a tall building, or step out in front of a monstrous creature anyway.”
David nodded slowly, only half-understanding what Starfire was saying, as she continued. “I am able to do this,” she said, “because I trust that before I fall to the ground, or before the monster is able to crush me, I will be able to marshal the appropriate feeling and begin either to fly or to fire the starbolts. I have faith that my powers, which have never failed me before, will manifest themselves in time to prevent an... unfortunate occurrence. All of us do this to some extent. For example, Beast Boy will allow Raven to push him off of buildings because he has faith that he will be able, as he always is, to transform into a creature of flight, and avoid impacting with the rocks below.”
And often, this alone is what permits all of us to defeat whatever foes we are summoned to combat, for if we did not have faith in our powers, we would hesitate whenever we were called to make use of them, and instead attempt to rely on more... normal... actions. When I flung the plastic discuss at you, you evaded it through diving to the ground. What you must learn to do instead, is to evade it not by doing as you would if you had no powers, but by trusting that your powers will protect you as they have always done.”
As though to punctuate her last statement, the discus launcher suddenly fired a trio of discuses at both David and Starfire. With one graceful action, Starfire spun around and launched three starbolts that intercepted the discuses in mid-air, reducing all three to heaps of smoldering ash. She allowed her momentum to complete her spin, rotating back around to face David, who had barely had a chance to blink.
“Had I not reacted in such a fashion,” said Starfire, “they would likely have struck you, would they not?”
David was forced to concede that they would, for he could not possibly have reacted in time.
“It is for this reason that you must learn to trust in your powers, for they provide the best means for you to defeat an enemy before they can harm innocent citizens of Jump City.”
“How... how do I do that?” asked David. “I... I didn't think when I duck, I just... did it...”
“Of course,” said Starfire, “but with practice, you may learn to do otherwise, even without thinking. It is not at all difficult to learn.”
“It's... it's not?”
Starfire giggled and flew up into the air. “Certainly not,” she said, “once you begin to trust your powers a small amount, you will automatically begin to do so more and more. They are your powers, and you know that you may always rely on them, as you may always rely on your friends, though that may take some time longer to learn.”
The last statement caused David to hesitate. “What do you mean?”
Starfire landed once more and smiled. “Sometimes it is not simply I who must jump from the tall building,” she said. “Sometimes Robin must also do so, and he must trust that I shall use my powers to catch him before he strikes the ground. He must trust that I trust my powers enough to save him, and he must do so without thinking twice.”
David had seen them do this exact thing before of course, in person as well as on the television, but he had never thought about it in terms of the trust that was required for such a thing. “Wow...” was all he could say.
“It is perhaps the greatest thing in the universe, such trust,” said Starfire. “You will see,”
“Even so,” said David, “I... I don't know if I could really jump off a building and expect someone else to catch me, you know?”
“It is not an easy thing to do,” said Starfire, “but that was not what I meant.”
“What... what did you mean?”
“Incredible though it is,” said Starfire, as she walked over to David, “the greatest thing in the world is not jumping off a building and knowing that your friends will catch you. The greatest thing is to have friends who will jump off a building without hesitation, because they trust that you will catch them.”
David's eyes widened and he had difficulty for a moment forming a coherent sentence. “Star... that... that sounds terrifying, not great,” he finally said, not sure why he had said it, but very sure that he meant every word. Starfire however merely smiled, as she extended one hand and placed it gently on David's shoulder, a gesture of re-assurance and understanding.
“You will find, Friend David,” she said, “that it is both.”
***
Day 14
“Come on man, we're waitin'. Let's see it.”
David's voice filtered out through the bathroom door. “Almost done,” he said, “just one second,”
“Did I get the sizes right? Nomex shrinks when you dry it, so I had to compensate by eye.”
“I think it's fine,” called David from within, “I just... give me one minute.”
“Hurry up, dude,” yelled Beast Boy, “Cyborg wants to see how good a seamstress he is!”
“I told you already, grass stain,” yelled Cyborg back angrily, “nobody sewed anything! This stuff's polymerized and pieced together with a nano-lathe. Don't be tryin' to call me a - “
Beast Boy cut him off. “Hey, Cy, when we're done here, I think Starfire could use a new dress, maybe you could make her something with ruffles? Since you're so good with a needle and thread...”
“Oh, would you be willing to provide me with such a thing, Cyborg? I do not know what the 'ruffles' are which Beast Boy speaks of, but if you are willing, there was a lovely picture I saw in a magazine of... is something the matter with Beast Boy's neck? Is it necessary that you squeeze it in such a manner?”
“Both of you, knock it off,” said Robin, with no apparent effect, as Beast Boy became a hummingbird, and flew around teasing Cyborg and deftly evading the metallic teen's swipes. Raven looked like she was rapidly approaching the point of flinging both Cyborg and Beast Boy out the nearest window, but fortunately for all concerned, a moment later, David's voice filtered back through the door.
“Okay... I... I think I've got it all set.”
“Well then let's see it, dude, come on out,” came Beast Boy's reply as he resumed normal form. There was a moment's shuffling from behind the door, the soft sound of a deep breath being taken, and then suddenly it slid aside, and David gingerly stepped out into the hallway, where the overhead light revealed the uniform he was wearing.
The two-piece uniform was red, red like a fire engine, similar to Robin's tunic's color, but several shades lighter, and unlike Robin, David's uniform was predominantly-so. Only on the sleeves and the pant legs did the color change, tapering slowly from a still solid red at the knees and elbows to a yellowish orange at the wrists and ankles. The pant legs were bloused over the tops of David's orange boots, like those of a paratrooper, and the soft 'clink' as David stepped into the hallway revealed the ferro-ceramic shock absorbers built into the soles. Coupled with a pair of fiery-orange fingerless gloves made of polymerized titanium, the suit had the appearance of... of all things... a freeze-framed explosion, with a dark core and a brighter periphery. The suit moved and looked like normal cloth, but looks were deceiving. Partly nomex, partly kevlar, partly other polymers woven together like threads and attached via a process few people could pronounce much less understand, the suit was connected at the waist by a small locking belt of a brass-colored metal, with several clips on it, all presently empty. Neither hat, nor mask, nor other head covering did David wear, but standing there in the hallway in front of everyone in his brand new uniform, his face was rapidly turning the color of the rest of his suit, and his eyes were fixed on the ground, darting back and forth as he awaited judgment, as self-conscious at present as if afflicted with stage fright.
For a few moments, nobody said anything, long enough for curiosity to overcome embarrassment, and slowly David lifted his head, hesitantly at first, then finally fully, to try and gauge the reaction he was about to get. It took him several times cycling through looking from Titan to Titan to realize that nobody was laughing.
It took him several more to realize that everyone was smiling.
Cyborg was the first to break the silence. “Damn, man,” he said, “I didn't know any better, I'd think you were ready to go kick some bad guy butt!”
“You... really?” A lame reply, but the best David could conjure given everything. He was still half-convinced that he looked absolutely ridiculous.
“A most excellent costume with which to kick the butt!” agreed Starfire. “It reminds me of the royal guard of the court of the emperor at Yereslass III.” David resolved to simply take her word for it.
“Not bad,” admitted Raven, which was among the more expressive forms of approval David had ever recalled hearing Raven use. “But is it gonna hold up?”
“A polymer weave like that is solid as a rock,” said Cyborg. “I based it on Robin's cloak, actually. It's completely fireproof, five times tougher than steel wool, and it'll hold up against anything short of a high powered rifle.”
“It'll protect him if he gets knocked around then,” asked Robin, and David guessed it was more for his benefit than Robin's edification.
“I figured he's gonna be dealin' with plenty of shrapnel once he starts mixing it up,” said Cyborg confidently, “so I double-plaited the weave. You could take a belt sander to that thing and not tear it. It'll hold up against a spill or two.”
“And you're not having any trouble moving?”
David rotated his arms a few times and moved his shoulders and legs. “No...” he said, “it feels... it feels pretty good.” To be frank, his relief at not looking like a complete idiot was such that he almost felt like he could do cartwheels in this suit... not that he could do cartwheels generally...
Robin stepped back and nodded. “Then I'd say,” said Robin, “you're ready for your big test.”
David took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I guess we'll find out,” he said, and he turned to walk off towards the training room. He had not made more than half a pace, when Robin unexpectedly turned to all the others, and said something David did not expect to hear.
“All right,” said Robin, “let's all go get lunch.”
David paused in mid-stride. “Lunch?” he asked, puzzled, “I thought I was supposed to do this... test?”
“Well we just go and do it right now,” said Beast Boy with a grin. “We've gotta wait for the next alert.”
David felt a chill run down his spine, “... a... alert?”
There were several glances back and forth between several of the Titans, coupled with grins David might have called mischievous had he not suddenly lost the capacity to think straight. Robin turned back to him to explain.
“Of course,” said Robin with a soft smirk that was his trademark, or one of them. “It's afield test, David, not a training exercise. It's time to use you've learned in the real world.”
The temperature in the hallway seemed to lower as Robin said that, and David felt his hands starting to shake, but he somehow managed to find the courage (and Lord-knew-how) to give Robin a slight nod, as though he had somehow known this all along.
He fooled nobody.
“Come on,” said Cyborg, putting a massive hand on David's shoulder, “you're gonna want to eat somethin' before we go out, and I wanna make sure that uniform of yours gives you totally free movement. Can't have it gettin' in your way when it's bad guy butt kicking time, can we?”
Eating was, perhaps, the last thing in the universe David wanted to do just now, but there was nothing for it, and slowly, he and the five Titans made their way towards the common room to get lunch, and to await for the alert that would no doubt arrive soon. Murphy's Law dictated that much. To David, it did not however feel like grabbing a bit of lunch before going out to save the universe. It felt far more like a last meal for a condemned prisoner. Such at least was what his emotions were telling him, while his intellect was trying to argue that with the five other Titans there, that everything would be fine, that he had handled Cinderblock alone, and that it would turn out to be easy, just like the others said it was.
He just hoped that part of him was the one that was right.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.19 added)
Chapter 19: To Protect and Serve
Lunch was a quiet affair, relatively speaking.
Granted, 'quiet' was not the word one normally associated with Titans' Tower even at its most serene, and mealtimes were usually anything but. Cyborg and Beast Boy could always be counted upon to engage in an epic battle over what sort of food should be served (Cyborg's idea of 'lunch' being six pounds of beef per person, and Beast Boy's being about the same amount of tofu and soybean), and on the off-chance that they were both satisfied with what was being served, there was always the games of who got to be the first one to try Starfire's latest concoction (David swore that the others were cheating but couldn't prove it), Robin's futile attempts to use lunch as an opportunity to comment on the last training session, or Raven's occasional pyrotechnic outbursts whenever Beast Boy or someone else managed to get on her nerves (which was how Beast Boy had come to be cleaning maple syrup off the ceiling the day before). Even if none of the above was happening however, it was usually a matter of everyone talking, arguing, joking, laughing, and otherwise making plenty of noise.
And so it was today, except that David couldn't keep his mind on any of it.
He'd never been that talkative at lunch (or any other time), but over the last few weeks (and months), he'd been slowly coming out of his shell in that regard, at least enough to participate in the conversation, whatever it was. Today though, he was as nervous as he ever remembered being in his life, and could barely manage to stop from glancing back every ten seconds at the large red alarm that was mounted above the main viewing screen in the lounge section of the Common Room. Indeed, several times he did so, but so far it had remained dark, quiet, waiting. It might not have been so bad if it had been a simple matter of a countdown, or some other scheduled thing, he had been preparing to take this 'final test' after all for over two weeks, but the most unsettling thing about it was not knowing when the hammer was going to fall, not knowing when the alarm would sound and he, along with everyone else, would have to drop everything and race off to engage in a battle that could well be even greater than the ones he had fought against Cinderblock.
It could happen in five seconds. It could happen in five days. There was no telling when.
“You gotta eat somethin', man,” said Cyborg, snapping David back into the moment once again. “Trust me, you don't wanna go out there on an empty stomach. 'Sides, how can you resist Cy's famous Five Alarm Chili?”
“Yeah,” said Beast Boy with a snicker, “five alarms to poison control maybe.” He extended a plate of his own food towards David. “Try some of my veggie chili, dude,” he said. “One bite and you'll never want to eat anything else.”
“Man, I told you already, it ain't chili without beef! All you got there is bean soup!” Cyborg picked up the pot of his chili and held it up, sniffing the aroma that came off it. “Now this, this is chili. Just what you want when it's time to kick butt.”
Beast Boy sat back and made a face. “Pft! Whatever, dude. This is the best stuff on the planet. All your meat paste is good for is patching tires.”
David temporized by accepting half a bowl of each, but the argument simmered on for several more minutes until Raven (who as usual seemed to subsist on herbal tea and meditation alone) threatened to force feed each of them the other's chili, which was a credible enough threat to change the subject. Starfire then proceeded to describe in some detail her experience in what appeared to be a hair salon (she called it an “advanced braiding maneuver institution”), and explained how pleasantly surprised she had been to find a passable imitation of the Tamaranean delicacy “Zazgarl”. Nobody had the heart (or the stomach) to ask what kind of a “delicacy” she had found in a hair salon.
All of this was as it always was, and yet it didn't serve to loosen the knot that was settled inside David's stomach. Every so often, Robin would glance over at him, and he would mechanically force himself to take a few bites (in this state, he frankly couldn't tell the difference between the two chilis), but it was the best he could do, and other than the odd topics of conversation, all of which had long since faded into the nebulous realm of “normal”, there was plenty to remind him that what he was about to do was anything but. Cyborg had insisted he make sure the uniform wasn't constricting his movement in any way, and it wasn't, but even if not uncomfortable it was certainly unfamiliar. Nomex and Kevlar simply didn't feel anything like cotton or denim, nor did his shock-absorbing, traction-enhanced boots feel anything like the sneakers he was accustomed to. The fingerless gloves, also made of polymer, didn't quite get in his way, but having lived his entire life in California, he'd never worn gloves before for any length of time, and they were a bit distracting. True, they didn't seem to slow him down any, and they certainly made it easier to get a (physical) grip on things, but it was one more reminder that he was walking into uncharted territory.
The stainless steel baton sitting in his lap was another.
He wished he could relax. He knew he should be relaxing. He knew that what was about to happen, however bad it was, was something he had trained for, and that there were all of the other Titans with him if anything went wrong. He knew that this was the sort of thing that the five of them usually handled by themselves, and that therefore they would never really let anything happen to him. But every time he shut his eyes or zoned out of the conversation, all he could see was the black dragon on the roof, about to incinerate him, or the ravening beast in the sewers, slashing to tear his guts out and lay him out on the concrete...
... or Cinderblock.
Sharp laughs snapped him back into reality once more, as everyone (save Raven) was laughing at a joke Beast Boy had told a moment ago that he had completely missed. He smiled anyway, just to give the impression he had been paying attention. Most everyone had finished, and David had eaten just about everything he felt that he was going to be able to eat today. Still, nobody left the table just yet, unwilling to start doing the dishes perhaps, or just sensing that David was not exactly attentive. He did notice that while the Titans were as relaxed as they always were with the prospect of an alert staring them in the face (they were always on call after all), none of them mentioned anything about what was to come. They were trying to put him at ease.
Had anything worked, it might well have been that, but nothing much did.
Eventually, there was no putting it off further, and Beast Boy wearily rose to do the dishes (it was his turn), while the others slowly filed out to whatever else they were doing. Starfire remained behind in the common room to watch one of her favorite television shows (“World of Fungus”), and Raven settled in on the other couch to continue reading whatever book she was presently going through (all David knew was that it was hardbound in leather, and would probably try to eat him if he ever touched it). The other two chose to make an exit at this stage, Cyborg to his garage, Robin to his evidence room, and David decided to follow their example by going back to his own room for a little while.
He didn't get there.
He no longer got lost in the tower, at least not on the top couple of levels. The hallways twisted and turned in permutations that seemed to defy physics, but enough repetition could stamp the layout of even a labyrinth such as this into his head. His trouble was not finding his room, his trouble was making it that far. A wave of nausea hit him like a baseball bat to the stomach in the middle of the hallway, and stopped him cold, doubling him over and nearly knocking him to the floor save that he managed to catch the wall with his hand, the baton falling out of his grip and clattering to the ground. He shut his eyes tightly and dug his fingers into the wallpaper, trying not to be sick, and ultimately managing to hold down the contents of his stomach, if only barely. After a minute or two, he slowly lowered himself down to the floor, and simply sat there, sweat standing out on his forehead, his hands trembling slightly as he slowly picked up the baton he'd dropped and fiddled with it like a priest fiddling with prayer beads. His heart was thundering in his ears, his breath coming in ragged hisses, and it took effort, real effort, to shift his vision into the netherworld of dancing particles that he often took refuge in when he needed to steady himself.
... and all this before he had even left the Tower.
He was about to embark on the usual round of self-recriminations for his worn and taut nerves, when he heard footsteps approaching, and lifted his head as his eyes took in light once again rather than whatever they were perceiving when it came time to destroy things. This shift too took effort, a testament to how tense he really was, and by the time it was done, Robin was standing in front of him with his arms crossed, looking as implacable as he ever did, with a vaguely smug look on his face that the mask did nothing to dispel. David, still trying to slow his racing heart rate, did no more than glance up at him furtively, half-worried for a moment that he was about to get some kind of lecture on never showing fear or something similar.
“Nervous?”
Robin's casual tone put him off his guard, and he looked up for a second. For the past weeks, Robin had been his training instructor, and had been telling him what to do and how to do it, but that was not who was standing before him now. Robin seemed... relaxed perhaps was an exaggeration, but at least more relaxed than normal, somewhat ironically given that he had caught David in the exact opposite state. David did not doubt for one instant that the answer to Robin's question was written all over him, but he replied honestly nonetheless. It helped a bit.
“Yeah.”
Robin did not lecture or recite a catchphrase, but simply nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself, as ever. Instead of the lecture, he leaned back against the wall, his arms still crossed, regarding the psychokinetic as if watching a documentary of some sort on television.
“You mind if I ask you a question?”
David almost forgot his own nerves for a second, so unexpected was this from Robin, who was usually as direct as a punch to the face, a trait he shared with Raven. There could only of course be one answer.
“Um... sure.”
“Why are you doing this?”
David blinked. “What?”
“You remember when we started training, I asked you if you were willing to try to become a hero?” explained Robin, “You said you were, and I believed you, and I still do. You were willing to try. You did try. And you're ready now, except that I still can't figure out why you're acting like this.”
The tone might not have been accusatory, but the words assuredly were. “What are you talking about?” asked David. Was it to be a lecture against showing fear after all?
It was not. “I don't mean why you act scared. I mean why you keep acting like a civilian.”
David wasn't sure if he was more puzzled at the question or at the fact that it had been asked. “I am a civilian,” he said by way of answer, knowing it wasn't what Robin wanted to hear, but not caring.
“No,” said Robin, shaking his head slightly, “you're not.”
David managed a smirk of his own. “I thought I was supposed to have this 'test' before we decided that.”
“The test is to see if you can become a superhero and a Titan,” said Robin with perfect equanimity. “That's not what I'm talking about. I don't mean you're not a civilian now. I mean you never were one, but you act like one anyway, and you've been doing it for so long that you think that's what you are.”
By now, David was having trouble determining if Robin was trying to lecture him, insult him, or simply asking harmless questions. “Look,” he said, “I'm...really not sure what you're talking about, so...”
Robin slowly crouched down, still facing David with his masked gaze, and spoke in a tone that was oddly unhurried, as though they were discussing subjects of no concern to anyone at all.
“David,” said Robin, “I'm just trying to be honest here, all right?” David nodded, but said nothing, bracing for impact. Nobody ever prefaced their words with such a thing unless they had something particularly difficult to impart. Robin continued.
“Do you actually know how powerful you are?” asked Robin, “because I don't think you do.”
“What do you mean?” replied David unevenly.
“I mean,” said Robin with perfect confidence, “that you have no idea of just how dangerous you really are.” He shrugged. “I guess there's no way you could have an idea, not from just training, but if you're scared of what's about to happen, why aren't you thinking about what happened with Cinderblock?”
David failed to suppress a shudder at the suggestion. “I'd really rather not.”
“That's a mistake,” said Robin, but there was no sternness to his tone. “You took Cinderblock out. By yourself. No backup, no support, no help from anybody. I've seen Cinderblock destroy buildings, flatten entire city blocks, and so have you. You know how powerful he was, because he spent most of the last five months trying to kill you. You remember what happened at the center, on the waterfront, and last month on Battery Street, right? You were scared of him then?”
“Of... of course I was...”
“So if he was so powerful, and I'm not trying to say he wasn't, then what does it say that you hurt him worse than anyone had ever hurt him before, and stopped him cold in his tracks, by yourself.”
David didn't answer directly. “Any one of you guys could have handled Cinderblock by yourselves,” he said. “Cyborg told me that he did once, and Cinderblock barely touched him. I nearly got killed.”
“But you didn't get killed,” said Robin. “He did.”
“I didn't kill Cinderblock,” insisted David, his throat tightening as he said it. Robin's reply was immediate.
“No, you didn't. But you knocked him out harder than anyone ever has, even Cyborg.”
“Yeah, because I got lucky and blew a gas main.”
“And you think luck doesn't have anything to do with what we do?” replied Robin without skipping a beat. “All of us would be dead long ago if it wasn't for luck.”
David didn't know weather to shiver or laugh, and wound up doing both. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Honestly?” said Robin, “it really should.”
“I'm supposed to feel good about the fact that I'd be dead if it wasn't for where the city planners laid their gas pipeline?”
“No,” said Robin, “you're supposed to realize that even if the rest of us could have done the same thing to Cinderblock, and yeah, any of us probably could have, we're not civilians, and neither are you.”
If only it were so simple. David however did not have the stomach to argue this any further. “I guess we'll find out,” he said lamely, lowering his head again. He half-expected Robin to leave, or change the subject, or at least do something, but Robin didn't move, didn't speak, and didn't give any reply. A few moments of awkward silence were enough to draw another comment out of David.
“Look,” he said, “you were the one who kept saying not to get overconfident, right? Don't assume you have what it takes, don't assume you know how to beat the other guy, always assume the worst? So why do you care how I feel about all this? Civilian, hero, I go out, I do what I'm supposed to do, isn't that all that's important?”
Robin's vague smile vanished as if dispelled by magic, replaced with a disappointed frown. David nearly winced, and was working up the courage to ask what was the matter when Robin answered.
“That isn't what I said,” said Robin with a dead serious tone that indicated he was no longer simply having a friendly conversation. “You're not supposed to think that it's going to be easy, or get complacent about fighting a criminal or a supervillain, but you have to believe you have what it takes, and that you can and willbeat the other guy. I can't teach you how to do that. Nobody can. But you have to.”
David sighed and shook his head. “Robin, I...” he wasn't sure how to put this, but decided for the direct method. It seemed to pay the best dividends insofar as Robin was concerned.
“I... never thought for a second that I could actually beat Cinderblock,” he said. “Not while I was fighting him, not ever. I thought... I thought maybe I could... I dunno, put off him crushing me to a pulp or something, but not beat him. It just happened... so fast, and then all of a sudden there was the gas main and I set off a spark and then when I woke up he was.., down. So I mean...” he rubbed his scalp with the palm of his hand nervously. “... why does it matter what I believe, as long as I do my best at it?”
“Well for one thing,” replied Robin, “it matters if you get so worried and worked up about going out on an alert that you make yourself too sick to take the test. It matters if you're thinking about this like you're a civilian, because no civilian in the world can do this sort of thing, and you know it, so you start assuming you're going to get beaten, or worse yet, killed, and those kinds of assumptions become self-fulfilling after a while. I'm not trying to say you're wrong to be nervous or scared, everybody gets that, especially their first time, but you get so focused on the idea that you're not good enough to do this that you're going to wind up finding a way to prove it to yourself.” Robin folded his arms again and concluded with a smirk. “Or if not that, then you're at least going to give yourself an ulcer, and trust me, those aren't fun. Take it from someone who knows a thing or two about stress.”
“Somehow I'm not surprised,” said David, but his heart wasn't in the sarcasm.
Robin stood back up. “My point is,” he said, “yes, you should always be a little worried about what's going to happen, but not like this, and not for these reasons. D'you think I'd actually let you take a field test if you weren't ready for one?”
David had to admit he hadn't thought of it that way. “What if you're wrong?”
“I'm not,” said Robin, with a tone that brooked absolutely no contradictions, a hair removed, if that, from the tone he used to give orders in. “There's a whole lot you don't know, so you're going to have to trust me. You know that fighting Cinderblock was the hardest thing you've ever done in your life, but you don't know or don't realize just how big of a thing that was. And part of that's because we got mixed up with the attack at the same time and there wasn't a chance to debrief, but the trap they sprung worked. They figured as long as they got you alone away from the rest of us, they'd kill you, but they didn't because you stopped Cinderblock by yourself, which I didn't think you could do, and neither did they. And if you can stop Cinderblock by yourself, then you can handle pretty much anything we're likely to meet on a normal alert with all five of us there. But even so, you still act like a civilian, which I don't get, because you're not one and you never were.”
“What do you mean I never was?” asked David.
“You've had these powers since forever, or so you say, right? I'm not gonna lie, I don't know what that's like. I don't have powers, but I know way too many people who do, and none of them are as shy about throwing them around as you, not even Raven. You had them for six years? Eight years? And you used them once before the first attack?”
“Pretty much.”
“Denying that they exist doesn't make them go away. Why didn't you ever use them? Most people with powers can't stop using them, just look at Beast Boy.”
“Beast Boy doesn't cause a pyroclastic molecular explosion when he sneezes.”
“That's just it, neither do you. All the fights, all the training, all the time you've been here, you've never once had them go off without wanting them to. No matter how scared you get, how angry you get, they've always done exactly what you want, right? People who can't control their powers sometimes try to hide them, and lots of metahumans try not to let anyone know that they are, but you don't look abnormal and except for those focuses you don't do anything obviously paranormal when you cause an explosion. Raven swears that there's something fishy about you and that you can't be telling us everything, but I think you are telling us the truth. I think you didn't use your powers, never tried to be anything except another kid in an orphanage, because that's what you wanted to be.”
David didn't say anything, and didn't look up. Robin didn't sound like he was angry or upset or even disappointed, but he did sound worried, and that was almost worse.
And then he asked a pointed question. “You never wanted to be a hero, did you?”
David lifted his eyes.
“Growing up. Did you ever want to be one? Most kids do at some point, especially the ones in orphanages and foster homes... but I don't think you did.”
David took a large breath and let it out slowly. “No,” he said, “I didn't.”
“Why not?”
Beast Boy had asked him this a long time ago, up on the roof the day he had agreed to train with Robin. He had had no good answer then. He had no better one now.
“I don't know.”
Robin said nothing, just waited for David to take a guess, and a long pause later, he did.
“I didn't... I didn't think I could be one. Not... not that I couldn't blow things up, and all, but... I didn't think I could handle being a hero. Not a superhero, a hero. With responsibilities, and people looking up to me, and all the rest of it. I mean... I didn't know about you guys, so for the kids at the centers it was usually Superman.” He looked up at Robin, shaking his head. “Who seriously looks at Superman and says 'I could do that'?” He shrugged and shook his head, and took a few more deep breaths. “The other kids dreamed about being a superhero because they knew it wasn't ever going to happen, because they weren't special and didn't have powers or military combat training. I had powers... so it wasn't the same thing. I thought that if I ever used them... or if people found out that I had them, then I'd have to go and try to be like Superman. I'd have to go and try to be heroic or powerful and if I didn't get killed, which I probably would, then I'd kill someone else, or let someone else get killed because they were relying on me. So... I never used them. I was... always too afraid that I'd like using them so much I couldn't stop.”
“You didn't think you had it in you to be a hero?”
David shook his head. “No.”
“There's about four hundred people who might say different after what happened on Battery Street,” said Robin
David chuckled a bit. “Yeah,” he said with a sigh, “well... this was before.”
“So what about now?” asked Robin.
“Now?”
“Have you changed your mind? You saved hundreds of people out there a couple weeks ago. You saved that girl you met up with when you went after Beast Boy and Raven. You stopped Cinderblock, fought Adonis to a standstill, and now you're one test run away from being offered a position on the team.” Robin smiled a bit. “Most people would be a little excited.”
“Well, like you said,” said David, his face taking on a wry smirk of its own, “I'm not like most people. You see an chance to go out and 'prove myself' or something? I don't. I see a chance to go out and get killed. Or maybe get other people killed.”
“But you're still here,” said Robin. “If that's all there was to it, you could have just quit, and stayed here in the Tower. You still can. So why didn't you stop? If you actually think you're going to wind up dead, or killing someone, or failing somebody somehow, then why did you agree to do this in the first place?”
David searched for an answer for a moment or two, before finally looking back up at Robin, and answering with the only reason he had to give.
“I...” he stammered softly, “I wanted to be wrong.”
And at that moment, the lights flashed red, and the alarm sounded, deep, unmistakable, a call to battle. Robin merely glanced up at the flashing red light in the middle of the hallway for a moment, then slowly returned his gaze to the psychokinetic, still sitting against the opposite wall, whose expression had frozen on his face like an oil painting. Slowly, as if to indicate that it was all right to breathe, the leader of the Titans extended a hand to David.
“Then let's find out how wrong you are.”
With a last deep and fitful breath to steady himself, David took Robin's offered hand to help himself up, and then with one last nod to Robin, both teens turned and ran down the hallway towards the elevator.
It was gametime...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
And what a game it was that was set before them...
The T-car's engine snarled and roared as it hurtled down the streets like a cannonball, the stoplights shifting to green as it passed while traffic parted for it as though it were an ambulance or a fire truck. Cyborg, at the wheel as always, swerved it left and right around cars, trucks, and other obstacles like a skier in a slalom course, not even bothering to consult the overhead map that the T-car's computer was displaying for him. The pillar of smoke looming over the rooftops was enough of a guide point.
Over the radio, tuned into the police band, came ever more frantic calls for aid. Shouts and static and the muffled sounds of what might have been gunfire or explosions or who knew what else competed with the frantic voice that came over the radio, speaking in a tone of barely-controlled panic that David recognized as easily as he would a familiar face.
“Ten thirty-five!” came the voice, “Code ten thirty-five! Emergency! We're under attack, I repeat, under attack! Shots fired! Officers in danger! Code ten thirty-five! We need backup down here!”
“To hell with backup!” shouted someone else into the radio. “We need the Titans, ASAP! We're under atta- “
There was a sharp crack and muffled blast, followed by static, and Cyborg leaned forward to switch the radio off. Nobody in the car needed to hear any more to determine what they were driving into, certainly not David, whose worst nightmares were parading loose in his head at each snatch of sound. He was wedged in the backseat of the T-car, on the passenger side behind Beast Boy and next to Starfire. Work of art though the T-car was, its present incarnation sat only five, and so Robin had opted to make the trip on the R-cycle, which was presently pacing the car just outside David's window. David however wasn't watching Robin. Indeed he wasn't watching anyone, his eyes shut and his breath coming in slow, even intakes and exhales, as he tried to dispel the queasy feeling in his stomach. Despite how much it felt like carsickness, he knew it wasn't that.
After all, it had started before he got in the car.
“What is the location of this disturbance, Cyborg?” asked Starfire, who sounded totally unperturbed at the thought of entering an urban warzone, to the point where David was envious.
“The cops said it was at 14th Street and Kearney,” said Cyborg. “That's the federal bank.”
“Dude, another bank?” groaned Beast Boy. “We just finished with a bunch of bank robbers last week. What gives?”
“That's where the money is, man,” said Cyborg with a shrug. “'Sides, this sounds a little heavier than just a bunch of bank robbers.”
Robin's voice piped in over the speakers from his motorcycle helmet as though he were sitting inside the car himself. “I told the police to back off, and let us handle it. They say it looks like an organized robbery team. Well armed. They're shooting at the police.”
Cyborg smiled greedily in anticipation of the fight to come. “They shoulda picked another city,” he said, swerving around a delivery truck hard enough to knock David against the door. He glanced at the other Titans, trying to discern if any of them were in the least worried about what they were proposing to do. Starfire was staring ahead with her hand clenching the armrest of her seat, as if eager to burst out of the car like a phoenix and thrash whoever had violated the sanctity of their city. Raven was looking away, her reflection in the window revealing that she looked as bored as she ever did, as if this was nothing more than a giant imposition on their time. Beast Boy's smirk in the rear view mirror was blossoming into a feral grin, anticipating no doubt the spectacular fight he was about to engage in, and in his mind, inevitably win. Cyborg's tone of voice and his driving made his own feelings clear. And while he couldn't see Robin's expression from where he was sitting, he had no doubt that Robin was already entering that professional zone he entered when it was time to go to work.
None of them were afraid.
Which of course didn't help at all, but... there was nothing for that. All he could do was to clench his fingers tighter around the handle of the riot baton held against his chest, and close his eyes, and breathe deeply, letting his mind focus on the baton, following the thought pathways that led to where he needed to be. Gradually he felt the baton begin to throb in his hand like a living thing, warm and cool, warm and cool, in tune with the beating of his own heart.
It was throbbing rapidly.
“Are... you well, David?”
David opened his eyes to see Starfire looking over to him with a concerned expression on her face. Only then did he remember that in focusing his mind, he had cloaked the baton in its red sheath, as though he was about to start blasting things to bits. That and he probably looked fairly pale.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah... I'm... I'm all right.”
Starfire might not have been the greatest expert on Earth or on Humans, but she could tell exactly what was the matter. She placed a hand on David's shoulder and looked him squarely in the eye.
“You shall not come to harm,” she said, with absolute conviction, as if reciting a known fact that was beyond all doubt. “You shall instead join us in gloriously defeating whoever is responsible for this latest disturbance. We shall all make certain of it.”
Starfire was wholly certain of what she was saying, and her certainty could not help but rub off. The knot in David's stomach loosened a bit, and he took another deep breath and smiled awkwardly. “Thanks,” he said. “I'm... I'm sure it'll be fine.”
“Hang on y'all,” called Cyborg from the driver's seat as the car swerved around the last corner. “Here it comes!”
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A war zone.
David wished that he could say he had never seen the likes of this before, but the truth was that this very image haunted his dreams like a spectre. Burning cars, overturned fire hydrants, uprooted street lights cast about like some kind of mad abstract piece. A scene of destruction and chaos replete with the pall of gasoline fumes and cordite smoke hovering over everything like a flock of gaseous carrion birds. The six of them were standing next to the T-car, which had been hastily parked where Cyborg had come to a screeching halt in the plaza in front of the Jump City Federal Bank, an art-deco skyscraper of masonry and steel, looming ahead though barely visible through the haze. The others surveyed the scene with what passed for professional detachment, and David tried to mimic them, but he could not fully suppress a small gasp when he realized that one of the vans in the plaza was that of the JCPD tactical squad, an armored command vehicle that the SWAT team used when they were deploying against serious threats. The van was laying on its roof, and there was a jagged hole two feet in diameter drilled into its side, from whence the vehicle was billowing smoke.
Nothing to be worried about... really... nothing at all...
“Looks like they got heavy weapons,” said Cyborg. “Any idea who these guys are?”
“No idea yet,” said Robin. “We'll have to ask while we're dragging them to jail.”
Raven's eyes were closed and she had a hand to her forehead, her chakra gem glowing bright red as she made use of her powers. “There's... maybe four dozen of them. And another ten or eleven hostages.” She clenched her eyes a little tighter closed. “Eleven.”
“Hostages?!” exclaimed Starfire, her eyes opening wide. “They have stooped to the seizing of hostages like lowly Drevnorgs! We must quickly liberate them before these cruel men are permitted to harm any of them!”
“I'm downloading the plans to the place now,” said Cyborg, whose mannerisms gave no indication that he was engaged in a remote uplink with the Tower's computer on the other side of the city. “The police band says that they snatched a bunch of civilians right off the street to use as human shields, and came right in the front door. They started shooting at the cops when they showed up until they pulled back to let us deal with it.”
“Then let's get to it,” said Robin. “Raven, I want you to take - “
Events overtook them.
The front doors to the facility burst open all of a sudden, and a flood of men came pouring out of it. Dressed in solid black, like mercenaries or paramilitary forces found the world over on the news, all of them were armed to the teeth with rifles of some sort, while a few sported larger weapons that David could only guess at the nature of. Sixty at least there seemed to be to David, though a more rational count would have shown more like twenty-five. Either way, it was clear that the soldiers had not expected to encounter anyone in the plaza, for no sooner had they burst out the door at a dead run for the few undamaged cars still remaining in the plaza, then they all ground to a halt, hesitating as they found waiting for them, not police, but superheroes.
Robin didn't even hesitate.
“Titans! Go!”
And then everything happened at once.
Starfire and Raven burst into the air like birds of prey, followed an instant later by Beast Boy in a far more literal fashion. As they did so, Cyborg dropped to one knee, his forearm opening up to reveal his infamous sonic cannon. With a shout, he unleashed a stabbing beam of blue energy that struck the nearest soldier square in the chest, blasting him off his feet and back into the open doors of the bank. Robin, as he always did in these circumstances, leaped into the air like a bullfrog, turned a flip, and released a handful of marble-sized objects that fell to the ground and exploded into light, smoke, and thunder, disorienting the entire first rank of soldiers whose rifles jerked upwards and discharged harmlessly into the air. Starfire's starbolts slammed into the ground an instant later, catching two more soldiers in their helmets and dropping them to the ground like marionettes with their strings cut, even as Raven uprooted a no parking sign with a wave of her hand and clobbered another soldier in the face with it, lifting him off the ground with the upward strike and tossing him back into the wall.
The remaining soldiers opened fire.
David, who had not yet had time to blink, let out an involuntary cry as a green laser shot over his shoulder close enough to feel the heat of the beam on his ear, and he dove to the side as several more beams nearly took his head off. An thunderous crash drowned out his shocked yelp as Beast Boy morphed from bird into Tyrannosaur, landing amidst the soldiers and scattering them in every direction, spinning his tail around and sending three of them flying like toys. One of the braver soldiers turned his rifle on Beast Boy, but the laser did no more than scorch his thick dinosaur's hide, and with an ear-splitting roar, Beast boy turned and shifted into an elephant, snatching the soldier up with his trunk and slamming him against the overturned police van hard enough to dent it. Cyborg gave a loud war cry and charged forward into the dust and smoke, even as David saw Robin coming down next to another soldier, grabbing the larger man's rifle, and using it as a pivot, spinning around to fling him headfirst into a rack of newspapers, which collapsed around the unfortunate soldier before Raven's dark energy tied the rack in knots around the struggling form.
An all out melee broke out, and for a second, David had no idea what to do. All the training he had been doing for five months had been aimed towards something like this, but the spectacle and the confusion dragged at his mind and he hesitated aimlessly, crouched behind a parked car, unsure of what to do, how to engage, how to help out. Inside he was screaming at himself to get moving and act, but despite the baton in his hand, the uniform on his back, he felt exactly like he had back on the rooftop so many months ago, with the Titans waging a tooth and nail battle against a monstrous dragon, and him unable to do more than hide behind something and watch helplessly.
But then suddenly... as it had before... something caught his eye.
One of the soldiers had taken cover from Beast Boy and Cyborg's rampages behind a stone fountain, and was hefting a massive shoulder-mounted weapon into place, leaning forward into it and squinting into the optical sight. David had no idea what that thing was, an energy cannon, a rocket launcher, or something else altogether, but it was unquestionably hostile, and it was aimed square at either Beast Boy or Cyborg, neither of whom had spotted it yet.
Time slowed down as he perceived the soldier steadying the heavy weapon, taking careful aim to be sure of a kill. David's hand started to move automatically, without even needing his brain to tell it to. Five months ago he would no doubt have been so paralyzed with fear as to be unable to act. Two months ago he might have tried to shout a warning to Beast Boy and Cyborg, in the hopes that they could turn about and deal with it. Today however, the endless repetitions in the training room suddenly came back to him a flood, and everything else faded to irrelevance as he lifted the baton in his hand which flared into full red flaming aura, as though coated in gasoline and set to spark. And with one fluid motion, he stood up from behind the car, and as his vision shifted to perceive, instead of a man, a mass of carbon, synthetic materials, and his block of steel, he swung the baton across and in front of him as though it was a tennis racket.
And the steel reacted precisely as he commanded it to.
The rocket launcher detonated like a bomb, several millionths of a second before the rockets within it went off as well, a cascading series of explosions channeled directly into the the unfortunate soldier's chest. The blast unhesitatingly lifted him off his feet and threw him backwards before slamming him headfirst into the metal-shuttered door of a nearby flower shop. And as the soldier crumpled unconscious to the ground, David felt a sudden rush of adrenaline burning through him, so strong, so unexpected that he stood stock still for a second, more than a little astonished that it had actually worked.
He realized just in the nick of time that he wasn't the only one who had noticed the blast.
Four or five nearby soldiers turned their guns on him, and loosed a barrage of lasers that forced him to dive to the ground or be perforated, scrambling behind the car he had been crouched behind a moment before. The lasers burned into the opposite side of the car, sending cascades of sparks spilling from the aluminum frame. Laying on the ground, David raised his head and peered over the hood of the car long enough to see one of the soldiers changing out the energy clip in his laser rifle, and semi-automatically, he shoved the baton through the open window like a billiards cue, willing the rifle to disintegrate and release its explosive energy backwards. It did so, catching the soldier in the solar plexus with the blast and upending him as the battery spilled white chemicals all over the ground. Another laser shot barely missed his hand, and he ducked back down, trying to think of what to do next, when all of a sudden the car exploded.
A rocket slammed into the car from the opposite side and blew it into scraps of metal, and the blast threw David back as he had done the two soldiers a moment ago. So quick was the blast that the next thing David knew, he was sliding on his back over the asphalt of the street before coming to an abrupt stop against the curb. White lights were blinking in his eyes, and he couldn't hear anything but a high pitched whine. For a moment or two he lay stunned on the ground, helpless and oblivious to the world around him, but fortunately for him, the soldier that had fired the rocket was not carrying a rifle, and had opted to drop the launcher and draw an extendable bayonet, which he was presently holding above his head as he ran full speed towards David, intending to spear the psychokinetic with it like a beached fish.
In retrospect, it was amazing how well screaming madmen brandishing inordinately large knives tended to galvanize one's attention.
David managed to roll over and scramble back up onto one knee, not yet possessing the wherewithal to realize that he had just slid fifty feet over asphalt on his back, and likely had torn the skin right off of his backbone. Glancing around for his baton, and finding it providently laying next to his knee, he grabbed it and brought it up in an automatic paltry defense, the sort he had attempted a hundred times against Robin in hand-to-hand practice, and which had never once worked, for Robin was always quick enough to simply evade the baton and strike him in the head.
But he wasn't fighting Robin.
The baton caught the soldier square in the wrist as he was bringing the knife down at David's head, and though not swung with the utmost force, it had enough strength behind it to knock the knife out of the soldier's hand. David flinched as the knife flew past his neck by centimeters before landing on the ground, but fortunately, his next move was quasi-automatic, drilled into his muscle memory by a thousand repetitions, and he swung the baton up and back, slamming cracking the soldier in the jaw with it and spinning him a full 360 degrees around. David distinctly saw a tooth come flying loose as the soldier staggered back, bleeding from the mouth where he'd been backhanded by the stainless steel riot baton. As the soldier spat blood out onto the street and turned back to face his diminutive opponent, it was hard to tell whether he or David looked the most surprised, the soldier at having been hurt, or David at having actually hurt him. The bad news was that the soldier, older, and less of a stranger to such things, recovered first, and reaching behind him, drew out another knife and lunged forward.
The good news was that David wasn't alone.
There was a bright green blur, and something smashed into the soldier like a meteor, casting up a cloud of dust and debris that nearly staggered David, who threw up one hand to shield his eyes, coughing as the dust cloud enveloped him. When it cleared a few moments later, David saw Starfire standing next to the foot-deep crater she had knocked the soldier into, staring down at his motionless form as if worried that she might have hit him too hard. Fortunately, the soldier was still breathing, though very much unconscious.
David stared in wordless astonishment as Starfire turned back to him. “Are you yet unharmed?” she asked with the utmost concern, her fists still glowing green from where she had been flinging starbolts and hammering soldiers into the dirt a moment ago. The question dragged him back into reality, and he reached back with his free hand to feel his back, expecting to find himself spilling blood like a faucet from where he had been scraped over the asphalt, but to his surprise, the nomex-kevlar weave had held, and other than some small pebbles ground into the back of his uniform, he seemed, and felt, perfectly fine.
Which in and of itself was weird, but he had no time to dwell on that.
“I'm - “ he started, but a shout interrupted him, and both he and Starfire turned to see a half dozen more soldiers sprinting towards them with rifles raised, firing energy bolts from their rifles left and right. A blast of Cyborg's sonic cannon lanced out of nowhere and struck one square in the back, toppling him over like a doll, but the others poured on their own fire, and the lead soldier's shots struck Starfire square in the throat, knocking her back onto the ground with a cry.
By now David knew, intellectually as well as from prior observation, that Starfire was as sturdy as an armored vehicle, and that it would take far more than a mere laser shot to meaningfully injure her. However, as had happened before in the heat of combat, what David knew to be true instinctively, and what thoughts crossed his mind were not entirely the same thing. His eyes widened as Starfire fell, his jaw dropped, and without a moment's thought to whether or not this was a good or a bad idea, he turned to follow her fall with his head. “Starfire!” he shouted, as though his words somehow were the arbiter of whether she was hurt or not. Green flashes of energy flew past his head as he stood motionless in the center of the street, practicallybegging to be shot, but he took no notice of them, his brain having short circuited. Another few seconds and he would certainly have been blasted into ash, but Starfire was not seriously hurt, and moreover had not been speaking idly in the car before they arrived. Even as she fell, she reached out with one hand and turned her fall into a roll, coming back up in a crouch with her fists glowing neon green with furious starbolts. Two of these she loosed with expert throws, scoring with one, a direct hit on the soldier that had been about to blow David's head off with his rifle that reduced his weapon to slag and sent him to the ground like a house of cards in a windstorm.
“David! Take care!”
It was not exactly the most normal of warnings, but it had the desired effect of waking David up to the terribly exposed position he was still standing in. He quickly looked for something to take cover behind, but nothing was within range, and so for lack of a better option he did the only thing he could think of. He turned back to the advancing soldiers, pointed his baton at the one that had shot Starfire, and blew the asphalt up underneath his foot.
The explosion was fierce and immediate, catapulting the soldier into the air and sending him pinwheeling through it as though he had stepped on a landmine. Impressive as this display was however, it was the wrong thing to do, a fact David realized when the remaining soldiers quite predictably turned their weapons on the one target that insisted on standing bolt upright, brandishing a flaming red baton that cast enough light to draw the eye of everyone within thirty yards. A fusillade erupted into him, one shot hitting him in the shoulder, spinning him around as though hit with a riot slug, and sending him crashing to the ground on his side, a fact which was the only thing that prevented him from being torn to shreds. Even this wouldn't have saved him for more than a few more seconds, for the shot sent a withering jolt of pain shooting down his left arm, and he landed on his back, clutching at his shoulder which felt like it was on fire, momentarily unable to raise a hand in his own defense. It would have been comically simple to finish him off.
But... he had managed to distract the enemy soldiers away from what Starfire and the others were doing for just a few seconds. And as was quickly demonstrated, removing one's eyes from the other Titans in the midst of battle was singularly unwise.
The leading soldier took a step forward and lowered his rifle to shoot the helpless teen on the ground, and consequently received no warning whatsoever as something charged out of the smoke behind him. Hearing only footsteps, the soldier had enough time to half-turn around before Cyborg's fist met his face at what might be termed an 'elevated' rate of speed. Had Cyborg not moderated his strike, he would have certainly torn the soldier's head clean off. As it was, he flung the unfortunate man over David's fallen form like a tin soldier struck by a locomotive, and without hesitating in the slightest, turned his sonic cannon on a second one of the soldiers and casually blew him thirty feet back into an overturned dumpster. The last remaining soldier turned his gun on Cyborg , firing at a range where he could not miss, but Cyborg, like Starfire, could sustain such blows, and as he was doing so, black tendrils emerged from the ground, snatching the soldier up like the coils of some malevolent demon sea monster, before slamming him headfirst into the street like a spiked football, and then dissipating into nothingness.
David only caught snatches of the above, laying on the ground half-blinded by dirt and by the pain in his shoulder, and by the time he had recovered his senses sufficiently to determine what was going on, Cyborg was standing over him, offering him a hand, troubled not in the least it appeared by the blackened scorch marks that coated his cyan and silver-chrome frame. Behind him stood Starfire, who had a similar burn mark marring the metallic coif that she wore around her neck and collar over her uniform top, but appeared otherwise unhurt. One by one, the other Titans were emerging from the smoke, Raven materializing out of a dark portal, Robin flipping down from somewhere unknown like an acrobat, and Beast Boy appearing in the form of a rhinoceros, which seamlessly shrank and morphed back into his usual human form.
“Everyone all right?” asked Robin tersely as David accepted Cyborg's help in getting back up, and the question prompted him to take a second to consider his shoulder which was still throbbing mercilessly. Gingerly, he pried his fingers away from it, expecting to see blood come gushing from a gaping wound, but to his surprise, there was only a black scorch mark on the shoulder of his uniform shirt where the energy bolt had nicked him, with only a few of the kevlar-nomex threads broken and peeled back to reveal a glimpse of the skin underneath, red and swollen and painful, but not ruptured. Apparently the uniform was made of stronger stuff than he had anticipated. That and the fact that the shot had just grazed him.
“David?”
David snapped back to reality. “I'm... I'm okay...” he said hesitantly, glancing back up at the others, particularly at Cyborg, who's expression was as serious as he remembered ever seeing it. “Am I okay?” he asked, suddenly not so sure.
“You ain't gonna be okay for long if you keep standing out there to get shot, man,” said Cyborg tersely. “This is the big leagues. These guys'll put you down if you let 'em.”
The reproach was not worded particularly harshly, but it was enough. David cringed involuntarily as he slowly picked up the baton laying next to his foot. “I... I know,” he said lamely. “I'm... I'll try to...”
Robin, all business as always, didn't let him finish. “We drove them back into the bank, but they'll be back out soon. We need to get to the hostages before they start using them as human shields or worse. Raven, Beast Boy, take David, head up to the roof, and try to get into the building that way. We'll keep them occupied down here.
“Got it,” said Beast Boy with a grin of anticipation. Clearly the skirmish so far had not been enough to satisfy his desire to mix it up with the soldiers engaged in this robbery. Raven said nothing, as was her way, but nodded curtly and floated back off the ground. David, the pain in his shoulder slowly subsiding, by now was flushed bright red, and not from exertion. After all the lessons and training, he had still stood out in the middle of the street like an idiot and nearly gotten killed for his trouble, still hesitated when he should have been acting, and indeed he probably would have gotten killed had the others not been so quick to react.
These thoughts might well have led down their usual path, but he was afforded no time for self-recriminations. He stared up at the bank, whose roof loomed some twenty stories above the ground, and his brow furrowed in puzzlement. Beast Boy and Raven could fly of course, but how was he supposed to -
Something grabbed his shoulders and lifted him into the air.
The surprise was such that he didn't realize immediately what was happening, and he nearly dropped his baton, which would have been more embarrassing than he cared to imagine at this point, and it wasn't until he looked up that he realized that Beast Boy had wordlessly shifted into a pterodactyl, grabbed him with his talons, and taken off for the roof. David had seen him do this a hundred times with Cyborg of course, but it was one thing to watch the process with someone else, and another to experience it himself. He clenched his eyes shut and squeezed the baton's handle hard enough to compress the leather, and tried to suppress the queasy sensation that flooded his stomach as his feet dangled in mid-air with no ground to rest upon. Fortunately it was all over in a minute, and before he knew it, David was being set down remarkably gently on top of the roof of the bank. He managed not to fall over as he landed, wobbling only slightly as he stepped away from the 250 foot drop next to him, towards the center of the roof. Beast Boy set down next to him and returned to his normal form, a second before Raven joined them both.
“See, what'd I tell you?” said Beast Boy with a swagger as he clapped David on the back. “The only way to travel, right?” David managed, with great effort, a nervous smile by way of response as his head re-assured itself that it was once more standing on something solid, even as Raven pulled out her communicator.
“Try to get down into the offices behind the lobby,” said Robin over the communicator. “It's the most secure place they could have put the hostages without getting into the vault.” He probably would have given more detailed orders, but there was the sound of more laserfire from down below, and a flash of green light from the communicator in Raven's hand, and suddenly the connection was severed. The sound of the lasers mixed with Cyborg's sonic cannon, Starfire's starbolts, and Robin's flash bombs in the distance, and despite his unease with heights, David nearly scrambled over to the side of the roof to see what was going on down below. A single glance from Raven restrained him however, and he quietly followed her and Beast Boy over to the rooftop access door.
The access door was locked. Indeed it was actually welded shut, a precaution that might have made sense against the police or SWAT, but against the Titans was a laughable obstacle. Raven could have ripped it off its hinges with a flick of her wrist. Beast Boy could have crushed it in the form of a dinosaur or elephant. David himself could have blown the entire door to fragments as a matter of a moment's thought, for it was made of solid steel, but as he turned to ask Raven which of these things they would do, Raven shook her head as if she had read his mind... which she very well might have, he supposed.
“They might hurt the hostages if they hear us coming in,” she said. “We'll have to go around.”
There was something in the word “around” that was not entirely comforting, especially given that Beast Boy turned a slightly paler shade of green as she said it. He glanced from her to Beast Boy and back, and asked the obvious question apprehensively.
“What do you mean 'around'?”
Raven merely smirked.
Lunch was a quiet affair, relatively speaking.
Granted, 'quiet' was not the word one normally associated with Titans' Tower even at its most serene, and mealtimes were usually anything but. Cyborg and Beast Boy could always be counted upon to engage in an epic battle over what sort of food should be served (Cyborg's idea of 'lunch' being six pounds of beef per person, and Beast Boy's being about the same amount of tofu and soybean), and on the off-chance that they were both satisfied with what was being served, there was always the games of who got to be the first one to try Starfire's latest concoction (David swore that the others were cheating but couldn't prove it), Robin's futile attempts to use lunch as an opportunity to comment on the last training session, or Raven's occasional pyrotechnic outbursts whenever Beast Boy or someone else managed to get on her nerves (which was how Beast Boy had come to be cleaning maple syrup off the ceiling the day before). Even if none of the above was happening however, it was usually a matter of everyone talking, arguing, joking, laughing, and otherwise making plenty of noise.
And so it was today, except that David couldn't keep his mind on any of it.
He'd never been that talkative at lunch (or any other time), but over the last few weeks (and months), he'd been slowly coming out of his shell in that regard, at least enough to participate in the conversation, whatever it was. Today though, he was as nervous as he ever remembered being in his life, and could barely manage to stop from glancing back every ten seconds at the large red alarm that was mounted above the main viewing screen in the lounge section of the Common Room. Indeed, several times he did so, but so far it had remained dark, quiet, waiting. It might not have been so bad if it had been a simple matter of a countdown, or some other scheduled thing, he had been preparing to take this 'final test' after all for over two weeks, but the most unsettling thing about it was not knowing when the hammer was going to fall, not knowing when the alarm would sound and he, along with everyone else, would have to drop everything and race off to engage in a battle that could well be even greater than the ones he had fought against Cinderblock.
It could happen in five seconds. It could happen in five days. There was no telling when.
“You gotta eat somethin', man,” said Cyborg, snapping David back into the moment once again. “Trust me, you don't wanna go out there on an empty stomach. 'Sides, how can you resist Cy's famous Five Alarm Chili?”
“Yeah,” said Beast Boy with a snicker, “five alarms to poison control maybe.” He extended a plate of his own food towards David. “Try some of my veggie chili, dude,” he said. “One bite and you'll never want to eat anything else.”
“Man, I told you already, it ain't chili without beef! All you got there is bean soup!” Cyborg picked up the pot of his chili and held it up, sniffing the aroma that came off it. “Now this, this is chili. Just what you want when it's time to kick butt.”
Beast Boy sat back and made a face. “Pft! Whatever, dude. This is the best stuff on the planet. All your meat paste is good for is patching tires.”
David temporized by accepting half a bowl of each, but the argument simmered on for several more minutes until Raven (who as usual seemed to subsist on herbal tea and meditation alone) threatened to force feed each of them the other's chili, which was a credible enough threat to change the subject. Starfire then proceeded to describe in some detail her experience in what appeared to be a hair salon (she called it an “advanced braiding maneuver institution”), and explained how pleasantly surprised she had been to find a passable imitation of the Tamaranean delicacy “Zazgarl”. Nobody had the heart (or the stomach) to ask what kind of a “delicacy” she had found in a hair salon.
All of this was as it always was, and yet it didn't serve to loosen the knot that was settled inside David's stomach. Every so often, Robin would glance over at him, and he would mechanically force himself to take a few bites (in this state, he frankly couldn't tell the difference between the two chilis), but it was the best he could do, and other than the odd topics of conversation, all of which had long since faded into the nebulous realm of “normal”, there was plenty to remind him that what he was about to do was anything but. Cyborg had insisted he make sure the uniform wasn't constricting his movement in any way, and it wasn't, but even if not uncomfortable it was certainly unfamiliar. Nomex and Kevlar simply didn't feel anything like cotton or denim, nor did his shock-absorbing, traction-enhanced boots feel anything like the sneakers he was accustomed to. The fingerless gloves, also made of polymer, didn't quite get in his way, but having lived his entire life in California, he'd never worn gloves before for any length of time, and they were a bit distracting. True, they didn't seem to slow him down any, and they certainly made it easier to get a (physical) grip on things, but it was one more reminder that he was walking into uncharted territory.
The stainless steel baton sitting in his lap was another.
He wished he could relax. He knew he should be relaxing. He knew that what was about to happen, however bad it was, was something he had trained for, and that there were all of the other Titans with him if anything went wrong. He knew that this was the sort of thing that the five of them usually handled by themselves, and that therefore they would never really let anything happen to him. But every time he shut his eyes or zoned out of the conversation, all he could see was the black dragon on the roof, about to incinerate him, or the ravening beast in the sewers, slashing to tear his guts out and lay him out on the concrete...
... or Cinderblock.
Sharp laughs snapped him back into reality once more, as everyone (save Raven) was laughing at a joke Beast Boy had told a moment ago that he had completely missed. He smiled anyway, just to give the impression he had been paying attention. Most everyone had finished, and David had eaten just about everything he felt that he was going to be able to eat today. Still, nobody left the table just yet, unwilling to start doing the dishes perhaps, or just sensing that David was not exactly attentive. He did notice that while the Titans were as relaxed as they always were with the prospect of an alert staring them in the face (they were always on call after all), none of them mentioned anything about what was to come. They were trying to put him at ease.
Had anything worked, it might well have been that, but nothing much did.
Eventually, there was no putting it off further, and Beast Boy wearily rose to do the dishes (it was his turn), while the others slowly filed out to whatever else they were doing. Starfire remained behind in the common room to watch one of her favorite television shows (“World of Fungus”), and Raven settled in on the other couch to continue reading whatever book she was presently going through (all David knew was that it was hardbound in leather, and would probably try to eat him if he ever touched it). The other two chose to make an exit at this stage, Cyborg to his garage, Robin to his evidence room, and David decided to follow their example by going back to his own room for a little while.
He didn't get there.
He no longer got lost in the tower, at least not on the top couple of levels. The hallways twisted and turned in permutations that seemed to defy physics, but enough repetition could stamp the layout of even a labyrinth such as this into his head. His trouble was not finding his room, his trouble was making it that far. A wave of nausea hit him like a baseball bat to the stomach in the middle of the hallway, and stopped him cold, doubling him over and nearly knocking him to the floor save that he managed to catch the wall with his hand, the baton falling out of his grip and clattering to the ground. He shut his eyes tightly and dug his fingers into the wallpaper, trying not to be sick, and ultimately managing to hold down the contents of his stomach, if only barely. After a minute or two, he slowly lowered himself down to the floor, and simply sat there, sweat standing out on his forehead, his hands trembling slightly as he slowly picked up the baton he'd dropped and fiddled with it like a priest fiddling with prayer beads. His heart was thundering in his ears, his breath coming in ragged hisses, and it took effort, real effort, to shift his vision into the netherworld of dancing particles that he often took refuge in when he needed to steady himself.
... and all this before he had even left the Tower.
He was about to embark on the usual round of self-recriminations for his worn and taut nerves, when he heard footsteps approaching, and lifted his head as his eyes took in light once again rather than whatever they were perceiving when it came time to destroy things. This shift too took effort, a testament to how tense he really was, and by the time it was done, Robin was standing in front of him with his arms crossed, looking as implacable as he ever did, with a vaguely smug look on his face that the mask did nothing to dispel. David, still trying to slow his racing heart rate, did no more than glance up at him furtively, half-worried for a moment that he was about to get some kind of lecture on never showing fear or something similar.
“Nervous?”
Robin's casual tone put him off his guard, and he looked up for a second. For the past weeks, Robin had been his training instructor, and had been telling him what to do and how to do it, but that was not who was standing before him now. Robin seemed... relaxed perhaps was an exaggeration, but at least more relaxed than normal, somewhat ironically given that he had caught David in the exact opposite state. David did not doubt for one instant that the answer to Robin's question was written all over him, but he replied honestly nonetheless. It helped a bit.
“Yeah.”
Robin did not lecture or recite a catchphrase, but simply nodded, keeping his thoughts to himself, as ever. Instead of the lecture, he leaned back against the wall, his arms still crossed, regarding the psychokinetic as if watching a documentary of some sort on television.
“You mind if I ask you a question?”
David almost forgot his own nerves for a second, so unexpected was this from Robin, who was usually as direct as a punch to the face, a trait he shared with Raven. There could only of course be one answer.
“Um... sure.”
“Why are you doing this?”
David blinked. “What?”
“You remember when we started training, I asked you if you were willing to try to become a hero?” explained Robin, “You said you were, and I believed you, and I still do. You were willing to try. You did try. And you're ready now, except that I still can't figure out why you're acting like this.”
The tone might not have been accusatory, but the words assuredly were. “What are you talking about?” asked David. Was it to be a lecture against showing fear after all?
It was not. “I don't mean why you act scared. I mean why you keep acting like a civilian.”
David wasn't sure if he was more puzzled at the question or at the fact that it had been asked. “I am a civilian,” he said by way of answer, knowing it wasn't what Robin wanted to hear, but not caring.
“No,” said Robin, shaking his head slightly, “you're not.”
David managed a smirk of his own. “I thought I was supposed to have this 'test' before we decided that.”
“The test is to see if you can become a superhero and a Titan,” said Robin with perfect equanimity. “That's not what I'm talking about. I don't mean you're not a civilian now. I mean you never were one, but you act like one anyway, and you've been doing it for so long that you think that's what you are.”
By now, David was having trouble determining if Robin was trying to lecture him, insult him, or simply asking harmless questions. “Look,” he said, “I'm...really not sure what you're talking about, so...”
Robin slowly crouched down, still facing David with his masked gaze, and spoke in a tone that was oddly unhurried, as though they were discussing subjects of no concern to anyone at all.
“David,” said Robin, “I'm just trying to be honest here, all right?” David nodded, but said nothing, bracing for impact. Nobody ever prefaced their words with such a thing unless they had something particularly difficult to impart. Robin continued.
“Do you actually know how powerful you are?” asked Robin, “because I don't think you do.”
“What do you mean?” replied David unevenly.
“I mean,” said Robin with perfect confidence, “that you have no idea of just how dangerous you really are.” He shrugged. “I guess there's no way you could have an idea, not from just training, but if you're scared of what's about to happen, why aren't you thinking about what happened with Cinderblock?”
David failed to suppress a shudder at the suggestion. “I'd really rather not.”
“That's a mistake,” said Robin, but there was no sternness to his tone. “You took Cinderblock out. By yourself. No backup, no support, no help from anybody. I've seen Cinderblock destroy buildings, flatten entire city blocks, and so have you. You know how powerful he was, because he spent most of the last five months trying to kill you. You remember what happened at the center, on the waterfront, and last month on Battery Street, right? You were scared of him then?”
“Of... of course I was...”
“So if he was so powerful, and I'm not trying to say he wasn't, then what does it say that you hurt him worse than anyone had ever hurt him before, and stopped him cold in his tracks, by yourself.”
David didn't answer directly. “Any one of you guys could have handled Cinderblock by yourselves,” he said. “Cyborg told me that he did once, and Cinderblock barely touched him. I nearly got killed.”
“But you didn't get killed,” said Robin. “He did.”
“I didn't kill Cinderblock,” insisted David, his throat tightening as he said it. Robin's reply was immediate.
“No, you didn't. But you knocked him out harder than anyone ever has, even Cyborg.”
“Yeah, because I got lucky and blew a gas main.”
“And you think luck doesn't have anything to do with what we do?” replied Robin without skipping a beat. “All of us would be dead long ago if it wasn't for luck.”
David didn't know weather to shiver or laugh, and wound up doing both. “Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“Honestly?” said Robin, “it really should.”
“I'm supposed to feel good about the fact that I'd be dead if it wasn't for where the city planners laid their gas pipeline?”
“No,” said Robin, “you're supposed to realize that even if the rest of us could have done the same thing to Cinderblock, and yeah, any of us probably could have, we're not civilians, and neither are you.”
If only it were so simple. David however did not have the stomach to argue this any further. “I guess we'll find out,” he said lamely, lowering his head again. He half-expected Robin to leave, or change the subject, or at least do something, but Robin didn't move, didn't speak, and didn't give any reply. A few moments of awkward silence were enough to draw another comment out of David.
“Look,” he said, “you were the one who kept saying not to get overconfident, right? Don't assume you have what it takes, don't assume you know how to beat the other guy, always assume the worst? So why do you care how I feel about all this? Civilian, hero, I go out, I do what I'm supposed to do, isn't that all that's important?”
Robin's vague smile vanished as if dispelled by magic, replaced with a disappointed frown. David nearly winced, and was working up the courage to ask what was the matter when Robin answered.
“That isn't what I said,” said Robin with a dead serious tone that indicated he was no longer simply having a friendly conversation. “You're not supposed to think that it's going to be easy, or get complacent about fighting a criminal or a supervillain, but you have to believe you have what it takes, and that you can and willbeat the other guy. I can't teach you how to do that. Nobody can. But you have to.”
David sighed and shook his head. “Robin, I...” he wasn't sure how to put this, but decided for the direct method. It seemed to pay the best dividends insofar as Robin was concerned.
“I... never thought for a second that I could actually beat Cinderblock,” he said. “Not while I was fighting him, not ever. I thought... I thought maybe I could... I dunno, put off him crushing me to a pulp or something, but not beat him. It just happened... so fast, and then all of a sudden there was the gas main and I set off a spark and then when I woke up he was.., down. So I mean...” he rubbed his scalp with the palm of his hand nervously. “... why does it matter what I believe, as long as I do my best at it?”
“Well for one thing,” replied Robin, “it matters if you get so worried and worked up about going out on an alert that you make yourself too sick to take the test. It matters if you're thinking about this like you're a civilian, because no civilian in the world can do this sort of thing, and you know it, so you start assuming you're going to get beaten, or worse yet, killed, and those kinds of assumptions become self-fulfilling after a while. I'm not trying to say you're wrong to be nervous or scared, everybody gets that, especially their first time, but you get so focused on the idea that you're not good enough to do this that you're going to wind up finding a way to prove it to yourself.” Robin folded his arms again and concluded with a smirk. “Or if not that, then you're at least going to give yourself an ulcer, and trust me, those aren't fun. Take it from someone who knows a thing or two about stress.”
“Somehow I'm not surprised,” said David, but his heart wasn't in the sarcasm.
Robin stood back up. “My point is,” he said, “yes, you should always be a little worried about what's going to happen, but not like this, and not for these reasons. D'you think I'd actually let you take a field test if you weren't ready for one?”
David had to admit he hadn't thought of it that way. “What if you're wrong?”
“I'm not,” said Robin, with a tone that brooked absolutely no contradictions, a hair removed, if that, from the tone he used to give orders in. “There's a whole lot you don't know, so you're going to have to trust me. You know that fighting Cinderblock was the hardest thing you've ever done in your life, but you don't know or don't realize just how big of a thing that was. And part of that's because we got mixed up with the attack at the same time and there wasn't a chance to debrief, but the trap they sprung worked. They figured as long as they got you alone away from the rest of us, they'd kill you, but they didn't because you stopped Cinderblock by yourself, which I didn't think you could do, and neither did they. And if you can stop Cinderblock by yourself, then you can handle pretty much anything we're likely to meet on a normal alert with all five of us there. But even so, you still act like a civilian, which I don't get, because you're not one and you never were.”
“What do you mean I never was?” asked David.
“You've had these powers since forever, or so you say, right? I'm not gonna lie, I don't know what that's like. I don't have powers, but I know way too many people who do, and none of them are as shy about throwing them around as you, not even Raven. You had them for six years? Eight years? And you used them once before the first attack?”
“Pretty much.”
“Denying that they exist doesn't make them go away. Why didn't you ever use them? Most people with powers can't stop using them, just look at Beast Boy.”
“Beast Boy doesn't cause a pyroclastic molecular explosion when he sneezes.”
“That's just it, neither do you. All the fights, all the training, all the time you've been here, you've never once had them go off without wanting them to. No matter how scared you get, how angry you get, they've always done exactly what you want, right? People who can't control their powers sometimes try to hide them, and lots of metahumans try not to let anyone know that they are, but you don't look abnormal and except for those focuses you don't do anything obviously paranormal when you cause an explosion. Raven swears that there's something fishy about you and that you can't be telling us everything, but I think you are telling us the truth. I think you didn't use your powers, never tried to be anything except another kid in an orphanage, because that's what you wanted to be.”
David didn't say anything, and didn't look up. Robin didn't sound like he was angry or upset or even disappointed, but he did sound worried, and that was almost worse.
And then he asked a pointed question. “You never wanted to be a hero, did you?”
David lifted his eyes.
“Growing up. Did you ever want to be one? Most kids do at some point, especially the ones in orphanages and foster homes... but I don't think you did.”
David took a large breath and let it out slowly. “No,” he said, “I didn't.”
“Why not?”
Beast Boy had asked him this a long time ago, up on the roof the day he had agreed to train with Robin. He had had no good answer then. He had no better one now.
“I don't know.”
Robin said nothing, just waited for David to take a guess, and a long pause later, he did.
“I didn't... I didn't think I could be one. Not... not that I couldn't blow things up, and all, but... I didn't think I could handle being a hero. Not a superhero, a hero. With responsibilities, and people looking up to me, and all the rest of it. I mean... I didn't know about you guys, so for the kids at the centers it was usually Superman.” He looked up at Robin, shaking his head. “Who seriously looks at Superman and says 'I could do that'?” He shrugged and shook his head, and took a few more deep breaths. “The other kids dreamed about being a superhero because they knew it wasn't ever going to happen, because they weren't special and didn't have powers or military combat training. I had powers... so it wasn't the same thing. I thought that if I ever used them... or if people found out that I had them, then I'd have to go and try to be like Superman. I'd have to go and try to be heroic or powerful and if I didn't get killed, which I probably would, then I'd kill someone else, or let someone else get killed because they were relying on me. So... I never used them. I was... always too afraid that I'd like using them so much I couldn't stop.”
“You didn't think you had it in you to be a hero?”
David shook his head. “No.”
“There's about four hundred people who might say different after what happened on Battery Street,” said Robin
David chuckled a bit. “Yeah,” he said with a sigh, “well... this was before.”
“So what about now?” asked Robin.
“Now?”
“Have you changed your mind? You saved hundreds of people out there a couple weeks ago. You saved that girl you met up with when you went after Beast Boy and Raven. You stopped Cinderblock, fought Adonis to a standstill, and now you're one test run away from being offered a position on the team.” Robin smiled a bit. “Most people would be a little excited.”
“Well, like you said,” said David, his face taking on a wry smirk of its own, “I'm not like most people. You see an chance to go out and 'prove myself' or something? I don't. I see a chance to go out and get killed. Or maybe get other people killed.”
“But you're still here,” said Robin. “If that's all there was to it, you could have just quit, and stayed here in the Tower. You still can. So why didn't you stop? If you actually think you're going to wind up dead, or killing someone, or failing somebody somehow, then why did you agree to do this in the first place?”
David searched for an answer for a moment or two, before finally looking back up at Robin, and answering with the only reason he had to give.
“I...” he stammered softly, “I wanted to be wrong.”
And at that moment, the lights flashed red, and the alarm sounded, deep, unmistakable, a call to battle. Robin merely glanced up at the flashing red light in the middle of the hallway for a moment, then slowly returned his gaze to the psychokinetic, still sitting against the opposite wall, whose expression had frozen on his face like an oil painting. Slowly, as if to indicate that it was all right to breathe, the leader of the Titans extended a hand to David.
“Then let's find out how wrong you are.”
With a last deep and fitful breath to steady himself, David took Robin's offered hand to help himself up, and then with one last nod to Robin, both teens turned and ran down the hallway towards the elevator.
It was gametime...
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And what a game it was that was set before them...
The T-car's engine snarled and roared as it hurtled down the streets like a cannonball, the stoplights shifting to green as it passed while traffic parted for it as though it were an ambulance or a fire truck. Cyborg, at the wheel as always, swerved it left and right around cars, trucks, and other obstacles like a skier in a slalom course, not even bothering to consult the overhead map that the T-car's computer was displaying for him. The pillar of smoke looming over the rooftops was enough of a guide point.
Over the radio, tuned into the police band, came ever more frantic calls for aid. Shouts and static and the muffled sounds of what might have been gunfire or explosions or who knew what else competed with the frantic voice that came over the radio, speaking in a tone of barely-controlled panic that David recognized as easily as he would a familiar face.
“Ten thirty-five!” came the voice, “Code ten thirty-five! Emergency! We're under attack, I repeat, under attack! Shots fired! Officers in danger! Code ten thirty-five! We need backup down here!”
“To hell with backup!” shouted someone else into the radio. “We need the Titans, ASAP! We're under atta- “
There was a sharp crack and muffled blast, followed by static, and Cyborg leaned forward to switch the radio off. Nobody in the car needed to hear any more to determine what they were driving into, certainly not David, whose worst nightmares were parading loose in his head at each snatch of sound. He was wedged in the backseat of the T-car, on the passenger side behind Beast Boy and next to Starfire. Work of art though the T-car was, its present incarnation sat only five, and so Robin had opted to make the trip on the R-cycle, which was presently pacing the car just outside David's window. David however wasn't watching Robin. Indeed he wasn't watching anyone, his eyes shut and his breath coming in slow, even intakes and exhales, as he tried to dispel the queasy feeling in his stomach. Despite how much it felt like carsickness, he knew it wasn't that.
After all, it had started before he got in the car.
“What is the location of this disturbance, Cyborg?” asked Starfire, who sounded totally unperturbed at the thought of entering an urban warzone, to the point where David was envious.
“The cops said it was at 14th Street and Kearney,” said Cyborg. “That's the federal bank.”
“Dude, another bank?” groaned Beast Boy. “We just finished with a bunch of bank robbers last week. What gives?”
“That's where the money is, man,” said Cyborg with a shrug. “'Sides, this sounds a little heavier than just a bunch of bank robbers.”
Robin's voice piped in over the speakers from his motorcycle helmet as though he were sitting inside the car himself. “I told the police to back off, and let us handle it. They say it looks like an organized robbery team. Well armed. They're shooting at the police.”
Cyborg smiled greedily in anticipation of the fight to come. “They shoulda picked another city,” he said, swerving around a delivery truck hard enough to knock David against the door. He glanced at the other Titans, trying to discern if any of them were in the least worried about what they were proposing to do. Starfire was staring ahead with her hand clenching the armrest of her seat, as if eager to burst out of the car like a phoenix and thrash whoever had violated the sanctity of their city. Raven was looking away, her reflection in the window revealing that she looked as bored as she ever did, as if this was nothing more than a giant imposition on their time. Beast Boy's smirk in the rear view mirror was blossoming into a feral grin, anticipating no doubt the spectacular fight he was about to engage in, and in his mind, inevitably win. Cyborg's tone of voice and his driving made his own feelings clear. And while he couldn't see Robin's expression from where he was sitting, he had no doubt that Robin was already entering that professional zone he entered when it was time to go to work.
None of them were afraid.
Which of course didn't help at all, but... there was nothing for that. All he could do was to clench his fingers tighter around the handle of the riot baton held against his chest, and close his eyes, and breathe deeply, letting his mind focus on the baton, following the thought pathways that led to where he needed to be. Gradually he felt the baton begin to throb in his hand like a living thing, warm and cool, warm and cool, in tune with the beating of his own heart.
It was throbbing rapidly.
“Are... you well, David?”
David opened his eyes to see Starfire looking over to him with a concerned expression on her face. Only then did he remember that in focusing his mind, he had cloaked the baton in its red sheath, as though he was about to start blasting things to bits. That and he probably looked fairly pale.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah... I'm... I'm all right.”
Starfire might not have been the greatest expert on Earth or on Humans, but she could tell exactly what was the matter. She placed a hand on David's shoulder and looked him squarely in the eye.
“You shall not come to harm,” she said, with absolute conviction, as if reciting a known fact that was beyond all doubt. “You shall instead join us in gloriously defeating whoever is responsible for this latest disturbance. We shall all make certain of it.”
Starfire was wholly certain of what she was saying, and her certainty could not help but rub off. The knot in David's stomach loosened a bit, and he took another deep breath and smiled awkwardly. “Thanks,” he said. “I'm... I'm sure it'll be fine.”
“Hang on y'all,” called Cyborg from the driver's seat as the car swerved around the last corner. “Here it comes!”
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A war zone.
David wished that he could say he had never seen the likes of this before, but the truth was that this very image haunted his dreams like a spectre. Burning cars, overturned fire hydrants, uprooted street lights cast about like some kind of mad abstract piece. A scene of destruction and chaos replete with the pall of gasoline fumes and cordite smoke hovering over everything like a flock of gaseous carrion birds. The six of them were standing next to the T-car, which had been hastily parked where Cyborg had come to a screeching halt in the plaza in front of the Jump City Federal Bank, an art-deco skyscraper of masonry and steel, looming ahead though barely visible through the haze. The others surveyed the scene with what passed for professional detachment, and David tried to mimic them, but he could not fully suppress a small gasp when he realized that one of the vans in the plaza was that of the JCPD tactical squad, an armored command vehicle that the SWAT team used when they were deploying against serious threats. The van was laying on its roof, and there was a jagged hole two feet in diameter drilled into its side, from whence the vehicle was billowing smoke.
Nothing to be worried about... really... nothing at all...
“Looks like they got heavy weapons,” said Cyborg. “Any idea who these guys are?”
“No idea yet,” said Robin. “We'll have to ask while we're dragging them to jail.”
Raven's eyes were closed and she had a hand to her forehead, her chakra gem glowing bright red as she made use of her powers. “There's... maybe four dozen of them. And another ten or eleven hostages.” She clenched her eyes a little tighter closed. “Eleven.”
“Hostages?!” exclaimed Starfire, her eyes opening wide. “They have stooped to the seizing of hostages like lowly Drevnorgs! We must quickly liberate them before these cruel men are permitted to harm any of them!”
“I'm downloading the plans to the place now,” said Cyborg, whose mannerisms gave no indication that he was engaged in a remote uplink with the Tower's computer on the other side of the city. “The police band says that they snatched a bunch of civilians right off the street to use as human shields, and came right in the front door. They started shooting at the cops when they showed up until they pulled back to let us deal with it.”
“Then let's get to it,” said Robin. “Raven, I want you to take - “
Events overtook them.
The front doors to the facility burst open all of a sudden, and a flood of men came pouring out of it. Dressed in solid black, like mercenaries or paramilitary forces found the world over on the news, all of them were armed to the teeth with rifles of some sort, while a few sported larger weapons that David could only guess at the nature of. Sixty at least there seemed to be to David, though a more rational count would have shown more like twenty-five. Either way, it was clear that the soldiers had not expected to encounter anyone in the plaza, for no sooner had they burst out the door at a dead run for the few undamaged cars still remaining in the plaza, then they all ground to a halt, hesitating as they found waiting for them, not police, but superheroes.
Robin didn't even hesitate.
“Titans! Go!”
And then everything happened at once.
Starfire and Raven burst into the air like birds of prey, followed an instant later by Beast Boy in a far more literal fashion. As they did so, Cyborg dropped to one knee, his forearm opening up to reveal his infamous sonic cannon. With a shout, he unleashed a stabbing beam of blue energy that struck the nearest soldier square in the chest, blasting him off his feet and back into the open doors of the bank. Robin, as he always did in these circumstances, leaped into the air like a bullfrog, turned a flip, and released a handful of marble-sized objects that fell to the ground and exploded into light, smoke, and thunder, disorienting the entire first rank of soldiers whose rifles jerked upwards and discharged harmlessly into the air. Starfire's starbolts slammed into the ground an instant later, catching two more soldiers in their helmets and dropping them to the ground like marionettes with their strings cut, even as Raven uprooted a no parking sign with a wave of her hand and clobbered another soldier in the face with it, lifting him off the ground with the upward strike and tossing him back into the wall.
The remaining soldiers opened fire.
David, who had not yet had time to blink, let out an involuntary cry as a green laser shot over his shoulder close enough to feel the heat of the beam on his ear, and he dove to the side as several more beams nearly took his head off. An thunderous crash drowned out his shocked yelp as Beast Boy morphed from bird into Tyrannosaur, landing amidst the soldiers and scattering them in every direction, spinning his tail around and sending three of them flying like toys. One of the braver soldiers turned his rifle on Beast Boy, but the laser did no more than scorch his thick dinosaur's hide, and with an ear-splitting roar, Beast boy turned and shifted into an elephant, snatching the soldier up with his trunk and slamming him against the overturned police van hard enough to dent it. Cyborg gave a loud war cry and charged forward into the dust and smoke, even as David saw Robin coming down next to another soldier, grabbing the larger man's rifle, and using it as a pivot, spinning around to fling him headfirst into a rack of newspapers, which collapsed around the unfortunate soldier before Raven's dark energy tied the rack in knots around the struggling form.
An all out melee broke out, and for a second, David had no idea what to do. All the training he had been doing for five months had been aimed towards something like this, but the spectacle and the confusion dragged at his mind and he hesitated aimlessly, crouched behind a parked car, unsure of what to do, how to engage, how to help out. Inside he was screaming at himself to get moving and act, but despite the baton in his hand, the uniform on his back, he felt exactly like he had back on the rooftop so many months ago, with the Titans waging a tooth and nail battle against a monstrous dragon, and him unable to do more than hide behind something and watch helplessly.
But then suddenly... as it had before... something caught his eye.
One of the soldiers had taken cover from Beast Boy and Cyborg's rampages behind a stone fountain, and was hefting a massive shoulder-mounted weapon into place, leaning forward into it and squinting into the optical sight. David had no idea what that thing was, an energy cannon, a rocket launcher, or something else altogether, but it was unquestionably hostile, and it was aimed square at either Beast Boy or Cyborg, neither of whom had spotted it yet.
Time slowed down as he perceived the soldier steadying the heavy weapon, taking careful aim to be sure of a kill. David's hand started to move automatically, without even needing his brain to tell it to. Five months ago he would no doubt have been so paralyzed with fear as to be unable to act. Two months ago he might have tried to shout a warning to Beast Boy and Cyborg, in the hopes that they could turn about and deal with it. Today however, the endless repetitions in the training room suddenly came back to him a flood, and everything else faded to irrelevance as he lifted the baton in his hand which flared into full red flaming aura, as though coated in gasoline and set to spark. And with one fluid motion, he stood up from behind the car, and as his vision shifted to perceive, instead of a man, a mass of carbon, synthetic materials, and his block of steel, he swung the baton across and in front of him as though it was a tennis racket.
And the steel reacted precisely as he commanded it to.
The rocket launcher detonated like a bomb, several millionths of a second before the rockets within it went off as well, a cascading series of explosions channeled directly into the the unfortunate soldier's chest. The blast unhesitatingly lifted him off his feet and threw him backwards before slamming him headfirst into the metal-shuttered door of a nearby flower shop. And as the soldier crumpled unconscious to the ground, David felt a sudden rush of adrenaline burning through him, so strong, so unexpected that he stood stock still for a second, more than a little astonished that it had actually worked.
He realized just in the nick of time that he wasn't the only one who had noticed the blast.
Four or five nearby soldiers turned their guns on him, and loosed a barrage of lasers that forced him to dive to the ground or be perforated, scrambling behind the car he had been crouched behind a moment before. The lasers burned into the opposite side of the car, sending cascades of sparks spilling from the aluminum frame. Laying on the ground, David raised his head and peered over the hood of the car long enough to see one of the soldiers changing out the energy clip in his laser rifle, and semi-automatically, he shoved the baton through the open window like a billiards cue, willing the rifle to disintegrate and release its explosive energy backwards. It did so, catching the soldier in the solar plexus with the blast and upending him as the battery spilled white chemicals all over the ground. Another laser shot barely missed his hand, and he ducked back down, trying to think of what to do next, when all of a sudden the car exploded.
A rocket slammed into the car from the opposite side and blew it into scraps of metal, and the blast threw David back as he had done the two soldiers a moment ago. So quick was the blast that the next thing David knew, he was sliding on his back over the asphalt of the street before coming to an abrupt stop against the curb. White lights were blinking in his eyes, and he couldn't hear anything but a high pitched whine. For a moment or two he lay stunned on the ground, helpless and oblivious to the world around him, but fortunately for him, the soldier that had fired the rocket was not carrying a rifle, and had opted to drop the launcher and draw an extendable bayonet, which he was presently holding above his head as he ran full speed towards David, intending to spear the psychokinetic with it like a beached fish.
In retrospect, it was amazing how well screaming madmen brandishing inordinately large knives tended to galvanize one's attention.
David managed to roll over and scramble back up onto one knee, not yet possessing the wherewithal to realize that he had just slid fifty feet over asphalt on his back, and likely had torn the skin right off of his backbone. Glancing around for his baton, and finding it providently laying next to his knee, he grabbed it and brought it up in an automatic paltry defense, the sort he had attempted a hundred times against Robin in hand-to-hand practice, and which had never once worked, for Robin was always quick enough to simply evade the baton and strike him in the head.
But he wasn't fighting Robin.
The baton caught the soldier square in the wrist as he was bringing the knife down at David's head, and though not swung with the utmost force, it had enough strength behind it to knock the knife out of the soldier's hand. David flinched as the knife flew past his neck by centimeters before landing on the ground, but fortunately, his next move was quasi-automatic, drilled into his muscle memory by a thousand repetitions, and he swung the baton up and back, slamming cracking the soldier in the jaw with it and spinning him a full 360 degrees around. David distinctly saw a tooth come flying loose as the soldier staggered back, bleeding from the mouth where he'd been backhanded by the stainless steel riot baton. As the soldier spat blood out onto the street and turned back to face his diminutive opponent, it was hard to tell whether he or David looked the most surprised, the soldier at having been hurt, or David at having actually hurt him. The bad news was that the soldier, older, and less of a stranger to such things, recovered first, and reaching behind him, drew out another knife and lunged forward.
The good news was that David wasn't alone.
There was a bright green blur, and something smashed into the soldier like a meteor, casting up a cloud of dust and debris that nearly staggered David, who threw up one hand to shield his eyes, coughing as the dust cloud enveloped him. When it cleared a few moments later, David saw Starfire standing next to the foot-deep crater she had knocked the soldier into, staring down at his motionless form as if worried that she might have hit him too hard. Fortunately, the soldier was still breathing, though very much unconscious.
David stared in wordless astonishment as Starfire turned back to him. “Are you yet unharmed?” she asked with the utmost concern, her fists still glowing green from where she had been flinging starbolts and hammering soldiers into the dirt a moment ago. The question dragged him back into reality, and he reached back with his free hand to feel his back, expecting to find himself spilling blood like a faucet from where he had been scraped over the asphalt, but to his surprise, the nomex-kevlar weave had held, and other than some small pebbles ground into the back of his uniform, he seemed, and felt, perfectly fine.
Which in and of itself was weird, but he had no time to dwell on that.
“I'm - “ he started, but a shout interrupted him, and both he and Starfire turned to see a half dozen more soldiers sprinting towards them with rifles raised, firing energy bolts from their rifles left and right. A blast of Cyborg's sonic cannon lanced out of nowhere and struck one square in the back, toppling him over like a doll, but the others poured on their own fire, and the lead soldier's shots struck Starfire square in the throat, knocking her back onto the ground with a cry.
By now David knew, intellectually as well as from prior observation, that Starfire was as sturdy as an armored vehicle, and that it would take far more than a mere laser shot to meaningfully injure her. However, as had happened before in the heat of combat, what David knew to be true instinctively, and what thoughts crossed his mind were not entirely the same thing. His eyes widened as Starfire fell, his jaw dropped, and without a moment's thought to whether or not this was a good or a bad idea, he turned to follow her fall with his head. “Starfire!” he shouted, as though his words somehow were the arbiter of whether she was hurt or not. Green flashes of energy flew past his head as he stood motionless in the center of the street, practicallybegging to be shot, but he took no notice of them, his brain having short circuited. Another few seconds and he would certainly have been blasted into ash, but Starfire was not seriously hurt, and moreover had not been speaking idly in the car before they arrived. Even as she fell, she reached out with one hand and turned her fall into a roll, coming back up in a crouch with her fists glowing neon green with furious starbolts. Two of these she loosed with expert throws, scoring with one, a direct hit on the soldier that had been about to blow David's head off with his rifle that reduced his weapon to slag and sent him to the ground like a house of cards in a windstorm.
“David! Take care!”
It was not exactly the most normal of warnings, but it had the desired effect of waking David up to the terribly exposed position he was still standing in. He quickly looked for something to take cover behind, but nothing was within range, and so for lack of a better option he did the only thing he could think of. He turned back to the advancing soldiers, pointed his baton at the one that had shot Starfire, and blew the asphalt up underneath his foot.
The explosion was fierce and immediate, catapulting the soldier into the air and sending him pinwheeling through it as though he had stepped on a landmine. Impressive as this display was however, it was the wrong thing to do, a fact David realized when the remaining soldiers quite predictably turned their weapons on the one target that insisted on standing bolt upright, brandishing a flaming red baton that cast enough light to draw the eye of everyone within thirty yards. A fusillade erupted into him, one shot hitting him in the shoulder, spinning him around as though hit with a riot slug, and sending him crashing to the ground on his side, a fact which was the only thing that prevented him from being torn to shreds. Even this wouldn't have saved him for more than a few more seconds, for the shot sent a withering jolt of pain shooting down his left arm, and he landed on his back, clutching at his shoulder which felt like it was on fire, momentarily unable to raise a hand in his own defense. It would have been comically simple to finish him off.
But... he had managed to distract the enemy soldiers away from what Starfire and the others were doing for just a few seconds. And as was quickly demonstrated, removing one's eyes from the other Titans in the midst of battle was singularly unwise.
The leading soldier took a step forward and lowered his rifle to shoot the helpless teen on the ground, and consequently received no warning whatsoever as something charged out of the smoke behind him. Hearing only footsteps, the soldier had enough time to half-turn around before Cyborg's fist met his face at what might be termed an 'elevated' rate of speed. Had Cyborg not moderated his strike, he would have certainly torn the soldier's head clean off. As it was, he flung the unfortunate man over David's fallen form like a tin soldier struck by a locomotive, and without hesitating in the slightest, turned his sonic cannon on a second one of the soldiers and casually blew him thirty feet back into an overturned dumpster. The last remaining soldier turned his gun on Cyborg , firing at a range where he could not miss, but Cyborg, like Starfire, could sustain such blows, and as he was doing so, black tendrils emerged from the ground, snatching the soldier up like the coils of some malevolent demon sea monster, before slamming him headfirst into the street like a spiked football, and then dissipating into nothingness.
David only caught snatches of the above, laying on the ground half-blinded by dirt and by the pain in his shoulder, and by the time he had recovered his senses sufficiently to determine what was going on, Cyborg was standing over him, offering him a hand, troubled not in the least it appeared by the blackened scorch marks that coated his cyan and silver-chrome frame. Behind him stood Starfire, who had a similar burn mark marring the metallic coif that she wore around her neck and collar over her uniform top, but appeared otherwise unhurt. One by one, the other Titans were emerging from the smoke, Raven materializing out of a dark portal, Robin flipping down from somewhere unknown like an acrobat, and Beast Boy appearing in the form of a rhinoceros, which seamlessly shrank and morphed back into his usual human form.
“Everyone all right?” asked Robin tersely as David accepted Cyborg's help in getting back up, and the question prompted him to take a second to consider his shoulder which was still throbbing mercilessly. Gingerly, he pried his fingers away from it, expecting to see blood come gushing from a gaping wound, but to his surprise, there was only a black scorch mark on the shoulder of his uniform shirt where the energy bolt had nicked him, with only a few of the kevlar-nomex threads broken and peeled back to reveal a glimpse of the skin underneath, red and swollen and painful, but not ruptured. Apparently the uniform was made of stronger stuff than he had anticipated. That and the fact that the shot had just grazed him.
“David?”
David snapped back to reality. “I'm... I'm okay...” he said hesitantly, glancing back up at the others, particularly at Cyborg, who's expression was as serious as he remembered ever seeing it. “Am I okay?” he asked, suddenly not so sure.
“You ain't gonna be okay for long if you keep standing out there to get shot, man,” said Cyborg tersely. “This is the big leagues. These guys'll put you down if you let 'em.”
The reproach was not worded particularly harshly, but it was enough. David cringed involuntarily as he slowly picked up the baton laying next to his foot. “I... I know,” he said lamely. “I'm... I'll try to...”
Robin, all business as always, didn't let him finish. “We drove them back into the bank, but they'll be back out soon. We need to get to the hostages before they start using them as human shields or worse. Raven, Beast Boy, take David, head up to the roof, and try to get into the building that way. We'll keep them occupied down here.
“Got it,” said Beast Boy with a grin of anticipation. Clearly the skirmish so far had not been enough to satisfy his desire to mix it up with the soldiers engaged in this robbery. Raven said nothing, as was her way, but nodded curtly and floated back off the ground. David, the pain in his shoulder slowly subsiding, by now was flushed bright red, and not from exertion. After all the lessons and training, he had still stood out in the middle of the street like an idiot and nearly gotten killed for his trouble, still hesitated when he should have been acting, and indeed he probably would have gotten killed had the others not been so quick to react.
These thoughts might well have led down their usual path, but he was afforded no time for self-recriminations. He stared up at the bank, whose roof loomed some twenty stories above the ground, and his brow furrowed in puzzlement. Beast Boy and Raven could fly of course, but how was he supposed to -
Something grabbed his shoulders and lifted him into the air.
The surprise was such that he didn't realize immediately what was happening, and he nearly dropped his baton, which would have been more embarrassing than he cared to imagine at this point, and it wasn't until he looked up that he realized that Beast Boy had wordlessly shifted into a pterodactyl, grabbed him with his talons, and taken off for the roof. David had seen him do this a hundred times with Cyborg of course, but it was one thing to watch the process with someone else, and another to experience it himself. He clenched his eyes shut and squeezed the baton's handle hard enough to compress the leather, and tried to suppress the queasy sensation that flooded his stomach as his feet dangled in mid-air with no ground to rest upon. Fortunately it was all over in a minute, and before he knew it, David was being set down remarkably gently on top of the roof of the bank. He managed not to fall over as he landed, wobbling only slightly as he stepped away from the 250 foot drop next to him, towards the center of the roof. Beast Boy set down next to him and returned to his normal form, a second before Raven joined them both.
“See, what'd I tell you?” said Beast Boy with a swagger as he clapped David on the back. “The only way to travel, right?” David managed, with great effort, a nervous smile by way of response as his head re-assured itself that it was once more standing on something solid, even as Raven pulled out her communicator.
“Try to get down into the offices behind the lobby,” said Robin over the communicator. “It's the most secure place they could have put the hostages without getting into the vault.” He probably would have given more detailed orders, but there was the sound of more laserfire from down below, and a flash of green light from the communicator in Raven's hand, and suddenly the connection was severed. The sound of the lasers mixed with Cyborg's sonic cannon, Starfire's starbolts, and Robin's flash bombs in the distance, and despite his unease with heights, David nearly scrambled over to the side of the roof to see what was going on down below. A single glance from Raven restrained him however, and he quietly followed her and Beast Boy over to the rooftop access door.
The access door was locked. Indeed it was actually welded shut, a precaution that might have made sense against the police or SWAT, but against the Titans was a laughable obstacle. Raven could have ripped it off its hinges with a flick of her wrist. Beast Boy could have crushed it in the form of a dinosaur or elephant. David himself could have blown the entire door to fragments as a matter of a moment's thought, for it was made of solid steel, but as he turned to ask Raven which of these things they would do, Raven shook her head as if she had read his mind... which she very well might have, he supposed.
“They might hurt the hostages if they hear us coming in,” she said. “We'll have to go around.”
There was something in the word “around” that was not entirely comforting, especially given that Beast Boy turned a slightly paler shade of green as she said it. He glanced from her to Beast Boy and back, and asked the obvious question apprehensively.
“What do you mean 'around'?”
Raven merely smirked.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 19, cont'd
A black portal materialized in mid-air, absorbing all light projected at it like an area of null space, before suddenly vomiting out three figures into the middle of the securely locked office. Raven, controlling the portal, did not so much appear as coalesce from the black energy of her portal, materializing in mid-air in her lotus position, just as she had left. Beast Boy landed on his feet, with scarcely a tremor to indicate his own discomfort, though he did see fit to steady himself against the wall after the momentary disorientation. For David, the disorientation was anything but momentary. He landed on his knees, hard, eyes wide, muscles quivering and shivering as though afflicted by a nerve disorder. He did not feel cold, he felt chilled, chilled straight through to his bones with a flesh-crawling sensation that was not exactly cold, but was not exactly not, either. For at least the dozenth time today, he fought back the urge to lose his lunch.
It took several moments for him to calm himself down and lose the sensation of being frozen from the inside. When he did, he found Raven looking elsewhere, purposefully, as though unwilling to acknowledge for some reason what her teleportation did to those not used to it. Beast Boy, who had commented to David before on what it was like to be teleported like that (his description was on the mark, as it turned out, but in David's opinion, watered down), helped him back up. “You'll be fine in a sec,” he whispered, hopefully out of Raven's hearing, though David wasn't ready to credit that, as Raven cleared her throat impatiently and walked over towards the single door in the wall.
“We're in the back office,” she said, as evenly as ever. “I can feel a lot of people in the front one. It's probably the hostages.”
David nodded, unclipping the baton from his belt, and subconsciously setting it alight again. “What should we do?”
“I'll go through and see what's there,” said Beast Boy, and David caught himself before he asked how he intended to get through a solid steel door. Solid steel it might have been, but the keyhole was large enough for a gnat to get through, and Beast Boy became one before buzzing on through. Raven folded her arms and waited, and David, still holding the aura-sheathed baton in one hand, had no choice but to follow her lead. As Raven seemed (as ever) unwilling to engage in chit-chat, the two of them waited in silence for Beast Boy's return.
They could not have been waiting for more than thirty seconds, but to David, it felt more like ten minutes. He had to force himself not to tap the baton against his leg, or worse yet, the wall, a nervous tic that was most inappropriate given their intention to remain undetected. Eventually though, he could not stand the tense wait any longer. Let Raven get angry if she wished.
“What's... the plan?” he asked, not sure if there was one, but as it turned out, there was.
“We wait for Beast Boy to stop messing around and get back here to tell us what's in the next room, and then we all go in at once,” said Raven flatly, as though reciting the nutrition information on the side of a cereal box. “There's probably gonna be a couple of guards, so we'll have to take them down fast before they can hurt a hostage. Try not to blow up anything that you - “
A sudden crash jarred Raven out of her monologue, and they door they were standing next to gave a heave as something large and solid collided with it at high speed. David nearly jumped in surprise, but to his astonishment, so did Raven, her eyes wide all of a sudden with what looked like fear. Without another word about stealth she waved one hand and ripped the door from its hinges like a plastic toy, casting it aside and rushing into the room, David right behind her.
Beast Boy, once more in human form, was standing inside an office very similar to the one they had just left, surrounded by nearly a dozen people in assorted civilian clothing, all of whom were seated on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs and gags shoved in their mouths. One of the soldiers that they had been fighting outside was laying unconscious in the middle of the room, surrounded by the shattered remnants of the overhead fluorescent light he had apparently been tossed into. Another was laying at Raven and David's feet, his helmet cracked from where he had collided with the door. Beast Boy was kneeling down and untying the bonds of an elderly woman crouched near the side of the room.
Raven's eyes fixed on Beast Boy, and in the space of a few seconds, shifted from abject fear, to abject rage. “Beast Boy!” she practically shouted, snapping everyone's head around to face her and spoiling all possibility, David thought, of them remaining undetected (then again, the door thing had already done that).
Beast Boy caught the tone if not the reason for it, and he raised his head with a wan smile. “Um... hey Rae! I got em both!”
“You were supposed to come back and tell us what was in here!”
“Oh,” said Beast Boy, and he turned and looked around for a second. “There's two soldier-dudes, and ten hostages.” And with that, he resumed untying the elderly woman, apparently considering the matter closed.
The flippant reply made Raven, if anything, more angry. “You weren't supposed to attack them by yourself!” she insisted forcefully.
“Rae, I got them,” said Beast Boy, looking back up at her. “What's the big deal? It was just two.”
“Don't call me 'Rae'!” said Raven with enough force to cause the lights to flicker. “You could have gotten killed!”
David decided that discretion was definitely the better part of valor here, and did not feel particularly ashamed of the fact that he was glad it was Beast Boy and not himself that was on the receiving end of Raven's tongue lashing. Still, through the shouting and the quivering energy eruptions and the talk of getting killed that was really not what he needed to be focusing on, there was a voice in the back of his mind telling him that there was something wrong here... something Raven had said before...
“Rae, c'mon,” said Beast Boy, ignoring Raven's demand as always. “I knew I could handle two of them. You're sounding like Robin.”
“I am not!” snarled Raven (David begged to disagree with her, but kept his opinion to himself), “but you were supposed to come and get us!” She faltered, obviously scrambling for excuses to stay angry, and hit upon one that would have made Robin proud. “We're supposed to be showing David how to do this! That means following the plan!”
Amusing as this exchange was, David was not paying too close attention to it, his eyes darting around the room quickly. “Guys?”
“Hmph,” said Beast Boy, “whatever you say, Robin,”
“Beast Boy,” said Raven darkly, “I swear, if the soldiers don't kill you, I'm gonna - “
“Guys?”
Normally David would never think of cutting off Raven, but he had now realized what was bothering him, and so he broke custom. It was unexpected enough that both Raven and Beast Boy fell silent and turned to him. He looked up at Raven semi-apprehensively. “Didn't you say there were eleven hostages?”
Both of the other Titans got the same look in their eyes.
Before anyone could do anything, the old woman Beast Boy had just finished untying and ungagging answered their unspoken question.
“There was a little girl,” said the old woman. “The men tied her up like the rest of us, but they didn't tie her proper. When the guards left to go shoot at the police, she got loose and snuck out. We couldn't stop her! She said she was gonna go look for her parents.”
“Which way did she go?” asked Raven, though realistically there was only one possible answer to that question, the only exit from the room other than the one they had just barged in from led out into the main lobby of the bank. It was in that direction that the old lady gestured, out into the lobby, which by now was almost assuredly crawling with soldiers.
“It was only just a minute ago,” said the old woman.
Still, Raven didn't hesitate. “Stay here!” she called to David as she turned, raced over to the door that led into the lobby, and phased right through it.
Beast Boy also did not hesitate. “Come on!” he called to David as he turned, raced over to the door that led into the lobby, and shifted into a gnat again before sliding right through the keyhole. Left with a set of contradictory orders, David set his jaw and tightened his grip on the riot baton, and followed Beast Boy, though of the three of them, he was the only one who actually had to open the door.
He emerged onto a large marble balcony, which ran along the top of the back wall of the massive atrium which served the Jump City Federal Bank as a lobby. The balcony was long, running from wall to wall, with a staircase on either end running down to the floor of the lobby itself. From where David was standing, with Beast Boy and Raven standing next to him, David could see the lobby floor. As predicted, it was full of soldiers, all of them scurrying about like ants, some shooting out the front door at Cyborg, Starfire, and Raven, others building impromptu barricades or hauling around bits of equipment. Presumably some of them were trying to break into the vault, but the vault was directly below them, and out of sight. The fallen forms of Jump City police officers were there too, many of whom had been dragged to once side of the room and left there, unconscious or dead, it was impossible to tell. Bits of their dropped equipment, tasers and riot guns and fiberglass helmets were scattered all over the place. There was no sign of a little girl.
Standing openly on the balcony, searching frantically for any sign of the lost hostage, it was only a matter of time before they were spotted by one of the soldiers. Beast Boy could perhaps have taken on a small or invisible form, Raven might have cloaked herself in shadows and hidden along the dark recesses of the wall, but their hope was plainly not in stealth but in speed. They had to find her, fast, before the soldiers did, and if that meant drawing their attention away from finding her by attracting it themselves... well... that was what they were here for.
And as to David, unable to hide either through shadow or transformation, all he knew was that there was a hostage loose and lost somewhere in the labyrinth before them, and that they had to find her. Thoughts of stealth or speed never entered the calculation, nor indeed did he even realize that the soldiers could see them until one of them shouted the alarm.
“It's them!”
And then it all broke loose again.
The man who had shouted was standing several dozen yards further down the balcony from them, and took the time to alert his comrades before raising his rifle. He never got it into position. Raven raised her hand and her black energy threw him through the granite railing and off of the balcony, letting him drop several stories down, enough to badly injure, but not enough to kill. She turned back to David and Beast Boy long enough to shout a brief command: “Find the girl!” before conjuring up a shield of blackness around herself and flying up into the air to engage the soldiers, utterly unafraid, supremely poised, ready to deal out destruction on a scale that defied belief.
Most of the soldiers turned to engage Raven, and it was perhaps well that they did, but several were already firing at Beast Boy and David. Another office door opened close by, and two more soldiers sprinted out of it, rifles and bayonets in hand. One lunged at Beast Boy, who simply shifted into a rat, allowing the man's momentum to pitch him over the balcony's railing and down to the ground below. The other was moving towards David, but before he could do anything untoward, Beast Boy shifted again, this time into a python, and grabbed the man around the ankles tightly with a coil, tripping him up and knocking him onto his face, whereupon he lay still, out cold from hitting his head against the marble.
Lasers began to sail up from below, sizzling and popping as they blasted the granite banister that ran the length of the balcony. David ducked behind the railing, taking what cover he could, and spotting a soldier racing up the stairs towards them, shoving a clip into his rifle as he ran.
The stairs also were made of marble. That was all David had time to think as he brought his baton around.
One of the stairs exploded like a pressure plate trap, blowing a five foot hole in the staircase through which the soldier ingloriously fell. Another soldier, from below, reared back and threw a hand grenade up at them, but David saw it coming, and turned his baton around to point at the arcing projectile, which burst in mid-air like a firework, well beyond lethal range, an instant before Raven lifted a heavy oak desk with a wave of her hand and broke it in half over the grenadier's head. Ducking back behind the banister once more as bits of shrapnel pinged off the gravel, David permitted himself, just for a second, to think that they might be able to hold out up here.
But as before, the soldiers had their own means of dealing with enemies in cover.
A shoulder-mounted rocket struck the balcony from below, and blew the supports to pieces. Before David even knew what was happening, the floor gave way beneath his hands and feet and crumbled like stale bread. He found himself falling, and his eyes opened wide and he shouted out in fear. The soldiers who had fallen off the balcony had landed on carpet, and been hurt bad enough for their trouble, but directly below the balcony, the floor was bare marble, and at this height he would surely dash his brains out on it. Scrambling with his hands to grab at something solid, he desperately tried to save himself. For an instant, his fingers touched the broken edge of the balcony, then nothing, and he was free-falling towards the floor, some forty feet below.
And then he stopped.
Something looped around his wrist like a noose and tightened with a jerk strong enough to nearly pull his arm out of its socket, and suddenly he wasn't falling anymore. He looked up, and saw Beast Boy, now in the form of an octopus, clinging to the railing of the undamaged section of the balcony with seven limbs, with the eighth one wrapped around his wrist like a rope. In this form, Beast Boy could not speak, but his eyes indicated clearly what he would have said.
“I've got you!”
His baton still clutched in his other hand, David hung in mid-air for a second, before a searing pain shot through his leg, and he cried out and clenched his teeth and nearly dropped the baton. The soldiers below were blasting away at the both of them, and one of their shots had just struck him in the calf. Unlike before, this shot was no glancing blow, and it burned a cauterized, dime-sized hole right through his leg, sending tears rushing to his eyes and a stifled scream to his lips. Beast Boy tried to haul David back up onto the balcony, but before he could do so, another rocket struck further down, jolting the entire balcony enough to shake loose Beast Boy's grip.
Once more he fell, mercifully throwing off the aim of the soldiers shooting at him, and sending him plummeting to the ground. Fortunately, thanks to Beast Boy, he had less distance to fall this time, and instead of landing on hard marble, he landed on top of a large pile of debris and rubble that formed what was left of the chunk of balcony that had been blown out from under him. Though it was as hard as the marble would have been, its broken state permitted it to give a bit, and there was actually a functional difference between falling 25 feet and falling 40. He lay on the rubble pile, stunned, shaken, battered, but alive. Such was the dust and smoke kicked up by the repeated explosions, that he could not see any of the soldiers, nor Beast Boy, nor Raven, though he retained enough lucidity to realize that this meant nobody could see him either. Try as he might, laying half-conscious on the ground like a bird with a broken wing, he could not see anything wrong with that, and slowly he started trying to prepare himself to move, to sneak off under cover of smoke and debris into a corner to wait out the end of this insane fight. He no longer had ambitions of showing himself competent against a paramilitary army. He wished merely to survive.
And then he saw her.
She was barely ten feet away, crouched behind the same pile of rubble he was half-propped up against, a little girl of no more than six years, huddled up against the broken debris as though trying to phase through it, which she might well have been trying to do. Clearly, from where she was sitting, she had come within a hair's breadth of getting crushed by the falling granite, and with the shooting and sounds of chaos all around, she too was merely trying to lie low.
It wasn't going to work.
Looming up through the dust behind the little girl materialized a dark figure, a soldier, with his rifle slung onto his back, making his way ponderously over the rubble. So loud was the chaos in the bank lobby that his footsteps were drowned out, and the little girl had no idea he was coming, no idea that is, until he was suddenly there, standing over her, reaching down with something in his hand that might have been a stungun or a knife or perhaps something totally innocuous, though that was unlikely, reaching down to disable, kill, or at the very least grab her, and drag her off for use as a human shield.
That was the plan.
The reality was that as he was ducking, a rock hit him in the face and exploded.
A fist-sized chunk of granite, to be precise, thrown with all the velocity David could muster, and which, by some miracle, had flown true, smashed into the soldier's nose an instant before detonating. At that range, the blast might well have injured the little girl, but David focused the explosion forwards, with the direction of his throw, and the blast hit the soldier in the chest like a wrecking ball, flinging him through the air only to slam him against the wall. The soldier slid down onto the floor and did not rise.
The little girl turned her head back, and for the first time saw that David was laying there, half-propped up on one elbow, having used his right hand to throw the piece of debris. She said nothing, merely stared at him wide-eyed, while he desperately tried to think of what to do. He had no communicator, no way of signaling Beast Boy and Raven, who in any event were no doubt very busy at the moment, and the din was such that he could barely hear himself think, let alone shout above the noise. He rolled over onto his hands and knees, his leg sending jolts of searing pain up him with every movement, and slowly he tried to work his way over to the little girl, who was not moving, too shocked to react. He knew how she felt.
And then he saw something that made his heart freeze.
The dust was settling, and through it, he made out a figure standing back a dozen yards, holding a large device in both hands, which it was directing towards him and the girl. The shape... the shape was familiar somehow, and it took him a second to realize that he'd seen it before... in movies.
A grenade launcher.
There was no time to get out of the way, the man's finger was already tightening on the trigger, and in David's fall, he had somehow lost his baton. Without it, he could not possibly detonate anything fast enough. In desperation, he half-crawled, half-lunged forward, and his hand landed on something cool and hard and solid-feeling, and he glanced down at it. It was one of the bits of equipment left behind by the fallen riot police, a large, concave, fiberglass and plastic polymer board, wider and taller than he was, partly buried in the rubble.
And by the time he realized what it was, he was already acting.
The grenade left the launcher with a puff of compressed air, and arced up and over, aimed directly at the spot the little girl was occupying. Praying that it would not be stuck, David grabbed at the handle of the dusty object, and rolled over onto his back and then back onto his stomach, pulling as hard as he could. The polymer board caught just for a second, then broke free in his hand, and with a cascade of dust and debris, he rolled over to the little girl, who was still frozen in mute shock, and as the grenade descended towards them, he he grabbed her with one hand, forcing her to lay flat on the ground next to him, and held the board up with his other hand hand like a tent canopy, enclosing both him and the little girl beneath it, letting its stenciled white “JCPD” lettering face the incoming missile.
The grenade exploded a foot above them.
Fragments rained down like hailstones, embedding themselves in the front of the board, and staggering David as he struggled to hold it up, but the shock dissipated after only an instant. It took him a second to realize that while his leg was still throbbing like the devil itself, he was not dead, and only then did he look down at the little girl, and see that she was not dead either.
For the object he had held up was not simply a fiberglass board... it was a riot shield.
For a few seconds, David didn't dare move. Beneath the shield he could see nothing whatsoever, and hear nothing save for his own heartbeat thundering in his ears, and the scared breathing of the little girl. He was trying to decide if he should take a risk and look out from under the shield when, to his surprise, the little girl actually spoke first.
“M... Mister?” she said in a terribly scared voice, but nevertheless one that was clear and understandable. Better than he could have managed in the same circumstances.
“Are you okay?” he asked, not sure what he was going to do if the answer should be 'no'. The other soldiers were probably approaching already, and he was going to have to stop them... somehow.
“Is... this yours?” asked the little girl, and she lifted her hand. In it was David's baton, dusted and dented, but otherwise no worse for wear after having been dropped nearly three stories and half-buried under falling rock. How or why she had grabbed it was beyond him, but he was in no mood to question miracles right now, and so he nodded, and she slipped the baton into his free hand, and took a deep breath of what might have been awe when it began to glow red once more.
“What's your name?” asked David. He had no idea what to do now beyond the obvious, which was stay alive and keep her alive as well, but he had the sense that he had to calm her down somewhat.
“Mary,” replied the little girl haltingly.
“Okay,” he said, trying to keep the fear out of his own voice. “Mary, here's what I need you to do.” What instructions could he give that made sense here? What should he tell her to do? He couldn't afford to think it over, he could hear the footsteps approaching already. He improvised.
“When I stand up,” he said, “I want you to get behind me, between me and the wall, and get down as low as you can, and cover your ears.” He felt like he was telling her to get under her desk for a nuclear attack, but what choice did he have? “Can you do that for me?”
Mary nodded quietly, but she had a question for him before they proceeded. “Are you gonna stop the bad men?”
Would that he could.
“Yes,” he said, hoping it didn't sound like too much of a lie, “but you need to do what I said, okay?” Mary nodded again, and David took a deep breath, and steeled himself, hearing the crunch of footsteps get closer and closer.
“On three,” he said. “One...”
Someone stepped next to the shield, still held up like the shell of a tortoise. David could see a pair of boots standing right next to them.
“Two...”
The person next to them bent over and grabbed the lip of the shield, intending clearly on overturning it and blasting whoever was inside.
Gametime.
“Three!”
Before the shield could be pried up, David pushed to his feet suddenly, catching the soldier next to him by surprise. The soldier was larger, stronger, and tougher no doubt than David, but the soldier had not expected to be leaped at, and lost his balance as David desperately swung upwards with his baton, cracking the soldier in the chin hard enough to send him tumbling down onto his back where he lay moaning. His counterpart stood on top of the rubble pile before David, and he brought his rifle around, but David aimed the baton down at the rubble itself and blew the pile up like a volcano, sending the soldier rocketing upwards headfirst into the underside of the balcony, before letting him fall senseless back to Earth. A third soldier loomed up from the left, and opened fire, but the shield was on David's left arm, and though built for someone much larger than he was, he managed to plant it and put his shoulder into it as the burst of lasers blasted into it. David ignored the screaming pain in his leg, planting his shoulder against the inside of the shield, and straining to keep it upright. A moment later, the shooting stopped as the soldier changed magazines, and instantly, David swung the shield out, revealing the soldier to him, his baton aimed like a spear straight at the soldier's chest. His rifle exploded in his hands, snapping both wrists and sending him crashing to the floor, writhing and screaming in pain.
Still more soldiers loomed up from behind the three he had disabled, and David stumbled backwards, hoping that Mary had followed his instructions, acting on pure instinct and muscle memory, with no time to think or form a coherent plan. A fourth soldier shot at him from in front, but he brought the shield around to block the shots, and retaliated by blowing the links on the chain that held one of the massive chandeliers aloft. The chandelier plummeted directly down onto the soldier and flattened him beneath its weight with a torrent of sparks and flame. Another soldier rushed in from his unprotected side, and he turned on this one too, swinging his baton in an underhand stroke, willing matter to bend at his command without reference to what it was shaped into. A series of explosions on the marble floor carved a furrow in the rock, sending chips and fragments flying into the soldier's face, upending him. Still more came charging on as he backed towards a corner, a glance from the corner of his eye showing that Mary was in fact cowering in the corner as he had told her to. The bad news of course, was that he now had nowhere else to back into.
He lashed out instead, his powers operating almost on their own behalf, as he willed things to be destroyed, and they were. A soldier who tried to vault an overturned desk caught most of the explosion of a computer monitor in the crotch, and landed on the ground in so much pain that he passed out then and there. Another who was shouldering a rocket launcher found his weapon turned into a fragmentation bomb, which blew him out of sight into the dusty swirls being cast about. Back and forth his baton flew, setting off explosion after explosion, no longer even targeting soldiers, simply trying to form some kind of firebreak to keep the enemy at bay. Lasers flew by like wasps from a nest, many scorching the shield as he crouched behind it. Everything was ammunition. The walls, the floor, the bits of rubble from previous explosions, he blew them all to bits, gouging sections of rock from the walls and the inlaid marble floor like a giant ice cream scoop, desperate, terrified, trying with all his might just to keep the enemy back, just to stay alive.
Soon he had backed up into the corner itself, barely a foot in front of the little girl hiding in his shadow. The shield in his hand was dented and bent and battered and cracked, but it was his only real defense, and he brandished it like a cross before vampires. Two more soldiers charged him, their guns empty and fixed with bayonets, and with nowhere to back into, he could not evade them. He managed to stop one by, once more, detonating a section of the floor, tripping the charging soldier who landed square on his chin on a piece of rubble. The other one lunged at him with the bayonet, and he moved to block it with his shield, but not even the polymerized riot shield of the JCPD could take such abuse forever. The shield split, and the blade drove right through, stabbing into David's forearm. He bit back a cry as the soldier pulled the blade back, ripping the shield out of David's hand, and throwing it back onto the ground behind him. Again the soldier lunged, and this time David simply parried the stab by hitting the side of the gun with his baton. The blade passed by his side by millimeters, and embedded itself in the rock of the wall behind. David swung the baton at the soldier's head, but he was no Robin, and his swing lacked skill, having merely the strength of desperation to it. The man lowered his head and took the blow to his helmet, which rang out but did not give or break. An instant later, the soldier, now too close to use his rifle effectively, dropped the weapon, and slammed his fist instead into the hapless teen's stomach.
The blow hit like a pile driver and knocked the wind out of David so hard that he thought his lungs were imploding. He staggered back against the wall, spots flashing before his eyes, his vision blurry and double, and as he shook his head to try and clear it, he saw the soldier grimacing at him as he stepped back and drew a long knife from his back pocket. Holding his baton up in a pathetic, paltry defense, swaying on his feet, with blood leaking from his arm and his leg screaming protest at having any weight applied, David could only watch as the soldier stepped forward to ram the knife into his stomach and spill his guts all over the floor.
But as the knife came in, all of a sudden, David's left arm lunged out and caught the soldier's wrist.
”When the enemy comes at you with a knife, the first thing to do is grab for it.”
The soldier reacted in surprise as his knife buried itself up to its hilt, not in David's body, but in the wall he was leaning against, but before he could do anything, David twisted the man's wrist around, eliciting a yelp of pain as the soldier's grip weakened and his arm twisted.
”Grab for the wrist, twist as hard as you can, then use the momentum to counterattack.”
David's right hand reversed its grip on the baton even as David stepped forward with his right foot, pivoting towards the soldier, he swung as though delivering a hook punch and missing, aiming several inches in front of his enemy's face.
”Execute your punch and follow through, and the baton will do the rest.”
It did.
The reversed baton hit the soldier in the side of the head beneath his helmet with a crack like a baseball player hitting a home run. David felt the tremor of the impact travel up the baton, up his arm, and into his chest, and watched as the soldier's eyes grew unfocused and and his arm fell limp. And then with all the grace of a tumbling skyscraper, the soldier collapsed backwards onto the ground, and lay still.
And then there was silence.
For a few seconds, David remained standing there, propped up against the wall of the bank, looking for the next soldier that was sure to come looming out of the darkness. None appeared. It wasn't until another ten seconds or so had passed that he permitted himself to think that maybe... there weren't any more.
And then he collapsed.
He slid down the wall onto the ground like a wet noodle, drained physically, emotionally, and mentally. The baton clattered to the ground next to him as he slowly reached up and felt the cut on his forearm. It had already stopped bleeding, for the nomex fibers had prevented the bayonet from driving too deep. Mary was standing next to him, blinking in the dusty light, casting him worried looks every so often, and he knew he ought to be looking for the others, or for her parents, but he was, at this point, quite content to not move at all, and let the others find him.
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It might have been half an hour before he moved again. It might have been ten minutes, or two, or barely a couple seconds. He couldn't tell the difference anymore. Time seemed to lag, punctuated with the sound of further blasts, explosions, and the occasional cry of pain that, had it come from one of the Titans, might have galvanized him to act. It never did, and as it never did, he managed to half-convince himself in the near-coma of his own exhaustion that his job was to stay here and make sure the little girl was all right. That this dovetailed nicely with his own desire to sit down and never move again was simply co-incidence...
Such he told himself.
The little girl herself, having belatedly determined that the coast was reasonably clear, stood up, and walked over. She looked scared, not that that attribute was in any short supply around here, and coated with dust just like everything else within eyesight. Still David could see no obvious blood or injury, and she was not crying. She said nothing, merely bent down slowly, and picked up the baton, gingerly, as though she was afraid it was going to burst into flames at any second. Slowly, she turned it over in her tiny hands, and then, holding it by the business end, gently handed it back to him. Wearily he lifted his hand to take it, and did so, and as he caught her staring at it expectantly, a soft smile crossed his face and he concentrated on it once more, causing the red aura to spring up around it again. Nevermind that in this state, he would have been lucky to be able to detonate a paper clip, she didn't know that. She gave an ever so slightly perceptible start as the aura materialized, but once it did, her expression lost a bit of its fear, and she smiled at him, revealing her missing front teeth.
As the sounds outside died down, and the dust began to settle, David decided it was time to chance moving. Without a word, he very slowly managed to struggle back to his feet, and gently (after several tries) clipped the baton back onto his belt. His now-free hand, he extended to Mary, who took it without a word, apparently understanding where they were going without question. He was reasonably confident by this point that there was nothing left of the enemy... but not so confident that he didn't stop as he walked towards the entrance to the bank to pick up the cracked, battered riot shield that he had been using. Better safe than sorry.
As it was, he needn't have worried, for he had not taken more than another dozen steps before Beast Boy found them.
A figure loomed up ahead out of the dust, but before he could react with violence, David he saw the greenish tinge and the pointed ears and the small frame, and relaxed. The little girl did not, and ducked behind him, but Beast Boy emerged without weapons or ill-intent, a massive grin on his face, no doubt from the victory the Titans had just scored, as well as from finding both David and the little girl alive.
“Dude!” exclaimed Beast Boy, and he scrambled over the rubble piles towards him. “You're okay! You found her!”
Was this okay? David wasn't sure any more, but he decided that if Beast Boy said so, then it was. “She found me,” he corrected, and the girl, discerning that there was no violence in their actions or words, crept out gently from behind the shield to stare at Beast Boy, who was, at least to judge by his actions, plainly used to that sort of thing.
“I thought you might've got knocked out when you fell there,” said Beast Boy as he arrived and put a hand on David’s shoulder to steady him., “but I couldn't get over to check because of all the soldiers. Raven was wrong, by the way. There was way more than four dozen of them. There was more like fifty.”
“... really?” asked David, too tired to point out to Beast Boy that, for all intents and purposes, four dozen was fifty.
“Yeah, but we handled it anyway. Cy and Rob and Star are still cleaning up outside, and Rae went to help them. I came back to look for you and her.”
David managed to suppress the unworthy thought that Beast Boy could perhaps have done so a little sooner. No doubt he had had a dozen or more soldiers to deal with on his own. Instead he smiled and let Beast Boy help him towards the door, lightly supported on one side by Beast Boy, on the other side by the little girl, who was still holding his hand, though whether that was for her sake or to make sure he wasn’t about to keel over was an open question.
They emerged onto the threshold of the bank, and stared down into the plaza below. Smoke still hovered above it, but the plaza was no longer deserted. EMTs and police cars were parked everywhere, the former tending to the more badly injured soldiers, and the latter carting them into paddy wagons to be transported to jail. Robin was there, talking to the chief of police, and Starfire next to him, pretending not to notice the stares and occasional cheers from the civilians crowded behind the hastily erected police cordon. Raven was off by herself helping the other hostages down the stairs, trying to exhibit the proper gratitude for their gushing thanks (and not one iota more) and glancing almost anxiously towards the T-car, as if eager to be done with the matter and to go home.
For once, David fully understood how Raven felt.
“My man!” came a loud and thunderous voice that could only be Cyborg’s, and David turned just in time to see Cyborg jogging up the steps towards them, taking them three at a time. “Check you out!”
Cyborg was himself covered in scorch marks, but these seemed to have affected him not at all. “Raven said you went off solo to go get one of the VIPs.” Cyborg winked at the little girl, who was unabashedly staring at the giant half-metal Titan.
“Sort of,” said David, not sure how to explain what had just happened, not even sure if he could. Cyborg didn’t seem to mind. Indeed Cyborg looked more fired up than David ever remembered seeing him.
“So how many?”
“… what?”
Cyborg grinned and patted David on the shoulder, nearly knocking him down. “How many bad guys did you get?”
David blinked. “I… kinda lost count.” Were they supposed to be keeping score?
“Well I got twenty-two,” said Cyborg, what about you grass stain?
“Twenty-three,” said Beast Boy with a smirk. David was not so out of it that he was prepared to believe either one of them and indeed neither were they. Before the heated argument that was no doubt coming could erupt however, David had an important question.
“Cy… what should I do with…?”
“Oh,” said Cyborg, snapped back to reality for a second. “She know where her parents are?”
David had honestly not remembered to ask. He turned to look down at Mary, who shook her head no. “You should prob’ly take her down to the police there, see if her mom and dad are in the crowd. I can take her if you don’t feel up to…”
”No,” said David, “No, I’ll… I’ll do it.” His arms and legs felt like lead weights, under ordinary circumstances he would barely have been able to walk, yet despite that, he was certain that he was able to do this much, and perhaps it showed, because neither Cyborg nor Beast Boy objected, and so he slowly made his way down the stairs into the plaza itself.
He expected, given the sheer number of people, that it would take forever to find the little girl’s parents, but it did not, indeed no sooner had they stepped down into the plaza than the girl let out a high pitched shout.
“Mommy! Daddy!”
Over to the side of the plaza, a man and a woman, both middle-aged, were straining against the police cordon, staring into the plaza looking for something, as soon as the little girl shouted, their heads whipped around, and then both of them ducked under the cordon, ran past one of the police officers who belatedly tried to stop them, and raced towards their little girl. The little girl released David’s hand and ran to them as well, nearly leaping into the woman’s arms, who lifted her up and embraced her and seemed liable to faint, had her husband not been there to steady her. David didn’t quite know what he was supposed to do at this juncture, and so he stood there, watching them, as the police slowly backed away, taking one look at him and assuming that he had the situation well under control.
News to him…
Finally, a minute or so later, the little girl, who had been breathlessly relating in her own words what had happened, pointed back at David and said something out of earshot. Both parents raised their heads at whatever was being described, and walked over towards him.
He was not sure what to expect, but… this was not it.
Without a word, without a gesture, without a single indication beforehand, the mother, who had since set her daughter down again, walked up to David and embraced him with enough force to rival Starfire. David felt the air crushed out of his lungs, and his eyes widened in surprise. The woman was crying, with relief, he hoped, and between her sobs could only repeat the same phrase over and over again.
“Thank you.”
The father stood nearby, holding his daughter, and there were tears in his eyes as well. David frankly did not know how to react, but fortunately it did not appear that they expected him to, and after a little bit, the mother slowly released him and stood back up, wiping her tears on her sleeve and taking no notice of the liberal coating of dust, blood, and grime she had picked up on the front of her clothes from David’s uniform.
Both parents insisted on thanking him a hundred times, or more, as if they feared that if they did not, somehow their daughter would vanish from their arms. David found himself feeling more than a little embarrassed, assuring them over and over that it wasn’t any trouble, that he didn’t need anything at all from them, that it was all right.
It was the father who noticed first that David was not one of the Titans that everyone in Jump City knew so well. “You’re… you’re that boy from the waterfront,” he said. “The one that fought with that Cinderblock creature, aren’t you?”
David nodded slowly. What point was there in denying it? “Yes,” he said. “That was… that was me…”
“Are you… are you a superhero then?” asked the man. “Like the Teen Titans?”
So many times he had heard that question asked since this had all started. So many times and always with the same, sometimes desperate reply. This time however, he looked over, past the father, to Starfire and Robin, to Raven and Beast Boy and Cyborg, all of whom were doing whatever they did at times like this, and thought back to what had happened in the bank. Robin had finished talking to the police chief, and, to David’s surprise, was watching him, his arms folded in front of him, with Starfire next to him, a broad smile on her face, and as David watched, it seemed that Robin gave just the slightest nod in his direction, as if, as he had long suspected, Raven was not the only Titan who was psychic.
He turned his eyes back up to the father, waiting for him to answer, and smiled slightly, and nodded.
“Yes.”
The man did not even blink. He took David’s hand with both of his, and held it in a tight, desperate grip. “We can’t possibly thank you enough,” he said, ignoring the fact that he had just done so, more than once. “Are you certain there’s nothing we can… I… I have a great deal of…”
David had seen this before, with Robin and the others, and at least this time, knew how to react. “Really… it’s okay,” he said. “This is, just sort of what we do.”
“Please,” said the woman, “at… at least tell us your name. The papers, and the TV, they said that nobody knew who you were. Some of them said that you were even… a terrorist or something.”
“I’ll write a letter to that studio this very evening!” insisted the man. “They can’t be allowed to spread such lies...”
“Gary, please,” said the woman sharply before turning back to David. “What… what do they call you?”
David’s eyes wandered over once more to the five Titans, who were gathering back together by the T-car, their job now completed, waiting for him to finish with the parents of the little girl he had rescued. Cyborg and Raven and Beast Boy and Starfire and Robin, all of whom were having some kind of discussion at the moment, no doubt about how many of the soldiers they had each taken out. If history was any indication, the total number of claimed ‘victories’ would wind up to be double the total number of enemies engaged, but that was all right. They had won, they all had won, a clear and unmistakable victory, and soon they would all be going home.
Home…
The woman had asked him who he was… and without taking his eyes off of the five Titans, he answered.
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“Man, they are chompin’ out there,” said Cyborg, walking back into the lobby of the Tower. Raven grunted and raised her book over her eyes a bit higher, her feelings on the proceedings abundantly clear as always. Starfire and Beast Boy took the opposite approach, though Starfire appeared to be convinced that David was a lot more nervous than he actually was, and kept trying to tell him that this would all be over soon and they could celebrate with a traditional Tamaranean festival, the name of which required three tongues to pronounce. He couldn’t find a way to tell her gently that it was the thought of the “traditional Tamaranean” anything that scared him, not the reporters.
Robin was late, which was almost unheard of except where the press was concerned, as his position on dealing with the media seemed to be the same as Beast Boy’s position on training. It needed to get done, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Robin had assured them all that he would be down in a moment or so, that he had to pick something up first.
“So anyway,” said Cyborg, resuming the conversation they had been having before he had gone out to check on the hastily erected podium, “don’t worry so much about what they ask. These guys make a living out of asking the dumbest stuff in the world. None of ‘em are gonna print anything except about how awesome we all are anyway, or their readers’d throw ‘em in the trash can, so just relax and take it easy. We all went through this, and it’s always…”
“… pointless?” suggested Raven.
“… simple,” insisted Cyborg. “Robin’ll do most of the talking anyway. He’s still worried BB might open his mouth again.”
“Which is totally dumb,” insisted Beast Boy. “I do great with the reporters!”
”Man, last time you talked to a reporter, you told him Robin was a zombie clone, that I used Gatorade as coolant, and that Raven was obsessed with Alvin and the Chipmunks.”
A book slammed shut to David’s left, and Raven stood up from her chair, her eyes practically blazing. “That wasyou?!”
“I… um… it was…” stammered Beast Boy, before he decided abruptly that discretion was the better part of valor, and turned into an insect before flying up to the ceiling and entering an air vent. Raven narrowed her eyes and vanished into a crackling black portal.
“Her fans started sending her these cards that played music,” Explained Cyborg. “Lots of ‘em.” David nodded, and hoped that it was just his imagination that the tower began to tremble and soft thumping noises emerged from somewhere overhead.
A moment later, Robin stepped out of a different elevator, with nothing in his hands to indicate what he had ‘picked up’. Not that this was surprising. Robin could (and did) fit the contents of a small hardware store in his utility belt. He had changed into a fresh uniform, something David, who had just received his earlier today, had not expected to be able to do, only to find that Cyborg had made, not one, but half a dozen copies, and that the others were waiting for him in his room. Raven had gone over his injuries as soon as they got back to the tower, repairing the cut on his forearm, and doing what she could with the laser burn on his calf, though he still had a bandage on that one under his pant leg, and his leg still throbbed whenever he put too much weight on it.
“Are you all set?” asked Robin.
David nodded. Normally, given his preference for remaining invisible in plain sight, this sort of thing would have scared him half to death. Compared to the events of this afternoon however, it was nothing more than a sideshow. The media was used to the Titans running out and saving people, but with David’s sudden re-appearance, all of them were clamoring to know who he was, and why he had fought in the latest battle alongside the Titans. It was harmless, he supposed, and besides, Robin would be doing most of the talking.
”I think so,” he said back to Robin. “What… what do you want me to do?”
”Just relax,” said Robin, “they’ll ask you a bunch of questions, you don’t have to answer anything personal. Don’t be afraid to say that you can’t answer something, they know how it works.”
David nodded. “Right,” he said. “So… are we going now?”
“Not quite,” said Robin. “There’s still a couple things to do first.”
Always there was something else that had to be done. “What do we need to do?”
“Well, if that was Raven and Beast Boy chasing one another through the ventilation system, then we need to wait for them.”
David hesitated. “I thought… I thought you said they weren’t going to be talking to the reporters. At least… Raven said it was stupid.”
“They’re not,” said Robin, “but they should both be here for this.”
Something in Robin’s voice gave David the impression that he was not talking about the press conference. “… for what?” he asked, and only then did he notice that Cyborg and Starfire had walked over and were standing in a circle around his chair. As he glanced from face to face, trying to figure out what was going on, another black portal appeared from nothingness, spilling both Raven and a very cowed-looking Beast Boy out. Beast Boy was rubbing the back of his head where Raven had no doubt smacked him repeatedly, with her hand if he was lucky.
“This was a field test,” said Robin, fixing David’s attention back on him, “and I wouldn’t call it perfect. You still have a lot to work on. Standing out in the open while people are shooting at you is just not acceptable, and you’re still hesitating more than you should be. You know how close a couple of those shots came to being serious.”
David nodded slightly, suddenly feeling his throat constricting. It wasn’t that he was worried about what Robin was saying now, he knew all of this already. What was beginning to worry him was that it didn’t sound like this was Robin’s main point.
“But… despite all that, when it came down to protecting your teammates, protecting the civilians in danger, when it counted the most, you did what you had to do. You saved that little girl’s life, at great personal risk. If you were a civilian still, they’d call you a hero, but you’re not, so instead…” Robin paused as he glanced at the others, all of whom were smiling, “… instead we’re going to have to call you something else.”
David’s head was beginning to spin. One by one, he looked to the Titans with trepidation and apprehension, and one by one, all he saw was smiles, or in Raven’s case a bemused smirk. Finally he returned his eyes to Robin. “What… what are you… talking about?” he asked hesitantly.
Robin did not answer directly, but instead reached behind him into one of the innumerable compartments on his belt, and drew out a small round, yellow object that David recognized instantly, and which caused his throat to catch and his heart to suddenly start thundering in his ears like a snare drum. It was an object that was close to omnipresent in the tower, churned out by Cyborg by the half dozen every so often to replace ones destroyed, crushed, or otherwise broken, and yet it was, assuredly, the last thing David had expected Robin to pull out.
It was a communicator.
“I’m talking about this,” said Robin.
For a few seconds, David forgot how to speak. He stared blankly at the palm-sized communicator in Robin’s hand, his eyes refusing even to blink. Slowly, with immense effort, he managed to raise his head to look Robin in the mask, and his face asked the question that his voice was suddenly unable to.
Robin simply nodded, and extended the communicator towards him in his open hand. Hesitantly, almost gingerly, David reached out with a trembling hand of his own, and picked it up. It was lighter than he expected, with a case made of titanium and circuits of gold and electrum inside. Gently, he turned it over in his hands, opening it with a press of a button, running his fingers ever-so-lightly over the speaker and screen, as if not completely able to believe that it was real.
“There’s one other question,” said Robin, and David raised his eyes again, his face pale, but not with fear. “I heard what you told those two people whose daughter you rescued, when they asked you what you were called. Is that… the name you’ve decided on?”
David swallowed several times to try and restore his vocal cords to functionality. “I… I think so… yes,” he said. The comment raised several expressions of what appeared to be concern on the Titans’ faces, and he quickly checked to see if it was appropriate or not. “I mean… does… is it all right to use that one?” he asked hastily. “It’s not… already taken or anything, is it?”
“No,” said Robin, “no, it’s not taken, and it works just fine. I just…” Robin looked to the other Titans for a second. “We all assumed you’d prefer something else, what with the history there…”
How to explain this?
“That’s… actually why I picked it,” said David, lowering his head again, and trying to get his words right. Robin raised an eyebrow, and Beast Boy glanced over at Cyborg, but said nothing, as David tried to explain.
“You guys know… my name… David Foster’s not my real name, you all know that, right?” He glanced up to see that nobody was reacting in surprise. He had assumed Raven had told them all, but wasn’t actually certain, but the looks he received indicated that this was not new information. Knowing he had to give an explanation, but not sure of how to explain it without sounding stupid, he started and stopped a few times before finally just saying it.
“I don’t know what my real name is,” he said, “and… I’ve been using David since I was old enough to talk, and I like it, but… I don’t know where I got it from, or if it was me in the first place. And I never… I never had any other name really, not even a nickname. I’ve always just been… well… David.” He glanced up again to ensure nobody was laughing at him, and resumed.
“And now… with this whole thing, and me needing this codename or whatever we call it, I know that I don’t know where they came up with it, or why… or what they meant by calling me this… but the one thing I do know… is that it’s me. I know that it’s… not usually how you guys pick these names, and that… it’s probably kind of weird but… this is the first name I’ve ever had that I actually know is mine. The first one.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The only one.”
No laughter greeted the silence after this statement, and he looked up at Robin once more.
“So… if it’s all the same to you guys… I think I’ll keep it.”
And judging from the smiles, nods, and glances at one another from the other Titans, it was.
The sound of the journalists outside was becoming audible even within the Tower, and Robin gestured to David that it was about time to speak to them. He stood up carefully, the communicator still held in his hand like a priceless talisman, and as he did, the others clapped him on the back with a giant metal hand and told him he’d done ‘damn good’, or lightly punched him in the shoulder with a smaller gloved hand and mentioned that they’d bet Cyborg ten dollars that he was going to faint when Robin gave him the communicator, or nearly crushed his skeleton with what passed for a light friendly hug and welcomed him ebulliently in flowery language from two different planets, or simply said everything that needed saying with one slight nod of recognition. And once all these things were done, David, surrounded by the other Titans, turned back to Robin, who simply extended his gloved, empty hand, took David’s and shook it firmly.
“Welcome to the Titans… ” said Robin, with only the barest pause before addressing him by his newly-accepted title.
“… Devastator.”
The word resonated inside David’s head like a gong, but for all the times he had repeated it to himself, for all the nights he had laid awake, wondering if this would ever happen, and not knowing if he dreaded it or not, for all the buildup and the months of work and the battles with Cinderblock and who knew what else, hearing Robin call him by that name made what he had done, what he was doing, where he was, and what it all meant more real than all of Cinderblock’s attacks combined.
And as all of them walked towards the front door to confront the flash bulbs and video cameras and reporters with microphones waiting for a statement, in the back of his mind, David knew that the conspiracy that had sent Cinderblock was still after him, was still trying to kill him, or worse, and that he still didn’t know why, but for the first time ever, that thought did not fill him with dread. It was still a threat, of course, still terrifying in its own way, but tempering the dread was a feeling of hope and wonder all rolled together that he couldn’t describe, like the electric anticipation of a football player moments before the big game. He was a Titan. He was a superhero. He could scarcely believe it, indeed he couldn’t believe it, and doubted he’d be able to for a long, long time, yet there it was. The communicator in his hand, and the name Robin had spoken both served to prove it.
He was a superhero.
So the people who were after him were still out there? So he didn’t know who they were, or what they wanted? So they were preparing, even now, new strokes against him and the rest of the Titans?
One glance around him at the others told him everything he needed to know, and he couldn’t stop a smile from spreading over his face as he mentally issued his reply back to whoever they were.
‘You want me?’ he thought, ‘All right then, come and get me.’
A black portal materialized in mid-air, absorbing all light projected at it like an area of null space, before suddenly vomiting out three figures into the middle of the securely locked office. Raven, controlling the portal, did not so much appear as coalesce from the black energy of her portal, materializing in mid-air in her lotus position, just as she had left. Beast Boy landed on his feet, with scarcely a tremor to indicate his own discomfort, though he did see fit to steady himself against the wall after the momentary disorientation. For David, the disorientation was anything but momentary. He landed on his knees, hard, eyes wide, muscles quivering and shivering as though afflicted by a nerve disorder. He did not feel cold, he felt chilled, chilled straight through to his bones with a flesh-crawling sensation that was not exactly cold, but was not exactly not, either. For at least the dozenth time today, he fought back the urge to lose his lunch.
It took several moments for him to calm himself down and lose the sensation of being frozen from the inside. When he did, he found Raven looking elsewhere, purposefully, as though unwilling to acknowledge for some reason what her teleportation did to those not used to it. Beast Boy, who had commented to David before on what it was like to be teleported like that (his description was on the mark, as it turned out, but in David's opinion, watered down), helped him back up. “You'll be fine in a sec,” he whispered, hopefully out of Raven's hearing, though David wasn't ready to credit that, as Raven cleared her throat impatiently and walked over towards the single door in the wall.
“We're in the back office,” she said, as evenly as ever. “I can feel a lot of people in the front one. It's probably the hostages.”
David nodded, unclipping the baton from his belt, and subconsciously setting it alight again. “What should we do?”
“I'll go through and see what's there,” said Beast Boy, and David caught himself before he asked how he intended to get through a solid steel door. Solid steel it might have been, but the keyhole was large enough for a gnat to get through, and Beast Boy became one before buzzing on through. Raven folded her arms and waited, and David, still holding the aura-sheathed baton in one hand, had no choice but to follow her lead. As Raven seemed (as ever) unwilling to engage in chit-chat, the two of them waited in silence for Beast Boy's return.
They could not have been waiting for more than thirty seconds, but to David, it felt more like ten minutes. He had to force himself not to tap the baton against his leg, or worse yet, the wall, a nervous tic that was most inappropriate given their intention to remain undetected. Eventually though, he could not stand the tense wait any longer. Let Raven get angry if she wished.
“What's... the plan?” he asked, not sure if there was one, but as it turned out, there was.
“We wait for Beast Boy to stop messing around and get back here to tell us what's in the next room, and then we all go in at once,” said Raven flatly, as though reciting the nutrition information on the side of a cereal box. “There's probably gonna be a couple of guards, so we'll have to take them down fast before they can hurt a hostage. Try not to blow up anything that you - “
A sudden crash jarred Raven out of her monologue, and they door they were standing next to gave a heave as something large and solid collided with it at high speed. David nearly jumped in surprise, but to his astonishment, so did Raven, her eyes wide all of a sudden with what looked like fear. Without another word about stealth she waved one hand and ripped the door from its hinges like a plastic toy, casting it aside and rushing into the room, David right behind her.
Beast Boy, once more in human form, was standing inside an office very similar to the one they had just left, surrounded by nearly a dozen people in assorted civilian clothing, all of whom were seated on the ground with their hands tied behind their backs and gags shoved in their mouths. One of the soldiers that they had been fighting outside was laying unconscious in the middle of the room, surrounded by the shattered remnants of the overhead fluorescent light he had apparently been tossed into. Another was laying at Raven and David's feet, his helmet cracked from where he had collided with the door. Beast Boy was kneeling down and untying the bonds of an elderly woman crouched near the side of the room.
Raven's eyes fixed on Beast Boy, and in the space of a few seconds, shifted from abject fear, to abject rage. “Beast Boy!” she practically shouted, snapping everyone's head around to face her and spoiling all possibility, David thought, of them remaining undetected (then again, the door thing had already done that).
Beast Boy caught the tone if not the reason for it, and he raised his head with a wan smile. “Um... hey Rae! I got em both!”
“You were supposed to come back and tell us what was in here!”
“Oh,” said Beast Boy, and he turned and looked around for a second. “There's two soldier-dudes, and ten hostages.” And with that, he resumed untying the elderly woman, apparently considering the matter closed.
The flippant reply made Raven, if anything, more angry. “You weren't supposed to attack them by yourself!” she insisted forcefully.
“Rae, I got them,” said Beast Boy, looking back up at her. “What's the big deal? It was just two.”
“Don't call me 'Rae'!” said Raven with enough force to cause the lights to flicker. “You could have gotten killed!”
David decided that discretion was definitely the better part of valor here, and did not feel particularly ashamed of the fact that he was glad it was Beast Boy and not himself that was on the receiving end of Raven's tongue lashing. Still, through the shouting and the quivering energy eruptions and the talk of getting killed that was really not what he needed to be focusing on, there was a voice in the back of his mind telling him that there was something wrong here... something Raven had said before...
“Rae, c'mon,” said Beast Boy, ignoring Raven's demand as always. “I knew I could handle two of them. You're sounding like Robin.”
“I am not!” snarled Raven (David begged to disagree with her, but kept his opinion to himself), “but you were supposed to come and get us!” She faltered, obviously scrambling for excuses to stay angry, and hit upon one that would have made Robin proud. “We're supposed to be showing David how to do this! That means following the plan!”
Amusing as this exchange was, David was not paying too close attention to it, his eyes darting around the room quickly. “Guys?”
“Hmph,” said Beast Boy, “whatever you say, Robin,”
“Beast Boy,” said Raven darkly, “I swear, if the soldiers don't kill you, I'm gonna - “
“Guys?”
Normally David would never think of cutting off Raven, but he had now realized what was bothering him, and so he broke custom. It was unexpected enough that both Raven and Beast Boy fell silent and turned to him. He looked up at Raven semi-apprehensively. “Didn't you say there were eleven hostages?”
Both of the other Titans got the same look in their eyes.
Before anyone could do anything, the old woman Beast Boy had just finished untying and ungagging answered their unspoken question.
“There was a little girl,” said the old woman. “The men tied her up like the rest of us, but they didn't tie her proper. When the guards left to go shoot at the police, she got loose and snuck out. We couldn't stop her! She said she was gonna go look for her parents.”
“Which way did she go?” asked Raven, though realistically there was only one possible answer to that question, the only exit from the room other than the one they had just barged in from led out into the main lobby of the bank. It was in that direction that the old lady gestured, out into the lobby, which by now was almost assuredly crawling with soldiers.
“It was only just a minute ago,” said the old woman.
Still, Raven didn't hesitate. “Stay here!” she called to David as she turned, raced over to the door that led into the lobby, and phased right through it.
Beast Boy also did not hesitate. “Come on!” he called to David as he turned, raced over to the door that led into the lobby, and shifted into a gnat again before sliding right through the keyhole. Left with a set of contradictory orders, David set his jaw and tightened his grip on the riot baton, and followed Beast Boy, though of the three of them, he was the only one who actually had to open the door.
He emerged onto a large marble balcony, which ran along the top of the back wall of the massive atrium which served the Jump City Federal Bank as a lobby. The balcony was long, running from wall to wall, with a staircase on either end running down to the floor of the lobby itself. From where David was standing, with Beast Boy and Raven standing next to him, David could see the lobby floor. As predicted, it was full of soldiers, all of them scurrying about like ants, some shooting out the front door at Cyborg, Starfire, and Raven, others building impromptu barricades or hauling around bits of equipment. Presumably some of them were trying to break into the vault, but the vault was directly below them, and out of sight. The fallen forms of Jump City police officers were there too, many of whom had been dragged to once side of the room and left there, unconscious or dead, it was impossible to tell. Bits of their dropped equipment, tasers and riot guns and fiberglass helmets were scattered all over the place. There was no sign of a little girl.
Standing openly on the balcony, searching frantically for any sign of the lost hostage, it was only a matter of time before they were spotted by one of the soldiers. Beast Boy could perhaps have taken on a small or invisible form, Raven might have cloaked herself in shadows and hidden along the dark recesses of the wall, but their hope was plainly not in stealth but in speed. They had to find her, fast, before the soldiers did, and if that meant drawing their attention away from finding her by attracting it themselves... well... that was what they were here for.
And as to David, unable to hide either through shadow or transformation, all he knew was that there was a hostage loose and lost somewhere in the labyrinth before them, and that they had to find her. Thoughts of stealth or speed never entered the calculation, nor indeed did he even realize that the soldiers could see them until one of them shouted the alarm.
“It's them!”
And then it all broke loose again.
The man who had shouted was standing several dozen yards further down the balcony from them, and took the time to alert his comrades before raising his rifle. He never got it into position. Raven raised her hand and her black energy threw him through the granite railing and off of the balcony, letting him drop several stories down, enough to badly injure, but not enough to kill. She turned back to David and Beast Boy long enough to shout a brief command: “Find the girl!” before conjuring up a shield of blackness around herself and flying up into the air to engage the soldiers, utterly unafraid, supremely poised, ready to deal out destruction on a scale that defied belief.
Most of the soldiers turned to engage Raven, and it was perhaps well that they did, but several were already firing at Beast Boy and David. Another office door opened close by, and two more soldiers sprinted out of it, rifles and bayonets in hand. One lunged at Beast Boy, who simply shifted into a rat, allowing the man's momentum to pitch him over the balcony's railing and down to the ground below. The other was moving towards David, but before he could do anything untoward, Beast Boy shifted again, this time into a python, and grabbed the man around the ankles tightly with a coil, tripping him up and knocking him onto his face, whereupon he lay still, out cold from hitting his head against the marble.
Lasers began to sail up from below, sizzling and popping as they blasted the granite banister that ran the length of the balcony. David ducked behind the railing, taking what cover he could, and spotting a soldier racing up the stairs towards them, shoving a clip into his rifle as he ran.
The stairs also were made of marble. That was all David had time to think as he brought his baton around.
One of the stairs exploded like a pressure plate trap, blowing a five foot hole in the staircase through which the soldier ingloriously fell. Another soldier, from below, reared back and threw a hand grenade up at them, but David saw it coming, and turned his baton around to point at the arcing projectile, which burst in mid-air like a firework, well beyond lethal range, an instant before Raven lifted a heavy oak desk with a wave of her hand and broke it in half over the grenadier's head. Ducking back behind the banister once more as bits of shrapnel pinged off the gravel, David permitted himself, just for a second, to think that they might be able to hold out up here.
But as before, the soldiers had their own means of dealing with enemies in cover.
A shoulder-mounted rocket struck the balcony from below, and blew the supports to pieces. Before David even knew what was happening, the floor gave way beneath his hands and feet and crumbled like stale bread. He found himself falling, and his eyes opened wide and he shouted out in fear. The soldiers who had fallen off the balcony had landed on carpet, and been hurt bad enough for their trouble, but directly below the balcony, the floor was bare marble, and at this height he would surely dash his brains out on it. Scrambling with his hands to grab at something solid, he desperately tried to save himself. For an instant, his fingers touched the broken edge of the balcony, then nothing, and he was free-falling towards the floor, some forty feet below.
And then he stopped.
Something looped around his wrist like a noose and tightened with a jerk strong enough to nearly pull his arm out of its socket, and suddenly he wasn't falling anymore. He looked up, and saw Beast Boy, now in the form of an octopus, clinging to the railing of the undamaged section of the balcony with seven limbs, with the eighth one wrapped around his wrist like a rope. In this form, Beast Boy could not speak, but his eyes indicated clearly what he would have said.
“I've got you!”
His baton still clutched in his other hand, David hung in mid-air for a second, before a searing pain shot through his leg, and he cried out and clenched his teeth and nearly dropped the baton. The soldiers below were blasting away at the both of them, and one of their shots had just struck him in the calf. Unlike before, this shot was no glancing blow, and it burned a cauterized, dime-sized hole right through his leg, sending tears rushing to his eyes and a stifled scream to his lips. Beast Boy tried to haul David back up onto the balcony, but before he could do so, another rocket struck further down, jolting the entire balcony enough to shake loose Beast Boy's grip.
Once more he fell, mercifully throwing off the aim of the soldiers shooting at him, and sending him plummeting to the ground. Fortunately, thanks to Beast Boy, he had less distance to fall this time, and instead of landing on hard marble, he landed on top of a large pile of debris and rubble that formed what was left of the chunk of balcony that had been blown out from under him. Though it was as hard as the marble would have been, its broken state permitted it to give a bit, and there was actually a functional difference between falling 25 feet and falling 40. He lay on the rubble pile, stunned, shaken, battered, but alive. Such was the dust and smoke kicked up by the repeated explosions, that he could not see any of the soldiers, nor Beast Boy, nor Raven, though he retained enough lucidity to realize that this meant nobody could see him either. Try as he might, laying half-conscious on the ground like a bird with a broken wing, he could not see anything wrong with that, and slowly he started trying to prepare himself to move, to sneak off under cover of smoke and debris into a corner to wait out the end of this insane fight. He no longer had ambitions of showing himself competent against a paramilitary army. He wished merely to survive.
And then he saw her.
She was barely ten feet away, crouched behind the same pile of rubble he was half-propped up against, a little girl of no more than six years, huddled up against the broken debris as though trying to phase through it, which she might well have been trying to do. Clearly, from where she was sitting, she had come within a hair's breadth of getting crushed by the falling granite, and with the shooting and sounds of chaos all around, she too was merely trying to lie low.
It wasn't going to work.
Looming up through the dust behind the little girl materialized a dark figure, a soldier, with his rifle slung onto his back, making his way ponderously over the rubble. So loud was the chaos in the bank lobby that his footsteps were drowned out, and the little girl had no idea he was coming, no idea that is, until he was suddenly there, standing over her, reaching down with something in his hand that might have been a stungun or a knife or perhaps something totally innocuous, though that was unlikely, reaching down to disable, kill, or at the very least grab her, and drag her off for use as a human shield.
That was the plan.
The reality was that as he was ducking, a rock hit him in the face and exploded.
A fist-sized chunk of granite, to be precise, thrown with all the velocity David could muster, and which, by some miracle, had flown true, smashed into the soldier's nose an instant before detonating. At that range, the blast might well have injured the little girl, but David focused the explosion forwards, with the direction of his throw, and the blast hit the soldier in the chest like a wrecking ball, flinging him through the air only to slam him against the wall. The soldier slid down onto the floor and did not rise.
The little girl turned her head back, and for the first time saw that David was laying there, half-propped up on one elbow, having used his right hand to throw the piece of debris. She said nothing, merely stared at him wide-eyed, while he desperately tried to think of what to do. He had no communicator, no way of signaling Beast Boy and Raven, who in any event were no doubt very busy at the moment, and the din was such that he could barely hear himself think, let alone shout above the noise. He rolled over onto his hands and knees, his leg sending jolts of searing pain up him with every movement, and slowly he tried to work his way over to the little girl, who was not moving, too shocked to react. He knew how she felt.
And then he saw something that made his heart freeze.
The dust was settling, and through it, he made out a figure standing back a dozen yards, holding a large device in both hands, which it was directing towards him and the girl. The shape... the shape was familiar somehow, and it took him a second to realize that he'd seen it before... in movies.
A grenade launcher.
There was no time to get out of the way, the man's finger was already tightening on the trigger, and in David's fall, he had somehow lost his baton. Without it, he could not possibly detonate anything fast enough. In desperation, he half-crawled, half-lunged forward, and his hand landed on something cool and hard and solid-feeling, and he glanced down at it. It was one of the bits of equipment left behind by the fallen riot police, a large, concave, fiberglass and plastic polymer board, wider and taller than he was, partly buried in the rubble.
And by the time he realized what it was, he was already acting.
The grenade left the launcher with a puff of compressed air, and arced up and over, aimed directly at the spot the little girl was occupying. Praying that it would not be stuck, David grabbed at the handle of the dusty object, and rolled over onto his back and then back onto his stomach, pulling as hard as he could. The polymer board caught just for a second, then broke free in his hand, and with a cascade of dust and debris, he rolled over to the little girl, who was still frozen in mute shock, and as the grenade descended towards them, he he grabbed her with one hand, forcing her to lay flat on the ground next to him, and held the board up with his other hand hand like a tent canopy, enclosing both him and the little girl beneath it, letting its stenciled white “JCPD” lettering face the incoming missile.
The grenade exploded a foot above them.
Fragments rained down like hailstones, embedding themselves in the front of the board, and staggering David as he struggled to hold it up, but the shock dissipated after only an instant. It took him a second to realize that while his leg was still throbbing like the devil itself, he was not dead, and only then did he look down at the little girl, and see that she was not dead either.
For the object he had held up was not simply a fiberglass board... it was a riot shield.
For a few seconds, David didn't dare move. Beneath the shield he could see nothing whatsoever, and hear nothing save for his own heartbeat thundering in his ears, and the scared breathing of the little girl. He was trying to decide if he should take a risk and look out from under the shield when, to his surprise, the little girl actually spoke first.
“M... Mister?” she said in a terribly scared voice, but nevertheless one that was clear and understandable. Better than he could have managed in the same circumstances.
“Are you okay?” he asked, not sure what he was going to do if the answer should be 'no'. The other soldiers were probably approaching already, and he was going to have to stop them... somehow.
“Is... this yours?” asked the little girl, and she lifted her hand. In it was David's baton, dusted and dented, but otherwise no worse for wear after having been dropped nearly three stories and half-buried under falling rock. How or why she had grabbed it was beyond him, but he was in no mood to question miracles right now, and so he nodded, and she slipped the baton into his free hand, and took a deep breath of what might have been awe when it began to glow red once more.
“What's your name?” asked David. He had no idea what to do now beyond the obvious, which was stay alive and keep her alive as well, but he had the sense that he had to calm her down somewhat.
“Mary,” replied the little girl haltingly.
“Okay,” he said, trying to keep the fear out of his own voice. “Mary, here's what I need you to do.” What instructions could he give that made sense here? What should he tell her to do? He couldn't afford to think it over, he could hear the footsteps approaching already. He improvised.
“When I stand up,” he said, “I want you to get behind me, between me and the wall, and get down as low as you can, and cover your ears.” He felt like he was telling her to get under her desk for a nuclear attack, but what choice did he have? “Can you do that for me?”
Mary nodded quietly, but she had a question for him before they proceeded. “Are you gonna stop the bad men?”
Would that he could.
“Yes,” he said, hoping it didn't sound like too much of a lie, “but you need to do what I said, okay?” Mary nodded again, and David took a deep breath, and steeled himself, hearing the crunch of footsteps get closer and closer.
“On three,” he said. “One...”
Someone stepped next to the shield, still held up like the shell of a tortoise. David could see a pair of boots standing right next to them.
“Two...”
The person next to them bent over and grabbed the lip of the shield, intending clearly on overturning it and blasting whoever was inside.
Gametime.
“Three!”
Before the shield could be pried up, David pushed to his feet suddenly, catching the soldier next to him by surprise. The soldier was larger, stronger, and tougher no doubt than David, but the soldier had not expected to be leaped at, and lost his balance as David desperately swung upwards with his baton, cracking the soldier in the chin hard enough to send him tumbling down onto his back where he lay moaning. His counterpart stood on top of the rubble pile before David, and he brought his rifle around, but David aimed the baton down at the rubble itself and blew the pile up like a volcano, sending the soldier rocketing upwards headfirst into the underside of the balcony, before letting him fall senseless back to Earth. A third soldier loomed up from the left, and opened fire, but the shield was on David's left arm, and though built for someone much larger than he was, he managed to plant it and put his shoulder into it as the burst of lasers blasted into it. David ignored the screaming pain in his leg, planting his shoulder against the inside of the shield, and straining to keep it upright. A moment later, the shooting stopped as the soldier changed magazines, and instantly, David swung the shield out, revealing the soldier to him, his baton aimed like a spear straight at the soldier's chest. His rifle exploded in his hands, snapping both wrists and sending him crashing to the floor, writhing and screaming in pain.
Still more soldiers loomed up from behind the three he had disabled, and David stumbled backwards, hoping that Mary had followed his instructions, acting on pure instinct and muscle memory, with no time to think or form a coherent plan. A fourth soldier shot at him from in front, but he brought the shield around to block the shots, and retaliated by blowing the links on the chain that held one of the massive chandeliers aloft. The chandelier plummeted directly down onto the soldier and flattened him beneath its weight with a torrent of sparks and flame. Another soldier rushed in from his unprotected side, and he turned on this one too, swinging his baton in an underhand stroke, willing matter to bend at his command without reference to what it was shaped into. A series of explosions on the marble floor carved a furrow in the rock, sending chips and fragments flying into the soldier's face, upending him. Still more came charging on as he backed towards a corner, a glance from the corner of his eye showing that Mary was in fact cowering in the corner as he had told her to. The bad news of course, was that he now had nowhere else to back into.
He lashed out instead, his powers operating almost on their own behalf, as he willed things to be destroyed, and they were. A soldier who tried to vault an overturned desk caught most of the explosion of a computer monitor in the crotch, and landed on the ground in so much pain that he passed out then and there. Another who was shouldering a rocket launcher found his weapon turned into a fragmentation bomb, which blew him out of sight into the dusty swirls being cast about. Back and forth his baton flew, setting off explosion after explosion, no longer even targeting soldiers, simply trying to form some kind of firebreak to keep the enemy at bay. Lasers flew by like wasps from a nest, many scorching the shield as he crouched behind it. Everything was ammunition. The walls, the floor, the bits of rubble from previous explosions, he blew them all to bits, gouging sections of rock from the walls and the inlaid marble floor like a giant ice cream scoop, desperate, terrified, trying with all his might just to keep the enemy back, just to stay alive.
Soon he had backed up into the corner itself, barely a foot in front of the little girl hiding in his shadow. The shield in his hand was dented and bent and battered and cracked, but it was his only real defense, and he brandished it like a cross before vampires. Two more soldiers charged him, their guns empty and fixed with bayonets, and with nowhere to back into, he could not evade them. He managed to stop one by, once more, detonating a section of the floor, tripping the charging soldier who landed square on his chin on a piece of rubble. The other one lunged at him with the bayonet, and he moved to block it with his shield, but not even the polymerized riot shield of the JCPD could take such abuse forever. The shield split, and the blade drove right through, stabbing into David's forearm. He bit back a cry as the soldier pulled the blade back, ripping the shield out of David's hand, and throwing it back onto the ground behind him. Again the soldier lunged, and this time David simply parried the stab by hitting the side of the gun with his baton. The blade passed by his side by millimeters, and embedded itself in the rock of the wall behind. David swung the baton at the soldier's head, but he was no Robin, and his swing lacked skill, having merely the strength of desperation to it. The man lowered his head and took the blow to his helmet, which rang out but did not give or break. An instant later, the soldier, now too close to use his rifle effectively, dropped the weapon, and slammed his fist instead into the hapless teen's stomach.
The blow hit like a pile driver and knocked the wind out of David so hard that he thought his lungs were imploding. He staggered back against the wall, spots flashing before his eyes, his vision blurry and double, and as he shook his head to try and clear it, he saw the soldier grimacing at him as he stepped back and drew a long knife from his back pocket. Holding his baton up in a pathetic, paltry defense, swaying on his feet, with blood leaking from his arm and his leg screaming protest at having any weight applied, David could only watch as the soldier stepped forward to ram the knife into his stomach and spill his guts all over the floor.
But as the knife came in, all of a sudden, David's left arm lunged out and caught the soldier's wrist.
”When the enemy comes at you with a knife, the first thing to do is grab for it.”
The soldier reacted in surprise as his knife buried itself up to its hilt, not in David's body, but in the wall he was leaning against, but before he could do anything, David twisted the man's wrist around, eliciting a yelp of pain as the soldier's grip weakened and his arm twisted.
”Grab for the wrist, twist as hard as you can, then use the momentum to counterattack.”
David's right hand reversed its grip on the baton even as David stepped forward with his right foot, pivoting towards the soldier, he swung as though delivering a hook punch and missing, aiming several inches in front of his enemy's face.
”Execute your punch and follow through, and the baton will do the rest.”
It did.
The reversed baton hit the soldier in the side of the head beneath his helmet with a crack like a baseball player hitting a home run. David felt the tremor of the impact travel up the baton, up his arm, and into his chest, and watched as the soldier's eyes grew unfocused and and his arm fell limp. And then with all the grace of a tumbling skyscraper, the soldier collapsed backwards onto the ground, and lay still.
And then there was silence.
For a few seconds, David remained standing there, propped up against the wall of the bank, looking for the next soldier that was sure to come looming out of the darkness. None appeared. It wasn't until another ten seconds or so had passed that he permitted himself to think that maybe... there weren't any more.
And then he collapsed.
He slid down the wall onto the ground like a wet noodle, drained physically, emotionally, and mentally. The baton clattered to the ground next to him as he slowly reached up and felt the cut on his forearm. It had already stopped bleeding, for the nomex fibers had prevented the bayonet from driving too deep. Mary was standing next to him, blinking in the dusty light, casting him worried looks every so often, and he knew he ought to be looking for the others, or for her parents, but he was, at this point, quite content to not move at all, and let the others find him.
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It might have been half an hour before he moved again. It might have been ten minutes, or two, or barely a couple seconds. He couldn't tell the difference anymore. Time seemed to lag, punctuated with the sound of further blasts, explosions, and the occasional cry of pain that, had it come from one of the Titans, might have galvanized him to act. It never did, and as it never did, he managed to half-convince himself in the near-coma of his own exhaustion that his job was to stay here and make sure the little girl was all right. That this dovetailed nicely with his own desire to sit down and never move again was simply co-incidence...
Such he told himself.
The little girl herself, having belatedly determined that the coast was reasonably clear, stood up, and walked over. She looked scared, not that that attribute was in any short supply around here, and coated with dust just like everything else within eyesight. Still David could see no obvious blood or injury, and she was not crying. She said nothing, merely bent down slowly, and picked up the baton, gingerly, as though she was afraid it was going to burst into flames at any second. Slowly, she turned it over in her tiny hands, and then, holding it by the business end, gently handed it back to him. Wearily he lifted his hand to take it, and did so, and as he caught her staring at it expectantly, a soft smile crossed his face and he concentrated on it once more, causing the red aura to spring up around it again. Nevermind that in this state, he would have been lucky to be able to detonate a paper clip, she didn't know that. She gave an ever so slightly perceptible start as the aura materialized, but once it did, her expression lost a bit of its fear, and she smiled at him, revealing her missing front teeth.
As the sounds outside died down, and the dust began to settle, David decided it was time to chance moving. Without a word, he very slowly managed to struggle back to his feet, and gently (after several tries) clipped the baton back onto his belt. His now-free hand, he extended to Mary, who took it without a word, apparently understanding where they were going without question. He was reasonably confident by this point that there was nothing left of the enemy... but not so confident that he didn't stop as he walked towards the entrance to the bank to pick up the cracked, battered riot shield that he had been using. Better safe than sorry.
As it was, he needn't have worried, for he had not taken more than another dozen steps before Beast Boy found them.
A figure loomed up ahead out of the dust, but before he could react with violence, David he saw the greenish tinge and the pointed ears and the small frame, and relaxed. The little girl did not, and ducked behind him, but Beast Boy emerged without weapons or ill-intent, a massive grin on his face, no doubt from the victory the Titans had just scored, as well as from finding both David and the little girl alive.
“Dude!” exclaimed Beast Boy, and he scrambled over the rubble piles towards him. “You're okay! You found her!”
Was this okay? David wasn't sure any more, but he decided that if Beast Boy said so, then it was. “She found me,” he corrected, and the girl, discerning that there was no violence in their actions or words, crept out gently from behind the shield to stare at Beast Boy, who was, at least to judge by his actions, plainly used to that sort of thing.
“I thought you might've got knocked out when you fell there,” said Beast Boy as he arrived and put a hand on David’s shoulder to steady him., “but I couldn't get over to check because of all the soldiers. Raven was wrong, by the way. There was way more than four dozen of them. There was more like fifty.”
“... really?” asked David, too tired to point out to Beast Boy that, for all intents and purposes, four dozen was fifty.
“Yeah, but we handled it anyway. Cy and Rob and Star are still cleaning up outside, and Rae went to help them. I came back to look for you and her.”
David managed to suppress the unworthy thought that Beast Boy could perhaps have done so a little sooner. No doubt he had had a dozen or more soldiers to deal with on his own. Instead he smiled and let Beast Boy help him towards the door, lightly supported on one side by Beast Boy, on the other side by the little girl, who was still holding his hand, though whether that was for her sake or to make sure he wasn’t about to keel over was an open question.
They emerged onto the threshold of the bank, and stared down into the plaza below. Smoke still hovered above it, but the plaza was no longer deserted. EMTs and police cars were parked everywhere, the former tending to the more badly injured soldiers, and the latter carting them into paddy wagons to be transported to jail. Robin was there, talking to the chief of police, and Starfire next to him, pretending not to notice the stares and occasional cheers from the civilians crowded behind the hastily erected police cordon. Raven was off by herself helping the other hostages down the stairs, trying to exhibit the proper gratitude for their gushing thanks (and not one iota more) and glancing almost anxiously towards the T-car, as if eager to be done with the matter and to go home.
For once, David fully understood how Raven felt.
“My man!” came a loud and thunderous voice that could only be Cyborg’s, and David turned just in time to see Cyborg jogging up the steps towards them, taking them three at a time. “Check you out!”
Cyborg was himself covered in scorch marks, but these seemed to have affected him not at all. “Raven said you went off solo to go get one of the VIPs.” Cyborg winked at the little girl, who was unabashedly staring at the giant half-metal Titan.
“Sort of,” said David, not sure how to explain what had just happened, not even sure if he could. Cyborg didn’t seem to mind. Indeed Cyborg looked more fired up than David ever remembered seeing him.
“So how many?”
“… what?”
Cyborg grinned and patted David on the shoulder, nearly knocking him down. “How many bad guys did you get?”
David blinked. “I… kinda lost count.” Were they supposed to be keeping score?
“Well I got twenty-two,” said Cyborg, what about you grass stain?
“Twenty-three,” said Beast Boy with a smirk. David was not so out of it that he was prepared to believe either one of them and indeed neither were they. Before the heated argument that was no doubt coming could erupt however, David had an important question.
“Cy… what should I do with…?”
“Oh,” said Cyborg, snapped back to reality for a second. “She know where her parents are?”
David had honestly not remembered to ask. He turned to look down at Mary, who shook her head no. “You should prob’ly take her down to the police there, see if her mom and dad are in the crowd. I can take her if you don’t feel up to…”
”No,” said David, “No, I’ll… I’ll do it.” His arms and legs felt like lead weights, under ordinary circumstances he would barely have been able to walk, yet despite that, he was certain that he was able to do this much, and perhaps it showed, because neither Cyborg nor Beast Boy objected, and so he slowly made his way down the stairs into the plaza itself.
He expected, given the sheer number of people, that it would take forever to find the little girl’s parents, but it did not, indeed no sooner had they stepped down into the plaza than the girl let out a high pitched shout.
“Mommy! Daddy!”
Over to the side of the plaza, a man and a woman, both middle-aged, were straining against the police cordon, staring into the plaza looking for something, as soon as the little girl shouted, their heads whipped around, and then both of them ducked under the cordon, ran past one of the police officers who belatedly tried to stop them, and raced towards their little girl. The little girl released David’s hand and ran to them as well, nearly leaping into the woman’s arms, who lifted her up and embraced her and seemed liable to faint, had her husband not been there to steady her. David didn’t quite know what he was supposed to do at this juncture, and so he stood there, watching them, as the police slowly backed away, taking one look at him and assuming that he had the situation well under control.
News to him…
Finally, a minute or so later, the little girl, who had been breathlessly relating in her own words what had happened, pointed back at David and said something out of earshot. Both parents raised their heads at whatever was being described, and walked over towards him.
He was not sure what to expect, but… this was not it.
Without a word, without a gesture, without a single indication beforehand, the mother, who had since set her daughter down again, walked up to David and embraced him with enough force to rival Starfire. David felt the air crushed out of his lungs, and his eyes widened in surprise. The woman was crying, with relief, he hoped, and between her sobs could only repeat the same phrase over and over again.
“Thank you.”
The father stood nearby, holding his daughter, and there were tears in his eyes as well. David frankly did not know how to react, but fortunately it did not appear that they expected him to, and after a little bit, the mother slowly released him and stood back up, wiping her tears on her sleeve and taking no notice of the liberal coating of dust, blood, and grime she had picked up on the front of her clothes from David’s uniform.
Both parents insisted on thanking him a hundred times, or more, as if they feared that if they did not, somehow their daughter would vanish from their arms. David found himself feeling more than a little embarrassed, assuring them over and over that it wasn’t any trouble, that he didn’t need anything at all from them, that it was all right.
It was the father who noticed first that David was not one of the Titans that everyone in Jump City knew so well. “You’re… you’re that boy from the waterfront,” he said. “The one that fought with that Cinderblock creature, aren’t you?”
David nodded slowly. What point was there in denying it? “Yes,” he said. “That was… that was me…”
“Are you… are you a superhero then?” asked the man. “Like the Teen Titans?”
So many times he had heard that question asked since this had all started. So many times and always with the same, sometimes desperate reply. This time however, he looked over, past the father, to Starfire and Robin, to Raven and Beast Boy and Cyborg, all of whom were doing whatever they did at times like this, and thought back to what had happened in the bank. Robin had finished talking to the police chief, and, to David’s surprise, was watching him, his arms folded in front of him, with Starfire next to him, a broad smile on her face, and as David watched, it seemed that Robin gave just the slightest nod in his direction, as if, as he had long suspected, Raven was not the only Titan who was psychic.
He turned his eyes back up to the father, waiting for him to answer, and smiled slightly, and nodded.
“Yes.”
The man did not even blink. He took David’s hand with both of his, and held it in a tight, desperate grip. “We can’t possibly thank you enough,” he said, ignoring the fact that he had just done so, more than once. “Are you certain there’s nothing we can… I… I have a great deal of…”
David had seen this before, with Robin and the others, and at least this time, knew how to react. “Really… it’s okay,” he said. “This is, just sort of what we do.”
“Please,” said the woman, “at… at least tell us your name. The papers, and the TV, they said that nobody knew who you were. Some of them said that you were even… a terrorist or something.”
“I’ll write a letter to that studio this very evening!” insisted the man. “They can’t be allowed to spread such lies...”
“Gary, please,” said the woman sharply before turning back to David. “What… what do they call you?”
David’s eyes wandered over once more to the five Titans, who were gathering back together by the T-car, their job now completed, waiting for him to finish with the parents of the little girl he had rescued. Cyborg and Raven and Beast Boy and Starfire and Robin, all of whom were having some kind of discussion at the moment, no doubt about how many of the soldiers they had each taken out. If history was any indication, the total number of claimed ‘victories’ would wind up to be double the total number of enemies engaged, but that was all right. They had won, they all had won, a clear and unmistakable victory, and soon they would all be going home.
Home…
The woman had asked him who he was… and without taking his eyes off of the five Titans, he answered.
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“Man, they are chompin’ out there,” said Cyborg, walking back into the lobby of the Tower. Raven grunted and raised her book over her eyes a bit higher, her feelings on the proceedings abundantly clear as always. Starfire and Beast Boy took the opposite approach, though Starfire appeared to be convinced that David was a lot more nervous than he actually was, and kept trying to tell him that this would all be over soon and they could celebrate with a traditional Tamaranean festival, the name of which required three tongues to pronounce. He couldn’t find a way to tell her gently that it was the thought of the “traditional Tamaranean” anything that scared him, not the reporters.
Robin was late, which was almost unheard of except where the press was concerned, as his position on dealing with the media seemed to be the same as Beast Boy’s position on training. It needed to get done, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Robin had assured them all that he would be down in a moment or so, that he had to pick something up first.
“So anyway,” said Cyborg, resuming the conversation they had been having before he had gone out to check on the hastily erected podium, “don’t worry so much about what they ask. These guys make a living out of asking the dumbest stuff in the world. None of ‘em are gonna print anything except about how awesome we all are anyway, or their readers’d throw ‘em in the trash can, so just relax and take it easy. We all went through this, and it’s always…”
“… pointless?” suggested Raven.
“… simple,” insisted Cyborg. “Robin’ll do most of the talking anyway. He’s still worried BB might open his mouth again.”
“Which is totally dumb,” insisted Beast Boy. “I do great with the reporters!”
”Man, last time you talked to a reporter, you told him Robin was a zombie clone, that I used Gatorade as coolant, and that Raven was obsessed with Alvin and the Chipmunks.”
A book slammed shut to David’s left, and Raven stood up from her chair, her eyes practically blazing. “That wasyou?!”
“I… um… it was…” stammered Beast Boy, before he decided abruptly that discretion was the better part of valor, and turned into an insect before flying up to the ceiling and entering an air vent. Raven narrowed her eyes and vanished into a crackling black portal.
“Her fans started sending her these cards that played music,” Explained Cyborg. “Lots of ‘em.” David nodded, and hoped that it was just his imagination that the tower began to tremble and soft thumping noises emerged from somewhere overhead.
A moment later, Robin stepped out of a different elevator, with nothing in his hands to indicate what he had ‘picked up’. Not that this was surprising. Robin could (and did) fit the contents of a small hardware store in his utility belt. He had changed into a fresh uniform, something David, who had just received his earlier today, had not expected to be able to do, only to find that Cyborg had made, not one, but half a dozen copies, and that the others were waiting for him in his room. Raven had gone over his injuries as soon as they got back to the tower, repairing the cut on his forearm, and doing what she could with the laser burn on his calf, though he still had a bandage on that one under his pant leg, and his leg still throbbed whenever he put too much weight on it.
“Are you all set?” asked Robin.
David nodded. Normally, given his preference for remaining invisible in plain sight, this sort of thing would have scared him half to death. Compared to the events of this afternoon however, it was nothing more than a sideshow. The media was used to the Titans running out and saving people, but with David’s sudden re-appearance, all of them were clamoring to know who he was, and why he had fought in the latest battle alongside the Titans. It was harmless, he supposed, and besides, Robin would be doing most of the talking.
”I think so,” he said back to Robin. “What… what do you want me to do?”
”Just relax,” said Robin, “they’ll ask you a bunch of questions, you don’t have to answer anything personal. Don’t be afraid to say that you can’t answer something, they know how it works.”
David nodded. “Right,” he said. “So… are we going now?”
“Not quite,” said Robin. “There’s still a couple things to do first.”
Always there was something else that had to be done. “What do we need to do?”
“Well, if that was Raven and Beast Boy chasing one another through the ventilation system, then we need to wait for them.”
David hesitated. “I thought… I thought you said they weren’t going to be talking to the reporters. At least… Raven said it was stupid.”
“They’re not,” said Robin, “but they should both be here for this.”
Something in Robin’s voice gave David the impression that he was not talking about the press conference. “… for what?” he asked, and only then did he notice that Cyborg and Starfire had walked over and were standing in a circle around his chair. As he glanced from face to face, trying to figure out what was going on, another black portal appeared from nothingness, spilling both Raven and a very cowed-looking Beast Boy out. Beast Boy was rubbing the back of his head where Raven had no doubt smacked him repeatedly, with her hand if he was lucky.
“This was a field test,” said Robin, fixing David’s attention back on him, “and I wouldn’t call it perfect. You still have a lot to work on. Standing out in the open while people are shooting at you is just not acceptable, and you’re still hesitating more than you should be. You know how close a couple of those shots came to being serious.”
David nodded slightly, suddenly feeling his throat constricting. It wasn’t that he was worried about what Robin was saying now, he knew all of this already. What was beginning to worry him was that it didn’t sound like this was Robin’s main point.
“But… despite all that, when it came down to protecting your teammates, protecting the civilians in danger, when it counted the most, you did what you had to do. You saved that little girl’s life, at great personal risk. If you were a civilian still, they’d call you a hero, but you’re not, so instead…” Robin paused as he glanced at the others, all of whom were smiling, “… instead we’re going to have to call you something else.”
David’s head was beginning to spin. One by one, he looked to the Titans with trepidation and apprehension, and one by one, all he saw was smiles, or in Raven’s case a bemused smirk. Finally he returned his eyes to Robin. “What… what are you… talking about?” he asked hesitantly.
Robin did not answer directly, but instead reached behind him into one of the innumerable compartments on his belt, and drew out a small round, yellow object that David recognized instantly, and which caused his throat to catch and his heart to suddenly start thundering in his ears like a snare drum. It was an object that was close to omnipresent in the tower, churned out by Cyborg by the half dozen every so often to replace ones destroyed, crushed, or otherwise broken, and yet it was, assuredly, the last thing David had expected Robin to pull out.
It was a communicator.
“I’m talking about this,” said Robin.
For a few seconds, David forgot how to speak. He stared blankly at the palm-sized communicator in Robin’s hand, his eyes refusing even to blink. Slowly, with immense effort, he managed to raise his head to look Robin in the mask, and his face asked the question that his voice was suddenly unable to.
Robin simply nodded, and extended the communicator towards him in his open hand. Hesitantly, almost gingerly, David reached out with a trembling hand of his own, and picked it up. It was lighter than he expected, with a case made of titanium and circuits of gold and electrum inside. Gently, he turned it over in his hands, opening it with a press of a button, running his fingers ever-so-lightly over the speaker and screen, as if not completely able to believe that it was real.
“There’s one other question,” said Robin, and David raised his eyes again, his face pale, but not with fear. “I heard what you told those two people whose daughter you rescued, when they asked you what you were called. Is that… the name you’ve decided on?”
David swallowed several times to try and restore his vocal cords to functionality. “I… I think so… yes,” he said. The comment raised several expressions of what appeared to be concern on the Titans’ faces, and he quickly checked to see if it was appropriate or not. “I mean… does… is it all right to use that one?” he asked hastily. “It’s not… already taken or anything, is it?”
“No,” said Robin, “no, it’s not taken, and it works just fine. I just…” Robin looked to the other Titans for a second. “We all assumed you’d prefer something else, what with the history there…”
How to explain this?
“That’s… actually why I picked it,” said David, lowering his head again, and trying to get his words right. Robin raised an eyebrow, and Beast Boy glanced over at Cyborg, but said nothing, as David tried to explain.
“You guys know… my name… David Foster’s not my real name, you all know that, right?” He glanced up to see that nobody was reacting in surprise. He had assumed Raven had told them all, but wasn’t actually certain, but the looks he received indicated that this was not new information. Knowing he had to give an explanation, but not sure of how to explain it without sounding stupid, he started and stopped a few times before finally just saying it.
“I don’t know what my real name is,” he said, “and… I’ve been using David since I was old enough to talk, and I like it, but… I don’t know where I got it from, or if it was me in the first place. And I never… I never had any other name really, not even a nickname. I’ve always just been… well… David.” He glanced up again to ensure nobody was laughing at him, and resumed.
“And now… with this whole thing, and me needing this codename or whatever we call it, I know that I don’t know where they came up with it, or why… or what they meant by calling me this… but the one thing I do know… is that it’s me. I know that it’s… not usually how you guys pick these names, and that… it’s probably kind of weird but… this is the first name I’ve ever had that I actually know is mine. The first one.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “The only one.”
No laughter greeted the silence after this statement, and he looked up at Robin once more.
“So… if it’s all the same to you guys… I think I’ll keep it.”
And judging from the smiles, nods, and glances at one another from the other Titans, it was.
The sound of the journalists outside was becoming audible even within the Tower, and Robin gestured to David that it was about time to speak to them. He stood up carefully, the communicator still held in his hand like a priceless talisman, and as he did, the others clapped him on the back with a giant metal hand and told him he’d done ‘damn good’, or lightly punched him in the shoulder with a smaller gloved hand and mentioned that they’d bet Cyborg ten dollars that he was going to faint when Robin gave him the communicator, or nearly crushed his skeleton with what passed for a light friendly hug and welcomed him ebulliently in flowery language from two different planets, or simply said everything that needed saying with one slight nod of recognition. And once all these things were done, David, surrounded by the other Titans, turned back to Robin, who simply extended his gloved, empty hand, took David’s and shook it firmly.
“Welcome to the Titans… ” said Robin, with only the barest pause before addressing him by his newly-accepted title.
“… Devastator.”
The word resonated inside David’s head like a gong, but for all the times he had repeated it to himself, for all the nights he had laid awake, wondering if this would ever happen, and not knowing if he dreaded it or not, for all the buildup and the months of work and the battles with Cinderblock and who knew what else, hearing Robin call him by that name made what he had done, what he was doing, where he was, and what it all meant more real than all of Cinderblock’s attacks combined.
And as all of them walked towards the front door to confront the flash bulbs and video cameras and reporters with microphones waiting for a statement, in the back of his mind, David knew that the conspiracy that had sent Cinderblock was still after him, was still trying to kill him, or worse, and that he still didn’t know why, but for the first time ever, that thought did not fill him with dread. It was still a threat, of course, still terrifying in its own way, but tempering the dread was a feeling of hope and wonder all rolled together that he couldn’t describe, like the electric anticipation of a football player moments before the big game. He was a Titan. He was a superhero. He could scarcely believe it, indeed he couldn’t believe it, and doubted he’d be able to for a long, long time, yet there it was. The communicator in his hand, and the name Robin had spoken both served to prove it.
He was a superhero.
So the people who were after him were still out there? So he didn’t know who they were, or what they wanted? So they were preparing, even now, new strokes against him and the rest of the Titans?
One glance around him at the others told him everything he needed to know, and he couldn’t stop a smile from spreading over his face as he mentally issued his reply back to whoever they were.
‘You want me?’ he thought, ‘All right then, come and get me.’
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 20: Dear Devastator
"Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget."
- Anonymous
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From the desk of Devastator, Titans Tower, Jump City, California
To:
Malcolm Fisher
c/o The Martha Wayne Memorial Foundation's Center for Foster Children
412 John Muir Ave.
San Francisco, CA
94112
Dear Malcolm,
I'm not sure how this is supposed to work, so if this wasn't what you were expecting to get back, I'm really sorry. It seems like for the last couple weeks, every time I talk to someone I start out by saying 'I've never done this before,' and this is just one more time. Robin said that I should just write back a quick note thanking you for your letter and answering whatever questions I could in a sentence or two, but he's also always telling me that I have to figure out how to do things my own way, so I think I'll go a little overboard if it's all right with you. I'll try to edit out the idiotic parts before I mail it. And before you ask, no, I don't know why I have my own letterhead either. I blame Robin.
So first off, thanks for writing. The others are kind of used to this sort of thing by now, I guess. One day I'll probably be used to it too, but for now... well... let's just say I didn't really expect to be doing this. What else is new, huh? Anyhow, I'll do my best to answer the questions you had, but remember, I'm still pretty new at this, so there's a bunch of stuff I just don't know the answer to, and probably some other things I'm not allowed to talk about. Still, this is sort of a special case, so I'd like to get it right...
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"This is wondrous fun, Beast Boy! I had no idea that the pressing of buttons so as to control the actions of imaginary characters projected onto the television screen was so enjoyable!"
Beast Boy did not reply, hammering on his controller like he was trying to drill through it with his fingers, his eyes wide and glued to the TV-screen, disbelief alternating with desperation on his face. Robin, standing behind the couch where Starfire was seated, had a smirk growing on his face, proportional with Starfire's rapidly-increasing score. David, sitting at the kitchen table on a stool, attempting to read a book on meditation Raven had loaned him, found that he was constantly re-reading the same line without any of it sinking in and glancing over at the screen every few seconds to watch the festivities as Beast Boy grew ever more frantic. The changeling's efforts were in vain however, and all too soon the sound of the end of the round brought the usual cheers and garbled expressions of stunned disbelief, the only difference being who was emitting what.
"Nice job, Starfire!" exclaimed Robin, and he might have said more, but Starfire threw her arms around his shoulders and chest in celebration and flatly crushed the air out of him. Beast Boy meanwhile was staring at the screen as though unable to process the words and numbers it was displaying, the controller held limply in his hands. Just the sight was enough to bring a smile to David's face, and when Beast Boy turned to Starfire and Robin with an expression of dumbfounded astonishment.
"Dude, Star..." he said, his voice reflecting his thunderstruck expression. "How did you do that?"
Starfire, smiling as brightly as she ever did, released Robin (who slowly returned to his normal color) and turned back to Beast Boy. "I pressed the buttons on the controller as you instructed," she said. "Was that not the objective of the game?"
"It... you..." stammered Beast Boy, periodically glancing back at the screen, as if expecting the score to suddenly change back to reflect his vision of reality. David gave up all pretense of reading and just watched, stifling his laughter with his sleeve as he pretended to cough. Robin too seemed content to simply watch Beast Boy's mind flail at what had just happened (and to breathe). It took another half a minute before Beast Boy realized what this actually meant, and his eyes (if possible) seemed to open even wider. "You guys cannot tell Cyborg..."
"Tell me what?" said Cyborg from the doorway, and Beast Boy whirled around to see his best friend leaning against the doorframe with a large box in one hand and a grin on his face. "You mean they shouldn't tell me that Star just kicked your green butt in Ninja Racer? Or they shouldn't tell me it was her first time ever playin'?" Beast Boy seemed to wilt, as Cyborg strode into the common room, setting the box down on the table. "Man, the way you suck it up at that game," said the cybernetic teen with a wry smile, "I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often. Pretty soon David's gonna be the only one left here you can beat."
"Hey!" said David in mock-outrage. "Don't drag me into this. You guys cheat."
"Well if he don't, he'd better start," said Cyborg with a chuckle as he set the box down on the table. "Anyhow y'all, it's that time again."
The others slowly began to gather around the table, leaving David, as always, the only one who wasn't sure what was going on. "What time?" he asked.
"Fan mail time," said Robin as Cyborg pried the top off of the box with one hand and began passing letters and packages out, calling each Titan's name as he did so. Raven's mail he set aside in a separate pile for her to collect later. The others began opening packages and letters, occasionally reading a particularly memorable passage out to the others or expressing their surprise at a particular gift. As always, it took a while, and David, who had seen this a hundred times before, returned his attention to the book, trying to figure out both what it was talking about and why Raven had thought it important enough to suggest reading.
"Robin," said Cyborg, passing out another letter, "Starfire, Robin, me, BB, BB again, Robin, all of us, Raven, Star, me again, Star and Robin both, BB..." Cyborg skipped a beat, "Devastator."
It took a second for everyone, David included, to realize that Cyborg had just called his name. "... wait, what?" he asked as he lowered the book and turned to Cyborg, his eyebrow raising. Cyborg was holding an envelope in his hand, a beaming smile on his face.
"This one's yours, man!" said Cyborg, and he handed the letter to David, who took it mutely. The envelope was plain and unadorned save for the stamp, address, and return address, yet displayed prominently across the front of it was the name 'Devastator', written in black felt pen in an uncertain hand, followed by the address of the Tower. David stared blankly at it for a few moments as Cyborg handed out the rest of the mail, and was still turning it over in his hands when Cyborg had finished and the others were opening their letters and packages.
"You gonna open it?" asked Beast Boy as he tore open a large cardboard box and scattered packing peanuts around the room as he searched for whatever was inside. Carefully, David slipped a finger under the envelope's lip and detached it, drawing a small folded sheet of paper out. As the others laughed or read sections of their letters aloud to one another, or rejoiced over some particular knick-knack or thank-you gift they had received. He unfolded the letter carefully. Written on the top in the same blocky handwriting was a simple introduction.
"Dear Devastator," it said.
He read the letter slowly, quietly, the sounds of the others fading out as he did so, and when he was done, he read it again, still having trouble believing that he was holding it in his hands. The others were finishing with their mail by now, Starfire glowing over the colored construction-paper thank you cards she had received from a class of pre-schoolers she had saved the week before from a collapsing building and Beast Boy savoring the Tofu sampler he had been sent from the owner of the food mart they'd protected from Johnny Rancid's last attempt at urban renewal, but he still sat there, re-reading the letter again and again, until finally Robin walked over behind the counter to make breakfast.
"Anything good?" asked Robin, snapping David out of his reading, and he looked up at Robin and for a second, didn't know what to say. Instead, he handed the letter over to the Boy Wonder, who skimmed it quickly, as did Cyborg, who had come over to help Robin.
"Heh, nice," said Cyborg, with a chuckle. "You remember the first one of these you ever got, Rob?"
"Batman didn't exactly advertise his mailing address," said Robin, rummaging in the cabinet at his knees for a frying pan. Cyborg handed the letter back to David, who took it carefully.
"What do I... am I supposed to..."
"Write back?" asked Cyborg, taking several pounds of bacon out of the freezer. "If you want. You saw how much of it the rest of us get. Won't be long before you're gettin' the same amount."
"Just a quick note's enough," said Robin. "Otherwise you'd be doing nothing but writing thank-you letters before too long."
"Dudes, anyone wanna try some of this?" chimed in Beast Boy, his mouth stuffed with tofu. Without waiting for an answer, he wolfed down a veggie-sausage in a single bite.
"Hey, BB, you know you're s'posed to cook those first, right?" called Cyborg over the hissing of his frying bacon, an instant before Beast Boy's eyes flew open wide and his face turned a lighter shade of green than usual. Cyborg cackled and flipped the bacon with his spatula as Beast Boy lunged towards the nearest trash can and violently spat out the uncooked sausage. "Told ya."
Ignoring what was likely to become round 4,371 of the never-ending meat/tofu debate, David stood up from the counter with the letter in hand. "I think I'll... just write a quick thing back to him, if that's all right." He could think of no particular reason why it wouldn't be, but...
"Sure thing," said Cyborg, "but once BB stops pretending like that stuff he just got is real food, he's probably gonna want to kick your butt at Ninja Racer, I mean seeing as you're the last one in the tower he can still beat and all..."
"Dude!" protested the offended Changeling. "That's it! You and me, Cyborg, right now, head to head matchup, best of three."
As the posturing continued, David decided it was a good time to make an exit, and accordingly he turned away and walked out of the common room, the sounds of Cyborg and Beast Boy's trash talking still filtering down the hallway
"Soon as I finish breakfast, Grass Stain, I'll be happy to show you how it's done. But if you can't beat Starfire, you think you can beat the reigning king of Ninja Racer?"
"Oh yeah? Guess again, tin-man."
David entered the elevator and pressed the button to go to the floor his room was on, and the doors slid shut an instant after Cyborg's anguished wail shook the tower to its very foundations.
"She beat my high score?!"
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Is it true you used to be one of us?
Yes, it's true.
I'm sure there's some kind of reason why I shouldn't be saying this, and I'm sure if and when I show this to Robin he's going to tell me all about it, but Robin's not the one who made a public debut in front of the entire news media and four dozen people he recognized without a mask. And thanks to Marcus... sorry... 'Adonis' deciding that he was going to 'get back at me' the only way he could think of, there's not much point in pretending, even if the DCS people cooperated by not releasing my real name.
Yes, I've lived in one foster care center or another for most of my life, as long back as I could remember. I was even in the one you're in now for a while. It was pretty nice as I remember (compared to that pit up in Redding at least), but I got transferred out of it after a year, so it could be different now. The one big thing I remember most about that place though, was that it was really easy to break into the records office. The lock on the window facing the courtyard doesn't work, and at night you could jimmy it open and get inside. We all did it at least once.
Robin's gonna insist that I take that part out, because I'm supposed to be providing an example or something. It's not that I don't care about that, but we both know what it's like to know that your records are there but that nobody will let you see them. Just don't do anything I wouldn't do while you're in there, or I'll probably get blamed for it. And before you go in, do me a favor and think about it for a while. You... might not want to know what's in those files. I knew a few kids who wished they hadn't. Don't let anyone talk you into it if you'd rather not know. But then you probably know all that already.
What's it like having superpowers?
I always used to think that superpowers would be the most awesome thing in the world. Then I found out I had some. You wouldn't think it, but when you're seven, real, honest-to-God superpowers scare you to death. I didn't quite think they made me into some kind of monster, but I did think they were something to avoid drawing attention to. Now that I know roughly how they work and how to use them... well it's kind of strange really. You get used to them being there and part of you for so long, that you really don't think about them as being "super". The others all use their powers like it's nothing special at all, like how Raven runs the vacuum cleaner around the room with her mind or Beast Boy turns into a rhino whenever he plays football. Mine are a little different, but even so, with all the combat training... I guess you just get used to them.
Sorry if I'm not making much sense, but I'm trying to say that superpowers, like anything else, just sort of become normal after a while. I always thought that a superhero could never get over just how amazing his powers were, and... they are, I mean when I sit down and think about it, they really are. But if I've learned anything being here, it's that you can get used to anything, no matter how weird.
I'm still not making sense, am I? Let's just say, having superpowers is terrifying at first, before you know what they are and how they work, and you're walking around wondering what's wrong with you or how much longer before someone finds out and picks you up. Once you get them figured out though, once you know (roughly) what you're doing with them and how to use them... well there's times when they're more incredible than anything else in the world. Most of the time though, they just are. Like riding a bike or driving a car or turning cartwheels or doing math problems in your head, they're just another thing you can do, and it's not until you step back from them that you realize just what it is you <u>do</u> every day, and how insane that is.
Do the Titans ever follow other superheros?
I'm... not quite sure what you mean by this one. Do you mean other real superheroes, or ones from the comic books? The Titans know a lot of the other superheros around the country and even around the world, which I'm sure is not a surprise to anybody. I've met some of them since I started doing this, people like Aqualad, Speedy, or Bumblebee. We keep up with them all the time certainly, but they're all about our age. They're our friends, more than anything else. I'm guessing you meant people like the JLA.
That one's a little more complicated. I've never met anyone from the JLA, and I wouldn't know what to do if I ever did. Some of us have more to do with the adult heroes than others. Obviously Robin has his connection to Batman, and Beast Boy with the Doom Patrol. By and large though, the adult heroes leave us alone, and we leave them alone. I guess they're trying to make sure we can handle ourselves on our own without calling on them all the time, or maybe they're just busy with their thing. I can't really speak for all the others this time, but the Justice League to me is probably no different than it is to you. I mean... Superman. Superman is sort of what we all want to be like, isn't he, even those of us who <u>do </u>have powers and costumes? Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, The Flash, a lot of people like us are former apprentices of people like that. I guess it depends on each of us if we "follow" them or not, I don't do it much, but that doesn't mean we don't all want to be like them in the end.
And as to made-up superheroes, like from the comics, well...
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David decided, after careful assessment of the facts in question, that either he had lost his mind, or everyone else had.
"There you are!" exclaimed Beast Boy. "C'mon, we gotta get you ready."
The scene before him was such that David had trouble remembering how to form coherent sentences. "... what happened?"
Beast Boy blinked at him. "What? Something wrong?"
David tried to say this in the most direct and rational manner he could. "You're blue."
"Oh," said Beast Boy by way of reply, and he rubbed the back of his head with one gloved hand. "Yeah. It took forever to get it to work. Looks pretty good though, huh?"
'Good' was not the word David was looking for. Beast Boy's green skin had been colored a dark indigo blue, like the sky shortly after dusk. The Changeling apparently thought it was worthy of praise, but David was still getting past the idea that it was face paint, and not some kind of weird chemical accident. Beast Boy however grabbed his wrist and dragged him into the garage, where he saw Starfire and Cyborg both engaged in applying, if not face paint, then other kinds of coloration. Starfire had exchanged her usual Tamaranean uniform for a green jumpsuit, and had (presumably) dyed a streak of white into her lengthy red hair. She was presently engaged in helping Cyborg, who had applied some kind of silver-chrome makeup to the human parts of his body, face included, and was now spray painting his metallic parts the same color.
It was enough to take one back a bit.
"Guys?" asked David, unsure if he wanted to hear the answer. "What's going on?"
Starfire turned around and smiled. "It is Florgarthab!" she explained, as though this removed all possible question as to what in the name of God was going on here, "the Tamaranean festival of imagination and wonder!"
Beast Boy was on-hand to translate. "Star says it's like an alien version of Halloween, 'cept without the candy. We all get dressed up for the day and pretend to be someone else." He grinned enthusiastically as he walked over to one of Cyborg's work benches and picked up what appeared to be a pair of fake fencing swords and swinging them around wildly.
"... oh," said David, "so... what are you doing?"
"Messin' with Robin," said Cyborg evenly as he finished a section of his arm. His voice indicated that this was a wise and virtuous use of time.
"And Raven too, if we can get her out of her room," added Beast Boy, before an over-enthusiastic swing took him off-balance and he upended himself onto the concrete floor.
"But, if this is like a Halloween thing, what are you guys supposed to be?"
"Aw c'mon, man," said Cyborg, setting down his spray can, and stepping forward into the light, which reflected off his polished silver paint like the fender of the T-car. Beast Boy sprang back to his feet and ran over to join him, crossing his arms and leaning against Cyborg confidently, while Starfire hovered several feet in the air, a beaming smile on her face. "You can't guess?"
And then it hit him.
His eyes opened wide and he fell back a step, his hand over his mouth. "Whoa..." he said, "that's... that's completely."
"Genius?" asked Beast Boy, "I know, it was all my idea. Don't worry though, we've got one for you too."
"Me?" said David, suddenly worried again. It wasn't until Cyborg held up the objects that he had sitting on the table next to him that David realized what Beast Boy had in mind...
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"So I'm guessing that the explanation for this is going to make me wish I hadn't asked."
Robin was too busy to respond to Raven's deadpan comment, as he was presently engaged in trying to decide which one of the other Titans he was going to kill first. One eyebrow was raised at least an inch above the other and his mouth was slightly ajar he tried to figure out if this was a bad joke or the work of some particularly perverse villain.
Or both.
Beast Boy appeared in front of him all of a sudden, apparently from nothingness, looking like someone had dropped him in a bucket of blue paint. There were swords in his hands, swords he insisted on swinging about like he was trying to decapitate himself and everyone within five feet, and he had attached what looked like a blue devil's tail to the back of his pants. He paused long enough to grin and shout "en garde!", and then suddenly vanished as though he had been vaporized, which given Raven's tolerance for his antics might well have just happened. More likely he had just taken on an invisibly-small form, a theory confirmed when he appeared all of a sudden perched precariously atop the couch. Cyborg, shining like the polished fender of his car, was standing behind him, talking to Starfire in an accent that sounded like a cheap ripoff of Boris Badanov's from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Starfire herself was flying loops around Cyborg, the kitchen, and everything else, crying out periodically how it was necessary that they all rally to do battle with someone called "the Magnetic man".
Suddenly, coming into the kitchen to get some lunch no longer sounded like such a good idea.
"What are you guys doing?" asked Robin, largely without anything else to ask. Beast Boy (why oh why did it have to be Beast Boy?) rushed over to answer, brandishing his swords like he actually knew what he was doing with them, a plain lie.
"Ve have intruderz!" he shouted in the most atrocious German accent Robin had ever heard. "You are spiez from ze Brotherhood, come to stop us!"
"Get them, comrades!" yelled Cyborg in an attempt at a Russian accent that was, if anything, even worse than Beast Boy's German. Robin was still pondering this when all three of the mis-colored Titans tackled him.
Under normal circumstances, Robin was a match for all the other Titans combined, a fact he had unfortunately proven at least once. At the moment however, he was in no position to make his escape with a closed door behind him, nor did he actually imagine that they were actually going to jump him until it was too late to move. By the time he realized it, Cyborg and Starfire had grabbed him and were dragging him into the center of the room. Beast Boy attempted to do the same to Raven, but Raven was having none of it, and simply phased through the floor. Robin hoped for a second that she would re-appear and get him out of here, but she had apparently returned to her room, leaving him at the mercy of his likely-deranged teammates.
He reminded himself to take this out on her in the next training session.
The three of them dumped him unceremoniously in the center of the room, and began to crow to one another at having captured the "dangerous villain". He had time to notice that Starfire too was talking in what passed for an accent, this time a southern one, and that hers, like Cyborg's and Beast Boy's, was almost unrecognizably bad.
"Um... guys, whatever you're doing, do you think I could just get some lunch? I've got a lot of work to..."
"Florgarthab cannot be ended until sundown," said Starfire, breaking back into her usual voice for a second. "And as you have been captured by the participants, you too must participate. Such are the rules of the festival,"
"Yeah man," said Cyborg, "'sides, we got it all ready for you." He reached behind his back and produced a small single-lensed visor that Robin realized had belonged to the Hive Five member See-More until the Titans' last defeat of the super villain team. It had been hastily repainted in gold, and the lens had red cellophane laminated over it, a feature Robin had a chance to see up close and personal when Cyborg summarily strapped the contraption onto his head over his mask and eyes.
With a sigh, Robin slid the visor back off. "Look, guys," he said, "like I said, I've got a lot of work to do. Can't you go and capture David or something instead?"
A cough from behind him caused him to turn his head, and only then did he notice that David was standing in the back of the room, leaning against the back wall. The kineticist had a long unfastened brown trenchcoat on over his red-orange uniform, and wore a black leather headband around his forehead. In one hand, he held one of Robin's telescoping combat staves, presently extended to full length, and planted on the floor like a flagpole. In his other hand, he held a deck of playing cards.
"It's a little late for that," said David, blushing the color of his uniform at the ridiculousness of what he was doing, but doing it anyhow. Setting the staff against the wall, he slid the Ace of Spades off the top of the deck and held it up in his free hand. Frost formed over the playing card as though it had been plunged into a deep freezer, and then he flung it into the air, where it twisted and fluttered and spun and then suddenly exploded into confetti which rained down upon all three of the other Florgarthab participants, and onto Robin. All three of the others laughed and cheered, addressing one another by their adopted code-names, and all Robin could do was quietly resign himself to getting no work done today.
Again.
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... no comment.
What's the training like?
I don't know what it's like for everyone else, but when Robin's the one training you, it's the hardest thing in the world. I thought I was going to die trying. In fact there were a couple times I wasn't so sure I <u>didn't</u> die trying. It's not just the physical workout, although that stuff's brutal. It's the reaction training, powers training, tactical training... there's no end really. I've seen those documentaries on what Navy SEALS and special forces go through. What we do is kind of like that, but not really. We don't use weapons, for one thing, and we're not trying to kill people, but on the other hand we're going after stuff that not even the special forces would take on. They call us instead.
Once you're up and running though... then it's a little easier. For one thing, you don't have to learn how to run a lap or throw a punch anymore, you can just do it, which means that you're doing more interesting stuff like the obstacle course, or what Robin calls "lateral solution work", which is where he thinks up the craziest challenge he can simulate in the training room (seriously, the last one involved mutant cauliflower), and just sits back to see how we deal with it. It has its ups and downs still, a lot of it's still busy work, but my favorite has to be Freestyle Combat Training.
Picture a game of lasertag, only there's no vests or light guns. It's like a free-for-all with all six of us where we all just try to take each other down however we can. The room's padded up with mats and so that nobody can get hurt, and everyone goes really easy on their powers to make sure, and then Robin (or someone) gives the signal, and we all just go at it. You shoot someone or knock them over with one of your powers, and they're out. Sometimes there's teams, three on three or whatever. Sometimes it's everyone for themselves. Sometimes we all gang up on Robin (usually without letting him know ahead of time). Sometimes it's an endurance test, where one of us has to survive against all the others for as long as they can. There's really no end to all the combinations of stuff we can do in freestyle training, and if you ask me, it beats running laps or blasting pieces of vulcanized rubber out of the air.
What do you guys do when you're not training or fighting?
Well somewhere in there we try to find time to eat and sleep and all that, but you mean down time? We've each got our little routines I guess.
Beast Boy's a video game fanatic. Cyborg and Robin play against him a lot, and so do I, but Beast Boy spends most of his time with that sort of thing, or at least with the TV in some way. I probably shouldn't mention that he's obsessed with cartoons, but honestly I doubt he cares who knows that. If it's not the TV or the Gamestation though, it'll be his comics or his pranks, or his games of stankball (don't ask). Beast Boy's kind of hard to keep track of sometimes. When Cyborg's got a second free, he likes to go down into the garage and work on the car, or on some other crazy project of his. He's the only guy I've ever seen who actually likes doing maintenance. Honestly though, Cy just needs to keep busy, or he gets restless. That's one of the reasons BB and him get along so well, or at least that's my opinion. Whatever else might happen, hanging out with Beast Boy is never dull.
Raven keeps to herself most of the time, but I know she's almost always reading something whenever she gets the chance. Before you ask, I don't know what her favorite genre is. She's loaned me a few things here and there, usually horror or some kind of reference book she thinks I ought to read, but I've seen her with everything from Sci-fi to historical fiction to books that look like they might be able to eat you if you messed with them. If she's not reading though, she'll usually be meditating somewhere in the tower. Starfire's a lot more active than the others, and she likes to be around other people more of the time. She'll be taking care of Silkie, or watching one of her documentaries, or preparing for one of her Tamaranean festivals, or going out to the mall or amusement park or whatnot. Starfire always seems to be busy with something, and usually something with someone else (and more often than not, with Robin). Robin doesn't get a lot of free time, and I think he prefers it that way. He's always doing something more "official", dealing with the press, paying bills, arranging for contractors to come and patch up whatever happened to the Tower last week. When he does get some time off, he likes to spend it training. It's no secret that he doesn't have any powers except his own skills, and so he likes to keep those in top shape. Usually it takes one of the others, Beast Boy or Cyborg or most often Starfire to get him to unwind with more relaxing stuff.
Of course all that's when we're not doing things together. Wednesday night is movie night, for example, and it rotates between us who gets to pick what to watch. On days with good weather, Starfire or Beast Boy will drag everyone to the park, or just up to the roof of the tower for a game of volleyball or football or just hanging out (getting tackled by Cyborg is... quite a thing). Those days are really the most fun, I think. I'm pretty good at occupying myself around the Tower, any of us from the system would be. There's more to do here than you could do in a hundred years, between everything I mentioned above, but...
I dunno... it's just hard to separate everything out like that. When we're not fighting, training, eating, or sleeping, when we're hanging out, we're just doing what anyone else would be. The only real difference is what we do between those times. I know, it's kind of hard to think of people like Robin or Starfire just being like anyone else, but it's really just like that. Sort of...
Ugh, I'm not making any sense. I'll come back to this section.
So do you have a favorite Titan?
Aw, come on, you don't actually think I'm gonna answer that, do you? I'm going to have to show this to Robin at least, just to make sure I don't accidentally give away some kind of deep secret that could get us all killed (unlikely, I know, but you can't be too careful). I'm not about to put down that I like one of the others more than another and then give it to them to read.
Seriously though... when I first got here, I thought they were larger than life, just like we all do. I mean, they were superheroes after all. The first time I ever saw them fight, it was like watching one of those old claymation movies with the Greek gods and whatever, only it was happening right in front of me. The first month or so, I think they all thought I was afraid of them. I guess I was afraid of them, but mostly it was just awe, you know? And I think that made them a little uncomfortable, so they tried, they really tried to get me past that, so that I wouldn't jump whenever one of them asked me a question, and so I'd just treat them normally, like they were anyone else.
Well it didn't work. At least not totally.
The Titans, all five of them... they're... they're like nobody I've ever met. Not just because they have superpowers, not because they fight monsters and aliens and armies, not even because they keep an entire city safe (not that those aren't amazing things). Those are the reasons everyone thinks they're amazing, and the reason I used to think it. But there's more to it than that, there's more to them than just a bunch of powers and a list of bad guys they've beaten, and I don't know if I can explain what I mean and still make sense. They're just...
There's days where I can't believe that people like them exist. Not superheroes, people.
I wouldn't be here, writing this to you, in more ways than one, if it wasn't for each one of the five of them. All of them. Any of them. Starfire's probably the most generous, kindest person I've ever met. Yes, I know what happened when she first got to this planet, or at least I've seen the archival footage. I don't care what it looks like there or on TV when she's fighting. She'd sooner die than hurt someone's feelings, and given the choice, she'd be friends with everyone on the planet, and I think she could do it. It takes a cold person to not like Starfire. Everyone's afraid of superheroes a little bit, but nobody who really knows her is afraid of Starfire, at least nobody who shouldn't be.
Cyborg, despite everything he's been through in the last few months (long story), is always there to just drag you back to your senses if you're scared or worried or anything. I have no idea how he does it. I know he gets mad, (everyone knows when Cyborg gets mad), but whenever I'm feeling stuck or like I can't do something, he's right there. You talk to Cyborg, and you get the idea that he's basically seen it all. The guy isn't even 17 yet, but he just makes sense, you know? He's one of those guys who's just like a rock. Solid, dependable, always there when you need him.
In a way, Beast Boy is too, and if I don't know how Cyborg does it, I'll <u>never</u> know how Beast Boy does. You'd never think it to meet them (or maybe you would), but Starfire and Beast Boy are a lot alike. It's like he can't stand the idea that there's someone having a bad day, and he'll make you feel better even if it means you're so mad at him you forget what was wrong in the first place. Nothing wakes you back up to reality like a water balloon full of motor oil hitting you in the face (yes, I've fallen for this more than once). He even manages to cheer <u>Raven</u> up when nobody else can (no, she won't admit it, but she's not as impossible to read as she pretends to be). Let's just say it takes a lot of guts to bother Raven when she's in a bad mood.
Robin... I mean what can you say about Robin? Yeah, he's not the most relaxed guy in the world, and he and Cyborg have had their... issues before (I'm pretty sure that's not a surprise to anybody), but even Cyborg's admitted to me that Robin brings things out of you that you didn't even know you had. It's like he can see right through you and see past all the junk and the fear and the doubt and figure out what you might become with a hell of a lot of work, and then he turns you into it. He's done that for all of the others, and he's certainly done it for me. And it doesn't matter how much work he has to put in to do it to you, he'll do it without even thinking twice, just <u>because</u>. There's nobody else like Robin in the world, I'm sure of that.
No, not even the person you're thinking of.
And as to Raven, yeah, it's true, she's pretty closed off a lot of the time. She's got a sense of humor like a desert, she's got zero tolerance for stupidity, and she scares the hell out of me (I don't care who reads that, it's not a secret), but like I said before, Raven's not as hard to read as she thinks she is, and anyone who says she's a goth or a witch doesn't know what they're talking about (okay, she <u>might</u> be a witch, but so what? Starfire's an alien). She's very, very protective of the others, of everybody really, and whatever the papers might say, she'd do absolutely anything for them (yes, even Beast Boy, not that she'd admit it). I mean, I'll be honest, Raven and I had our... problems when I first got here, but we've been working them out, and she's been helping me an huge amount, especially since that fight with Cinderblock. I don't think I'd say I was 'close' to Raven, I don't think she lets people get close to her, but I think we finally sort of... understand each other a little bit.
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"Raven?"
The mail sack felt like a backpack full of rocks to Beast Boy as he knocked on the door with one hand, his padded gloves making a muffled noise against the solid metal door. No sound or signal emerged from inside, and Beast Boy groaned, sliding the bag off his shoulder and dropping it onto the floor of the hallway with a thud. He knocked again, a bit louder this time. "Hey, uh, Raven?" he said, "I've got your mail here." He shoved the bag with his foot, and it moved an inch or so. "Some of this stuff weighs a ton. You wanna see what's in it? Don't worry, I didn't booby trap it or anything."
Neither the door, nor anything behind the door said a word in reply. Beast Boy groaned. "C'mon, Rae," he said, "I know you're in there. Robin said you were in your room." He crossed his arms, facing the door stubbornly as though it was going to respond to him. "I'm not leaving until you at least open the door to take this stuff." As though to indicate his seriousness in this regard, Beast Boy impassively stared at the door, no doubt expecting it to open up and reveal Raven, annoyed or otherwise. It did no such thing, and after several minutes of waiting, Beast Boy's resolve began to wane. Tentatively, he knocked on the door again. "Raven? You there?" he asked. He glanced up and down the corridor, looking for any sign of someone approaching, but neither sight nor sound of anyone could be detected even to his senses.
"Nobody home, I guess," said Beast Boy to himself, but as in reply, no sooner had he said it than there was a noise from within Raven's room, a series of soft 'thuds', like a small landslide of objects landing on the floor. The changeling froze, but there was no other noise to be heard, not even when he crept back to the door and placed his ear to it. He thought he could hear breathing from within the room, soft and even.
"Raven?" he asked again, but he knew there would be no answer. He was starting to get a bit worried. It was not at all uncommon for Raven to tell him to go away when he pestered her, but to say nothing was... not normal. Raven wasn't the sort of person who spared your feelings. He supposed she could be asleep, but it was the middle of the day and Raven wasn't the sort to take naps either. Of course she could have been meditating, but then she would have already yelled at him to leave her alone. Besides, what was that sound?
"Raven, are you okay?" he asked, "I'm... I'm gonna come in, okay?" The door to Raven's room was a sliding steel frame-door, just like all the others, built by Cyborg to withstand everything from battering rams to military-grade munitions. It had not however been built to withstand Beast Boy. It was a trivial matter to change into the form of a gnat and slip under the door. Ordinarily of course, this was unspeakably foolish. Raven would skin him alive for a stunt like this under almost any conditions, but all he wanted to do was make sure that everything was all right... at least that was what he told himself.
And when he finally got inside, he forgot all about Raven killing him, as his insect mouth fell open wide
Raven's room was a mess.
A relative term to be sure. It was not the same deep-seeded disaster zone as Beast Boy's room, which had not been fully cleaned since he had first moved into it. Everything was still more or less in place here in Raven's room, save for the books. Hundreds of books were scattered all over the place, piled on the floor like heaps of treasure in a dragon's lair, hard and softbound both, books written in English and Latin and scripts that Beast Boy couldn't even begin to identify. Behind them, still in place against the walls, Raven's bookshelves stood denuded of their contents.
It took Beast Boy a second to find Raven. The sorceress was at her desk, a single desk lamp illuminating the scene. The desk was completely covered in books, manuscripts, and tomes of uncertain source, one of which, a gigantic reference work that appeared to be longer than everything Beast Boy had ever read put together, Raven was using as a pillow, her head and arms draped over it, fast asleep. As Beast Boy resumed human form and quietly approached, he saw that one of the stacks of books on the desk had capsized, avalanching down onto the ground in a heap. No doubt that was what he had heard. The sound of the heavy hardbound textbooks crashing down onto the un-carpeted ground had apparently not stirred her.
Silently for once, Beast Boy approached the desk. Raven was quite clearly asleep and oblivious to his presence, her head on its side, facing him, but with her eyes shut. Her mouth was moving, making words in her sleep, her brow was furrowed, and her hand twitched every few seconds, her fingernails scraping over the surface of the desk. As Beast Boy drew closer, he could make out some of the titles of the books, which as always seemed to be the exact last things he would ever try to read. "A Comparative Study of Metahuman Psychology", a well worn blue-covered hardback book propped against Raven's hand, "Interpreting Mindscapes", a tie-die-colored softbound book standing open on the back of the desk, and the laughably-named "Brief History of Paranormal Encounters", which despite the title, was the size of a large dictionary, and looked about as interesting. Beast Boy couldn't make hair nor hide of what any of these things were about... but none of them looked like the sort of reading anyone, even Raven, would do for fun.
Partially obscured underneath the books however, was a large manila folder laying flat and open with what looked like legal documents inside. Beast Boy couldn't tell what they said without getting closer, but he didn't have to, for the colorful watermark on top of each page read "California Department of Child Services", and the folder itself was stamped with the words "Permanent Record"
Suddenly Raven seemed to tense up, her teeth baring into a snarl, her fists balling up, knocking several more books off her desk. She shook her head, mouthing words between clenched teeth but making no sound other than the rattling of her chair legs on the floor. Abandoning caution, Beast Boy jumped forward, but was an instant too late as the chair suddenly slipped out from under Raven and overturned, spilling her onto the floor, several more large volumes following her down in a heap.
That woke her up.
Raven blinked awake with a stuttering cough, as the dust from fallen books wafted through the air. When finally she had blinked the dust out of her eyes, only then did she notice Beast Boy crouching down over her, offering a hand.
"Dude," said Beast Boy, "Raven, are you okay?"
Raven seemed completely out of sorts, having just woken up from whatever in the world had just happened. Perhaps this was why she did not instantly react with fire and brimstone. "Beast Boy?" she asked, sounding confused and uncertain. Semi-automatically, she knocked the spilled books off herself and slowly got back up, declining Beast Boy's outstretched hand, but not slapping it away or hurling him through the ceiling either, which was certainly an improvement over the normal reaction his presence here would have engendered.
"What happened?" asked Beast Boy, looking around the room at the spilled and discarded books.
"Nothing happened," said Raven stiffly, still clearly out of sorts. "What are you doing in my room?"
There was more than a hint of menace to that question, and Beast Boy backed up a step or two. "I was just delivering your mail!" he protested. "I heard something collapse and wanted to make sure everything was okay." He cringed, expecting Raven to zap him with something, or at least yell and scream, but she was still somewhat disoriented at having been randomly awoken by falling off her desk, and she simply sat down again with a tired sigh.
"Just... get out of my room," she said as she picked the dictionary-sized book up and resumed thumbing through it, paying him no further mind. Instead of following her instructions however, which would have been the sane thing to do, he walked carefully over to her desk, bound and determined to press his luck.
"What is all this stuff?"
"They're called 'books'," said Raven irritably, "you might have heard of them? They're what some people do instead of watching TV all day."
Beast Boy ignored the jibe as he looked around at more of the books. The titles were all reference titles, "A Study of this" and "The Authoritative that". It didn't make sense. Sure, Raven liked to read, but...
"Are these Robin's?" he asked lamely, picking one of the books up off the floor. It was thicker than the Gamestation, written by somebody named "Garrick". Several of the pages were dog-eared, and he casually opened it to one of the marked sections, only to find pages upon pages of text so dense that even looking at them made his head spin.
"Some of them," said Raven sharply without looking up. "Weren't you supposed to be leaving?" Once more, he ignored her, flipping through the pages hoping for a picture or two, but there was nothing except diagrams of the brain marked with pointers and a whole bunch of long words. He was about to give the book back to Raven when suddenly he came to another marked page that had underlines and other marks written all over it in pencil in Raven's crisp handwriting. One of these marks in particular caught his eye, as it was no doubt intended to, for the words were underlined three times and circled in heavy lines.
'Beast Boy', said the note.
"Beast Boy!" said Raven, snapping Beast Boy back to the present. Only now did he notice that she had stood up again and was looming in front of him. With a snap, she slammed the book shut in his hands and snatched it away from him. "Go away," she said, a final warning before the fireworks that would no doubt come.
But Beast Boy still didn't move. The threat she was making had been driven out of his mind by the realization of just how tired Raven looked. There were dark circles under her violet eyes, her eyelids seemed to be drooping, and even her angry stare and threatening posture were almost half-hearted, as though she was about to fall asleep again where she stood.
"Dude, Raven," said Beast Boy, "what's wrong? You look like you stayed up all night playing Ninja Racer."
"I'm just... I'm just tired, okay?" snapped Raven. "I haven't been sleeping all that great, thanks to people barging in here whenever they feel like it."
"You fell asleep at your desk! I've never even seen Robin do that! What're all these books for? And how come I'm in one of them?"
That question took Raven back a second. "What?" she asked. "You're not in..."
"You wrote my name in that one you've got there," said Beast Boy, "and you even circled it. What are you doing?"
"I'm not doing anything," protested Raven. "It's just a little research."
Beast Boy's eyes widened as he gestured around. "This is a little research?"
Anger shot through Raven's eyes. "It is when you have more than half a brain!" she snapped. "Now I'm not telling you again! Get out!"
The walls shook with the last words of Raven's demand, but Beast Boy folded his arms in front of his chest and tried to look resolute. "Not until you tell me what's going on here."
"How many times do I have to tell you there's nothing going on?" demanded Raven.
"The last time you said that, I got eaten by your beauty mirror, remember?"
"You mean you broke into my room and tried to play with a sophisticated meditation tool? That's my fault now?"
"No," said Beast Boy, "but since I'm gonna keep looking until I figure it out anyway, you could just tell me what you're doing instead of waiting until I get sucked into your head this time."
Raven looked like she wanted to say any one of a hundred different things, probably all of them variations on the theme of "no", but either they all got in the way of one another, or something else prevented her from saying it. Beast Boy simply tried to look like his mind was irrevocably made up, under the theory that predators could smell fear.
Perhaps it worked.
With a sigh of extreme exasperation, Raven gritted her teeth and practically hissed out an explanation, as the light bulb in her desklamp flickered and rattled.
"I'm just looking into a few things, okay? It's got nothing to do with you."
"Then how come my name's in your book?"
"I was making some notes. It's not about you."
"So then who's it about? David?" asked Beast Boy. "I thought you said we could trust him now."
"It's not about trusting him," said Raven, "I'm just trying to see if there's anything else I can do to help him."
Beast Boy didn't respond for a few seconds. "Uhhh... okay..." he finally said, and if anything, that reply only seemed to make Raven angrier.
"What?" she snapped.
"Just... you're doing that so much you fell asleep at your desk?"
"Well since all you seem to try to teach him is how to play those stupid games of yours, someone has to try and figure out how to make him useful."
Beast Boy dodged the bait. "So... that's why you've got his permanent record? And all those books?"
Now it was Raven's turn to fold her arms. "Yes."
Beast Boy didn't say anything to that for a second, watching Raven with concern. He apparently waited too long, for Raven's frail patience was already worn out.
"Now if you don't mind, Beast Boy, I'm busy. You can either leave through the door, or the window." Given that Raven's windows didn't open, that was not exactly a small threat. Still, something about this worried him. He backtracked slowly towards the door, Raven watching his every move, but before he reached it, he turned around once more.
"Raven,"
"What?!"
"Are you sure... you didn't find anything in David's head that time?"
"Beast Boy," said Raven, "I am not telling you again. I did not find anything except what I told Robin and David about." Her eyes turned were begining to tinge red with anger as she summoned a black aura around her fists. "Now so help me, if you don't leave this room inthree seconds..."
Beast Boy didn't wait around long enough to hear what was going to happen to him in three seconds. He yelped and turned and ran out the door, getting halfway down the hall before tripping and landing flat on his face on the floor. Behind him, the door slid shut quietly, solemn and blank once more, though his acute hearing could pick up the sound of Raven sitting back down at her desk once again. He picked himself up off the ground, dusting his uniform off, still watching the sealed entrance to Raven's room. Raven was right about one thing at least, shehad been very clear, both then and now, about what she had seen.
But that didn't explain the fear in Raven's eyes when he had asked her, nor did it explain the almost imperceptible hesitation in her voice before she denied seeing anything...
"Truly great friends are hard to find, difficult to leave, and impossible to forget."
- Anonymous
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From the desk of Devastator, Titans Tower, Jump City, California
To:
Malcolm Fisher
c/o The Martha Wayne Memorial Foundation's Center for Foster Children
412 John Muir Ave.
San Francisco, CA
94112
Dear Malcolm,
I'm not sure how this is supposed to work, so if this wasn't what you were expecting to get back, I'm really sorry. It seems like for the last couple weeks, every time I talk to someone I start out by saying 'I've never done this before,' and this is just one more time. Robin said that I should just write back a quick note thanking you for your letter and answering whatever questions I could in a sentence or two, but he's also always telling me that I have to figure out how to do things my own way, so I think I'll go a little overboard if it's all right with you. I'll try to edit out the idiotic parts before I mail it. And before you ask, no, I don't know why I have my own letterhead either. I blame Robin.
So first off, thanks for writing. The others are kind of used to this sort of thing by now, I guess. One day I'll probably be used to it too, but for now... well... let's just say I didn't really expect to be doing this. What else is new, huh? Anyhow, I'll do my best to answer the questions you had, but remember, I'm still pretty new at this, so there's a bunch of stuff I just don't know the answer to, and probably some other things I'm not allowed to talk about. Still, this is sort of a special case, so I'd like to get it right...
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"This is wondrous fun, Beast Boy! I had no idea that the pressing of buttons so as to control the actions of imaginary characters projected onto the television screen was so enjoyable!"
Beast Boy did not reply, hammering on his controller like he was trying to drill through it with his fingers, his eyes wide and glued to the TV-screen, disbelief alternating with desperation on his face. Robin, standing behind the couch where Starfire was seated, had a smirk growing on his face, proportional with Starfire's rapidly-increasing score. David, sitting at the kitchen table on a stool, attempting to read a book on meditation Raven had loaned him, found that he was constantly re-reading the same line without any of it sinking in and glancing over at the screen every few seconds to watch the festivities as Beast Boy grew ever more frantic. The changeling's efforts were in vain however, and all too soon the sound of the end of the round brought the usual cheers and garbled expressions of stunned disbelief, the only difference being who was emitting what.
"Nice job, Starfire!" exclaimed Robin, and he might have said more, but Starfire threw her arms around his shoulders and chest in celebration and flatly crushed the air out of him. Beast Boy meanwhile was staring at the screen as though unable to process the words and numbers it was displaying, the controller held limply in his hands. Just the sight was enough to bring a smile to David's face, and when Beast Boy turned to Starfire and Robin with an expression of dumbfounded astonishment.
"Dude, Star..." he said, his voice reflecting his thunderstruck expression. "How did you do that?"
Starfire, smiling as brightly as she ever did, released Robin (who slowly returned to his normal color) and turned back to Beast Boy. "I pressed the buttons on the controller as you instructed," she said. "Was that not the objective of the game?"
"It... you..." stammered Beast Boy, periodically glancing back at the screen, as if expecting the score to suddenly change back to reflect his vision of reality. David gave up all pretense of reading and just watched, stifling his laughter with his sleeve as he pretended to cough. Robin too seemed content to simply watch Beast Boy's mind flail at what had just happened (and to breathe). It took another half a minute before Beast Boy realized what this actually meant, and his eyes (if possible) seemed to open even wider. "You guys cannot tell Cyborg..."
"Tell me what?" said Cyborg from the doorway, and Beast Boy whirled around to see his best friend leaning against the doorframe with a large box in one hand and a grin on his face. "You mean they shouldn't tell me that Star just kicked your green butt in Ninja Racer? Or they shouldn't tell me it was her first time ever playin'?" Beast Boy seemed to wilt, as Cyborg strode into the common room, setting the box down on the table. "Man, the way you suck it up at that game," said the cybernetic teen with a wry smile, "I'm surprised this doesn't happen more often. Pretty soon David's gonna be the only one left here you can beat."
"Hey!" said David in mock-outrage. "Don't drag me into this. You guys cheat."
"Well if he don't, he'd better start," said Cyborg with a chuckle as he set the box down on the table. "Anyhow y'all, it's that time again."
The others slowly began to gather around the table, leaving David, as always, the only one who wasn't sure what was going on. "What time?" he asked.
"Fan mail time," said Robin as Cyborg pried the top off of the box with one hand and began passing letters and packages out, calling each Titan's name as he did so. Raven's mail he set aside in a separate pile for her to collect later. The others began opening packages and letters, occasionally reading a particularly memorable passage out to the others or expressing their surprise at a particular gift. As always, it took a while, and David, who had seen this a hundred times before, returned his attention to the book, trying to figure out both what it was talking about and why Raven had thought it important enough to suggest reading.
"Robin," said Cyborg, passing out another letter, "Starfire, Robin, me, BB, BB again, Robin, all of us, Raven, Star, me again, Star and Robin both, BB..." Cyborg skipped a beat, "Devastator."
It took a second for everyone, David included, to realize that Cyborg had just called his name. "... wait, what?" he asked as he lowered the book and turned to Cyborg, his eyebrow raising. Cyborg was holding an envelope in his hand, a beaming smile on his face.
"This one's yours, man!" said Cyborg, and he handed the letter to David, who took it mutely. The envelope was plain and unadorned save for the stamp, address, and return address, yet displayed prominently across the front of it was the name 'Devastator', written in black felt pen in an uncertain hand, followed by the address of the Tower. David stared blankly at it for a few moments as Cyborg handed out the rest of the mail, and was still turning it over in his hands when Cyborg had finished and the others were opening their letters and packages.
"You gonna open it?" asked Beast Boy as he tore open a large cardboard box and scattered packing peanuts around the room as he searched for whatever was inside. Carefully, David slipped a finger under the envelope's lip and detached it, drawing a small folded sheet of paper out. As the others laughed or read sections of their letters aloud to one another, or rejoiced over some particular knick-knack or thank-you gift they had received. He unfolded the letter carefully. Written on the top in the same blocky handwriting was a simple introduction.
"Dear Devastator," it said.
He read the letter slowly, quietly, the sounds of the others fading out as he did so, and when he was done, he read it again, still having trouble believing that he was holding it in his hands. The others were finishing with their mail by now, Starfire glowing over the colored construction-paper thank you cards she had received from a class of pre-schoolers she had saved the week before from a collapsing building and Beast Boy savoring the Tofu sampler he had been sent from the owner of the food mart they'd protected from Johnny Rancid's last attempt at urban renewal, but he still sat there, re-reading the letter again and again, until finally Robin walked over behind the counter to make breakfast.
"Anything good?" asked Robin, snapping David out of his reading, and he looked up at Robin and for a second, didn't know what to say. Instead, he handed the letter over to the Boy Wonder, who skimmed it quickly, as did Cyborg, who had come over to help Robin.
"Heh, nice," said Cyborg, with a chuckle. "You remember the first one of these you ever got, Rob?"
"Batman didn't exactly advertise his mailing address," said Robin, rummaging in the cabinet at his knees for a frying pan. Cyborg handed the letter back to David, who took it carefully.
"What do I... am I supposed to..."
"Write back?" asked Cyborg, taking several pounds of bacon out of the freezer. "If you want. You saw how much of it the rest of us get. Won't be long before you're gettin' the same amount."
"Just a quick note's enough," said Robin. "Otherwise you'd be doing nothing but writing thank-you letters before too long."
"Dudes, anyone wanna try some of this?" chimed in Beast Boy, his mouth stuffed with tofu. Without waiting for an answer, he wolfed down a veggie-sausage in a single bite.
"Hey, BB, you know you're s'posed to cook those first, right?" called Cyborg over the hissing of his frying bacon, an instant before Beast Boy's eyes flew open wide and his face turned a lighter shade of green than usual. Cyborg cackled and flipped the bacon with his spatula as Beast Boy lunged towards the nearest trash can and violently spat out the uncooked sausage. "Told ya."
Ignoring what was likely to become round 4,371 of the never-ending meat/tofu debate, David stood up from the counter with the letter in hand. "I think I'll... just write a quick thing back to him, if that's all right." He could think of no particular reason why it wouldn't be, but...
"Sure thing," said Cyborg, "but once BB stops pretending like that stuff he just got is real food, he's probably gonna want to kick your butt at Ninja Racer, I mean seeing as you're the last one in the tower he can still beat and all..."
"Dude!" protested the offended Changeling. "That's it! You and me, Cyborg, right now, head to head matchup, best of three."
As the posturing continued, David decided it was a good time to make an exit, and accordingly he turned away and walked out of the common room, the sounds of Cyborg and Beast Boy's trash talking still filtering down the hallway
"Soon as I finish breakfast, Grass Stain, I'll be happy to show you how it's done. But if you can't beat Starfire, you think you can beat the reigning king of Ninja Racer?"
"Oh yeah? Guess again, tin-man."
David entered the elevator and pressed the button to go to the floor his room was on, and the doors slid shut an instant after Cyborg's anguished wail shook the tower to its very foundations.
"She beat my high score?!"
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Is it true you used to be one of us?
Yes, it's true.
I'm sure there's some kind of reason why I shouldn't be saying this, and I'm sure if and when I show this to Robin he's going to tell me all about it, but Robin's not the one who made a public debut in front of the entire news media and four dozen people he recognized without a mask. And thanks to Marcus... sorry... 'Adonis' deciding that he was going to 'get back at me' the only way he could think of, there's not much point in pretending, even if the DCS people cooperated by not releasing my real name.
Yes, I've lived in one foster care center or another for most of my life, as long back as I could remember. I was even in the one you're in now for a while. It was pretty nice as I remember (compared to that pit up in Redding at least), but I got transferred out of it after a year, so it could be different now. The one big thing I remember most about that place though, was that it was really easy to break into the records office. The lock on the window facing the courtyard doesn't work, and at night you could jimmy it open and get inside. We all did it at least once.
Robin's gonna insist that I take that part out, because I'm supposed to be providing an example or something. It's not that I don't care about that, but we both know what it's like to know that your records are there but that nobody will let you see them. Just don't do anything I wouldn't do while you're in there, or I'll probably get blamed for it. And before you go in, do me a favor and think about it for a while. You... might not want to know what's in those files. I knew a few kids who wished they hadn't. Don't let anyone talk you into it if you'd rather not know. But then you probably know all that already.
What's it like having superpowers?
I always used to think that superpowers would be the most awesome thing in the world. Then I found out I had some. You wouldn't think it, but when you're seven, real, honest-to-God superpowers scare you to death. I didn't quite think they made me into some kind of monster, but I did think they were something to avoid drawing attention to. Now that I know roughly how they work and how to use them... well it's kind of strange really. You get used to them being there and part of you for so long, that you really don't think about them as being "super". The others all use their powers like it's nothing special at all, like how Raven runs the vacuum cleaner around the room with her mind or Beast Boy turns into a rhino whenever he plays football. Mine are a little different, but even so, with all the combat training... I guess you just get used to them.
Sorry if I'm not making much sense, but I'm trying to say that superpowers, like anything else, just sort of become normal after a while. I always thought that a superhero could never get over just how amazing his powers were, and... they are, I mean when I sit down and think about it, they really are. But if I've learned anything being here, it's that you can get used to anything, no matter how weird.
I'm still not making sense, am I? Let's just say, having superpowers is terrifying at first, before you know what they are and how they work, and you're walking around wondering what's wrong with you or how much longer before someone finds out and picks you up. Once you get them figured out though, once you know (roughly) what you're doing with them and how to use them... well there's times when they're more incredible than anything else in the world. Most of the time though, they just are. Like riding a bike or driving a car or turning cartwheels or doing math problems in your head, they're just another thing you can do, and it's not until you step back from them that you realize just what it is you <u>do</u> every day, and how insane that is.
Do the Titans ever follow other superheros?
I'm... not quite sure what you mean by this one. Do you mean other real superheroes, or ones from the comic books? The Titans know a lot of the other superheros around the country and even around the world, which I'm sure is not a surprise to anybody. I've met some of them since I started doing this, people like Aqualad, Speedy, or Bumblebee. We keep up with them all the time certainly, but they're all about our age. They're our friends, more than anything else. I'm guessing you meant people like the JLA.
That one's a little more complicated. I've never met anyone from the JLA, and I wouldn't know what to do if I ever did. Some of us have more to do with the adult heroes than others. Obviously Robin has his connection to Batman, and Beast Boy with the Doom Patrol. By and large though, the adult heroes leave us alone, and we leave them alone. I guess they're trying to make sure we can handle ourselves on our own without calling on them all the time, or maybe they're just busy with their thing. I can't really speak for all the others this time, but the Justice League to me is probably no different than it is to you. I mean... Superman. Superman is sort of what we all want to be like, isn't he, even those of us who <u>do </u>have powers and costumes? Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, The Flash, a lot of people like us are former apprentices of people like that. I guess it depends on each of us if we "follow" them or not, I don't do it much, but that doesn't mean we don't all want to be like them in the end.
And as to made-up superheroes, like from the comics, well...
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David decided, after careful assessment of the facts in question, that either he had lost his mind, or everyone else had.
"There you are!" exclaimed Beast Boy. "C'mon, we gotta get you ready."
The scene before him was such that David had trouble remembering how to form coherent sentences. "... what happened?"
Beast Boy blinked at him. "What? Something wrong?"
David tried to say this in the most direct and rational manner he could. "You're blue."
"Oh," said Beast Boy by way of reply, and he rubbed the back of his head with one gloved hand. "Yeah. It took forever to get it to work. Looks pretty good though, huh?"
'Good' was not the word David was looking for. Beast Boy's green skin had been colored a dark indigo blue, like the sky shortly after dusk. The Changeling apparently thought it was worthy of praise, but David was still getting past the idea that it was face paint, and not some kind of weird chemical accident. Beast Boy however grabbed his wrist and dragged him into the garage, where he saw Starfire and Cyborg both engaged in applying, if not face paint, then other kinds of coloration. Starfire had exchanged her usual Tamaranean uniform for a green jumpsuit, and had (presumably) dyed a streak of white into her lengthy red hair. She was presently engaged in helping Cyborg, who had applied some kind of silver-chrome makeup to the human parts of his body, face included, and was now spray painting his metallic parts the same color.
It was enough to take one back a bit.
"Guys?" asked David, unsure if he wanted to hear the answer. "What's going on?"
Starfire turned around and smiled. "It is Florgarthab!" she explained, as though this removed all possible question as to what in the name of God was going on here, "the Tamaranean festival of imagination and wonder!"
Beast Boy was on-hand to translate. "Star says it's like an alien version of Halloween, 'cept without the candy. We all get dressed up for the day and pretend to be someone else." He grinned enthusiastically as he walked over to one of Cyborg's work benches and picked up what appeared to be a pair of fake fencing swords and swinging them around wildly.
"... oh," said David, "so... what are you doing?"
"Messin' with Robin," said Cyborg evenly as he finished a section of his arm. His voice indicated that this was a wise and virtuous use of time.
"And Raven too, if we can get her out of her room," added Beast Boy, before an over-enthusiastic swing took him off-balance and he upended himself onto the concrete floor.
"But, if this is like a Halloween thing, what are you guys supposed to be?"
"Aw c'mon, man," said Cyborg, setting down his spray can, and stepping forward into the light, which reflected off his polished silver paint like the fender of the T-car. Beast Boy sprang back to his feet and ran over to join him, crossing his arms and leaning against Cyborg confidently, while Starfire hovered several feet in the air, a beaming smile on her face. "You can't guess?"
And then it hit him.
His eyes opened wide and he fell back a step, his hand over his mouth. "Whoa..." he said, "that's... that's completely."
"Genius?" asked Beast Boy, "I know, it was all my idea. Don't worry though, we've got one for you too."
"Me?" said David, suddenly worried again. It wasn't until Cyborg held up the objects that he had sitting on the table next to him that David realized what Beast Boy had in mind...
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"So I'm guessing that the explanation for this is going to make me wish I hadn't asked."
Robin was too busy to respond to Raven's deadpan comment, as he was presently engaged in trying to decide which one of the other Titans he was going to kill first. One eyebrow was raised at least an inch above the other and his mouth was slightly ajar he tried to figure out if this was a bad joke or the work of some particularly perverse villain.
Or both.
Beast Boy appeared in front of him all of a sudden, apparently from nothingness, looking like someone had dropped him in a bucket of blue paint. There were swords in his hands, swords he insisted on swinging about like he was trying to decapitate himself and everyone within five feet, and he had attached what looked like a blue devil's tail to the back of his pants. He paused long enough to grin and shout "en garde!", and then suddenly vanished as though he had been vaporized, which given Raven's tolerance for his antics might well have just happened. More likely he had just taken on an invisibly-small form, a theory confirmed when he appeared all of a sudden perched precariously atop the couch. Cyborg, shining like the polished fender of his car, was standing behind him, talking to Starfire in an accent that sounded like a cheap ripoff of Boris Badanov's from the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. Starfire herself was flying loops around Cyborg, the kitchen, and everything else, crying out periodically how it was necessary that they all rally to do battle with someone called "the Magnetic man".
Suddenly, coming into the kitchen to get some lunch no longer sounded like such a good idea.
"What are you guys doing?" asked Robin, largely without anything else to ask. Beast Boy (why oh why did it have to be Beast Boy?) rushed over to answer, brandishing his swords like he actually knew what he was doing with them, a plain lie.
"Ve have intruderz!" he shouted in the most atrocious German accent Robin had ever heard. "You are spiez from ze Brotherhood, come to stop us!"
"Get them, comrades!" yelled Cyborg in an attempt at a Russian accent that was, if anything, even worse than Beast Boy's German. Robin was still pondering this when all three of the mis-colored Titans tackled him.
Under normal circumstances, Robin was a match for all the other Titans combined, a fact he had unfortunately proven at least once. At the moment however, he was in no position to make his escape with a closed door behind him, nor did he actually imagine that they were actually going to jump him until it was too late to move. By the time he realized it, Cyborg and Starfire had grabbed him and were dragging him into the center of the room. Beast Boy attempted to do the same to Raven, but Raven was having none of it, and simply phased through the floor. Robin hoped for a second that she would re-appear and get him out of here, but she had apparently returned to her room, leaving him at the mercy of his likely-deranged teammates.
He reminded himself to take this out on her in the next training session.
The three of them dumped him unceremoniously in the center of the room, and began to crow to one another at having captured the "dangerous villain". He had time to notice that Starfire too was talking in what passed for an accent, this time a southern one, and that hers, like Cyborg's and Beast Boy's, was almost unrecognizably bad.
"Um... guys, whatever you're doing, do you think I could just get some lunch? I've got a lot of work to..."
"Florgarthab cannot be ended until sundown," said Starfire, breaking back into her usual voice for a second. "And as you have been captured by the participants, you too must participate. Such are the rules of the festival,"
"Yeah man," said Cyborg, "'sides, we got it all ready for you." He reached behind his back and produced a small single-lensed visor that Robin realized had belonged to the Hive Five member See-More until the Titans' last defeat of the super villain team. It had been hastily repainted in gold, and the lens had red cellophane laminated over it, a feature Robin had a chance to see up close and personal when Cyborg summarily strapped the contraption onto his head over his mask and eyes.
With a sigh, Robin slid the visor back off. "Look, guys," he said, "like I said, I've got a lot of work to do. Can't you go and capture David or something instead?"
A cough from behind him caused him to turn his head, and only then did he notice that David was standing in the back of the room, leaning against the back wall. The kineticist had a long unfastened brown trenchcoat on over his red-orange uniform, and wore a black leather headband around his forehead. In one hand, he held one of Robin's telescoping combat staves, presently extended to full length, and planted on the floor like a flagpole. In his other hand, he held a deck of playing cards.
"It's a little late for that," said David, blushing the color of his uniform at the ridiculousness of what he was doing, but doing it anyhow. Setting the staff against the wall, he slid the Ace of Spades off the top of the deck and held it up in his free hand. Frost formed over the playing card as though it had been plunged into a deep freezer, and then he flung it into the air, where it twisted and fluttered and spun and then suddenly exploded into confetti which rained down upon all three of the other Florgarthab participants, and onto Robin. All three of the others laughed and cheered, addressing one another by their adopted code-names, and all Robin could do was quietly resign himself to getting no work done today.
Again.
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... no comment.
What's the training like?
I don't know what it's like for everyone else, but when Robin's the one training you, it's the hardest thing in the world. I thought I was going to die trying. In fact there were a couple times I wasn't so sure I <u>didn't</u> die trying. It's not just the physical workout, although that stuff's brutal. It's the reaction training, powers training, tactical training... there's no end really. I've seen those documentaries on what Navy SEALS and special forces go through. What we do is kind of like that, but not really. We don't use weapons, for one thing, and we're not trying to kill people, but on the other hand we're going after stuff that not even the special forces would take on. They call us instead.
Once you're up and running though... then it's a little easier. For one thing, you don't have to learn how to run a lap or throw a punch anymore, you can just do it, which means that you're doing more interesting stuff like the obstacle course, or what Robin calls "lateral solution work", which is where he thinks up the craziest challenge he can simulate in the training room (seriously, the last one involved mutant cauliflower), and just sits back to see how we deal with it. It has its ups and downs still, a lot of it's still busy work, but my favorite has to be Freestyle Combat Training.
Picture a game of lasertag, only there's no vests or light guns. It's like a free-for-all with all six of us where we all just try to take each other down however we can. The room's padded up with mats and so that nobody can get hurt, and everyone goes really easy on their powers to make sure, and then Robin (or someone) gives the signal, and we all just go at it. You shoot someone or knock them over with one of your powers, and they're out. Sometimes there's teams, three on three or whatever. Sometimes it's everyone for themselves. Sometimes we all gang up on Robin (usually without letting him know ahead of time). Sometimes it's an endurance test, where one of us has to survive against all the others for as long as they can. There's really no end to all the combinations of stuff we can do in freestyle training, and if you ask me, it beats running laps or blasting pieces of vulcanized rubber out of the air.
What do you guys do when you're not training or fighting?
Well somewhere in there we try to find time to eat and sleep and all that, but you mean down time? We've each got our little routines I guess.
Beast Boy's a video game fanatic. Cyborg and Robin play against him a lot, and so do I, but Beast Boy spends most of his time with that sort of thing, or at least with the TV in some way. I probably shouldn't mention that he's obsessed with cartoons, but honestly I doubt he cares who knows that. If it's not the TV or the Gamestation though, it'll be his comics or his pranks, or his games of stankball (don't ask). Beast Boy's kind of hard to keep track of sometimes. When Cyborg's got a second free, he likes to go down into the garage and work on the car, or on some other crazy project of his. He's the only guy I've ever seen who actually likes doing maintenance. Honestly though, Cy just needs to keep busy, or he gets restless. That's one of the reasons BB and him get along so well, or at least that's my opinion. Whatever else might happen, hanging out with Beast Boy is never dull.
Raven keeps to herself most of the time, but I know she's almost always reading something whenever she gets the chance. Before you ask, I don't know what her favorite genre is. She's loaned me a few things here and there, usually horror or some kind of reference book she thinks I ought to read, but I've seen her with everything from Sci-fi to historical fiction to books that look like they might be able to eat you if you messed with them. If she's not reading though, she'll usually be meditating somewhere in the tower. Starfire's a lot more active than the others, and she likes to be around other people more of the time. She'll be taking care of Silkie, or watching one of her documentaries, or preparing for one of her Tamaranean festivals, or going out to the mall or amusement park or whatnot. Starfire always seems to be busy with something, and usually something with someone else (and more often than not, with Robin). Robin doesn't get a lot of free time, and I think he prefers it that way. He's always doing something more "official", dealing with the press, paying bills, arranging for contractors to come and patch up whatever happened to the Tower last week. When he does get some time off, he likes to spend it training. It's no secret that he doesn't have any powers except his own skills, and so he likes to keep those in top shape. Usually it takes one of the others, Beast Boy or Cyborg or most often Starfire to get him to unwind with more relaxing stuff.
Of course all that's when we're not doing things together. Wednesday night is movie night, for example, and it rotates between us who gets to pick what to watch. On days with good weather, Starfire or Beast Boy will drag everyone to the park, or just up to the roof of the tower for a game of volleyball or football or just hanging out (getting tackled by Cyborg is... quite a thing). Those days are really the most fun, I think. I'm pretty good at occupying myself around the Tower, any of us from the system would be. There's more to do here than you could do in a hundred years, between everything I mentioned above, but...
I dunno... it's just hard to separate everything out like that. When we're not fighting, training, eating, or sleeping, when we're hanging out, we're just doing what anyone else would be. The only real difference is what we do between those times. I know, it's kind of hard to think of people like Robin or Starfire just being like anyone else, but it's really just like that. Sort of...
Ugh, I'm not making any sense. I'll come back to this section.
So do you have a favorite Titan?
Aw, come on, you don't actually think I'm gonna answer that, do you? I'm going to have to show this to Robin at least, just to make sure I don't accidentally give away some kind of deep secret that could get us all killed (unlikely, I know, but you can't be too careful). I'm not about to put down that I like one of the others more than another and then give it to them to read.
Seriously though... when I first got here, I thought they were larger than life, just like we all do. I mean, they were superheroes after all. The first time I ever saw them fight, it was like watching one of those old claymation movies with the Greek gods and whatever, only it was happening right in front of me. The first month or so, I think they all thought I was afraid of them. I guess I was afraid of them, but mostly it was just awe, you know? And I think that made them a little uncomfortable, so they tried, they really tried to get me past that, so that I wouldn't jump whenever one of them asked me a question, and so I'd just treat them normally, like they were anyone else.
Well it didn't work. At least not totally.
The Titans, all five of them... they're... they're like nobody I've ever met. Not just because they have superpowers, not because they fight monsters and aliens and armies, not even because they keep an entire city safe (not that those aren't amazing things). Those are the reasons everyone thinks they're amazing, and the reason I used to think it. But there's more to it than that, there's more to them than just a bunch of powers and a list of bad guys they've beaten, and I don't know if I can explain what I mean and still make sense. They're just...
There's days where I can't believe that people like them exist. Not superheroes, people.
I wouldn't be here, writing this to you, in more ways than one, if it wasn't for each one of the five of them. All of them. Any of them. Starfire's probably the most generous, kindest person I've ever met. Yes, I know what happened when she first got to this planet, or at least I've seen the archival footage. I don't care what it looks like there or on TV when she's fighting. She'd sooner die than hurt someone's feelings, and given the choice, she'd be friends with everyone on the planet, and I think she could do it. It takes a cold person to not like Starfire. Everyone's afraid of superheroes a little bit, but nobody who really knows her is afraid of Starfire, at least nobody who shouldn't be.
Cyborg, despite everything he's been through in the last few months (long story), is always there to just drag you back to your senses if you're scared or worried or anything. I have no idea how he does it. I know he gets mad, (everyone knows when Cyborg gets mad), but whenever I'm feeling stuck or like I can't do something, he's right there. You talk to Cyborg, and you get the idea that he's basically seen it all. The guy isn't even 17 yet, but he just makes sense, you know? He's one of those guys who's just like a rock. Solid, dependable, always there when you need him.
In a way, Beast Boy is too, and if I don't know how Cyborg does it, I'll <u>never</u> know how Beast Boy does. You'd never think it to meet them (or maybe you would), but Starfire and Beast Boy are a lot alike. It's like he can't stand the idea that there's someone having a bad day, and he'll make you feel better even if it means you're so mad at him you forget what was wrong in the first place. Nothing wakes you back up to reality like a water balloon full of motor oil hitting you in the face (yes, I've fallen for this more than once). He even manages to cheer <u>Raven</u> up when nobody else can (no, she won't admit it, but she's not as impossible to read as she pretends to be). Let's just say it takes a lot of guts to bother Raven when she's in a bad mood.
Robin... I mean what can you say about Robin? Yeah, he's not the most relaxed guy in the world, and he and Cyborg have had their... issues before (I'm pretty sure that's not a surprise to anybody), but even Cyborg's admitted to me that Robin brings things out of you that you didn't even know you had. It's like he can see right through you and see past all the junk and the fear and the doubt and figure out what you might become with a hell of a lot of work, and then he turns you into it. He's done that for all of the others, and he's certainly done it for me. And it doesn't matter how much work he has to put in to do it to you, he'll do it without even thinking twice, just <u>because</u>. There's nobody else like Robin in the world, I'm sure of that.
No, not even the person you're thinking of.
And as to Raven, yeah, it's true, she's pretty closed off a lot of the time. She's got a sense of humor like a desert, she's got zero tolerance for stupidity, and she scares the hell out of me (I don't care who reads that, it's not a secret), but like I said before, Raven's not as hard to read as she thinks she is, and anyone who says she's a goth or a witch doesn't know what they're talking about (okay, she <u>might</u> be a witch, but so what? Starfire's an alien). She's very, very protective of the others, of everybody really, and whatever the papers might say, she'd do absolutely anything for them (yes, even Beast Boy, not that she'd admit it). I mean, I'll be honest, Raven and I had our... problems when I first got here, but we've been working them out, and she's been helping me an huge amount, especially since that fight with Cinderblock. I don't think I'd say I was 'close' to Raven, I don't think she lets people get close to her, but I think we finally sort of... understand each other a little bit.
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"Raven?"
The mail sack felt like a backpack full of rocks to Beast Boy as he knocked on the door with one hand, his padded gloves making a muffled noise against the solid metal door. No sound or signal emerged from inside, and Beast Boy groaned, sliding the bag off his shoulder and dropping it onto the floor of the hallway with a thud. He knocked again, a bit louder this time. "Hey, uh, Raven?" he said, "I've got your mail here." He shoved the bag with his foot, and it moved an inch or so. "Some of this stuff weighs a ton. You wanna see what's in it? Don't worry, I didn't booby trap it or anything."
Neither the door, nor anything behind the door said a word in reply. Beast Boy groaned. "C'mon, Rae," he said, "I know you're in there. Robin said you were in your room." He crossed his arms, facing the door stubbornly as though it was going to respond to him. "I'm not leaving until you at least open the door to take this stuff." As though to indicate his seriousness in this regard, Beast Boy impassively stared at the door, no doubt expecting it to open up and reveal Raven, annoyed or otherwise. It did no such thing, and after several minutes of waiting, Beast Boy's resolve began to wane. Tentatively, he knocked on the door again. "Raven? You there?" he asked. He glanced up and down the corridor, looking for any sign of someone approaching, but neither sight nor sound of anyone could be detected even to his senses.
"Nobody home, I guess," said Beast Boy to himself, but as in reply, no sooner had he said it than there was a noise from within Raven's room, a series of soft 'thuds', like a small landslide of objects landing on the floor. The changeling froze, but there was no other noise to be heard, not even when he crept back to the door and placed his ear to it. He thought he could hear breathing from within the room, soft and even.
"Raven?" he asked again, but he knew there would be no answer. He was starting to get a bit worried. It was not at all uncommon for Raven to tell him to go away when he pestered her, but to say nothing was... not normal. Raven wasn't the sort of person who spared your feelings. He supposed she could be asleep, but it was the middle of the day and Raven wasn't the sort to take naps either. Of course she could have been meditating, but then she would have already yelled at him to leave her alone. Besides, what was that sound?
"Raven, are you okay?" he asked, "I'm... I'm gonna come in, okay?" The door to Raven's room was a sliding steel frame-door, just like all the others, built by Cyborg to withstand everything from battering rams to military-grade munitions. It had not however been built to withstand Beast Boy. It was a trivial matter to change into the form of a gnat and slip under the door. Ordinarily of course, this was unspeakably foolish. Raven would skin him alive for a stunt like this under almost any conditions, but all he wanted to do was make sure that everything was all right... at least that was what he told himself.
And when he finally got inside, he forgot all about Raven killing him, as his insect mouth fell open wide
Raven's room was a mess.
A relative term to be sure. It was not the same deep-seeded disaster zone as Beast Boy's room, which had not been fully cleaned since he had first moved into it. Everything was still more or less in place here in Raven's room, save for the books. Hundreds of books were scattered all over the place, piled on the floor like heaps of treasure in a dragon's lair, hard and softbound both, books written in English and Latin and scripts that Beast Boy couldn't even begin to identify. Behind them, still in place against the walls, Raven's bookshelves stood denuded of their contents.
It took Beast Boy a second to find Raven. The sorceress was at her desk, a single desk lamp illuminating the scene. The desk was completely covered in books, manuscripts, and tomes of uncertain source, one of which, a gigantic reference work that appeared to be longer than everything Beast Boy had ever read put together, Raven was using as a pillow, her head and arms draped over it, fast asleep. As Beast Boy resumed human form and quietly approached, he saw that one of the stacks of books on the desk had capsized, avalanching down onto the ground in a heap. No doubt that was what he had heard. The sound of the heavy hardbound textbooks crashing down onto the un-carpeted ground had apparently not stirred her.
Silently for once, Beast Boy approached the desk. Raven was quite clearly asleep and oblivious to his presence, her head on its side, facing him, but with her eyes shut. Her mouth was moving, making words in her sleep, her brow was furrowed, and her hand twitched every few seconds, her fingernails scraping over the surface of the desk. As Beast Boy drew closer, he could make out some of the titles of the books, which as always seemed to be the exact last things he would ever try to read. "A Comparative Study of Metahuman Psychology", a well worn blue-covered hardback book propped against Raven's hand, "Interpreting Mindscapes", a tie-die-colored softbound book standing open on the back of the desk, and the laughably-named "Brief History of Paranormal Encounters", which despite the title, was the size of a large dictionary, and looked about as interesting. Beast Boy couldn't make hair nor hide of what any of these things were about... but none of them looked like the sort of reading anyone, even Raven, would do for fun.
Partially obscured underneath the books however, was a large manila folder laying flat and open with what looked like legal documents inside. Beast Boy couldn't tell what they said without getting closer, but he didn't have to, for the colorful watermark on top of each page read "California Department of Child Services", and the folder itself was stamped with the words "Permanent Record"
Suddenly Raven seemed to tense up, her teeth baring into a snarl, her fists balling up, knocking several more books off her desk. She shook her head, mouthing words between clenched teeth but making no sound other than the rattling of her chair legs on the floor. Abandoning caution, Beast Boy jumped forward, but was an instant too late as the chair suddenly slipped out from under Raven and overturned, spilling her onto the floor, several more large volumes following her down in a heap.
That woke her up.
Raven blinked awake with a stuttering cough, as the dust from fallen books wafted through the air. When finally she had blinked the dust out of her eyes, only then did she notice Beast Boy crouching down over her, offering a hand.
"Dude," said Beast Boy, "Raven, are you okay?"
Raven seemed completely out of sorts, having just woken up from whatever in the world had just happened. Perhaps this was why she did not instantly react with fire and brimstone. "Beast Boy?" she asked, sounding confused and uncertain. Semi-automatically, she knocked the spilled books off herself and slowly got back up, declining Beast Boy's outstretched hand, but not slapping it away or hurling him through the ceiling either, which was certainly an improvement over the normal reaction his presence here would have engendered.
"What happened?" asked Beast Boy, looking around the room at the spilled and discarded books.
"Nothing happened," said Raven stiffly, still clearly out of sorts. "What are you doing in my room?"
There was more than a hint of menace to that question, and Beast Boy backed up a step or two. "I was just delivering your mail!" he protested. "I heard something collapse and wanted to make sure everything was okay." He cringed, expecting Raven to zap him with something, or at least yell and scream, but she was still somewhat disoriented at having been randomly awoken by falling off her desk, and she simply sat down again with a tired sigh.
"Just... get out of my room," she said as she picked the dictionary-sized book up and resumed thumbing through it, paying him no further mind. Instead of following her instructions however, which would have been the sane thing to do, he walked carefully over to her desk, bound and determined to press his luck.
"What is all this stuff?"
"They're called 'books'," said Raven irritably, "you might have heard of them? They're what some people do instead of watching TV all day."
Beast Boy ignored the jibe as he looked around at more of the books. The titles were all reference titles, "A Study of this" and "The Authoritative that". It didn't make sense. Sure, Raven liked to read, but...
"Are these Robin's?" he asked lamely, picking one of the books up off the floor. It was thicker than the Gamestation, written by somebody named "Garrick". Several of the pages were dog-eared, and he casually opened it to one of the marked sections, only to find pages upon pages of text so dense that even looking at them made his head spin.
"Some of them," said Raven sharply without looking up. "Weren't you supposed to be leaving?" Once more, he ignored her, flipping through the pages hoping for a picture or two, but there was nothing except diagrams of the brain marked with pointers and a whole bunch of long words. He was about to give the book back to Raven when suddenly he came to another marked page that had underlines and other marks written all over it in pencil in Raven's crisp handwriting. One of these marks in particular caught his eye, as it was no doubt intended to, for the words were underlined three times and circled in heavy lines.
'Beast Boy', said the note.
"Beast Boy!" said Raven, snapping Beast Boy back to the present. Only now did he notice that she had stood up again and was looming in front of him. With a snap, she slammed the book shut in his hands and snatched it away from him. "Go away," she said, a final warning before the fireworks that would no doubt come.
But Beast Boy still didn't move. The threat she was making had been driven out of his mind by the realization of just how tired Raven looked. There were dark circles under her violet eyes, her eyelids seemed to be drooping, and even her angry stare and threatening posture were almost half-hearted, as though she was about to fall asleep again where she stood.
"Dude, Raven," said Beast Boy, "what's wrong? You look like you stayed up all night playing Ninja Racer."
"I'm just... I'm just tired, okay?" snapped Raven. "I haven't been sleeping all that great, thanks to people barging in here whenever they feel like it."
"You fell asleep at your desk! I've never even seen Robin do that! What're all these books for? And how come I'm in one of them?"
That question took Raven back a second. "What?" she asked. "You're not in..."
"You wrote my name in that one you've got there," said Beast Boy, "and you even circled it. What are you doing?"
"I'm not doing anything," protested Raven. "It's just a little research."
Beast Boy's eyes widened as he gestured around. "This is a little research?"
Anger shot through Raven's eyes. "It is when you have more than half a brain!" she snapped. "Now I'm not telling you again! Get out!"
The walls shook with the last words of Raven's demand, but Beast Boy folded his arms in front of his chest and tried to look resolute. "Not until you tell me what's going on here."
"How many times do I have to tell you there's nothing going on?" demanded Raven.
"The last time you said that, I got eaten by your beauty mirror, remember?"
"You mean you broke into my room and tried to play with a sophisticated meditation tool? That's my fault now?"
"No," said Beast Boy, "but since I'm gonna keep looking until I figure it out anyway, you could just tell me what you're doing instead of waiting until I get sucked into your head this time."
Raven looked like she wanted to say any one of a hundred different things, probably all of them variations on the theme of "no", but either they all got in the way of one another, or something else prevented her from saying it. Beast Boy simply tried to look like his mind was irrevocably made up, under the theory that predators could smell fear.
Perhaps it worked.
With a sigh of extreme exasperation, Raven gritted her teeth and practically hissed out an explanation, as the light bulb in her desklamp flickered and rattled.
"I'm just looking into a few things, okay? It's got nothing to do with you."
"Then how come my name's in your book?"
"I was making some notes. It's not about you."
"So then who's it about? David?" asked Beast Boy. "I thought you said we could trust him now."
"It's not about trusting him," said Raven, "I'm just trying to see if there's anything else I can do to help him."
Beast Boy didn't respond for a few seconds. "Uhhh... okay..." he finally said, and if anything, that reply only seemed to make Raven angrier.
"What?" she snapped.
"Just... you're doing that so much you fell asleep at your desk?"
"Well since all you seem to try to teach him is how to play those stupid games of yours, someone has to try and figure out how to make him useful."
Beast Boy dodged the bait. "So... that's why you've got his permanent record? And all those books?"
Now it was Raven's turn to fold her arms. "Yes."
Beast Boy didn't say anything to that for a second, watching Raven with concern. He apparently waited too long, for Raven's frail patience was already worn out.
"Now if you don't mind, Beast Boy, I'm busy. You can either leave through the door, or the window." Given that Raven's windows didn't open, that was not exactly a small threat. Still, something about this worried him. He backtracked slowly towards the door, Raven watching his every move, but before he reached it, he turned around once more.
"Raven,"
"What?!"
"Are you sure... you didn't find anything in David's head that time?"
"Beast Boy," said Raven, "I am not telling you again. I did not find anything except what I told Robin and David about." Her eyes turned were begining to tinge red with anger as she summoned a black aura around her fists. "Now so help me, if you don't leave this room inthree seconds..."
Beast Boy didn't wait around long enough to hear what was going to happen to him in three seconds. He yelped and turned and ran out the door, getting halfway down the hall before tripping and landing flat on his face on the floor. Behind him, the door slid shut quietly, solemn and blank once more, though his acute hearing could pick up the sound of Raven sitting back down at her desk once again. He picked himself up off the ground, dusting his uniform off, still watching the sealed entrance to Raven's room. Raven was right about one thing at least, shehad been very clear, both then and now, about what she had seen.
But that didn't explain the fear in Raven's eyes when he had asked her, nor did it explain the almost imperceptible hesitation in her voice before she denied seeing anything...
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 20, Cont'd
Do you ever get scared?
All the time.
You have to understand, I wasn't trained for this when I was growing up. I had superpowers, but that doesn't come with special bravery or anything, or living without fear. I was terrified of my own powers when they first showed up, so I just ignored them. When I first started getting mixed up in all this stuff, I bet I didn't react any differently than you would have. For some reason, people seem to think that superheroes never get scared. I do.
I mean, I haven't been doing this for too long, so maybe that's not normal for us, but I doubt it. I know that everyone talked about how I wasn't scared at all that time I fought Cinderblock on the waterfront. They're wrong. I was scared out of my head that time, but I didn't have any choice but to fight him.
That's really all there is to this thing...
I mean... I'm not sure how to explain this. I'm sure it's different for the others because they've been doing it longer or whatever, but as far as I can tell, being a hero isn't about never being afraid. It's about fighting the bad guys anyway. There's... all kinds of reasons why people do it anyway, and I don't know most of them, but I think a lot of it has to do with being more afraid of what will happen if you don't fight, than of what will happen if you do.
I know that doesn't sound very heroic, but... I don't meaning being afraid that people won't think you're a hero anymore (although who knows? Maybe that works for some people). I mean... being afraid that if you don't fight, the bad guy will destroy the city, or kill innocent people, or even just hurt one of your friends. Have you ever been so afraid of something horrible that you'll do something else you were afraid of doing, something you wouldn't even imagine being able to do before, just to stop it?
I think that's how this is supposed to work.
Anyway, yeah, I get scared doing this sort of thing, more than you probably would think. You just try to... deal with it I guess, and if your training is good enough, and you've worked at it hard enough, then even when you're so scared you want to find a corner to hide in, you'll still manage to do what you have to do. At least that's the hope.
What's it like being on the Titans' team?
You know, on second thought, maybe I won't show this to Robin.
You asked about superheroes before, so I'm guessing this time you mean being one of the Titans as opposed to being in some other group. Well before I try to answer that, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. The Titans aren't a team.
No, I'm not crazy, and yes, they do call themselves that, but they're not a team, they're something else, even if Robin wouldn't agree. A team is a bunch of people who work together to do something, like play football or wage war or even fight crime, and yes, we do that, but that's all a team does. A team exists to do that thing, to play or fight or whatever, and when they're not doing it, they're no longer a unit. I mean, they may come back every week or so to keep doing their thing, but that's about it. Even if they did it constantly though, a team is what they do. That's it.
This isn't a team. It's something else. Something a lot more... special.
Boy, how do I explain this?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The bay glistened in the pale light of the full moon mixed with the colorful bursts of home-made fireworks as the sounds of the celebrating city mingled with the waves splashing against the rocks that ringed the Tower's island and the sizzling of Cyborg's portable grill. Drifting across the bay came the sound of brass bands playing, of crowds cheering and mingling, of the whizzing and screaming of children's firecrackers and noisemakers.
"... and then we captured the Mad Mod and restored the city to its normal state of happiness. Unfortunately, by the time we had done so, the birthday of America was already over, and so the people of the city were forced to wait for another year to pass before they could celebrate the birthday once again. That is the reason why it is being celebrated with such vigor."
It certainly was. Fireworks were exploding out of the city every few minutes, sending streams of sparks or explosions of colored light cascading through the night sky, and yet these were nothing but amateur versions, as the official display hadn't begun yet. Out on the bay were fireboats, police cutters, even a navy destroyer, all polished and glimmering as they sailed by, streaming jets of water into the air and firing blank salutes to the oversized American flags draped from the waterfront buildings that echoed across the bay like claps of thunder. Starfire gave a start every time one exploded, not of fright but of wonder, and across the way, David could see Robin watching Starfire out of the corner of his mask with a smile as he endeavored to help Beast Boy set up the portable picnic table. For once, Robin's attention was less than totally committed to what he was doing, and the table gave way and collapsed onto him, prompting Starfire to rush over to help, no doubt on the off-chance that this 'Mad Mod' person had rigged the table to eat Robin.
"Y'all set?"
Cyborg had come out from around the grill, and was walking over to him. David's hand slid to his side and unclipped the steel baton from his belt, feeling it pulse in his hand like a living thing, warm and then cool, the metal expanding and contracting almost imperceptibly. "I think so," he said, and glanced over at the battery of fireworks sitting further along the rocky shore. "You guys sure you want me to do this?"
"You got somebody in mind who knows more about this sorta thing?" asked Cyborg with a grin as he wolfed down half a grilled hot dog in one bite. "'Sides, this is the only way the city'd let us do it. They're still worried we're gonna let BB at the fireworks."
"I still say you oughta play that song when you do it," chimed in Beast Boy from where he was trying to disentangle the partly-collapsed table.
David blinked and raised an eyebrow at Cyborg. "Song?"
"The 1812 Overture," said Raven, materializing from nothing behind them in a manner that never failed to give David a start, though the others barely seemed to notice. Raven walked past David and Cyborg as she moved towards an isolated rock, a large book in her hand. "By Tchaikovsky."
"It would be totally sweet, dude!" insisted Beast Boy, who had finally gotten the table set up again. "Like in V for Vendetta, you know?"
"No way," said Robin, as he and Starfire sat down on one of the tarps that had been set out facing the ocean.
"Why not?" asked Beast Boy, clearly convinced that this was not just a good idea for a joke, but ergo, something that by rights had to be done.
"Because for one thing it's lame," said Cyborg, throwing another package of sausages on the grill, "and for another thing nobody'd be able to hear it over the fireworks anyway."
"Aw, c'mon, we'll just crank up the volume!"
"Didn't you blow the fuses last time you decided to 'crank up the volume'?" asked Raven with a smirk from her perch atop her rock. Beast Boy grinned nervously and rapidly changed the subject, no doubt to everyone's everlasting relief, striking up a running commentary on how Cyborg was cooking his vegetarian sausages, giving a lengthy series of pointers about the hows and the whys that went totally unheeded by Cyborg, who continued to insist that he knew what he was doing, even if he had to physically force Beast Boy back from the grill a few times.
"Don't put them on that way, you'll get meat juice on them!"
"Man, I cleaned the grill before I put your fake-food on there. There ain't no meat juice."
"Turn them now! They'll burn!"
"They're not done on that side yet, I'll turn them when they're ready."
Robin and Starfire sat away, paying no mind to the background noise of Beast Boy and Cyborg's debate, Seating on the tarp overlooking the bay and the fireworks, now pouring off the distant shoreline in a cascade of color and light as the official display began. Starfire was holding Robin's hand, attempting to be surreptitious about it, and failing spectacularly, but not as spectacularly as Robin's attempts to conceal the smile on his face as he pointed up at the exploding fireworks and said something that David couldn't hear from where he was. Staring off across the water, Robin could not see what David could, namely that Starfire wasn't watching the explosions, nor was her attention following where he was pointing. Her sparkling emerald-green eyes were fixed on Robin himself, and a glance at Raven told David that he wasn't the only one who noticed, nor was he the only one amused by the fact that the only one who could possibly mistake Starfire's point of interest at the moment, was of course the point of interest himself.
But what else was new?
He sat down himself on top of the plastic cooler that he and Cyborg had dragged outside, and leaned forward, resting his head on his left hand, his baton still lightly held in his right. He tapped the baton against his leg semi-consciously as he watched the fireworks explode over the city in flowery bursts of green and gold and crimson, like the flamboyant, bright color of the uniform he had sworn he'd never be able to get used to, and after only a week or two, now barely noticed. One could get used to anything. Some things more easily than others.
Beast Boy walked into view, carrying a quartet of fresh tofu dogs, walking over towards where Raven was sitting, and David had to suppress a smile. He turned his head back around towards Cyborg, who was preparing more burgers (his third round), and who rolled his human eye at David and smiled in silent recognition of what they both knew. He returned to facing forward to see Beast Boy offering Raven one of the tofu-dogs. Displaying restrained David (who had tried one earlier and found both the consistency and taste to be that of wallpaper paste) could only describe as 'heroic', Raven semi-politely declined the offer, and the five more that immediately followed it. David watched serenely as Beast Boy made some sort of impassioned plea on behalf of the tofu dogs (typical), and while he couldn't hear what the changeling was saying, he guessed that it was only partly because of exasperation (and the fact that the coast guard might mis-interpret her throwing him into the bay as something requiring an intervention) that she finally, reluctantly, took one of the tofu dogs. Beaming like a lighthouse with this apparent victory, Beast Boy settled down on another rock nearby and watched the fireworks, devouring the remaining three hot dogs like a starving wolf, and once in a while making some kind of comment to Raven about who-knew-what, to which she either did not reply, or replied in monosyllables, her face still buried in her book. David could only smile and shake his head softly. There was a time when he had wondered to himself (and to Cyborg) what Beast Boy thought he was going to get out of Raven with his constant attempts to... to do whatever it was he was doing with her. But now he just watched as Beast Boy persisted in trying to wring blood from the stone...
And experienced people-watcher that he was, Raven's nearly-imperceptible glances up at Beast Boy when he was clearly not watching did not escape his attention either.
Perhaps some rocks could bleed.
Maybe he was more tired than he thought, maybe time simply flew, but sitting there, quietly watching all of the others, he had closed his eyes for what seemed like just a couple of seconds, before he felt a hand on his shoulder shaking him awake. He knew the grip was Starfire's even before he opened his eyes. "Friend!" she said in her eternal voice of joy and optimism, "you will miss the work of fire show if you sleep now! And you are needed to launch our contribution to the display." Behind her stood Robin, and his hand was still held in Starfire's. David blinked a few times to clear his vision and then nodded and stood up. slowly from where he was sitting, lifting his baton to his shoulder, paying no mind to the flame-like emissions surrounding it. Beast Boy was busy dragging Raven over to where the fireworks were set up by the wrist. What feats of self-control she had to engage in to refrain from doing something both unpleasant and hilarious to Beast Boy could only be guessed at, but he dragged her on, oblivious (or perhaps not), babbling about how awesome fireworks up close, and Robin was calling after him to make sure he didn't get too close, quite clearly torn between wanting to go over and push him back himself, and not wanting to let go of Starfire's hand, a debate which ended quickly and in the only way it could. And as he turned to walk towards the fireworks setup, already running through the chemical combinations in his head like memorized multiplication tables or the faces of long-remembered acquaintances, Cyborg stepped up next to him with a warm smile and cocked his head slightly.
"Everything okay, man?"
Perhaps it was the setting, or the lateness of the hour, or something else altogether that made him take a moment before replying, not because he didn't know the answer to the question, but because the question he was answering was not entirely the one Cyborg had meant to ask. The lights of the fireworks lit the island in a technicolor, and reflected off the windows of the mighty tower behind them all, the fortress, command center, headquarters, the place they all called home.
Home.
A smile crossed his face slowly, like a living thing awakening from slumber, and when he raised his head to Cyborg and nodded slowly, the certainty written all over him was such that Cyborg asked nothing further and just nodded back, understanding wordlessly, as always. And then, turning his head and slowly raising the baton, David let the world wash out into a trillion trillion tiny flecks of matter before commanding his power to go forth and perform his will, directing his thought and effort at fuses and firing charges, until the whiz and crack of the first rocket screaming into the air brought a hush over all five of the other Titans. One by one, the fireworks blew upwards as he moved his baton back and forth like a conductor at a symphony, and Starfire held Robin's hand tighter and exclaimed that it was a glorious sight, rivaled only by the solar flares of her homeworld, and Beast Boy even managed to elicit from Raven the admission, albeit sarcastic, that the fireworks were "nice".
But once the automatic charges were going off regularly, and there was nothing to be done, David honestly couldn't have cared less about the fireworks, for wondrous as they were, they couldn't possibly compare to the other wonders present.
For what could fireworks compare... to this?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
They've been through more things than I can even think of, and none of them are more than two or three years older than me. They've had things happen just in the last few months, just in the time I was able to understand sort of what was going on, that I don't think I could have survived and kept going on with, but they're still here, and it hasn't jaded them or made them distant or any more 'professional'. They didn't know me when I got here. It was a crazy situation and a lot of people had just died (like, a <u>lot</u>), and they didn't know who I was or where I'd come from, and I was so messed up that I couldn't really give them any help with anything, but they didn't just help me, they didn't just fix me back up or help me stop Cinderblock, like you'd think superheroes would. When Cinderblock was chasing me down everywhere I went, they let me stay at the Tower with them, for as long as I wanted, and when things got even hotter they showed me how to be a superhero, how to fight, how to use my powers... but all that isn't even the end of it.
Like I said before, the Titans' aren't a team, they're a family.
They're the weirdest, least sane, most dysfunctional family you've ever heard of. They totally should not work. Half of them want to kill the other half at any given time, and all five of them are as different as they come, but... none of that even matters <u>at all</u>. Even when they're fighting, really fighting, threatening to leave and quit (they've all threatened it at least once... well all but Starfire), or getting on each other's nerves (which happens all the time), it's just... it's <u>not</u> like when kids, even close friends back in the orphanages or centers fought. In some weird way, they all need each other, and they all know it. It's what's kept them together through all the misery and the fighting and the city-wide emergencies. It may even be why they're still alive. They need one another.
And I need them.
And they need me.
And I don't even know how to explain what that's like. There's just no words for it. The only thing I can think of is, and this'll sound stupid to anybody except people like us, but maybe... maybe this is what being adopted is like.
With any luck, maybe one day you'll get to tell me.
Anyway, it's getting really late now, and I've been working on this for way too long. I'll go over it again tomorrow to cut out all the stupid-sounding parts and all the stuff that could somehow be used against us. Maybe I'll clear it with Cyborg or something, just to be sure. Feel free to show this to your friends at the center when you get it, and... just in case, try to hold onto it. Who knows, it could be worth something some day. I know I'm supposed to close this with some kind of role-model instructions to be good and always eat your Wheaties and all that, but if you're anything like me, you know what you're supposed to be doing already, and a letter isn't going to make you behave any more or less than you would anyway. Kids like us learn fast what they do and don't have to do. I will say though, that however bad it gets (and I know how bad it can get for you there), just remember that with a few friends, you can survive almost anything.
I've spent the last couple months putting that one to the test.
So write back when you get this, and let me know if it answered all your questions, and if you ever get transferred down to Jump City after they finish rebuilding the center down here, let me know, and I'll stop by to say hi. I'll even bring the others with me if I can. In the meanwhile, good luck in school, and with the other kids, and with the DCS people. Most of them are actually trying to help you, even if it doesn't seem like it. If anything really goes wrong though, if you need help from outside the system with anything at all... you know who to call.
We'll all be there.
Sincerely,
Devastator
Do you ever get scared?
All the time.
You have to understand, I wasn't trained for this when I was growing up. I had superpowers, but that doesn't come with special bravery or anything, or living without fear. I was terrified of my own powers when they first showed up, so I just ignored them. When I first started getting mixed up in all this stuff, I bet I didn't react any differently than you would have. For some reason, people seem to think that superheroes never get scared. I do.
I mean, I haven't been doing this for too long, so maybe that's not normal for us, but I doubt it. I know that everyone talked about how I wasn't scared at all that time I fought Cinderblock on the waterfront. They're wrong. I was scared out of my head that time, but I didn't have any choice but to fight him.
That's really all there is to this thing...
I mean... I'm not sure how to explain this. I'm sure it's different for the others because they've been doing it longer or whatever, but as far as I can tell, being a hero isn't about never being afraid. It's about fighting the bad guys anyway. There's... all kinds of reasons why people do it anyway, and I don't know most of them, but I think a lot of it has to do with being more afraid of what will happen if you don't fight, than of what will happen if you do.
I know that doesn't sound very heroic, but... I don't meaning being afraid that people won't think you're a hero anymore (although who knows? Maybe that works for some people). I mean... being afraid that if you don't fight, the bad guy will destroy the city, or kill innocent people, or even just hurt one of your friends. Have you ever been so afraid of something horrible that you'll do something else you were afraid of doing, something you wouldn't even imagine being able to do before, just to stop it?
I think that's how this is supposed to work.
Anyway, yeah, I get scared doing this sort of thing, more than you probably would think. You just try to... deal with it I guess, and if your training is good enough, and you've worked at it hard enough, then even when you're so scared you want to find a corner to hide in, you'll still manage to do what you have to do. At least that's the hope.
What's it like being on the Titans' team?
You know, on second thought, maybe I won't show this to Robin.
You asked about superheroes before, so I'm guessing this time you mean being one of the Titans as opposed to being in some other group. Well before I try to answer that, I'm gonna let you in on a little secret. The Titans aren't a team.
No, I'm not crazy, and yes, they do call themselves that, but they're not a team, they're something else, even if Robin wouldn't agree. A team is a bunch of people who work together to do something, like play football or wage war or even fight crime, and yes, we do that, but that's all a team does. A team exists to do that thing, to play or fight or whatever, and when they're not doing it, they're no longer a unit. I mean, they may come back every week or so to keep doing their thing, but that's about it. Even if they did it constantly though, a team is what they do. That's it.
This isn't a team. It's something else. Something a lot more... special.
Boy, how do I explain this?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The bay glistened in the pale light of the full moon mixed with the colorful bursts of home-made fireworks as the sounds of the celebrating city mingled with the waves splashing against the rocks that ringed the Tower's island and the sizzling of Cyborg's portable grill. Drifting across the bay came the sound of brass bands playing, of crowds cheering and mingling, of the whizzing and screaming of children's firecrackers and noisemakers.
"... and then we captured the Mad Mod and restored the city to its normal state of happiness. Unfortunately, by the time we had done so, the birthday of America was already over, and so the people of the city were forced to wait for another year to pass before they could celebrate the birthday once again. That is the reason why it is being celebrated with such vigor."
It certainly was. Fireworks were exploding out of the city every few minutes, sending streams of sparks or explosions of colored light cascading through the night sky, and yet these were nothing but amateur versions, as the official display hadn't begun yet. Out on the bay were fireboats, police cutters, even a navy destroyer, all polished and glimmering as they sailed by, streaming jets of water into the air and firing blank salutes to the oversized American flags draped from the waterfront buildings that echoed across the bay like claps of thunder. Starfire gave a start every time one exploded, not of fright but of wonder, and across the way, David could see Robin watching Starfire out of the corner of his mask with a smile as he endeavored to help Beast Boy set up the portable picnic table. For once, Robin's attention was less than totally committed to what he was doing, and the table gave way and collapsed onto him, prompting Starfire to rush over to help, no doubt on the off-chance that this 'Mad Mod' person had rigged the table to eat Robin.
"Y'all set?"
Cyborg had come out from around the grill, and was walking over to him. David's hand slid to his side and unclipped the steel baton from his belt, feeling it pulse in his hand like a living thing, warm and then cool, the metal expanding and contracting almost imperceptibly. "I think so," he said, and glanced over at the battery of fireworks sitting further along the rocky shore. "You guys sure you want me to do this?"
"You got somebody in mind who knows more about this sorta thing?" asked Cyborg with a grin as he wolfed down half a grilled hot dog in one bite. "'Sides, this is the only way the city'd let us do it. They're still worried we're gonna let BB at the fireworks."
"I still say you oughta play that song when you do it," chimed in Beast Boy from where he was trying to disentangle the partly-collapsed table.
David blinked and raised an eyebrow at Cyborg. "Song?"
"The 1812 Overture," said Raven, materializing from nothing behind them in a manner that never failed to give David a start, though the others barely seemed to notice. Raven walked past David and Cyborg as she moved towards an isolated rock, a large book in her hand. "By Tchaikovsky."
"It would be totally sweet, dude!" insisted Beast Boy, who had finally gotten the table set up again. "Like in V for Vendetta, you know?"
"No way," said Robin, as he and Starfire sat down on one of the tarps that had been set out facing the ocean.
"Why not?" asked Beast Boy, clearly convinced that this was not just a good idea for a joke, but ergo, something that by rights had to be done.
"Because for one thing it's lame," said Cyborg, throwing another package of sausages on the grill, "and for another thing nobody'd be able to hear it over the fireworks anyway."
"Aw, c'mon, we'll just crank up the volume!"
"Didn't you blow the fuses last time you decided to 'crank up the volume'?" asked Raven with a smirk from her perch atop her rock. Beast Boy grinned nervously and rapidly changed the subject, no doubt to everyone's everlasting relief, striking up a running commentary on how Cyborg was cooking his vegetarian sausages, giving a lengthy series of pointers about the hows and the whys that went totally unheeded by Cyborg, who continued to insist that he knew what he was doing, even if he had to physically force Beast Boy back from the grill a few times.
"Don't put them on that way, you'll get meat juice on them!"
"Man, I cleaned the grill before I put your fake-food on there. There ain't no meat juice."
"Turn them now! They'll burn!"
"They're not done on that side yet, I'll turn them when they're ready."
Robin and Starfire sat away, paying no mind to the background noise of Beast Boy and Cyborg's debate, Seating on the tarp overlooking the bay and the fireworks, now pouring off the distant shoreline in a cascade of color and light as the official display began. Starfire was holding Robin's hand, attempting to be surreptitious about it, and failing spectacularly, but not as spectacularly as Robin's attempts to conceal the smile on his face as he pointed up at the exploding fireworks and said something that David couldn't hear from where he was. Staring off across the water, Robin could not see what David could, namely that Starfire wasn't watching the explosions, nor was her attention following where he was pointing. Her sparkling emerald-green eyes were fixed on Robin himself, and a glance at Raven told David that he wasn't the only one who noticed, nor was he the only one amused by the fact that the only one who could possibly mistake Starfire's point of interest at the moment, was of course the point of interest himself.
But what else was new?
He sat down himself on top of the plastic cooler that he and Cyborg had dragged outside, and leaned forward, resting his head on his left hand, his baton still lightly held in his right. He tapped the baton against his leg semi-consciously as he watched the fireworks explode over the city in flowery bursts of green and gold and crimson, like the flamboyant, bright color of the uniform he had sworn he'd never be able to get used to, and after only a week or two, now barely noticed. One could get used to anything. Some things more easily than others.
Beast Boy walked into view, carrying a quartet of fresh tofu dogs, walking over towards where Raven was sitting, and David had to suppress a smile. He turned his head back around towards Cyborg, who was preparing more burgers (his third round), and who rolled his human eye at David and smiled in silent recognition of what they both knew. He returned to facing forward to see Beast Boy offering Raven one of the tofu-dogs. Displaying restrained David (who had tried one earlier and found both the consistency and taste to be that of wallpaper paste) could only describe as 'heroic', Raven semi-politely declined the offer, and the five more that immediately followed it. David watched serenely as Beast Boy made some sort of impassioned plea on behalf of the tofu dogs (typical), and while he couldn't hear what the changeling was saying, he guessed that it was only partly because of exasperation (and the fact that the coast guard might mis-interpret her throwing him into the bay as something requiring an intervention) that she finally, reluctantly, took one of the tofu dogs. Beaming like a lighthouse with this apparent victory, Beast Boy settled down on another rock nearby and watched the fireworks, devouring the remaining three hot dogs like a starving wolf, and once in a while making some kind of comment to Raven about who-knew-what, to which she either did not reply, or replied in monosyllables, her face still buried in her book. David could only smile and shake his head softly. There was a time when he had wondered to himself (and to Cyborg) what Beast Boy thought he was going to get out of Raven with his constant attempts to... to do whatever it was he was doing with her. But now he just watched as Beast Boy persisted in trying to wring blood from the stone...
And experienced people-watcher that he was, Raven's nearly-imperceptible glances up at Beast Boy when he was clearly not watching did not escape his attention either.
Perhaps some rocks could bleed.
Maybe he was more tired than he thought, maybe time simply flew, but sitting there, quietly watching all of the others, he had closed his eyes for what seemed like just a couple of seconds, before he felt a hand on his shoulder shaking him awake. He knew the grip was Starfire's even before he opened his eyes. "Friend!" she said in her eternal voice of joy and optimism, "you will miss the work of fire show if you sleep now! And you are needed to launch our contribution to the display." Behind her stood Robin, and his hand was still held in Starfire's. David blinked a few times to clear his vision and then nodded and stood up. slowly from where he was sitting, lifting his baton to his shoulder, paying no mind to the flame-like emissions surrounding it. Beast Boy was busy dragging Raven over to where the fireworks were set up by the wrist. What feats of self-control she had to engage in to refrain from doing something both unpleasant and hilarious to Beast Boy could only be guessed at, but he dragged her on, oblivious (or perhaps not), babbling about how awesome fireworks up close, and Robin was calling after him to make sure he didn't get too close, quite clearly torn between wanting to go over and push him back himself, and not wanting to let go of Starfire's hand, a debate which ended quickly and in the only way it could. And as he turned to walk towards the fireworks setup, already running through the chemical combinations in his head like memorized multiplication tables or the faces of long-remembered acquaintances, Cyborg stepped up next to him with a warm smile and cocked his head slightly.
"Everything okay, man?"
Perhaps it was the setting, or the lateness of the hour, or something else altogether that made him take a moment before replying, not because he didn't know the answer to the question, but because the question he was answering was not entirely the one Cyborg had meant to ask. The lights of the fireworks lit the island in a technicolor, and reflected off the windows of the mighty tower behind them all, the fortress, command center, headquarters, the place they all called home.
Home.
A smile crossed his face slowly, like a living thing awakening from slumber, and when he raised his head to Cyborg and nodded slowly, the certainty written all over him was such that Cyborg asked nothing further and just nodded back, understanding wordlessly, as always. And then, turning his head and slowly raising the baton, David let the world wash out into a trillion trillion tiny flecks of matter before commanding his power to go forth and perform his will, directing his thought and effort at fuses and firing charges, until the whiz and crack of the first rocket screaming into the air brought a hush over all five of the other Titans. One by one, the fireworks blew upwards as he moved his baton back and forth like a conductor at a symphony, and Starfire held Robin's hand tighter and exclaimed that it was a glorious sight, rivaled only by the solar flares of her homeworld, and Beast Boy even managed to elicit from Raven the admission, albeit sarcastic, that the fireworks were "nice".
But once the automatic charges were going off regularly, and there was nothing to be done, David honestly couldn't have cared less about the fireworks, for wondrous as they were, they couldn't possibly compare to the other wonders present.
For what could fireworks compare... to this?
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They've been through more things than I can even think of, and none of them are more than two or three years older than me. They've had things happen just in the last few months, just in the time I was able to understand sort of what was going on, that I don't think I could have survived and kept going on with, but they're still here, and it hasn't jaded them or made them distant or any more 'professional'. They didn't know me when I got here. It was a crazy situation and a lot of people had just died (like, a <u>lot</u>), and they didn't know who I was or where I'd come from, and I was so messed up that I couldn't really give them any help with anything, but they didn't just help me, they didn't just fix me back up or help me stop Cinderblock, like you'd think superheroes would. When Cinderblock was chasing me down everywhere I went, they let me stay at the Tower with them, for as long as I wanted, and when things got even hotter they showed me how to be a superhero, how to fight, how to use my powers... but all that isn't even the end of it.
Like I said before, the Titans' aren't a team, they're a family.
They're the weirdest, least sane, most dysfunctional family you've ever heard of. They totally should not work. Half of them want to kill the other half at any given time, and all five of them are as different as they come, but... none of that even matters <u>at all</u>. Even when they're fighting, really fighting, threatening to leave and quit (they've all threatened it at least once... well all but Starfire), or getting on each other's nerves (which happens all the time), it's just... it's <u>not</u> like when kids, even close friends back in the orphanages or centers fought. In some weird way, they all need each other, and they all know it. It's what's kept them together through all the misery and the fighting and the city-wide emergencies. It may even be why they're still alive. They need one another.
And I need them.
And they need me.
And I don't even know how to explain what that's like. There's just no words for it. The only thing I can think of is, and this'll sound stupid to anybody except people like us, but maybe... maybe this is what being adopted is like.
With any luck, maybe one day you'll get to tell me.
Anyway, it's getting really late now, and I've been working on this for way too long. I'll go over it again tomorrow to cut out all the stupid-sounding parts and all the stuff that could somehow be used against us. Maybe I'll clear it with Cyborg or something, just to be sure. Feel free to show this to your friends at the center when you get it, and... just in case, try to hold onto it. Who knows, it could be worth something some day. I know I'm supposed to close this with some kind of role-model instructions to be good and always eat your Wheaties and all that, but if you're anything like me, you know what you're supposed to be doing already, and a letter isn't going to make you behave any more or less than you would anyway. Kids like us learn fast what they do and don't have to do. I will say though, that however bad it gets (and I know how bad it can get for you there), just remember that with a few friends, you can survive almost anything.
I've spent the last couple months putting that one to the test.
So write back when you get this, and let me know if it answered all your questions, and if you ever get transferred down to Jump City after they finish rebuilding the center down here, let me know, and I'll stop by to say hi. I'll even bring the others with me if I can. In the meanwhile, good luck in school, and with the other kids, and with the DCS people. Most of them are actually trying to help you, even if it doesn't seem like it. If anything really goes wrong though, if you need help from outside the system with anything at all... you know who to call.
We'll all be there.
Sincerely,
Devastator
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 21: The Ghost at the Banquet
"But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death."
- Revelations 21:8
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Wednesday, July 11th, 9:02 PM
The tall man's footsteps echoed in the cave system as he paced towards the open cavern looming ahead. There, in the corner, a small yellow light illuminated the empty gloom, half-revealing the figure cloaked in inky shadows that hovered on its periphery.
"What are you doing here?" asked the tall man as he approached the flickering circle of light, his fists held calmly at his sides as he surveyed the scene with a practiced eye.
The figure on its edge did not turn or react physically. When it spoke, its tone was bitter despite its softness. "Get out."
"No," said the tall man sharply, advancing through the open cavern with an inexorable gait. "You have work to do, and I am here to see that you do it."
"I said get out!" yelled the half-hidden figure, and a flash lit the cavern like a bolt of lightning moments before something large and heavy smashed itself to bits on the floor in front of the tall man. "This isn't your place anymore!"
"It never ceased to be mine," said the tall man, kicking the smashed bits of rock over with his foot, "but by all means, continue acting like a spoiled child. That will resolve everything to your satisfaction. And while you're at it, be sure to leave plenty of evidence that you were here by destroying things left and right. That should serve nicely."
"Shut up," spat the figure on the other end of the room. "Just shut up, okay? I don't want to hear whatever you came here to say!"
"Unfortunately," said the tall man as he approached, "the world does not revolve around you, but I'll be glad to leave you alone with your own childishness as soon as you assure me you understand what needs to happen."
The figure stopped, its words dying in its throat as it slowly turned towards the tall man, its tone suddenly subdued and quiet. "Now?" it asked, almost in disbelief, but the tall man did not slacken.
"Now."
"Can't..." the voice was thin now, pleading, a tone the tall man remembered well, "can't we... try something else? Someone - "
"You've picked an odd time to develop a conscience," remarked the tall man acidly. "But regardless, no, we cannot try something else, even if there was a reason to. Cinderblock is dead, and we are rapidly running out of time. We have to strike now, and hard, or else - "
"Yeah, I know," interrupted the other, turning away. The tall man barely hesitated before lunging forward like a coiled spring, grabbing the still half-shrouded figure by the arm, and slamming it up into a wall.
"This is not a game," said the tall man, spitting the words out like bullets. "You know what's at stake here. This is no time to start pretending that you're above such things." The figure shook and twisted in the tall man's grip, but he did not loosen it, leaning forward to make sure his words sank in properly. "In 48 hours, you will have one opportunity. Just one. If you fail to take it, there will not be another, and you and all of your so-called 'friends' will be butchered like cattle. Do you understand that? Has that sunk through your head, or are you still entertaining fantasies that all this is un-necessary?"
Revulsion coursed through the smaller figure's eyes and expression like a poison, and the Tall man felt steel returning to the arm he still held. He did not slacken in the slightest, letting the smaller figure twist and squirm for a moment before finally releasing it all at once and letting it fall to the floor.
"Will you do what is necessary? Or shall I write the obituary of this world and everything living in it?"
"I'll do what I have to do," hissed the figure on the floor through clenched teeth. "I don't need you rubbing it in my face!"
"My dear," said the tall man, "do you imagine I enjoy dealing with you at all after what you did? If you weren't necessary, you would not even be alive today. Try to remember that before you start thinking that you are somehow unjustly prevailed upon."
Slowly, the figure stood back up, brushing its hair out of its eyes as it stared the Tall man in the face. The Tall man regarded the figure with equanimity as it spat on the ground in front of him.
"You remember the plan?"
"Yes," said the figure in a surly tone that the tall man resolutely ignored.
"Once you've triggered the eruption, you will need to survive long enough for the damage to take effect. Adrenaline will prolong it for a while, but not for - "
"I said I know what to do! I can handle it!"
A smirk crossed the tall man's face. "Oh, I have no doubt of that. In fact, I selected you because of your unquestionable skill in these sorts of - "
He was interrupted by a strong blow to the face, delivered in haste and anger, but still hard enough to snap his head around to the right. He turned it back slowly, to see the figure standing with teeth bared and fists raised, and he snorted.
"You get that one for free," said the tall man with perfect calm. "Any beyond that will be paid for, with interest."
The threat was just barely enough to stop the other figure, who instead snarled like a cornered wolverine.
"Get. Out."
For a moment neither one moved, until the tall man finally turned and began to make his way back the way he had come. "Forty-eight hours," he said. "And I will arrange for you to have your chance. Do not miss it, or else..."
Both of them knew what the end of that sentence was.
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Thursday, July 12th, 2:12 PM
The smoke was thick enough to chew on as green flashes dimly filtered through the edge of David's vision. They were not precisely targeted at him, he knew, but at the general area he was supposed to be in, not that this was terribly re-assuring. He stumbled as he ran, nearly tripping as his foot hit something hard and unyielding. He couldn't see what it was through the smoke, not visually, so he shifted his perception and waved away the loose cloud of carbon and water vapor that blocked his sight. It was a metal girder, cast iron, large enough to serve as cover if he crouched. He quickly vaulted over it and ducked down behind, his baton held in one hand, out of sight behind the girder so as not to attract attention with its red glow. Silently, he scanned for threats, but whether looking at molecules or light, he couldn't detect a thing.
Then something knocked him over like a bowling pin.
There was a concussive burst, an explosion without shrapnel, and he landed on his side, hard, but quickly scrambled back to his feet, having managed somehow to retain his grip on the baton. He looked up, scanning automatically for Starfire, whom he assumed was behind the blast, but instead of the sight of the resplendent Tamaranean, he found only empty air. Puzzled, he hesitated for a second, a clear mistake which was rewarded with a birdarang flying out of nowhere and knocking the baton out of his hand.
He made a half turn, backing up towards where the baton had landed, but before he had taken more than half a dozen steps, Robin emerged from the smoke in front of him, one of his ubiquitous telescoping staves held in his right hand like a shepherd's crook, advancing with a poised, measured gait towards a target already disarmed. David gave ground before Robin, who moved quickly and with purpose, brandishing the staff as resolutely as he ever had, his mask-covered face revealing nothing but utter determination to bring down his enemy. As many had learned before, as David himself had determined long ago, Robin might have only been a skinny teenager when you broke it all down, but in combat, he was one of the most imposing things you could ever face.
... but that didn't mean David hadn't learned a trick or two.
Robin advanced on David quickly, but the ground was covered with loose debris, and he couldn't run quite at top speed. The difference was marginal, but it was enough, for an instant before Robin could sweep the staff around and knock David off his feet, David's threw his hand out with his index finger extended like a spear at Robin's chest. Instantly, Robin's staff snapped in half like a twig, the burst of explosive energy slamming into Robin's sternum and arresting him in mid-sprint as though he had run headlong into a wall. It was testament to Robin's skill that he did not fall over, but instead turned the hard explosive shove into a backroll, coming up on his feet poised to strike forward again with both halves of the staff held in each hand like escrima sticks, but the blast had delayed him, and delay was enough. David had already turned and run as fast as he could into the debris and smoke, snatching his fallen baton up as he ran, and ducking behind a pillar a moment later.
This earned him exactly five seconds of respite.
The ground suddenly turned pitch black under his feet, like a cavernous void had opened below him, and before he even knew what was happening, a quartet of black tendrils emerged from the ground, erupting into the air like giant earthworms. Behind them floated the agent of their creation, a figure in black and indigo, arms raised, hands sheathed in black energy, cloak splayed out behind like the aura of pure darkness she would no doubt soon be conjuring. Before David could think of where to run or what to blow up, all four tendrils swirled around him like snakes before rearing up and diving inwards, clearly intent on binding him up like a straitjacket. He tried to dodge, but there was nowhere to go, and all four tendrils latched onto him at once...
... and instantly dissolved.
The exact moment the tendrils touched David's uniform, all four of them dissipated into smoke, streaming up and vanishing into the air. For a brief second, neither Raven nor David moved, but it was David who recovered first from the unexpected stroke of luck. Pivoting on one foot and turning to run, he waved the baton behind him and set off a series of blasts like falling mortar shells, designed to do nothing more than kick up dust, debris, and confusion. In this respect they appeared to succeed, for Raven did not pursue him as he raced along, stumbling and sliding over the scattered debris, looking for a corner or a hidden spot in which to hide.
But suddenly something loomed up out of the smoke ahead of him like an over-sized statue, and he tried to stop himself too late, skidding straight into the thing and bouncing off it like a rubber ball. He lost his balance, slipped, and fell backwards onto the ground with a hard thud, and when he shook his head and focused his eyes again, he saw Cyborg standing over him, his sonic cannon extended down towards David's face. The baton had fallen from his hand again, but even if it had not, the energy coils within the barrel of the cannon were already charging up, the blueish glow filling his field of vision and blotting out all else, save for Cyborg's red mechanical eye boring down at him like a drilling laser. Semi-automatically he raised both hands in an automatic, paltry defense, and shut his eyes, cringing with every muscle in his body as he awaited the inevitable end.
"Bang, you're dead."
A series of mechanical clicks prompted David to crack his eyes open, and he saw Cyborg still standing over him, his forearm reformed into a normal hand, which he was extending down to David with a satisfied smile on his face. Sheepishly, David reached up and took it, rubbing the back of his head where he had hit it on the floor as Cyborg helped him back to his feet. The massive ventilation systems embedded in the walls and ceiling began to pump the smoke and dust out, and gradually the air cleared, revealing the other four Titans one by one.
"Nice trick there with the staff," said Cyborg. "What'd I tell you?"
David stood doubled over, his hands on his knees, breathing heavily and trying to keep his stomach from contracting all of a sudden. The best he could do was nod up at Cyborg with a smile. It had been Cyborg who had pointed out to him that Robin's weapons were almost universally made from a pure titanium-steel alloy, a much easier combination to destroy than the fifty different elements found in the rubble scattered about the floor.
The others had arrived by now, save for Raven, who was hanging back behind Robin a bit. Consumed as David was with trying to remain on his feet, it was Beast Boy who asked Robin the all-important question.
"So?"
Robin already had his communicator open, both halves of his broken staff held awkwardly in his other hand as he punched a few commands in. David hoped he didn't mind the equipment damage. He had said to use any means...
A small smirk crossed Robin's face.
"Sixty-two seconds."
Even before Robin had finished reciting the time, Beast Boy let out a cheer that could have woken the dead and clapped David on the back so hard in congratulations that he would have fallen over if Cyborg hadn't grabbed him by the shoulder. Even as they shook him and punched him in the shoulder (lightly, thank God), David barely heard anything they said. Partly he was exhausted, but partly he was barely able to believe it. A minute. He'd lasted a full minute. As usual, Robin quickly gave his professional analysis, citing the fact that he clearly hadn't been watching where he was going when he ran into Cyborg, that he had hesitated where he shouldn't have several times. All this was true of course, but couldn't blunt the accomplishment, even for Robin. So what if the others had all lasted more than five times longer? It was still a major milestone.
And apparently Beast Boy agreed, or perhaps he simply wanted an excuse to take the rest of the day off, for as they all walked towards the door, he was babbling about how they should celebrate this with a video game tournament or a trip to the pizza parlor. His proposals met no resistance from Cyborg or Starfire, and as they continued out the door and down towards the elevator to the common room, all four of their voices could be heard, debating what else to do for the rest of the day.
It would probably have been five voices, for Robin was already resolved to give the others the rest of the day off, alerts permitting, but instead of joining the others, he had remained behind to have a quick word with Raven about something he had noticed.
"Raven?"
Raven was still standing on the side of the room, and her expression was confused. She did not look as though she had heard a word that had just transpired, indeed she was staring down at the onyx and obsidian gems on the back of her wristguards, lost in thought. It took Robin a second repetition of her name to bring her around.
"What?"
"Um... is everything okay?" asked Robin as delicately as he could. "You... had him there, dead to rights. What happened?"
"Not... not sure," said Raven as she rubbed the side of her head. "My powers just... I don't know what happened."
"Did you lose focus?" suggested Robin, "did he distract you with a - "
"No," said Raven, in a more definitive tone. "They just... they just failed, all of a sudden. As soon as they touched him."
"Failed?" asked Robin, "What do you mean?"
"Look... I don't know what happened. I need to... to think." And with no more explanation than that, Raven walked across the training room and out the door, leaving Robin, once again, with no answers in her wake.
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Thursday, July 12th, 9:35 PM
"You have two new messages."
David looked up from the book he was reading and blinked his eyes, trying to figure out what had said that. It took him a second to realize that it was the computer terminal sitting on his desk. Cyborg had installed it a week or so ago, not a full computer, but instead an uplink terminal to the massive supercomputer in the Tower's basement. So far, save for a few messages, he had barely touched it. He had never had a chance to learn much about computers back at the center, and the one time he'd asked Cyborg for help, he'd wound up more confused than ever. Cyborg's technical explanations were not exactly easy to follow.
He had however, managed to figure out how to check his Email at least, and he set the book down and walked over to the terminal to do just that. All of the Titans had Email, filtered through the central computer to eliminate viruses and spam. The others still got a massive amount of mail even with all of the filters (some were more religious about checking it than others), but David's address wasn't well known yet to the general public, which to be honest was perfectly fine by him. There was still something a bit... weird... about fan mail. He supposed he would get used to it.
Neither message was from an address he recognized offhand, not that this was surprising. The Titans were the only people he knew in the city, and if they had something to tell him, they did so in person. He sat down and opened the first Email with a click of the mouse, and a moment later, the text filled the screen. The subject line got his attention immediately.
"It's Carrie"
A smile crossed his face as he scrolled through the text.
"Hey there! I saw you on the news after the bank robbery, and decided to see if I could get a message to you here. Hope this is the right place."
"So you're a Titan now, huh? After all that stuff about how you 'weren't a superhero', I guess I was right
. Seriously though, congratulations! That had to have been pretty hard to do. All the papers have been talking about how you're so mysterious and how you appeared from nowhere, but I guess I know better. Just between you and me, I think you look pretty good in red, but I'm surprised they didn't give you any goggles or safety glasses or something, you know, for all the explosions? I guess they wouldn't look as cool or something."
"Anyway, it's been a while since we talked last time, and I never got to thank you for that thing you did on the waterfront. I know that every time we meet up, it seems like something attacks the city, but even so, I was wondering if you wanted to get together some time this weekend, just so that we can hang out without getting interrupted by Cinderblock or whatever. I dunno if you're allowed to do that anymore now that you're a Titan and all, but if you are, you just come down to Patriot Park sometime tomorrow evening. Me and some of my friends are gonna be there, and I'd love to introduce you around. Don't worry, I promise I won't get all weird and ask for your autograph. I bet you've got thousands of 'number one fans' already who do that. We'll just hang out. It'll be fun."
"I know that you guys are really busy and that you don't usually do that sort of thing, so if you can't make it I understand, but if you want to, we'll be at the park all day tomorrow. If you want, you can even come dressed like a normal person, and I'll pretend you're just a friend from out of town. It's up to you."
"I hope we get to see you there!"
- Carrie
David sat back in his chair and shook his head, smiling. Carrie hadn't said how she had gotten his address, but then he supposed "Devastator at TitansTower . Meta" wasn't particularly hard to guess. He made a mental note to see what Robin's policy was on going incognito in public. None of the others ever seemed to try to blend in (Cyborg and Beast Boy simply couldn't), but normal as it had become to wear, he didn't relish the attention that his uniform would get him outside the tower. Lazily, he leaned back and punched up the next message, already in his mind formulating plans for the next day...
... all of which vanished as soon as the message came up on screen.
The subject line, "Concerning Devastator", was innocuous enough, but the message inside was anything but.
"MURDERER!"
It had his attention, at least.
"You may have fooled the papers and the media, but I KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY ARE! You think you can just come into this city and like nothing really happened? You think I don't know that you're here to kill us all just like TERRA WAS?! I don't know how you manipulated the Titans into thinking you're here to help, but you CAN'T FOOL ME!! You're a LIAR, a MURDERER, and I WON'T STAND FOR IT! I'm gonna MAKE SURE EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT YOU REALLY ARE!!"
"The army denied entry to the city,
The Duke will enter through persuasion:
The army led secretly to the weak gates,
They will put it to fire and sword, effusion of blood."
"YOU DON'T FOOL ME! I KNOW THE APOCALYPSE YOU BRING, 'DEVASTATOR!'"
David didn't move for a little while, staring at the screen as though expecting it to change, like this was all some form of practical joke that would be made good any second now, but instead it continued to sit there, daring him to do something about it. Part of him wanted to react like it was just spam, a random message from the bowels of the internet that had somehow slipped through the filters. Part of him wanted to say that there were crazy people out there who had crazy things to say (and apparently, to say in verse). But within the body of the text, a single word stood out.
A single name.
The text remained immobile on the screen, and finally he shook himself out of his thoughts. He felt like the temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees and he didn't know why, but his eye was constantly drawing back to that one name in the middle of the opening paragraph. He had resolved to delete the Email, to get rid of it and try to put it out of his mind as the work of a kook, when he noticed something in the address line.
CC: Titansgroup (Raven; BeastBoy; Cyborg; Robin; Starfire; Devastator) at TitansTower . Meta<br>
There was a knock on the door...
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Thursday, July 12th, 10:07 PM
"Man, what did I tell you about bringing apocalypses in here without letting us know first?"
"Yeah dude, that's totally unfair! Robin won't even let me have a moped, and you get a whole apocalypse to yourself? What gives?"
That one elicited a nervous chuckle from the psychokinetic sitting on the stool at the kitchen table, as Cyborg and Beast Boy did what they always did, making troubles and worries seem insignificant. There was nothing in Raven's expression to indicate how much she wished they would not speak about the apocalypse though, at least not tonight. There was no sign she could give that wouldn't raise... questions.
"I know it's stupid..." said David, sliding one of the printed out copies of the Email he had received (printed courtesy of Beast Boy, of course) across the table. "I just... didn't really expect something like this."
"Don't let it get to you," said Cyborg. "There's a whole bunch of idiots out there who send us stuff like this. They're always goin' on about how Raven's a witch, I'm the Terminator, and Starfire's really here to get us all ready for an alien invasion. These guys need a hobby, you ask me."
"I guess..." David didn't sound too convinced. Raven didn't need her empathy to tell that he was more worried about this than he was letting on. Or was it this at all? Surely not even David could be so sensitive that a random online lunatic could upset him with some badly-phrased warnings of doom. Raven herself never checked her Titans Email, partly because of the sheer number of 'burn the witch' messages she received from the depths of the internet. Glancing at the printout again, she wondered if perhaps there wasn't another reason he was worried by it.
"The Duke will enter through persuasion?" asked Beast Boy, mispronouncing the last word. "What is this, some kind of song?"
Raven said nothing, though she knew what it was. It was one of the prophecies of Nostradamus, a favorite source for would-be occultist lunatics. His prophecies were considered bad jokes by anybody except for a few easily-fooled people, but it was still worrisome that it should have appeared today of all days.
She turned the page of her book, so as to make it appear that she was doing nothing but reading. Instead she listened to Cyborg and Beast Boy making light of the Email, jokingly speculating about who had sent it, and what types of mental disorders the author was suffering from. It was working, she could tell, but not as well as it should have, and Raven caught David occasionally glancing over at her nervously, as though he could tell what she was thinking. Had he felt something odd from the afternoon's training session too? She couldn't discount it, though he seemed to be maddeningly incapable of detecting anything wrong whatsoever with his own powers. He hadn't even noticed what had happened when she entered his head that time some weeks ago, or at least he had claimed not to have noticed. But then why would he lie?
And what the hell had happened today?
She'd had him. She'd had him dead to rights, as Robin would put it, caught between four tendrils. He had been distracted, disoriented, unable to do anything, and yet when she had moved in for the simulated kill, her powers had failed as though someone had thrown a switch. After leaving the training room, she had meditated for hours, searching for what had gone wrong. She hadn't fumbled a syllable or mis-channelled the energy, that at least would be an answer. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was she had done everything right... something had to have disrupted her.
What?
Was it David? She'd used her powers on him a dozen times before, healed him back from near-dead, even gone inside his head. No problem, no resistance. Had something else happened? Was it tied to...
"Raven?"
Beast Boy was staring at her, and Raven realized all of a sudden that the mug of tea on the table in front of her had just cracked. Refusing to meet the others' gazes, she swept the debris into the trash with a wave of her hand, and returned to her book, leaving the others to quietly return to talking, occasionally glancing back over at her whenever they thought she wouldn't notice.
"There is no such thing as coincidence." That was one of Azar's precepts. She'd always taken comfort in that thought, that she had not randomly met her friends, or defeated all of their enemies by luck, but instead because she was 'meant' to. Recently however, that age-old mantra had begun to take on a decidedly sinister tone, for if there was no such thing as coincidence, then what was she to make of all this?
"Demonspawn, begone!"
Robin was better at this than she was.
"Hey, guys? What's that?"
Raven shook herself awake and saw David pointing at the living room window of the Tower, out towards the night-shrouded ocean. Cyborg glanced outside. "Oh that?" he asked, gesturing at a black spot on the horizon, barely visible against the indigo sky. "That's San Saltador. It's an offshore oil platform." He chuckled. "You got good eyes if you can make it out at this time of - "
There was a bright flash, like a bolt of lightning, that briefly illuminated the entire sky, followed by a series of lights bursting to life on the distant oil platform. Cyborg quickly abandoned what he was saying, and Raven put her book down, standing up as she watched the lights flicker, then stabilize, causing the entire rig to glow like a false dawn on the horizon.
Everyone's communicator went off at once. Cyborg opened his first, revealing Robin and Starfire, who were out on patrol. Within moments, everyone was scrambling out of the common room to meet Robin and Starfire at the T-sub and go and investigate whatever was happening out there. Raven brought up the rear of the four superheroes, her mind still refusing to release what had happened today, for fear of having to consider what might happen tomorrow. It struck her, as she floated down the hallway, that the message had specifically mentioned Terra, and yet neither Cyborg nor Beast Boy had said anything about her. Then again, she supposed that wasn't so surprising.
Terra was a subject that none of them were ready to face if they could avoid it.
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Friday, July 13th, 12:31 AM
"Look man," said Cyborg, his voice muffled by the donuts he had stuffed into his mouth. "Raven does weird stuff sometimes. Just let it go."
Beast Boy frowned as he took a bite from his vegan donut and washed it down with a gulp of soy milk. "I'm telling you, dude," he said, not bothering to swallow first, "she's acting totally strange, even for her. What's so special about tomorrow that she's all worried about?"
The disturbance on the oil platform had been the work of Doctor Light, who in a less than brilliant move (pun intended), had decided to attack a target literally within sight of the Tower's common room. What he had been planning to do out there was beyond Beast Boy, something about flooding the city with light or some other lame excuse for an evil plot. They had just been warming up to take him down when Raven had shortcut the entire process by appearing in front of him, ready to strike. One look at her, and Doctor Light had actually asked to go to jail, and yet when Cyborg had proposed that they all go celebrate, Raven had turned back to the tower, saying that she needed to be back home before tomorrow.
And of course, she hadn't explained why that was.
"Man, I don't know," said Cyborg. "Maybe she's got some ritual or somethin' to do. Look, if it was a problem, she'd let us know."
"Perhaps there is an astronomical significance to the date?" suggested Starfire, who was busy lathering relish on her chocolate donut. "She explained to me once that certain types of magic involve various planetary alignments that occur only on specific dates."
"It's not just that," insisted Beast Boy. "She's been acting weird all week. I told you that she fell asleep at her desk, remember?"
"Is... that uncommon?" asked Starfire. "Robin does this quite often. I believed it was normal behavior for certain people."
"Only for bird-boy," remarked Cyborg, glancing back at Robin, who was safely out of earshot up at the donut shop's counter, chatting with several cops who had stopped in for a quick snack. "But even Raven's gotta study for her magic, don't she?"
"I told you, it wasn't magic stuff," said Beast Boy. "She had this big book full of technical mumbo-jumbo, and she had my name written down in it."
"Maybe she's tryin' to make a voodoo doll?"
Beast Boy scowled. "Dude, that is so not funny."
Cyborg appeared to disagree, judging from his grin as he tore into his fifth donut, but Starfire stepped in with a suggestion. "I have... perhaps seen this book," she said. "Raven was reading from it one day several months ago. She said it was a description of the various powers that people such as us possess. Perhaps she wished to conduct further research."
Beast Boy shook his head. "I'm telling you guys, ever since she did that Vulcan mind-meld thing with David, she's been acting weird."
Cyborg remained unconvinced. "It ain't exactly weird for Raven to not come out for donuts with us. You know how she is, man."
"Indeed," said Starfire. "Raven does not typically engage in these activities, and after all, did not David also ask to stay behind?"
"That's different, Star," said Beast Boy. Right before Raven had 'convinced' Doctor Light to surrender, David had gotten blasted in the eyes by a light beam that had left him dazed and blinded for a few minutes. He had still been seeing spots when they dropped the Doctor off at the jail, and though Raven had assured them all that he would be fine in a couple hours, he had elected to skip the donuts in favor of going home and finding some eyedrops. "David didn't say he had to get home because of some mystery thing that's s'possed to happen tomorrow."
"So what're you sayin'?" asked Cyborg.
"I'm saying, dude, that we should figure out what's so special about tomorrow." Beast Boy gulped down the last bite of his donut and crossed his arms in an attempt to look serious and convincing.
"What, you mean snoop around in Raven's business again?" asked Cyborg. "No way, man, the last time I did that, I got sucked into a magic mirror and dumped into Raven's brain."
"But what if this is something we really oughta know about? What if it's like that time with Malchior?"
"Raven pledged to alert us in the future if anything potentially dangerous was the matter," said Starfire. "Surely whatever her concerns about the coming day, she would not hide it if it was of potential concern to us."
"But it might be serious! You gotta help me figure it out."
"C'mon, BB, calm down," said Cyborg, "it's probably nothing anyway. Even if it ain't though, Raven's a big girl, she can take care of herself whatever it is, and if she can't she'll ask us for help. You know she doesn't like people gettin' all up in her business, and you're just gonna get her mad at you if you go off trying to pry it out of her. Besides, I remember what happened last time you decided to go playing Raven-detective, and I don't need another round of that. If you're gonna go doin' something that's gonna piss off Raven, you can do it yourself."
Beast Boy opened his mouth to reply, but then stopped as a thought hit him. A grin that the others no doubt would describe as 'worrying' crossed his face, but all he could say back to Cyborg were two words.
"We'll see..."
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Friday, July 13th, 10:50 AM
"This is such a bad idea."
"It'll be fine, just watch for anyone coming."
David glanced back up and down the corridor nervously. "And what are we supposed to do if someone is coming? I can't turn into a mouse and hide in a corner, remember?"
"Just say you got lost," said Beast Boy. "It still happens to me."
"Right, lie to Robin, that's a smart idea," said David. "Just hurry up. I really don't want to be running laps all morning tomorrow."
"Almost finished," said the changeling, tapping some more commands into the master computer before grinning and stepping back. "There we go, we are officially inside."
Forgetting his many objections to what they were doing for the moment, David walked back over to the computer. "We're logged in?" he asked.
"Better, dude," replied Beast Boy with a smile as he brought up a series of folders on the screen. "Those are the secure files. I bet that's where we'll find out what's so special about today."
"But I thought those were locked?" asked David, confused.
"They are, but you're working with a master here..." said Beast Boy smugly. He flexed his fingers before bringing up the login screen, and quickly typing in a username and password combination. The computer thought for a few seconds, before a green window blinked up with the words "Access Granted" written in bold letters.
"Voila!" exclaimed Beast Boy, stepping back to permit David to admire his handiwork, and looking around as though expecting applause to emanate from the walls. "We're all set."
"Where'd... how'd you find Robin's login and password?" asked David, still scarcely able to believe that they had gotten inside so easily.
"I used my amazing detective skills," said Beast Boy, smiling serenely.
"Meaning you asked Starfire?"
"Yeah, pretty much. Anyway I'm gonna see if I can find anything. You keep a look out." Beast Boy began typing on the computer's keyboard as David turned around and faced the hallway, letting the world dissolve into constituent parts again, until he was no longer looking at the door, but through it, at the molecular basis of the tower itself. Anyone even exiting the elevator on this level would be clearly visible to him.
"So you're okay, now I mean?"
"Yeah," said David as he sat down in a folding chair, facing the door, "Raven was right, I just needed a few hours. Who was that wacko anyway?"
"Who, Doctor Light?" asked Beast Boy without turning around. "He's some wannabe hotshot who can control light or something. He's kind of a doofus. Raven really cooked him last year, and he's been terrified of her ever since."
"Smart guy," commented David. "I'll just remember to duck next time."
"Wait," said Beast Boy, pausing in mid-keystroke, "you didn't know who he was? I thought Robin told you about all the local bad guys."
"David shook his head. "Just some of them," he said, "Those kids from the H.I.V.E. academy, that crazy British guy, we haven't gotten through all of them yet. I guess this guy didn't qualify as 'major'."
"Yeah, probably not," said Beast Boy, resuming typing. "Anyway, he won't be back for a while, so don't worry about it."
"I'm not worried," said David, and for once he meant it, and he chuckled lightly. "It's just a little weird..."
"What is?" asked Beast Boy
"You remember... I told you about Carrie, right?"
"Your new girlfriend?" Beast Boy asked with a smirk.
He smiled and shook his head. "Whatever man. Anyway, I got a message from her yesterday, before Doctor Light showed up, and she said she'd saw me on TV, and she thought I should start wearing safety glasses or something, in case I blew something up too close. Maybe she was right."
"Pft," scoffed Beast Boy, "dude, glasses never look good. I remember once when Rita..." he stopped suddenly, and his eyes lit up. "Jackpot!"
David raised an eyebrow as he walked over to the screen. "You found something?"
"Not just something, I found out what's so special about today!" He slid his chair back and pointed at the relevant entry on the screen. "Check it out!"
It took David a second to realize what the information on the screen was. When he did however, his eyes widened in recognition. "I don't believe it," he said incredulously...
"It's all there in black and white, dude! And you know what this means, right?"
David had the distinct feeling that he did...
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Friday, July 13th, 3:41 PM
"I need more flour!"
"You already used the entire bag!" protested Robin in something approaching horror. "How much cake are you making?"
"I don't call it the eight-layer cake 'cause it's got seven layers. Star's sendin' you out to get the steak for that crown thing she's puttin' together, right? Just pick up another sack of flower and about thirty more sticks of butter while you're at it." As though to counter all potential arguments, Cyborg turned his back and returned to the mixing bowl, his white chef's pastry hat sliding down over his robotic eye as he did so."
"Yeah, and get some more ice cream while you're out!" called Beast Boy from up in the rafters, where he was helping Starfire string up the large banner. "Be sure to get some non-dairy stuff, will ya? And where's David at?"
"I'm here, I'm here!" said David as common room door slid open and David entered, nearly obscured behind rolls of streamers and boxes of party hats and balloons. "These are all I could find."
Beast Boy turned into a bird, fluttered down from the ceiling, and turned back into a human again. "I thought there were more..." he said thoughtfully as David set the boxes down, "did you check the basement?"
"You know big the basement is here?" said David in mild exasperation as he tried to prevent the boxes from avalanching over. "I checked everywhere I could find. You want anything more down there, you're gonna have to call Indiana Jones or something."
Beast Boy however wasn't listening. "No, dude, I'm sure there's some blue ones down there somewhere. Raven likes blue. We should look for those."
David knew by now exactly what Beast Boy meant by 'we'. "Beast Boy, you could hide the Titanic in that place. How am I supposed to find a box of blue balloons?"
"Simple, man," shouted Cyborg over the noise of the food processor. "Just use your powers and look for latex."
David suppressed the urge to detonate Cyborg's food processor, and settled instead for a soft groan, which Beast Boy took to be acquiescence. "It's down there somewhere, and blue's Raven's favorite color. It'll be worth it." He turned back into a hummingbird and flitted back into the air to help Starfire, leaving David to turn around and trudge back down the hallway towards the elevator.
The entire day had been spent in preparation. Robin and Cyborg had made two trips to the store already to get food, and from the sound of things, would require a third to for everything they had forgotten. Beast Boy had been directing the efforts along with Starfire, and for once, Robin had not felt the need to overrule him. Though the other Titans had been together long enough to have done so, this was the first year they would get to celebrate Raven's birthday, and Beast Boy seemed determined to pack all of the would-be celebrations from the previous couple years into one day. Questions about whether or not Raven might perhaps have preferred it low-key way went unasked, or at least unanswered. Beast Boy brushed aside all concerns of the sort, and nobody was particularly interested in contradicting him.
The upshot was that David found himself back in the cavernous warehouse that the Titans colloquially called the "basement" for the third time today, looking for a needle in a haystack made of needles. Cyborg's suggestion might have sounded reasonable to him, but latex was an organic compound, made of a hundred thousand different things, and moreover was found in everything from balloons to clothes, rubber, paint, and chewing gum. It took about thirty seconds of trying to sift through the soup of molecular structures present in the crowded basement before he gave it up as hopeless and returned to his normal vision.
Or rather he was about to, when he spotted something... odd.
Off in the corner was a mass of dense molecules hidden underneath several layers of more common material. The molecules were silicon dioxide, sand, not an uncommon thing to see in a city near the ocean. What was uncommon was the formation and density of the molecules. Rather than sitting loose, they were closely packed together, in a crystalline structure of some kind, quartz or chalcedony. Even that wasn't particularly strange, save for something odd about the shape and formation of the crystals, which seemed much tighter packed, much denser than anything else around them, and thus stood out as a solid mass of crystal. His curiosity piqued, he made his way over to the side of the room and reverted to his normal vision, shifting the tarps and loose coils of rope and cable aside that covered whatever the thing was. Underneath, sitting buried amidst the building materials, he found something entirely out of place.
Wedged underneath a pile of assorted junk sat a pair of bottlecap goggles mounted in flexible black rubber frames attached to an elastic headband, also black. The lenses were quartz with just enough boron sprinkled in to give them a deep blueish color. While quartz was nothing special normally, David had never even heard of someone making a lens out of them. Gently, David picked up the goggles and peered through them. The lenses were unblemished, perfectly transparent except for the light blue tinge that the boron gave them, and flexed easily in the rubber polymer frame. The layer of dust over everything he had sifted through indicated that these had likely been here for quite a long time, and yet no cracks or scratches or any other imperfection could he detect. Though he was no optical engineer, even David could tell that the workmanship on these was astonishing, but for the life of him he could not figure out why someone would bother to create such a thing, when any eyeglass store in the world could have made the same thing in less than an hour without the fuss of trying to form glasses out of transparent stones.
But then suddenly he remembered what Carrie had said, and an idea came to mind...
Carefully, almost gingerly, David tugged on the elastic band attached to the goggles. It seemed to be in perfectly good shape, stretching without any signs of wear, and so he gently slid them on over his head and eyes, adjusting them. The lenses had no prescription in them, and no imperfections even from this close a distance, such that other than a blueish tinge, he could still see perfectly well in either mode of vision. He turned back, walked across the basement and through the door into Cyborg's garage, approaching the T-car, which Cyborg always kept waxed and washed to a mirror shine in between missions. The overhead light was enough to show David his reflection in the front passenger window, and he considered the sight for a few moments before glancing around, just to make sure that nobody else was down here. Once he had verified that he was alone, he drew the baton from his belt and 'lit it up', so to speak brandishing it in his right hand and dropping into his ready position, the one Robin had drilled him in for weeks on end. He rocked back and forth gently shifting his weight from his front to his back foot, smirking inadvertently at the reflection in the window. The goggles held in place easily, snug against his forehead, and made not of plastic or glass but of rock crystal, they would serve admirably to keep out shrapnel, debris, and maybe even errant beams of blinding light.
And on top of that... he had to admit, they looked pretty good.
He pulled the goggles up onto his forehead as he resumed his search through the basement. It took nearly twenty minutes before he finally found a package of blue balloons (rubber, not latex), and pulling it free from the coils of electrical cable it was sitting amongst, he finally turned back to the elevator to go back up to the common room. As the elevator rose up the Tower's spine, he quickly slid the goggles back down over his eyes. He still wasn't sure which one of the Titans the goggles belonged to, but as he had come across them buried in the basement, he doubted seriously that anyone had touched them for a long time. Probably a relic of some adventure they had all had before his time. The Tower was full of those.
He exited the elevator, walked briskly down the hallway, clipping the baton back onto his belt as he did so, and walked into the common room as the automatic doors whisked aside to let him pass. "Found 'em," he said as he tossed the balloon package onto the table where Beast Boy had stacked up the party decorations. "And check it out, I also found these really cool..."
The words died in his throat as he saw the looks on the other Titans' faces.
All four of the Titans were staring at him in various degrees of abject shock, as though he had walked into the room brandishing a severed head. Cyborg's human eye was open as wide as his mouth, the wooden spoon in his hand held as if frozen, sticking out of the cake batter he had been mixing. Robin had been holding a glass of water, which fell from his hands and shattered on the floor as he did a double-take at what David was wearing on his hear. Starfire actually gasped and clasped her hands over her mouth, her bright hazel eyes stretched out in appalled horror, a sight that, even if only for a millisecond, was time enough.
But the worst was Beast Boy, who was staring at him with an expression David had never before seen or imagined, his face paling from its customary emerald to a more sickly color, his eyebrows arched, his breath stopped, his mouth open and quivering, his eyes...
The look in his eyes, the pained, stunned look, like a deer caught in headlights, seemed to drive right through the blue quartz goggles and hit David like a sledgehammer to the face. Like Beast Boy, David seemed to lose the power of speech as he suddenly, appallingly realized that he had flagrantly breached some sort of compact he hadn't even known existed.
And then his nerve broke, and before anyone could say anything further, before anyone could so much as move a muscle, David stumbled backwards into the door he had so triumphantly entered just a second ago. It opened as before, permitting him to turn and run back down the hallway towards his room, heedless of what anyone else might have been saying or calling after him, thinking of nothing but escape and flight, knowing only that he had made a terrible mistake, and that the look in Beast Boy's eye had been enough to shatter his will like a pane of glass.
And on his forehead, the blue quartz goggles still sat, advertising his terrible error to the world like a scarlet brand.
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Friday, July 13th, 5:53 PM
That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day.
He had raced back to his room and locked the door behind him, the first time since he had arrived at the Tower that he had ever seen fit to do so. For hours, he had stayed there, pacing back and forth, with the goggles sitting on his desk, trying to puzzle out what he had done. Once or twice, someone had knocked on the door, Starfire perhaps, or Cyborg, but both times he had simply frozen and made no noise, as if he were asleep. Given who the other Titans were, he doubted he was fooling them, but they let him be regardless. It would have been criminally simple to just ask them what had happened, but he couldn't do that. He couldn't face those empty, breath-catching expressions again, looks of deep-rooted pain and fear and utter, helpless terror that, coming from the rest of them, felt like knives boring into him.
Besides... he was pretty sure he already knew the answer, at least in general.
When finally someone had knocked on the door and not gone away, David had tentatively crossed his room and opened the door, only to find Beast Boy standing there, his color returned, but his expression still as grave as anything David had ever seen. Still, the changeling made an effort to pretend that nothing had happened. "Almost party time," he said, omitting his usual appellation, and forcing a smile that looked like it desperately wanted to be genuine, but wasn't quite able to manage it.
"Beast Boy, I..." said David, trying to think of what to say, and finding nothing that sounded remotely applicable. "I'm sorry. I didn't meant to..."
"Dude... it's okay," said Beast Boy, his voice quiet, but at least no longer forced. He too was struggling for words, and not finding them. "You just sorta... you surprised us, is all." The changeling's gaze was fixed on something behind David, and David turned his head to follow it back to the quartz goggles still sitting on his desk, in plain sight. It was clearly far too late to move them, and kicking himself for leaving them out in the open wouldn't help anything. Previously, Beast Boy had looked like someone had just dropped his best friend's heart on a plate in front of him, but now his expression was less stunned and more wistful, as though he had zoned out of everything around him.
"Beast Boy?"
Beast Boy snapped out of his thousand yard stare, blinked a few times, and fixed his eyes back on David. "Um... right, the... the party. We're gonna surprise Raven in a few minutes. You... wanna come?"
There was only one possible answer to that.
"Sure,"
Out of sight, out of mind. Or at least he hoped that was how it worked.
They walked back down towards the common room in silence. David came within millimeters of stopping Beast Boy and asking him if what had happened had anything to do with the name that kept creeping around the periphery of his perception all the time he was here at the Tower, a name that held terrible importance, but that seemed to be as ephemeral as whispers on the wind, always vanishing whenever he tried to listen for it, or look at it. A name caught in snatches of overheard conversation, one he had only asked about once, and then indirectly, and been told it was not something that could be spoken of. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. He nearly asked, but every time he drew breath to do so, his throat caught, and he refrained
They arrived at the common room. Cyborg had prepared a veritable feast, more food than even he could possibly eat. The banner proclaiming "Happy Birthday" stretched from wall to wall, buttressed with the blue rubber balloons he had dug up from the basement. Starfire and Cyborg and Robin were there, and David caught the glances that they cast at one another and at him when they thought he wasn't looking, but none of them said a word to indicate that anything was wrong. The uncomfortable silence was there however, an elephant in the room that nobody was acknowledging, despite Starfire's customarily pleasant (and wordy) greeting, and Cyborg grinning and offering David a hot dog even as he explained the plan for how they were going to surprise Raven. For David's part, he just hoped that whatever happened at this party would take everyone's mind off whatever terrible error of propriety he had made.
It did.
"But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death."
- Revelations 21:8
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Wednesday, July 11th, 9:02 PM
The tall man's footsteps echoed in the cave system as he paced towards the open cavern looming ahead. There, in the corner, a small yellow light illuminated the empty gloom, half-revealing the figure cloaked in inky shadows that hovered on its periphery.
"What are you doing here?" asked the tall man as he approached the flickering circle of light, his fists held calmly at his sides as he surveyed the scene with a practiced eye.
The figure on its edge did not turn or react physically. When it spoke, its tone was bitter despite its softness. "Get out."
"No," said the tall man sharply, advancing through the open cavern with an inexorable gait. "You have work to do, and I am here to see that you do it."
"I said get out!" yelled the half-hidden figure, and a flash lit the cavern like a bolt of lightning moments before something large and heavy smashed itself to bits on the floor in front of the tall man. "This isn't your place anymore!"
"It never ceased to be mine," said the tall man, kicking the smashed bits of rock over with his foot, "but by all means, continue acting like a spoiled child. That will resolve everything to your satisfaction. And while you're at it, be sure to leave plenty of evidence that you were here by destroying things left and right. That should serve nicely."
"Shut up," spat the figure on the other end of the room. "Just shut up, okay? I don't want to hear whatever you came here to say!"
"Unfortunately," said the tall man as he approached, "the world does not revolve around you, but I'll be glad to leave you alone with your own childishness as soon as you assure me you understand what needs to happen."
The figure stopped, its words dying in its throat as it slowly turned towards the tall man, its tone suddenly subdued and quiet. "Now?" it asked, almost in disbelief, but the tall man did not slacken.
"Now."
"Can't..." the voice was thin now, pleading, a tone the tall man remembered well, "can't we... try something else? Someone - "
"You've picked an odd time to develop a conscience," remarked the tall man acidly. "But regardless, no, we cannot try something else, even if there was a reason to. Cinderblock is dead, and we are rapidly running out of time. We have to strike now, and hard, or else - "
"Yeah, I know," interrupted the other, turning away. The tall man barely hesitated before lunging forward like a coiled spring, grabbing the still half-shrouded figure by the arm, and slamming it up into a wall.
"This is not a game," said the tall man, spitting the words out like bullets. "You know what's at stake here. This is no time to start pretending that you're above such things." The figure shook and twisted in the tall man's grip, but he did not loosen it, leaning forward to make sure his words sank in properly. "In 48 hours, you will have one opportunity. Just one. If you fail to take it, there will not be another, and you and all of your so-called 'friends' will be butchered like cattle. Do you understand that? Has that sunk through your head, or are you still entertaining fantasies that all this is un-necessary?"
Revulsion coursed through the smaller figure's eyes and expression like a poison, and the Tall man felt steel returning to the arm he still held. He did not slacken in the slightest, letting the smaller figure twist and squirm for a moment before finally releasing it all at once and letting it fall to the floor.
"Will you do what is necessary? Or shall I write the obituary of this world and everything living in it?"
"I'll do what I have to do," hissed the figure on the floor through clenched teeth. "I don't need you rubbing it in my face!"
"My dear," said the tall man, "do you imagine I enjoy dealing with you at all after what you did? If you weren't necessary, you would not even be alive today. Try to remember that before you start thinking that you are somehow unjustly prevailed upon."
Slowly, the figure stood back up, brushing its hair out of its eyes as it stared the Tall man in the face. The Tall man regarded the figure with equanimity as it spat on the ground in front of him.
"You remember the plan?"
"Yes," said the figure in a surly tone that the tall man resolutely ignored.
"Once you've triggered the eruption, you will need to survive long enough for the damage to take effect. Adrenaline will prolong it for a while, but not for - "
"I said I know what to do! I can handle it!"
A smirk crossed the tall man's face. "Oh, I have no doubt of that. In fact, I selected you because of your unquestionable skill in these sorts of - "
He was interrupted by a strong blow to the face, delivered in haste and anger, but still hard enough to snap his head around to the right. He turned it back slowly, to see the figure standing with teeth bared and fists raised, and he snorted.
"You get that one for free," said the tall man with perfect calm. "Any beyond that will be paid for, with interest."
The threat was just barely enough to stop the other figure, who instead snarled like a cornered wolverine.
"Get. Out."
For a moment neither one moved, until the tall man finally turned and began to make his way back the way he had come. "Forty-eight hours," he said. "And I will arrange for you to have your chance. Do not miss it, or else..."
Both of them knew what the end of that sentence was.
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Thursday, July 12th, 2:12 PM
The smoke was thick enough to chew on as green flashes dimly filtered through the edge of David's vision. They were not precisely targeted at him, he knew, but at the general area he was supposed to be in, not that this was terribly re-assuring. He stumbled as he ran, nearly tripping as his foot hit something hard and unyielding. He couldn't see what it was through the smoke, not visually, so he shifted his perception and waved away the loose cloud of carbon and water vapor that blocked his sight. It was a metal girder, cast iron, large enough to serve as cover if he crouched. He quickly vaulted over it and ducked down behind, his baton held in one hand, out of sight behind the girder so as not to attract attention with its red glow. Silently, he scanned for threats, but whether looking at molecules or light, he couldn't detect a thing.
Then something knocked him over like a bowling pin.
There was a concussive burst, an explosion without shrapnel, and he landed on his side, hard, but quickly scrambled back to his feet, having managed somehow to retain his grip on the baton. He looked up, scanning automatically for Starfire, whom he assumed was behind the blast, but instead of the sight of the resplendent Tamaranean, he found only empty air. Puzzled, he hesitated for a second, a clear mistake which was rewarded with a birdarang flying out of nowhere and knocking the baton out of his hand.
He made a half turn, backing up towards where the baton had landed, but before he had taken more than half a dozen steps, Robin emerged from the smoke in front of him, one of his ubiquitous telescoping staves held in his right hand like a shepherd's crook, advancing with a poised, measured gait towards a target already disarmed. David gave ground before Robin, who moved quickly and with purpose, brandishing the staff as resolutely as he ever had, his mask-covered face revealing nothing but utter determination to bring down his enemy. As many had learned before, as David himself had determined long ago, Robin might have only been a skinny teenager when you broke it all down, but in combat, he was one of the most imposing things you could ever face.
... but that didn't mean David hadn't learned a trick or two.
Robin advanced on David quickly, but the ground was covered with loose debris, and he couldn't run quite at top speed. The difference was marginal, but it was enough, for an instant before Robin could sweep the staff around and knock David off his feet, David's threw his hand out with his index finger extended like a spear at Robin's chest. Instantly, Robin's staff snapped in half like a twig, the burst of explosive energy slamming into Robin's sternum and arresting him in mid-sprint as though he had run headlong into a wall. It was testament to Robin's skill that he did not fall over, but instead turned the hard explosive shove into a backroll, coming up on his feet poised to strike forward again with both halves of the staff held in each hand like escrima sticks, but the blast had delayed him, and delay was enough. David had already turned and run as fast as he could into the debris and smoke, snatching his fallen baton up as he ran, and ducking behind a pillar a moment later.
This earned him exactly five seconds of respite.
The ground suddenly turned pitch black under his feet, like a cavernous void had opened below him, and before he even knew what was happening, a quartet of black tendrils emerged from the ground, erupting into the air like giant earthworms. Behind them floated the agent of their creation, a figure in black and indigo, arms raised, hands sheathed in black energy, cloak splayed out behind like the aura of pure darkness she would no doubt soon be conjuring. Before David could think of where to run or what to blow up, all four tendrils swirled around him like snakes before rearing up and diving inwards, clearly intent on binding him up like a straitjacket. He tried to dodge, but there was nowhere to go, and all four tendrils latched onto him at once...
... and instantly dissolved.
The exact moment the tendrils touched David's uniform, all four of them dissipated into smoke, streaming up and vanishing into the air. For a brief second, neither Raven nor David moved, but it was David who recovered first from the unexpected stroke of luck. Pivoting on one foot and turning to run, he waved the baton behind him and set off a series of blasts like falling mortar shells, designed to do nothing more than kick up dust, debris, and confusion. In this respect they appeared to succeed, for Raven did not pursue him as he raced along, stumbling and sliding over the scattered debris, looking for a corner or a hidden spot in which to hide.
But suddenly something loomed up out of the smoke ahead of him like an over-sized statue, and he tried to stop himself too late, skidding straight into the thing and bouncing off it like a rubber ball. He lost his balance, slipped, and fell backwards onto the ground with a hard thud, and when he shook his head and focused his eyes again, he saw Cyborg standing over him, his sonic cannon extended down towards David's face. The baton had fallen from his hand again, but even if it had not, the energy coils within the barrel of the cannon were already charging up, the blueish glow filling his field of vision and blotting out all else, save for Cyborg's red mechanical eye boring down at him like a drilling laser. Semi-automatically he raised both hands in an automatic, paltry defense, and shut his eyes, cringing with every muscle in his body as he awaited the inevitable end.
"Bang, you're dead."
A series of mechanical clicks prompted David to crack his eyes open, and he saw Cyborg still standing over him, his forearm reformed into a normal hand, which he was extending down to David with a satisfied smile on his face. Sheepishly, David reached up and took it, rubbing the back of his head where he had hit it on the floor as Cyborg helped him back to his feet. The massive ventilation systems embedded in the walls and ceiling began to pump the smoke and dust out, and gradually the air cleared, revealing the other four Titans one by one.
"Nice trick there with the staff," said Cyborg. "What'd I tell you?"
David stood doubled over, his hands on his knees, breathing heavily and trying to keep his stomach from contracting all of a sudden. The best he could do was nod up at Cyborg with a smile. It had been Cyborg who had pointed out to him that Robin's weapons were almost universally made from a pure titanium-steel alloy, a much easier combination to destroy than the fifty different elements found in the rubble scattered about the floor.
The others had arrived by now, save for Raven, who was hanging back behind Robin a bit. Consumed as David was with trying to remain on his feet, it was Beast Boy who asked Robin the all-important question.
"So?"
Robin already had his communicator open, both halves of his broken staff held awkwardly in his other hand as he punched a few commands in. David hoped he didn't mind the equipment damage. He had said to use any means...
A small smirk crossed Robin's face.
"Sixty-two seconds."
Even before Robin had finished reciting the time, Beast Boy let out a cheer that could have woken the dead and clapped David on the back so hard in congratulations that he would have fallen over if Cyborg hadn't grabbed him by the shoulder. Even as they shook him and punched him in the shoulder (lightly, thank God), David barely heard anything they said. Partly he was exhausted, but partly he was barely able to believe it. A minute. He'd lasted a full minute. As usual, Robin quickly gave his professional analysis, citing the fact that he clearly hadn't been watching where he was going when he ran into Cyborg, that he had hesitated where he shouldn't have several times. All this was true of course, but couldn't blunt the accomplishment, even for Robin. So what if the others had all lasted more than five times longer? It was still a major milestone.
And apparently Beast Boy agreed, or perhaps he simply wanted an excuse to take the rest of the day off, for as they all walked towards the door, he was babbling about how they should celebrate this with a video game tournament or a trip to the pizza parlor. His proposals met no resistance from Cyborg or Starfire, and as they continued out the door and down towards the elevator to the common room, all four of their voices could be heard, debating what else to do for the rest of the day.
It would probably have been five voices, for Robin was already resolved to give the others the rest of the day off, alerts permitting, but instead of joining the others, he had remained behind to have a quick word with Raven about something he had noticed.
"Raven?"
Raven was still standing on the side of the room, and her expression was confused. She did not look as though she had heard a word that had just transpired, indeed she was staring down at the onyx and obsidian gems on the back of her wristguards, lost in thought. It took Robin a second repetition of her name to bring her around.
"What?"
"Um... is everything okay?" asked Robin as delicately as he could. "You... had him there, dead to rights. What happened?"
"Not... not sure," said Raven as she rubbed the side of her head. "My powers just... I don't know what happened."
"Did you lose focus?" suggested Robin, "did he distract you with a - "
"No," said Raven, in a more definitive tone. "They just... they just failed, all of a sudden. As soon as they touched him."
"Failed?" asked Robin, "What do you mean?"
"Look... I don't know what happened. I need to... to think." And with no more explanation than that, Raven walked across the training room and out the door, leaving Robin, once again, with no answers in her wake.
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Thursday, July 12th, 9:35 PM
"You have two new messages."
David looked up from the book he was reading and blinked his eyes, trying to figure out what had said that. It took him a second to realize that it was the computer terminal sitting on his desk. Cyborg had installed it a week or so ago, not a full computer, but instead an uplink terminal to the massive supercomputer in the Tower's basement. So far, save for a few messages, he had barely touched it. He had never had a chance to learn much about computers back at the center, and the one time he'd asked Cyborg for help, he'd wound up more confused than ever. Cyborg's technical explanations were not exactly easy to follow.
He had however, managed to figure out how to check his Email at least, and he set the book down and walked over to the terminal to do just that. All of the Titans had Email, filtered through the central computer to eliminate viruses and spam. The others still got a massive amount of mail even with all of the filters (some were more religious about checking it than others), but David's address wasn't well known yet to the general public, which to be honest was perfectly fine by him. There was still something a bit... weird... about fan mail. He supposed he would get used to it.
Neither message was from an address he recognized offhand, not that this was surprising. The Titans were the only people he knew in the city, and if they had something to tell him, they did so in person. He sat down and opened the first Email with a click of the mouse, and a moment later, the text filled the screen. The subject line got his attention immediately.
"It's Carrie"
A smile crossed his face as he scrolled through the text.
"Hey there! I saw you on the news after the bank robbery, and decided to see if I could get a message to you here. Hope this is the right place."
"So you're a Titan now, huh? After all that stuff about how you 'weren't a superhero', I guess I was right
. Seriously though, congratulations! That had to have been pretty hard to do. All the papers have been talking about how you're so mysterious and how you appeared from nowhere, but I guess I know better. Just between you and me, I think you look pretty good in red, but I'm surprised they didn't give you any goggles or safety glasses or something, you know, for all the explosions? I guess they wouldn't look as cool or something.""Anyway, it's been a while since we talked last time, and I never got to thank you for that thing you did on the waterfront. I know that every time we meet up, it seems like something attacks the city, but even so, I was wondering if you wanted to get together some time this weekend, just so that we can hang out without getting interrupted by Cinderblock or whatever. I dunno if you're allowed to do that anymore now that you're a Titan and all, but if you are, you just come down to Patriot Park sometime tomorrow evening. Me and some of my friends are gonna be there, and I'd love to introduce you around. Don't worry, I promise I won't get all weird and ask for your autograph. I bet you've got thousands of 'number one fans' already who do that. We'll just hang out. It'll be fun."
"I know that you guys are really busy and that you don't usually do that sort of thing, so if you can't make it I understand, but if you want to, we'll be at the park all day tomorrow. If you want, you can even come dressed like a normal person, and I'll pretend you're just a friend from out of town. It's up to you."
"I hope we get to see you there!"
- Carrie
David sat back in his chair and shook his head, smiling. Carrie hadn't said how she had gotten his address, but then he supposed "Devastator at TitansTower . Meta" wasn't particularly hard to guess. He made a mental note to see what Robin's policy was on going incognito in public. None of the others ever seemed to try to blend in (Cyborg and Beast Boy simply couldn't), but normal as it had become to wear, he didn't relish the attention that his uniform would get him outside the tower. Lazily, he leaned back and punched up the next message, already in his mind formulating plans for the next day...
... all of which vanished as soon as the message came up on screen.
The subject line, "Concerning Devastator", was innocuous enough, but the message inside was anything but.
"MURDERER!"
It had his attention, at least.
"You may have fooled the papers and the media, but I KNOW WHAT YOU REALLY ARE! You think you can just come into this city and like nothing really happened? You think I don't know that you're here to kill us all just like TERRA WAS?! I don't know how you manipulated the Titans into thinking you're here to help, but you CAN'T FOOL ME!! You're a LIAR, a MURDERER, and I WON'T STAND FOR IT! I'm gonna MAKE SURE EVERYBODY KNOWS WHAT YOU REALLY ARE!!"
"The army denied entry to the city,
The Duke will enter through persuasion:
The army led secretly to the weak gates,
They will put it to fire and sword, effusion of blood."
"YOU DON'T FOOL ME! I KNOW THE APOCALYPSE YOU BRING, 'DEVASTATOR!'"
David didn't move for a little while, staring at the screen as though expecting it to change, like this was all some form of practical joke that would be made good any second now, but instead it continued to sit there, daring him to do something about it. Part of him wanted to react like it was just spam, a random message from the bowels of the internet that had somehow slipped through the filters. Part of him wanted to say that there were crazy people out there who had crazy things to say (and apparently, to say in verse). But within the body of the text, a single word stood out.
A single name.
The text remained immobile on the screen, and finally he shook himself out of his thoughts. He felt like the temperature in the room had dropped ten degrees and he didn't know why, but his eye was constantly drawing back to that one name in the middle of the opening paragraph. He had resolved to delete the Email, to get rid of it and try to put it out of his mind as the work of a kook, when he noticed something in the address line.
CC: Titansgroup (Raven; BeastBoy; Cyborg; Robin; Starfire; Devastator) at TitansTower . Meta<br>
There was a knock on the door...
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Thursday, July 12th, 10:07 PM
"Man, what did I tell you about bringing apocalypses in here without letting us know first?"
"Yeah dude, that's totally unfair! Robin won't even let me have a moped, and you get a whole apocalypse to yourself? What gives?"
That one elicited a nervous chuckle from the psychokinetic sitting on the stool at the kitchen table, as Cyborg and Beast Boy did what they always did, making troubles and worries seem insignificant. There was nothing in Raven's expression to indicate how much she wished they would not speak about the apocalypse though, at least not tonight. There was no sign she could give that wouldn't raise... questions.
"I know it's stupid..." said David, sliding one of the printed out copies of the Email he had received (printed courtesy of Beast Boy, of course) across the table. "I just... didn't really expect something like this."
"Don't let it get to you," said Cyborg. "There's a whole bunch of idiots out there who send us stuff like this. They're always goin' on about how Raven's a witch, I'm the Terminator, and Starfire's really here to get us all ready for an alien invasion. These guys need a hobby, you ask me."
"I guess..." David didn't sound too convinced. Raven didn't need her empathy to tell that he was more worried about this than he was letting on. Or was it this at all? Surely not even David could be so sensitive that a random online lunatic could upset him with some badly-phrased warnings of doom. Raven herself never checked her Titans Email, partly because of the sheer number of 'burn the witch' messages she received from the depths of the internet. Glancing at the printout again, she wondered if perhaps there wasn't another reason he was worried by it.
"The Duke will enter through persuasion?" asked Beast Boy, mispronouncing the last word. "What is this, some kind of song?"
Raven said nothing, though she knew what it was. It was one of the prophecies of Nostradamus, a favorite source for would-be occultist lunatics. His prophecies were considered bad jokes by anybody except for a few easily-fooled people, but it was still worrisome that it should have appeared today of all days.
She turned the page of her book, so as to make it appear that she was doing nothing but reading. Instead she listened to Cyborg and Beast Boy making light of the Email, jokingly speculating about who had sent it, and what types of mental disorders the author was suffering from. It was working, she could tell, but not as well as it should have, and Raven caught David occasionally glancing over at her nervously, as though he could tell what she was thinking. Had he felt something odd from the afternoon's training session too? She couldn't discount it, though he seemed to be maddeningly incapable of detecting anything wrong whatsoever with his own powers. He hadn't even noticed what had happened when she entered his head that time some weeks ago, or at least he had claimed not to have noticed. But then why would he lie?
And what the hell had happened today?
She'd had him. She'd had him dead to rights, as Robin would put it, caught between four tendrils. He had been distracted, disoriented, unable to do anything, and yet when she had moved in for the simulated kill, her powers had failed as though someone had thrown a switch. After leaving the training room, she had meditated for hours, searching for what had gone wrong. She hadn't fumbled a syllable or mis-channelled the energy, that at least would be an answer. The more she thought about it, the more certain she was she had done everything right... something had to have disrupted her.
What?
Was it David? She'd used her powers on him a dozen times before, healed him back from near-dead, even gone inside his head. No problem, no resistance. Had something else happened? Was it tied to...
"Raven?"
Beast Boy was staring at her, and Raven realized all of a sudden that the mug of tea on the table in front of her had just cracked. Refusing to meet the others' gazes, she swept the debris into the trash with a wave of her hand, and returned to her book, leaving the others to quietly return to talking, occasionally glancing back over at her whenever they thought she wouldn't notice.
"There is no such thing as coincidence." That was one of Azar's precepts. She'd always taken comfort in that thought, that she had not randomly met her friends, or defeated all of their enemies by luck, but instead because she was 'meant' to. Recently however, that age-old mantra had begun to take on a decidedly sinister tone, for if there was no such thing as coincidence, then what was she to make of all this?
"Demonspawn, begone!"
Robin was better at this than she was.
"Hey, guys? What's that?"
Raven shook herself awake and saw David pointing at the living room window of the Tower, out towards the night-shrouded ocean. Cyborg glanced outside. "Oh that?" he asked, gesturing at a black spot on the horizon, barely visible against the indigo sky. "That's San Saltador. It's an offshore oil platform." He chuckled. "You got good eyes if you can make it out at this time of - "
There was a bright flash, like a bolt of lightning, that briefly illuminated the entire sky, followed by a series of lights bursting to life on the distant oil platform. Cyborg quickly abandoned what he was saying, and Raven put her book down, standing up as she watched the lights flicker, then stabilize, causing the entire rig to glow like a false dawn on the horizon.
Everyone's communicator went off at once. Cyborg opened his first, revealing Robin and Starfire, who were out on patrol. Within moments, everyone was scrambling out of the common room to meet Robin and Starfire at the T-sub and go and investigate whatever was happening out there. Raven brought up the rear of the four superheroes, her mind still refusing to release what had happened today, for fear of having to consider what might happen tomorrow. It struck her, as she floated down the hallway, that the message had specifically mentioned Terra, and yet neither Cyborg nor Beast Boy had said anything about her. Then again, she supposed that wasn't so surprising.
Terra was a subject that none of them were ready to face if they could avoid it.
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Friday, July 13th, 12:31 AM
"Look man," said Cyborg, his voice muffled by the donuts he had stuffed into his mouth. "Raven does weird stuff sometimes. Just let it go."
Beast Boy frowned as he took a bite from his vegan donut and washed it down with a gulp of soy milk. "I'm telling you, dude," he said, not bothering to swallow first, "she's acting totally strange, even for her. What's so special about tomorrow that she's all worried about?"
The disturbance on the oil platform had been the work of Doctor Light, who in a less than brilliant move (pun intended), had decided to attack a target literally within sight of the Tower's common room. What he had been planning to do out there was beyond Beast Boy, something about flooding the city with light or some other lame excuse for an evil plot. They had just been warming up to take him down when Raven had shortcut the entire process by appearing in front of him, ready to strike. One look at her, and Doctor Light had actually asked to go to jail, and yet when Cyborg had proposed that they all go celebrate, Raven had turned back to the tower, saying that she needed to be back home before tomorrow.
And of course, she hadn't explained why that was.
"Man, I don't know," said Cyborg. "Maybe she's got some ritual or somethin' to do. Look, if it was a problem, she'd let us know."
"Perhaps there is an astronomical significance to the date?" suggested Starfire, who was busy lathering relish on her chocolate donut. "She explained to me once that certain types of magic involve various planetary alignments that occur only on specific dates."
"It's not just that," insisted Beast Boy. "She's been acting weird all week. I told you that she fell asleep at her desk, remember?"
"Is... that uncommon?" asked Starfire. "Robin does this quite often. I believed it was normal behavior for certain people."
"Only for bird-boy," remarked Cyborg, glancing back at Robin, who was safely out of earshot up at the donut shop's counter, chatting with several cops who had stopped in for a quick snack. "But even Raven's gotta study for her magic, don't she?"
"I told you, it wasn't magic stuff," said Beast Boy. "She had this big book full of technical mumbo-jumbo, and she had my name written down in it."
"Maybe she's tryin' to make a voodoo doll?"
Beast Boy scowled. "Dude, that is so not funny."
Cyborg appeared to disagree, judging from his grin as he tore into his fifth donut, but Starfire stepped in with a suggestion. "I have... perhaps seen this book," she said. "Raven was reading from it one day several months ago. She said it was a description of the various powers that people such as us possess. Perhaps she wished to conduct further research."
Beast Boy shook his head. "I'm telling you guys, ever since she did that Vulcan mind-meld thing with David, she's been acting weird."
Cyborg remained unconvinced. "It ain't exactly weird for Raven to not come out for donuts with us. You know how she is, man."
"Indeed," said Starfire. "Raven does not typically engage in these activities, and after all, did not David also ask to stay behind?"
"That's different, Star," said Beast Boy. Right before Raven had 'convinced' Doctor Light to surrender, David had gotten blasted in the eyes by a light beam that had left him dazed and blinded for a few minutes. He had still been seeing spots when they dropped the Doctor off at the jail, and though Raven had assured them all that he would be fine in a couple hours, he had elected to skip the donuts in favor of going home and finding some eyedrops. "David didn't say he had to get home because of some mystery thing that's s'possed to happen tomorrow."
"So what're you sayin'?" asked Cyborg.
"I'm saying, dude, that we should figure out what's so special about tomorrow." Beast Boy gulped down the last bite of his donut and crossed his arms in an attempt to look serious and convincing.
"What, you mean snoop around in Raven's business again?" asked Cyborg. "No way, man, the last time I did that, I got sucked into a magic mirror and dumped into Raven's brain."
"But what if this is something we really oughta know about? What if it's like that time with Malchior?"
"Raven pledged to alert us in the future if anything potentially dangerous was the matter," said Starfire. "Surely whatever her concerns about the coming day, she would not hide it if it was of potential concern to us."
"But it might be serious! You gotta help me figure it out."
"C'mon, BB, calm down," said Cyborg, "it's probably nothing anyway. Even if it ain't though, Raven's a big girl, she can take care of herself whatever it is, and if she can't she'll ask us for help. You know she doesn't like people gettin' all up in her business, and you're just gonna get her mad at you if you go off trying to pry it out of her. Besides, I remember what happened last time you decided to go playing Raven-detective, and I don't need another round of that. If you're gonna go doin' something that's gonna piss off Raven, you can do it yourself."
Beast Boy opened his mouth to reply, but then stopped as a thought hit him. A grin that the others no doubt would describe as 'worrying' crossed his face, but all he could say back to Cyborg were two words.
"We'll see..."
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Friday, July 13th, 10:50 AM
"This is such a bad idea."
"It'll be fine, just watch for anyone coming."
David glanced back up and down the corridor nervously. "And what are we supposed to do if someone is coming? I can't turn into a mouse and hide in a corner, remember?"
"Just say you got lost," said Beast Boy. "It still happens to me."
"Right, lie to Robin, that's a smart idea," said David. "Just hurry up. I really don't want to be running laps all morning tomorrow."
"Almost finished," said the changeling, tapping some more commands into the master computer before grinning and stepping back. "There we go, we are officially inside."
Forgetting his many objections to what they were doing for the moment, David walked back over to the computer. "We're logged in?" he asked.
"Better, dude," replied Beast Boy with a smile as he brought up a series of folders on the screen. "Those are the secure files. I bet that's where we'll find out what's so special about today."
"But I thought those were locked?" asked David, confused.
"They are, but you're working with a master here..." said Beast Boy smugly. He flexed his fingers before bringing up the login screen, and quickly typing in a username and password combination. The computer thought for a few seconds, before a green window blinked up with the words "Access Granted" written in bold letters.
"Voila!" exclaimed Beast Boy, stepping back to permit David to admire his handiwork, and looking around as though expecting applause to emanate from the walls. "We're all set."
"Where'd... how'd you find Robin's login and password?" asked David, still scarcely able to believe that they had gotten inside so easily.
"I used my amazing detective skills," said Beast Boy, smiling serenely.
"Meaning you asked Starfire?"
"Yeah, pretty much. Anyway I'm gonna see if I can find anything. You keep a look out." Beast Boy began typing on the computer's keyboard as David turned around and faced the hallway, letting the world dissolve into constituent parts again, until he was no longer looking at the door, but through it, at the molecular basis of the tower itself. Anyone even exiting the elevator on this level would be clearly visible to him.
"So you're okay, now I mean?"
"Yeah," said David as he sat down in a folding chair, facing the door, "Raven was right, I just needed a few hours. Who was that wacko anyway?"
"Who, Doctor Light?" asked Beast Boy without turning around. "He's some wannabe hotshot who can control light or something. He's kind of a doofus. Raven really cooked him last year, and he's been terrified of her ever since."
"Smart guy," commented David. "I'll just remember to duck next time."
"Wait," said Beast Boy, pausing in mid-keystroke, "you didn't know who he was? I thought Robin told you about all the local bad guys."
"David shook his head. "Just some of them," he said, "Those kids from the H.I.V.E. academy, that crazy British guy, we haven't gotten through all of them yet. I guess this guy didn't qualify as 'major'."
"Yeah, probably not," said Beast Boy, resuming typing. "Anyway, he won't be back for a while, so don't worry about it."
"I'm not worried," said David, and for once he meant it, and he chuckled lightly. "It's just a little weird..."
"What is?" asked Beast Boy
"You remember... I told you about Carrie, right?"
"Your new girlfriend?" Beast Boy asked with a smirk.
He smiled and shook his head. "Whatever man. Anyway, I got a message from her yesterday, before Doctor Light showed up, and she said she'd saw me on TV, and she thought I should start wearing safety glasses or something, in case I blew something up too close. Maybe she was right."
"Pft," scoffed Beast Boy, "dude, glasses never look good. I remember once when Rita..." he stopped suddenly, and his eyes lit up. "Jackpot!"
David raised an eyebrow as he walked over to the screen. "You found something?"
"Not just something, I found out what's so special about today!" He slid his chair back and pointed at the relevant entry on the screen. "Check it out!"
It took David a second to realize what the information on the screen was. When he did however, his eyes widened in recognition. "I don't believe it," he said incredulously...
"It's all there in black and white, dude! And you know what this means, right?"
David had the distinct feeling that he did...
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Friday, July 13th, 3:41 PM
"I need more flour!"
"You already used the entire bag!" protested Robin in something approaching horror. "How much cake are you making?"
"I don't call it the eight-layer cake 'cause it's got seven layers. Star's sendin' you out to get the steak for that crown thing she's puttin' together, right? Just pick up another sack of flower and about thirty more sticks of butter while you're at it." As though to counter all potential arguments, Cyborg turned his back and returned to the mixing bowl, his white chef's pastry hat sliding down over his robotic eye as he did so."
"Yeah, and get some more ice cream while you're out!" called Beast Boy from up in the rafters, where he was helping Starfire string up the large banner. "Be sure to get some non-dairy stuff, will ya? And where's David at?"
"I'm here, I'm here!" said David as common room door slid open and David entered, nearly obscured behind rolls of streamers and boxes of party hats and balloons. "These are all I could find."
Beast Boy turned into a bird, fluttered down from the ceiling, and turned back into a human again. "I thought there were more..." he said thoughtfully as David set the boxes down, "did you check the basement?"
"You know big the basement is here?" said David in mild exasperation as he tried to prevent the boxes from avalanching over. "I checked everywhere I could find. You want anything more down there, you're gonna have to call Indiana Jones or something."
Beast Boy however wasn't listening. "No, dude, I'm sure there's some blue ones down there somewhere. Raven likes blue. We should look for those."
David knew by now exactly what Beast Boy meant by 'we'. "Beast Boy, you could hide the Titanic in that place. How am I supposed to find a box of blue balloons?"
"Simple, man," shouted Cyborg over the noise of the food processor. "Just use your powers and look for latex."
David suppressed the urge to detonate Cyborg's food processor, and settled instead for a soft groan, which Beast Boy took to be acquiescence. "It's down there somewhere, and blue's Raven's favorite color. It'll be worth it." He turned back into a hummingbird and flitted back into the air to help Starfire, leaving David to turn around and trudge back down the hallway towards the elevator.
The entire day had been spent in preparation. Robin and Cyborg had made two trips to the store already to get food, and from the sound of things, would require a third to for everything they had forgotten. Beast Boy had been directing the efforts along with Starfire, and for once, Robin had not felt the need to overrule him. Though the other Titans had been together long enough to have done so, this was the first year they would get to celebrate Raven's birthday, and Beast Boy seemed determined to pack all of the would-be celebrations from the previous couple years into one day. Questions about whether or not Raven might perhaps have preferred it low-key way went unasked, or at least unanswered. Beast Boy brushed aside all concerns of the sort, and nobody was particularly interested in contradicting him.
The upshot was that David found himself back in the cavernous warehouse that the Titans colloquially called the "basement" for the third time today, looking for a needle in a haystack made of needles. Cyborg's suggestion might have sounded reasonable to him, but latex was an organic compound, made of a hundred thousand different things, and moreover was found in everything from balloons to clothes, rubber, paint, and chewing gum. It took about thirty seconds of trying to sift through the soup of molecular structures present in the crowded basement before he gave it up as hopeless and returned to his normal vision.
Or rather he was about to, when he spotted something... odd.
Off in the corner was a mass of dense molecules hidden underneath several layers of more common material. The molecules were silicon dioxide, sand, not an uncommon thing to see in a city near the ocean. What was uncommon was the formation and density of the molecules. Rather than sitting loose, they were closely packed together, in a crystalline structure of some kind, quartz or chalcedony. Even that wasn't particularly strange, save for something odd about the shape and formation of the crystals, which seemed much tighter packed, much denser than anything else around them, and thus stood out as a solid mass of crystal. His curiosity piqued, he made his way over to the side of the room and reverted to his normal vision, shifting the tarps and loose coils of rope and cable aside that covered whatever the thing was. Underneath, sitting buried amidst the building materials, he found something entirely out of place.
Wedged underneath a pile of assorted junk sat a pair of bottlecap goggles mounted in flexible black rubber frames attached to an elastic headband, also black. The lenses were quartz with just enough boron sprinkled in to give them a deep blueish color. While quartz was nothing special normally, David had never even heard of someone making a lens out of them. Gently, David picked up the goggles and peered through them. The lenses were unblemished, perfectly transparent except for the light blue tinge that the boron gave them, and flexed easily in the rubber polymer frame. The layer of dust over everything he had sifted through indicated that these had likely been here for quite a long time, and yet no cracks or scratches or any other imperfection could he detect. Though he was no optical engineer, even David could tell that the workmanship on these was astonishing, but for the life of him he could not figure out why someone would bother to create such a thing, when any eyeglass store in the world could have made the same thing in less than an hour without the fuss of trying to form glasses out of transparent stones.
But then suddenly he remembered what Carrie had said, and an idea came to mind...
Carefully, almost gingerly, David tugged on the elastic band attached to the goggles. It seemed to be in perfectly good shape, stretching without any signs of wear, and so he gently slid them on over his head and eyes, adjusting them. The lenses had no prescription in them, and no imperfections even from this close a distance, such that other than a blueish tinge, he could still see perfectly well in either mode of vision. He turned back, walked across the basement and through the door into Cyborg's garage, approaching the T-car, which Cyborg always kept waxed and washed to a mirror shine in between missions. The overhead light was enough to show David his reflection in the front passenger window, and he considered the sight for a few moments before glancing around, just to make sure that nobody else was down here. Once he had verified that he was alone, he drew the baton from his belt and 'lit it up', so to speak brandishing it in his right hand and dropping into his ready position, the one Robin had drilled him in for weeks on end. He rocked back and forth gently shifting his weight from his front to his back foot, smirking inadvertently at the reflection in the window. The goggles held in place easily, snug against his forehead, and made not of plastic or glass but of rock crystal, they would serve admirably to keep out shrapnel, debris, and maybe even errant beams of blinding light.
And on top of that... he had to admit, they looked pretty good.
He pulled the goggles up onto his forehead as he resumed his search through the basement. It took nearly twenty minutes before he finally found a package of blue balloons (rubber, not latex), and pulling it free from the coils of electrical cable it was sitting amongst, he finally turned back to the elevator to go back up to the common room. As the elevator rose up the Tower's spine, he quickly slid the goggles back down over his eyes. He still wasn't sure which one of the Titans the goggles belonged to, but as he had come across them buried in the basement, he doubted seriously that anyone had touched them for a long time. Probably a relic of some adventure they had all had before his time. The Tower was full of those.
He exited the elevator, walked briskly down the hallway, clipping the baton back onto his belt as he did so, and walked into the common room as the automatic doors whisked aside to let him pass. "Found 'em," he said as he tossed the balloon package onto the table where Beast Boy had stacked up the party decorations. "And check it out, I also found these really cool..."
The words died in his throat as he saw the looks on the other Titans' faces.
All four of the Titans were staring at him in various degrees of abject shock, as though he had walked into the room brandishing a severed head. Cyborg's human eye was open as wide as his mouth, the wooden spoon in his hand held as if frozen, sticking out of the cake batter he had been mixing. Robin had been holding a glass of water, which fell from his hands and shattered on the floor as he did a double-take at what David was wearing on his hear. Starfire actually gasped and clasped her hands over her mouth, her bright hazel eyes stretched out in appalled horror, a sight that, even if only for a millisecond, was time enough.
But the worst was Beast Boy, who was staring at him with an expression David had never before seen or imagined, his face paling from its customary emerald to a more sickly color, his eyebrows arched, his breath stopped, his mouth open and quivering, his eyes...
The look in his eyes, the pained, stunned look, like a deer caught in headlights, seemed to drive right through the blue quartz goggles and hit David like a sledgehammer to the face. Like Beast Boy, David seemed to lose the power of speech as he suddenly, appallingly realized that he had flagrantly breached some sort of compact he hadn't even known existed.
And then his nerve broke, and before anyone could say anything further, before anyone could so much as move a muscle, David stumbled backwards into the door he had so triumphantly entered just a second ago. It opened as before, permitting him to turn and run back down the hallway towards his room, heedless of what anyone else might have been saying or calling after him, thinking of nothing but escape and flight, knowing only that he had made a terrible mistake, and that the look in Beast Boy's eye had been enough to shatter his will like a pane of glass.
And on his forehead, the blue quartz goggles still sat, advertising his terrible error to the world like a scarlet brand.
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Friday, July 13th, 5:53 PM
That pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day.
He had raced back to his room and locked the door behind him, the first time since he had arrived at the Tower that he had ever seen fit to do so. For hours, he had stayed there, pacing back and forth, with the goggles sitting on his desk, trying to puzzle out what he had done. Once or twice, someone had knocked on the door, Starfire perhaps, or Cyborg, but both times he had simply frozen and made no noise, as if he were asleep. Given who the other Titans were, he doubted he was fooling them, but they let him be regardless. It would have been criminally simple to just ask them what had happened, but he couldn't do that. He couldn't face those empty, breath-catching expressions again, looks of deep-rooted pain and fear and utter, helpless terror that, coming from the rest of them, felt like knives boring into him.
Besides... he was pretty sure he already knew the answer, at least in general.
When finally someone had knocked on the door and not gone away, David had tentatively crossed his room and opened the door, only to find Beast Boy standing there, his color returned, but his expression still as grave as anything David had ever seen. Still, the changeling made an effort to pretend that nothing had happened. "Almost party time," he said, omitting his usual appellation, and forcing a smile that looked like it desperately wanted to be genuine, but wasn't quite able to manage it.
"Beast Boy, I..." said David, trying to think of what to say, and finding nothing that sounded remotely applicable. "I'm sorry. I didn't meant to..."
"Dude... it's okay," said Beast Boy, his voice quiet, but at least no longer forced. He too was struggling for words, and not finding them. "You just sorta... you surprised us, is all." The changeling's gaze was fixed on something behind David, and David turned his head to follow it back to the quartz goggles still sitting on his desk, in plain sight. It was clearly far too late to move them, and kicking himself for leaving them out in the open wouldn't help anything. Previously, Beast Boy had looked like someone had just dropped his best friend's heart on a plate in front of him, but now his expression was less stunned and more wistful, as though he had zoned out of everything around him.
"Beast Boy?"
Beast Boy snapped out of his thousand yard stare, blinked a few times, and fixed his eyes back on David. "Um... right, the... the party. We're gonna surprise Raven in a few minutes. You... wanna come?"
There was only one possible answer to that.
"Sure,"
Out of sight, out of mind. Or at least he hoped that was how it worked.
They walked back down towards the common room in silence. David came within millimeters of stopping Beast Boy and asking him if what had happened had anything to do with the name that kept creeping around the periphery of his perception all the time he was here at the Tower, a name that held terrible importance, but that seemed to be as ephemeral as whispers on the wind, always vanishing whenever he tried to listen for it, or look at it. A name caught in snatches of overheard conversation, one he had only asked about once, and then indirectly, and been told it was not something that could be spoken of. Not yet. Perhaps not ever. He nearly asked, but every time he drew breath to do so, his throat caught, and he refrained
They arrived at the common room. Cyborg had prepared a veritable feast, more food than even he could possibly eat. The banner proclaiming "Happy Birthday" stretched from wall to wall, buttressed with the blue rubber balloons he had dug up from the basement. Starfire and Cyborg and Robin were there, and David caught the glances that they cast at one another and at him when they thought he wasn't looking, but none of them said a word to indicate that anything was wrong. The uncomfortable silence was there however, an elephant in the room that nobody was acknowledging, despite Starfire's customarily pleasant (and wordy) greeting, and Cyborg grinning and offering David a hot dog even as he explained the plan for how they were going to surprise Raven. For David's part, he just hoped that whatever happened at this party would take everyone's mind off whatever terrible error of propriety he had made.
It did.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 21, Cont'd
Friday, July 13th, 6:02 PM
In the end, David had to admit that he could not have done a better job himself. Or a worse one, for that matter.
Raven reacted to her surprise party, not with gratitude (which Beast Boy had clearly hoped for), nor with indifference (which David had assumed she would adopt), nor even with annoyance (which he had considered the worst case scenario). She reacted with hostility, panic, and fear.
Yes, fear.
It went completely wrong right from the start. The 'surprise' party came as something more of a surprise than anyone had expected. When they surprised her, Raven melted into the floor like an ice sculpture and only reappeared after Starfire re-assured her that it was only her friends about. When she did, she was fuming mad, both at Beast Boy (which was nothing new), and at everyone who had gone along with it (which was also nothing new). She forced Beast Boy to admit how he had found her birthday out (although he omitted any reference to David himself, David saw several suspicious glances aimed in his general direction), and then utterly refused to have anything to do with it. "I'm not interested," was her verdict, delivered with all the warmth of a glacier. When the others tried, gently, to talk her into staying, she rebuffed them all in turn, until finally Beast Boy's final plea snapped whatever thin thread was suspending Raven's patience, and she blew up.
Or rather, she blew everything else up.
Her eyes blazed with some kind of inner fire, and before David knew what was happening, her powers tore the entire setup to shreds. Balloons, banners, refreshments, cake, everything, obliterated in half a heartbeat. No sooner had she laid waste to the common room, than she departed as quickly as she had come, back through the doors towards her room, leaving behind yet another scene of stunned and hurt silence. Robin hastened after her to try and figure out what was wrong, as this was extreme even for Raven. Cyborg and Starfire made some halfhearted efforts towards cleaning up the mess, but elected in the end to leave it for the morning. Beast Boy stood there in the center of the room like a mannequin, part of Cyborg's cake stuck almost comically to his head, a pained expression on his face that his stale attempts at humor could not dispel. He looked like someone had just run over his pet, and indeed, Cyborg had had to drag him back out of the common room, explaining that Raven just needed to be alone, and that there was nothing left to do here.
David required no such encouragement. Bidding a good night to Starfire, he had made his way back to his room via a roundabout route, staring down at his shoes on the floor and, for the first time in a long while, wishing that he were somewhere else entirely.
Which is how he wound up walking right into Raven.
He had turned a corner at the same time as her and before either of them could stop, he had collided with her head on and bounced back, for Raven, while hardly enormous, was older and larger than he was. He steadied himself against the wall and stopped, as did she, and the two of them faced one another for a moment in silence.
"Sorry," he said, not averting his gaze from the sorceress. Her stare was entirely unsettling, so much so that he had an urge to reach for his baton, which he suppressed only with difficulty.
Raven seemed torn between several different things to say, but settled after a few moments for another sharp comment. "Don't ever go snooping around in my files again," she said, though how she had intuited that he was the one who had helped Beast Boy was beyond him.
"I wasn't snooping in anything," replied David lamely, "Beast Boy just wanted to know..."
Wrong answer.
"It's none of your business," she said furiously, "or his. My birthday is nothing to celebrate."
That one confused him. "What are you talking about?"
"You wouldn't understand," she said simply, and turned to walk away, but in the spur of the moment, David decided to speak up.
"No, Raven, I think you don't understand."
Raven stopped in her tracks and turned around sharply. "What?"
"Look," said David, "I don't know what this weird thing is with you and your birthday..."
"That's right," interrupted Raven, "you don't. Like I said, it's none of your business."
"Fine," said David, "but I don't have a birthday, remember? And what you don't know and I do is that I'd kill to have one that my friends would want to celebrate so much that they'd go to that level of effort."
"So pick one," said Raven dismissively, "there's lots of days in the calendar."
"That's not the point, and you know it," countered David. "What's going on here?"
"It is none of your business." repeated Raven for the third time, and she turned to leave, apparently considering it her last word on the subject. Any other day, David would have let it go. His usual policy vis-a-vis Raven was the same one he took with large and dangerous predators: avoid eye contact and hope they weren't hungry.
This wasn't any other day.
"Oh come on!" He demanded. "What is this? Look, I'm sorry about whatever I did with those stupid goggles, okay? I didn't even know what they were... I still don't know what they - "
"What goggles?"
The question calmed David down enough for him to notice that Raven had stopped in her tracks, and was half-looking back towards him, silhouetted by the dim overhead lights.
"The... the blue ones," he said, only now remembering that Raven had been the only one not in the room when he had made his 'grand' entrance. "I... found a pair of blue safety goggles down in the basement. I thought... I assumed that since they were stuck down there that nobody was using them, so I brought them upstairs to... to see if... Raven?"
Raven wasn't moving.
From where David was standing, he couldn't see Raven's face, but he could see her fist, clenched tightly with a black aura of magic (or whatever her powers actually were) shrouding it like a boxing glove.
... well that was a bad sign.
"Where did you find those goggles?"
"In... in the basement," said David, unconsciously taking a step back. "They were stuck under a pile of - "
"Blue goggles?" asked Raven, her voice short and sharp like a dagger. "Made of crystal?"
"Um... yeah..." said David guardedly. "Quartz and boron..."
Raven turned back towards him slowly, both of her fists clenched shut and sheathed in energy. Her expression was not angry or aggressive, as he would have expected it to be. It was instead fearful, her eyes wide, her forehead knotted with worry and apprehension. In a way, this was even worse than angry-Raven, for David did not recall having ever seen Raven afraid of anything. Without any thought on his part, David's hand slid down to the hilt of the baton clipped to his belt, as he took half a step back from the sorceress.
"There's an awful lot of coincidences around you," said Raven. "Your mystery powers, your missing records, name, date of birth, the way Cinderblock kept herding you towards us? I guess you don't know anything about this either?"
"Anything about what?" asked David, sensing the threat, but not where it was coming from.
"Where did you find those goggles?" asked Raven in a voice that brooked no equivocation.
"I told you already, they were in the basement, buried under - "
"Bullshit!" she shouted, plunging them into strobe as the lights flickered overhead. David throat caught and he backed up another step as Raven stared at him with eyes like laser beams, wide, unblinking, and filled with equal measures of fear and wrath. "Cyborg and I searched through the Tower for two weeks looking for any shred of Terra, and you found a pristine pair of her goggles in twenty minutes?! We emptied the entire basement to make sure, so don't tell me they were just laying in there! Where did you find them?!"
The very walls were beginning to vibrate with Raven's raging temper and David, who now if not before was scared out of his wits, could only continue to back up before the barrage of accusations and try and stammer a rational reply.
"I found them in the basement!" he insisted. "I don't know how the hell they got there! I don't even know who - "
"Just like you don't know how you resisted my powers yesterday?"
David nearly lost his footing as the question hit him like a physical blow. "What?"
"Don't play stupid with me!" snapped Raven. "Yesterday in the training room, you dispelled my powers like they weren't even there! Don't tell me you didn't even notice! I won't just write this stuff off forever, Devastator! Cute trick by the way, picking that name. We're all supposed to just forget where it came from?"
"This is insane!" cried David. "I don't know where it came from, and I told you why I picked it! I didn't dispel anything of yours, I didn't even know anything went wrong!" Only too late did he realize that he had just said, in essence, exactly what she had told him not to say.
Raven's powers send a tremor through the walls and ceiling, strong enough to be felt, and she clutched at her head with one hand, clenching her eyes shut. "I can't deal with this tonight," she said through clenched teeth. Slowly the tremors subsided, and she opened her eyes again and pointed a black-shrouded finger accusingly at David. "But if I find out that you ever lied to us about any of this, it will be the last thing you ever do."
David stopped retreating.
In one even motion, streamlined through weeks and weeks of practice, David pulled the baton off his belt, flipped it around into to hold it right-side up, and ignited the fiery aura around it, the one Raven herself had shown him how to produce. He raised the baton in his right hand, a flaming beacon amidst the darkness pouring off of Raven herself, and locked his gaze with hers.
"Raven," he said, his voice barely rising above a steel-coated whisper, "don't you ever threaten me!"
Time hung for a few seconds as the two superheroes faced one another down, but amidst the fear and anger and boiling something in Raven's gaze, David caught a glimpse of what looked to be doubt. Clearly not sure of what to do here, perhaps perceiving, if nothing else, that she had backed David into a corner, Raven hesitated and then slowly lowered her hand, though her eyes never left his.
"I don't make threats," she said in a near-whisper, and with that, she turned and walked away down the hall, leaving David standing in the hallway with his baton still held uselessly in his right hand. Even after she disappeared around the corner, he did not even dare to blink, his breath coming in ragged gasps, and his heart pounding in his throat. It wasn't until he heard fast-approaching footsteps that he lowered his baton, extinguishing the aura around it as he turned his head and saw Robin jogging towards him.
"What happened?" asked Robin, and he noticed that Robin had a birdarang in his hand. "We felt the tower shaking, and I heard someone shouting."
David looked down at the baton in his hand, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath to calm his racing heart rate. "Nothing," he said, without even turning back to look at Robin. "Just a misunderstanding. And before Robin could ask any more questions, David turned and walked past him down the hallway and away from the scene of confrontation, looking to all the world like he was just heading back to his own room, and didn't want to talk about what had just happened. Raven was imposing even when she was just sitting in a corner, reading a book, let alone when she was fuming mad. David was usually one who liked to think things over before he did anything, and normally he would have gone back to his room, and stewed for a while, and tried to come up with a plan for what he should do such that Raven would not carry out the threat she had just made.
In this case however, between one word and the next, he had already decided.
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Friday, July 13th, 8:37 PM
"Enter Login and Password."
"Username: 'Robin'. Password: 'Pennyworth'."
"Processing..."
David sat back in the the computer chair and listened to the soft sounds of the computer working. Other than the low mechanical hum of the Tower's generator next door, he could hear nothing, which wasn't a surprise, as everyone else was at least twenty stories above him. So quiet was it, that the computer's chime actually gave him a start. Technically, now that he was a part of the team, he had just as much right as anyone to be down here in the basement, but he was pretty certain he had no right whatsoever to be using Robin's login like this.
It was a risk he would have to take.
He leaned forward and looked at the file structure that came up on the main computer, certain of what he was looking for, but not entirely sure of how to find it. One of the headings was titled "media archives", which sounded promising, and he opened it up, only to find a massive listing of various recordings of radio and television programs from the Jump City area, as well as digitized microfilm copies of the Jump City Tribune and several other local newspapers. It would quite plainly take years to sift through it all, he would need to narrow the search. He pulled up the search box, and the computer prompted him to enter a search term.
He hesitated only slightly before entering it.
"Terra,"
"Working," said the computer, and then a moment later another box popped up. "271 references found," it said, "166 print, 77 audiovisual, 28 audio."
He clicked on the 'print' heading, and the first few articles appeared.
"Unknown Superhero Destroys Mutant Scorpion near Almond Hills Elementary"
"Titans Plus One Defeat Slade at Los Palmas Diamond Mine"
"Still no word on new superhero's origins, Robin declines comment"
It was all here.
Every whispered mention of a name he didn't recognize, every sideways glance that seemed to reference some apocalyptic event that he had no knowledge of, every half-assembled theory he'd had regarding what had happened before he arrived, built on shreds of evidence garnered unwillingly from random outbursts by the other Titans, everything led here, to the truth. He had long suspected that Terra was a metahuman, someone who the Titans had known well, someone who was no longer with them. He had tried not to think about it, tried to push aside his doubts as being the natural result of coming late to this strange family. He had silenced his questions and let the matter go, but it wasn't until Raven had burst the name out in the middle of accusing him of being all kinds of terrible things that he realized he couldn't ignore the issue any longer. He had to know who Terra was. He had to know what had happened to her.
And here, in an unending list of headlines and articles, here was the whole story.
"Titans induct new member. Public Press Briefing Scheduled Wednesday."
"World First Interview with the newest Teen Titan, Details Inside."
"Attempted Bank Robbery Foiled by Geokinetic Titan. Mayor Expresses Thanks."
"Enquirer Exclusive! Beast Boy and Terra: What the Titans don't want you to know about their Illicit Love"
The last one, from a tabloid David remembered Cyborg mentioning once, nearly made David spit out his tea. While he was pretty sure that the article's claims of "Venezuelan Voodoo Love Enchantments"were probably not too accurate, there were several other articles from the Society sections of the more reputable papers that seemed to confirm that Beast Boy and this Terra girl had been something of an item. One letter to the editor predicted that the entire affair would end in tears, and was roundly condemned in the very next issue by a dozen other readers, all of whom publicly wished Beast Boy and Terra all the best.
Even without reading on, David knew that their wishes had not been enough.
The shift was as stark as it could be. The very next article was a banner headline from the Tribune: "Attack on Titans Tower! Casualties Feared!" followed by a grainy picture taken from helicopter of hundreds of robots swarming towards and into the Tower's front door. Several more articles followed in quick succession, unsubstantiated reports of attacks at the Amusement Park and elsewhere, followed by a recap headline a week later: "Terra Feared Dead. No Comment from Titans on Whereabouts."
David felt a knot tying in his stomach. He had suspected that this "Terra" person had met an untimely end, but to have it confirmed like this was something else. There were more articles though, many more, and he continued to sift through pages of idle speculation about what had become of Terra. Bad as it was if she was actually dead, while it would make sense for the others to have avoided speaking of her, it still didn't all quite fit...
And then he found it.
"Titans Betrayed!"
The headline was twice the size of a normal one, and the article below was written like it was announcing World War III, describing in shocking, blunt terms how this Terra person had turned up armored and twice as powerful as before, and set to work trying to slaughter the other Titans in a very public battle in the middle of Downtown. The paper called it a draw, God alone knew what it actually was, and there followed some opinion pieces about what this new development "meant", each one as inane as the last, until the next day's headlines laid the events out in terrible declarative statements that left no doubt at all.
"Massive Breakouts from Jump City Jail, JCPD in Chaos."
"Robotic Army Invades Suburbs, Governor Calls out National Guard."
"Eyewitness Reports Beast Boy and Cyborg Killed by Terra. No Sign of Remaining Titans."
"Police Recover Robin's Effects. Entire Team Feared Dead."
"President Appeals for Calm as Jump City Evacuation Orders Issued."
"Justice League Announces Imminent Campaign to Relieve Jump City."
David remembered most of these events vaguely. Geopolitics had not been his thing, but Jump City had been close enough by to generate a certain amount of worry among the staff of whichever place he had been at then. All he remembered was that some enormous attack had occurred in Jump City, and that various superheroes were dealing with it, as they always did. Reading it all here however made it quite clear just how serious a matter it had been, particularly the cover of a magazine called "Heroes and Villains" (which David had honestly never heard of), that showed simply a picture of Titans' Tower, dark and abandoned, with two words written below it. "The End?"
But of course, it hadn't been the end, as he well knew...
"Titans Sighted Alive, Air Force Confirms."
"Battles Rage on Main Street, Cinderblock and Overload Defeated."
"National Guard Occupies Almond Hills. Light Resistance Reported."
"Earthquake Disturbs Jump City Fault Lines. Robot Armies Deactivate."
"No Sign of Terra or Slade as Titans Return to Tower. FEMA Pledges Rebuilding Assistance."
"Reports Confirm Terra and Slade dead. Governor Issues Statement."
Ten minutes might have passed, maybe fifteen, before David put down the now-cold mug of tea. The room still hummed quietly, no other sound or person disturbing him, but to be honest, he no longer cared if the others should find him down here. At long last, after months of dancing around the subject, he finally knew what had happened.
And as he hoped it would, it explained everything.
He had believed that Terra had died, perhaps even had been killed by someone in a particularly grotesque way. Superheroes led dangerous lives, and had many sadistic and twisted enemies. He had semi-constructed a likely scenario in his head for what had happened, but never in his wildest dreams had he imagined this. He had been right before. They had been burned, but not by some villain... by one of their own.
Those goggles, transparent rock crystal, almost impossible to create conventionally. Terra had been a geokinetic, a controller of earth and stone...
He closed his eyes and lowered his face into his hand. They were hers.
No wonder the others had reacted so strongly. No wonder Beast Boy had looked so shocked. Raven had mentioned that she and Cyborg had swept out the Tower of all of Terra's personal effects. Had it been for Beast Boy's sake, or their own? Or both?
There were only a few articles left, and for the sake of completion, he browsed through them quickly. An Op-ed piece about how the entire incident proved that metahumans all needed to be rounded up and interned. A handbill from some conspiracy group explaining how Terra had actually been part of the New World Order and that the UN was going to use Superheroes to plant mind-controlling chemicals in the drinking water. A recap summary of what had happened in the Tribune, this time with actual pictures. Most of the time, microfilmed copies of newspapers omitted the images except for cover pages and the like so as to save space. This one apparently had been deemed important enough to film unedited however, and the images showed Beast Boy in gorilla form smashing robots to pieces. It showed Robin and Starfire battling Cinderblock in some kind of rock quarry. It showed...
David's heart froze.
It... it couldn't... there was some kind of... some kind of mistake! It...
"Oh my God..."
David's blood turned to ice-water, and he clutched one hand over his chest as though trying to ward off a heart attack even as his mouth worked up and down soundlessly. Ten thousand disparate thoughts and bits of half-remembered information all suddenly collided together into a single, inescapable mass. He staggered backwards, upending the chair, tripping over it, falling onto the ground and scrambling back away from the monitor as though he was afraid whatever was on it was about to climb through and consume his soul. "Oh my God!" he said to nobody in an abject panic. "Oh my God, ohmyGod, ohmyGod! NononononoNO!!"
The last 'no' was a scream, and he clutched at his head and doubled over as a wave of nausea flowed through him. The implications were swirling around inside his head, and he could not shut them up no matter what he tried to do. What the hell was he going to do now?! What could he do now?! As soon as the others... they would... oh GOD...
The Email.
He got up and practically sprinted back to the computer, kicking the chair aside and hammering on the "Print Screen" button on the keyboard. Seconds later, the laserprinter next to the computer spat out a sheet of paper, which he grabbed in one hand as he turned around and ran out the door, nearly bouncing off the back wall as he did so. Down the hall he ran, as fast as he could, blind panic propelling him with speed as he raced towards the garage and the tunnel beyond it, already trying to figure out just what the hell he was going to do when he got to where he was going.
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Friday, July 13th, 9:02 PM
"I'm serious, man, you want me to talk to her? There just ain't no call for that sort of thing."
Beast Boy wrapped his arms around his knees and clutched them to his chest as he stared out over the waves. "Nah, thanks Cy. It's okay."
"You don't gotta worry. She ain't gonna take it out on you. Hell, I might do it myself after what..."
"Seriously," said Beast Boy, turning his head to the half-metal Titan crouched on the rooftop next to him. "It was a dumb idea to begin with. I'll go apologize tomorrow."
"Ain't nothin' for you to apologize about this time, man. She was totally out of line."
"Yeah," said Beast Boy with a sheepish grin, "but by tomorrow I'll probably do something else that I need to apologize for, so it'll all work out."
Cyborg raised his human eyebrow at Beast Boy's expression, and shook his head as he chuckled. "You are one weird little dude, you know that?"
The broad smile on Beast Boy's face told Cyborg that the comment had worked, which was a relief. He quickly changed the subject before it could wear off. "So we still on for tomorrow? Saturday Afternoon Ninja Racer IV Tournament o' Champions?"
"Well that depends," said Beast Boy. "What do I get when I kick your butt this time?"
"I was thinkin'... loser has to eat whatever the winner wants for dinner."
Beast Boy recoiled violently. "Ugh, sick dude! You'll probably make me eat spareribs or something."
"Well," said Cyborg, whistling nonchalantly and blowing on his metal knuckles before polishing them against his chestplate. "I mean, if you wanna turn and run at the first sign of the inevitable crushing defeat I will lay on anyone who tries to challenge me..."
It worked.
"Dude, you are so going down! You're gonna be eating so much tofu, it'll be coming out your ears!"
"Well bring it on, green bean." said Cyborg with a broad grin. "I'm gonna kick your butt so hard you'll be prayin' for an alert to come and save your sorry - "
A klaxon sounded, and the roof suddenly flashed red. Both Titans froze, but Beast Boy recovered first, turning smirking as he turned back to Cyborg. "Nice one..."
"Oh shut up," said Cyborg as he punched the red button on his right arm. "Cyborg and Beast Boy here, what's goin' on."
Robin's face appeared on the screen. "Trouble downtown. Some kind of intruder at the bottling plant. We don't have any details. Grab David and meet us in the Garage. Star, Raven, and I are on the way."
"Roger," said Cyborg, and he shut the screen down before hitting another button. "Cyborg to Devastator. We got trouble downtown. Meet us at the T-car."
Cyborg got up and was running towards the stairwell after Beast Boy when he realized he hadn't heard a reply. He glanced back down at his arm, only to see a screenful of snowy static. Puzzled, he reset the communicator, to no effect at all.
"Cyborg to Devastator, you readin' me?"
"Dude, come on, we gotta go!" called Beast Boy from the stairs.
"Hey BB, try and raise David, will ya? I ain't gettin' nothin' from my comm."
Beast Boy pulled out his communicator. "Beast Boy to Devastator, come in." The sound of static told Cyborg everything he needed to know. Beast Boy tried several more times, then looked back over at Cyborg. "What gives?"
"I don't know," said Cyborg, already punching commands into his scanners. "My comm's reading right, so's yours. I'm tryin' to track him, but the scanners say he's not in the Tower. I don't get it. It's almost like..." He paused.
"Like what?"
"Like he's... not answerin'."
"But... why wouldn't he answer his communicator? Wouldn't he get the alert message?"
"Yeah," said Cyborg, looking confused. "The communicators automatically get the alert signals broadcast to 'em. Robin and I made sure he knows he's always gotta answer whenever one o' those goes off so..."
"So what's going on?"
"Cyborg shook his head. "I don't know, but we don't have time to sit around and figure it out. Call Robin, tell him we're comin' alone."
"Rob's not gonna be happy about that,"
"Yeah... he ain't the only one..."
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Friday, July 13th, 9:23 PM
July meant warm nights, and warm nights meant barbecues, baseball games, and a generally crowded atmosphere in Patriot Park. Families, kids, young couples and older ones were out, enjoying themselves and relaxing in celebration of the weekend's arrival. It was a bustling, happy, energetic crowd, the sort of crowd David adored to get lost in, to vanish within and be un-noticed and unseen.
That was not what he was doing now.
He had been forced to walk Robin's bicycle, as the crowds were too thick on the pathways to ride through, and he couldn't ride it effectively over the grass. Had the bicycle, bright red and stenciled with the Titans' logo not drawn attention, surely his brilliant red and orange uniform would have succeeded in doing so, complete as it was with a riot baton that, even if not presently on fire, still looked wicked enough. People stopped. People stared. He was not yet well known enough for everyone to identify him on sight, but some were able to, and he heard their whispers as he walked past. Most of the people did not pay that much attention. It was not at all uncommon to see the Titans out in public, but ordinarily even this little notoriety would have bothered him, made him timid and hesitant. Tonight, however he ignored them entirely, walking past their stares, brushing aside their whispers, for he was looking for only one thing.
And then he found it.
Ahead, through the mingling crowds was a series of picnic benches, and standing around one of them was a teenaged girl. Shortly after David spotted her, she spotted him, and smiled as she jogged over to meet him.
"There you are!" she said, "I was wondering if you were gonna show up." She glanced at his uniform. "Nice getup, I thought you didn't like the attention from this superhero stuff. C'mon, there's a barbecue going on in a couple..."
Carrie's voice faded out as she noticed the expression on David's face.
"Is... something wrong?"
David didn't respond in words. Instead he reached down into his pocket and drew out a crumpled up piece of paper with a picture printed on it. Smoothing it out on his uniform, he held it up with one hand in front of her, his eyes never leaving the blue-eyed, blond-haired girl standing in front of him as the color slowly drained from her face.
The picture was that of all five of the original Teen Titans posing for a snapshot from the local newspapers. With the five of them stood a sixth figure, dressed in a light-gray long-sleeved shirt with a darker vest on top of it, blue denim shorts, hiking boots and leather gloves, her long blond hair pinned up with a butterfly clip, her bright blue eyes sparkling from beneath tinted goggles mounted in a black latex frame.
David watched Carrie's expression pale as she realized what she was looking at, and her eyes flickered back to him as he lowered the piece of paper and dropped it on the ground.
"I... think we need to talk..." said David in a voice that was barely a hollow whisper. "... Terra."
Friday, July 13th, 6:02 PM
In the end, David had to admit that he could not have done a better job himself. Or a worse one, for that matter.
Raven reacted to her surprise party, not with gratitude (which Beast Boy had clearly hoped for), nor with indifference (which David had assumed she would adopt), nor even with annoyance (which he had considered the worst case scenario). She reacted with hostility, panic, and fear.
Yes, fear.
It went completely wrong right from the start. The 'surprise' party came as something more of a surprise than anyone had expected. When they surprised her, Raven melted into the floor like an ice sculpture and only reappeared after Starfire re-assured her that it was only her friends about. When she did, she was fuming mad, both at Beast Boy (which was nothing new), and at everyone who had gone along with it (which was also nothing new). She forced Beast Boy to admit how he had found her birthday out (although he omitted any reference to David himself, David saw several suspicious glances aimed in his general direction), and then utterly refused to have anything to do with it. "I'm not interested," was her verdict, delivered with all the warmth of a glacier. When the others tried, gently, to talk her into staying, she rebuffed them all in turn, until finally Beast Boy's final plea snapped whatever thin thread was suspending Raven's patience, and she blew up.
Or rather, she blew everything else up.
Her eyes blazed with some kind of inner fire, and before David knew what was happening, her powers tore the entire setup to shreds. Balloons, banners, refreshments, cake, everything, obliterated in half a heartbeat. No sooner had she laid waste to the common room, than she departed as quickly as she had come, back through the doors towards her room, leaving behind yet another scene of stunned and hurt silence. Robin hastened after her to try and figure out what was wrong, as this was extreme even for Raven. Cyborg and Starfire made some halfhearted efforts towards cleaning up the mess, but elected in the end to leave it for the morning. Beast Boy stood there in the center of the room like a mannequin, part of Cyborg's cake stuck almost comically to his head, a pained expression on his face that his stale attempts at humor could not dispel. He looked like someone had just run over his pet, and indeed, Cyborg had had to drag him back out of the common room, explaining that Raven just needed to be alone, and that there was nothing left to do here.
David required no such encouragement. Bidding a good night to Starfire, he had made his way back to his room via a roundabout route, staring down at his shoes on the floor and, for the first time in a long while, wishing that he were somewhere else entirely.
Which is how he wound up walking right into Raven.
He had turned a corner at the same time as her and before either of them could stop, he had collided with her head on and bounced back, for Raven, while hardly enormous, was older and larger than he was. He steadied himself against the wall and stopped, as did she, and the two of them faced one another for a moment in silence.
"Sorry," he said, not averting his gaze from the sorceress. Her stare was entirely unsettling, so much so that he had an urge to reach for his baton, which he suppressed only with difficulty.
Raven seemed torn between several different things to say, but settled after a few moments for another sharp comment. "Don't ever go snooping around in my files again," she said, though how she had intuited that he was the one who had helped Beast Boy was beyond him.
"I wasn't snooping in anything," replied David lamely, "Beast Boy just wanted to know..."
Wrong answer.
"It's none of your business," she said furiously, "or his. My birthday is nothing to celebrate."
That one confused him. "What are you talking about?"
"You wouldn't understand," she said simply, and turned to walk away, but in the spur of the moment, David decided to speak up.
"No, Raven, I think you don't understand."
Raven stopped in her tracks and turned around sharply. "What?"
"Look," said David, "I don't know what this weird thing is with you and your birthday..."
"That's right," interrupted Raven, "you don't. Like I said, it's none of your business."
"Fine," said David, "but I don't have a birthday, remember? And what you don't know and I do is that I'd kill to have one that my friends would want to celebrate so much that they'd go to that level of effort."
"So pick one," said Raven dismissively, "there's lots of days in the calendar."
"That's not the point, and you know it," countered David. "What's going on here?"
"It is none of your business." repeated Raven for the third time, and she turned to leave, apparently considering it her last word on the subject. Any other day, David would have let it go. His usual policy vis-a-vis Raven was the same one he took with large and dangerous predators: avoid eye contact and hope they weren't hungry.
This wasn't any other day.
"Oh come on!" He demanded. "What is this? Look, I'm sorry about whatever I did with those stupid goggles, okay? I didn't even know what they were... I still don't know what they - "
"What goggles?"
The question calmed David down enough for him to notice that Raven had stopped in her tracks, and was half-looking back towards him, silhouetted by the dim overhead lights.
"The... the blue ones," he said, only now remembering that Raven had been the only one not in the room when he had made his 'grand' entrance. "I... found a pair of blue safety goggles down in the basement. I thought... I assumed that since they were stuck down there that nobody was using them, so I brought them upstairs to... to see if... Raven?"
Raven wasn't moving.
From where David was standing, he couldn't see Raven's face, but he could see her fist, clenched tightly with a black aura of magic (or whatever her powers actually were) shrouding it like a boxing glove.
... well that was a bad sign.
"Where did you find those goggles?"
"In... in the basement," said David, unconsciously taking a step back. "They were stuck under a pile of - "
"Blue goggles?" asked Raven, her voice short and sharp like a dagger. "Made of crystal?"
"Um... yeah..." said David guardedly. "Quartz and boron..."
Raven turned back towards him slowly, both of her fists clenched shut and sheathed in energy. Her expression was not angry or aggressive, as he would have expected it to be. It was instead fearful, her eyes wide, her forehead knotted with worry and apprehension. In a way, this was even worse than angry-Raven, for David did not recall having ever seen Raven afraid of anything. Without any thought on his part, David's hand slid down to the hilt of the baton clipped to his belt, as he took half a step back from the sorceress.
"There's an awful lot of coincidences around you," said Raven. "Your mystery powers, your missing records, name, date of birth, the way Cinderblock kept herding you towards us? I guess you don't know anything about this either?"
"Anything about what?" asked David, sensing the threat, but not where it was coming from.
"Where did you find those goggles?" asked Raven in a voice that brooked no equivocation.
"I told you already, they were in the basement, buried under - "
"Bullshit!" she shouted, plunging them into strobe as the lights flickered overhead. David throat caught and he backed up another step as Raven stared at him with eyes like laser beams, wide, unblinking, and filled with equal measures of fear and wrath. "Cyborg and I searched through the Tower for two weeks looking for any shred of Terra, and you found a pristine pair of her goggles in twenty minutes?! We emptied the entire basement to make sure, so don't tell me they were just laying in there! Where did you find them?!"
The very walls were beginning to vibrate with Raven's raging temper and David, who now if not before was scared out of his wits, could only continue to back up before the barrage of accusations and try and stammer a rational reply.
"I found them in the basement!" he insisted. "I don't know how the hell they got there! I don't even know who - "
"Just like you don't know how you resisted my powers yesterday?"
David nearly lost his footing as the question hit him like a physical blow. "What?"
"Don't play stupid with me!" snapped Raven. "Yesterday in the training room, you dispelled my powers like they weren't even there! Don't tell me you didn't even notice! I won't just write this stuff off forever, Devastator! Cute trick by the way, picking that name. We're all supposed to just forget where it came from?"
"This is insane!" cried David. "I don't know where it came from, and I told you why I picked it! I didn't dispel anything of yours, I didn't even know anything went wrong!" Only too late did he realize that he had just said, in essence, exactly what she had told him not to say.
Raven's powers send a tremor through the walls and ceiling, strong enough to be felt, and she clutched at her head with one hand, clenching her eyes shut. "I can't deal with this tonight," she said through clenched teeth. Slowly the tremors subsided, and she opened her eyes again and pointed a black-shrouded finger accusingly at David. "But if I find out that you ever lied to us about any of this, it will be the last thing you ever do."
David stopped retreating.
In one even motion, streamlined through weeks and weeks of practice, David pulled the baton off his belt, flipped it around into to hold it right-side up, and ignited the fiery aura around it, the one Raven herself had shown him how to produce. He raised the baton in his right hand, a flaming beacon amidst the darkness pouring off of Raven herself, and locked his gaze with hers.
"Raven," he said, his voice barely rising above a steel-coated whisper, "don't you ever threaten me!"
Time hung for a few seconds as the two superheroes faced one another down, but amidst the fear and anger and boiling something in Raven's gaze, David caught a glimpse of what looked to be doubt. Clearly not sure of what to do here, perhaps perceiving, if nothing else, that she had backed David into a corner, Raven hesitated and then slowly lowered her hand, though her eyes never left his.
"I don't make threats," she said in a near-whisper, and with that, she turned and walked away down the hall, leaving David standing in the hallway with his baton still held uselessly in his right hand. Even after she disappeared around the corner, he did not even dare to blink, his breath coming in ragged gasps, and his heart pounding in his throat. It wasn't until he heard fast-approaching footsteps that he lowered his baton, extinguishing the aura around it as he turned his head and saw Robin jogging towards him.
"What happened?" asked Robin, and he noticed that Robin had a birdarang in his hand. "We felt the tower shaking, and I heard someone shouting."
David looked down at the baton in his hand, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath to calm his racing heart rate. "Nothing," he said, without even turning back to look at Robin. "Just a misunderstanding. And before Robin could ask any more questions, David turned and walked past him down the hallway and away from the scene of confrontation, looking to all the world like he was just heading back to his own room, and didn't want to talk about what had just happened. Raven was imposing even when she was just sitting in a corner, reading a book, let alone when she was fuming mad. David was usually one who liked to think things over before he did anything, and normally he would have gone back to his room, and stewed for a while, and tried to come up with a plan for what he should do such that Raven would not carry out the threat she had just made.
In this case however, between one word and the next, he had already decided.
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Friday, July 13th, 8:37 PM
"Enter Login and Password."
"Username: 'Robin'. Password: 'Pennyworth'."
"Processing..."
David sat back in the the computer chair and listened to the soft sounds of the computer working. Other than the low mechanical hum of the Tower's generator next door, he could hear nothing, which wasn't a surprise, as everyone else was at least twenty stories above him. So quiet was it, that the computer's chime actually gave him a start. Technically, now that he was a part of the team, he had just as much right as anyone to be down here in the basement, but he was pretty certain he had no right whatsoever to be using Robin's login like this.
It was a risk he would have to take.
He leaned forward and looked at the file structure that came up on the main computer, certain of what he was looking for, but not entirely sure of how to find it. One of the headings was titled "media archives", which sounded promising, and he opened it up, only to find a massive listing of various recordings of radio and television programs from the Jump City area, as well as digitized microfilm copies of the Jump City Tribune and several other local newspapers. It would quite plainly take years to sift through it all, he would need to narrow the search. He pulled up the search box, and the computer prompted him to enter a search term.
He hesitated only slightly before entering it.
"Terra,"
"Working," said the computer, and then a moment later another box popped up. "271 references found," it said, "166 print, 77 audiovisual, 28 audio."
He clicked on the 'print' heading, and the first few articles appeared.
"Unknown Superhero Destroys Mutant Scorpion near Almond Hills Elementary"
"Titans Plus One Defeat Slade at Los Palmas Diamond Mine"
"Still no word on new superhero's origins, Robin declines comment"
It was all here.
Every whispered mention of a name he didn't recognize, every sideways glance that seemed to reference some apocalyptic event that he had no knowledge of, every half-assembled theory he'd had regarding what had happened before he arrived, built on shreds of evidence garnered unwillingly from random outbursts by the other Titans, everything led here, to the truth. He had long suspected that Terra was a metahuman, someone who the Titans had known well, someone who was no longer with them. He had tried not to think about it, tried to push aside his doubts as being the natural result of coming late to this strange family. He had silenced his questions and let the matter go, but it wasn't until Raven had burst the name out in the middle of accusing him of being all kinds of terrible things that he realized he couldn't ignore the issue any longer. He had to know who Terra was. He had to know what had happened to her.
And here, in an unending list of headlines and articles, here was the whole story.
"Titans induct new member. Public Press Briefing Scheduled Wednesday."
"World First Interview with the newest Teen Titan, Details Inside."
"Attempted Bank Robbery Foiled by Geokinetic Titan. Mayor Expresses Thanks."
"Enquirer Exclusive! Beast Boy and Terra: What the Titans don't want you to know about their Illicit Love"
The last one, from a tabloid David remembered Cyborg mentioning once, nearly made David spit out his tea. While he was pretty sure that the article's claims of "Venezuelan Voodoo Love Enchantments"were probably not too accurate, there were several other articles from the Society sections of the more reputable papers that seemed to confirm that Beast Boy and this Terra girl had been something of an item. One letter to the editor predicted that the entire affair would end in tears, and was roundly condemned in the very next issue by a dozen other readers, all of whom publicly wished Beast Boy and Terra all the best.
Even without reading on, David knew that their wishes had not been enough.
The shift was as stark as it could be. The very next article was a banner headline from the Tribune: "Attack on Titans Tower! Casualties Feared!" followed by a grainy picture taken from helicopter of hundreds of robots swarming towards and into the Tower's front door. Several more articles followed in quick succession, unsubstantiated reports of attacks at the Amusement Park and elsewhere, followed by a recap headline a week later: "Terra Feared Dead. No Comment from Titans on Whereabouts."
David felt a knot tying in his stomach. He had suspected that this "Terra" person had met an untimely end, but to have it confirmed like this was something else. There were more articles though, many more, and he continued to sift through pages of idle speculation about what had become of Terra. Bad as it was if she was actually dead, while it would make sense for the others to have avoided speaking of her, it still didn't all quite fit...
And then he found it.
"Titans Betrayed!"
The headline was twice the size of a normal one, and the article below was written like it was announcing World War III, describing in shocking, blunt terms how this Terra person had turned up armored and twice as powerful as before, and set to work trying to slaughter the other Titans in a very public battle in the middle of Downtown. The paper called it a draw, God alone knew what it actually was, and there followed some opinion pieces about what this new development "meant", each one as inane as the last, until the next day's headlines laid the events out in terrible declarative statements that left no doubt at all.
"Massive Breakouts from Jump City Jail, JCPD in Chaos."
"Robotic Army Invades Suburbs, Governor Calls out National Guard."
"Eyewitness Reports Beast Boy and Cyborg Killed by Terra. No Sign of Remaining Titans."
"Police Recover Robin's Effects. Entire Team Feared Dead."
"President Appeals for Calm as Jump City Evacuation Orders Issued."
"Justice League Announces Imminent Campaign to Relieve Jump City."
David remembered most of these events vaguely. Geopolitics had not been his thing, but Jump City had been close enough by to generate a certain amount of worry among the staff of whichever place he had been at then. All he remembered was that some enormous attack had occurred in Jump City, and that various superheroes were dealing with it, as they always did. Reading it all here however made it quite clear just how serious a matter it had been, particularly the cover of a magazine called "Heroes and Villains" (which David had honestly never heard of), that showed simply a picture of Titans' Tower, dark and abandoned, with two words written below it. "The End?"
But of course, it hadn't been the end, as he well knew...
"Titans Sighted Alive, Air Force Confirms."
"Battles Rage on Main Street, Cinderblock and Overload Defeated."
"National Guard Occupies Almond Hills. Light Resistance Reported."
"Earthquake Disturbs Jump City Fault Lines. Robot Armies Deactivate."
"No Sign of Terra or Slade as Titans Return to Tower. FEMA Pledges Rebuilding Assistance."
"Reports Confirm Terra and Slade dead. Governor Issues Statement."
Ten minutes might have passed, maybe fifteen, before David put down the now-cold mug of tea. The room still hummed quietly, no other sound or person disturbing him, but to be honest, he no longer cared if the others should find him down here. At long last, after months of dancing around the subject, he finally knew what had happened.
And as he hoped it would, it explained everything.
He had believed that Terra had died, perhaps even had been killed by someone in a particularly grotesque way. Superheroes led dangerous lives, and had many sadistic and twisted enemies. He had semi-constructed a likely scenario in his head for what had happened, but never in his wildest dreams had he imagined this. He had been right before. They had been burned, but not by some villain... by one of their own.
Those goggles, transparent rock crystal, almost impossible to create conventionally. Terra had been a geokinetic, a controller of earth and stone...
He closed his eyes and lowered his face into his hand. They were hers.
No wonder the others had reacted so strongly. No wonder Beast Boy had looked so shocked. Raven had mentioned that she and Cyborg had swept out the Tower of all of Terra's personal effects. Had it been for Beast Boy's sake, or their own? Or both?
There were only a few articles left, and for the sake of completion, he browsed through them quickly. An Op-ed piece about how the entire incident proved that metahumans all needed to be rounded up and interned. A handbill from some conspiracy group explaining how Terra had actually been part of the New World Order and that the UN was going to use Superheroes to plant mind-controlling chemicals in the drinking water. A recap summary of what had happened in the Tribune, this time with actual pictures. Most of the time, microfilmed copies of newspapers omitted the images except for cover pages and the like so as to save space. This one apparently had been deemed important enough to film unedited however, and the images showed Beast Boy in gorilla form smashing robots to pieces. It showed Robin and Starfire battling Cinderblock in some kind of rock quarry. It showed...
David's heart froze.
It... it couldn't... there was some kind of... some kind of mistake! It...
"Oh my God..."
David's blood turned to ice-water, and he clutched one hand over his chest as though trying to ward off a heart attack even as his mouth worked up and down soundlessly. Ten thousand disparate thoughts and bits of half-remembered information all suddenly collided together into a single, inescapable mass. He staggered backwards, upending the chair, tripping over it, falling onto the ground and scrambling back away from the monitor as though he was afraid whatever was on it was about to climb through and consume his soul. "Oh my God!" he said to nobody in an abject panic. "Oh my God, ohmyGod, ohmyGod! NononononoNO!!"
The last 'no' was a scream, and he clutched at his head and doubled over as a wave of nausea flowed through him. The implications were swirling around inside his head, and he could not shut them up no matter what he tried to do. What the hell was he going to do now?! What could he do now?! As soon as the others... they would... oh GOD...
The Email.
He got up and practically sprinted back to the computer, kicking the chair aside and hammering on the "Print Screen" button on the keyboard. Seconds later, the laserprinter next to the computer spat out a sheet of paper, which he grabbed in one hand as he turned around and ran out the door, nearly bouncing off the back wall as he did so. Down the hall he ran, as fast as he could, blind panic propelling him with speed as he raced towards the garage and the tunnel beyond it, already trying to figure out just what the hell he was going to do when he got to where he was going.
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Friday, July 13th, 9:02 PM
"I'm serious, man, you want me to talk to her? There just ain't no call for that sort of thing."
Beast Boy wrapped his arms around his knees and clutched them to his chest as he stared out over the waves. "Nah, thanks Cy. It's okay."
"You don't gotta worry. She ain't gonna take it out on you. Hell, I might do it myself after what..."
"Seriously," said Beast Boy, turning his head to the half-metal Titan crouched on the rooftop next to him. "It was a dumb idea to begin with. I'll go apologize tomorrow."
"Ain't nothin' for you to apologize about this time, man. She was totally out of line."
"Yeah," said Beast Boy with a sheepish grin, "but by tomorrow I'll probably do something else that I need to apologize for, so it'll all work out."
Cyborg raised his human eyebrow at Beast Boy's expression, and shook his head as he chuckled. "You are one weird little dude, you know that?"
The broad smile on Beast Boy's face told Cyborg that the comment had worked, which was a relief. He quickly changed the subject before it could wear off. "So we still on for tomorrow? Saturday Afternoon Ninja Racer IV Tournament o' Champions?"
"Well that depends," said Beast Boy. "What do I get when I kick your butt this time?"
"I was thinkin'... loser has to eat whatever the winner wants for dinner."
Beast Boy recoiled violently. "Ugh, sick dude! You'll probably make me eat spareribs or something."
"Well," said Cyborg, whistling nonchalantly and blowing on his metal knuckles before polishing them against his chestplate. "I mean, if you wanna turn and run at the first sign of the inevitable crushing defeat I will lay on anyone who tries to challenge me..."
It worked.
"Dude, you are so going down! You're gonna be eating so much tofu, it'll be coming out your ears!"
"Well bring it on, green bean." said Cyborg with a broad grin. "I'm gonna kick your butt so hard you'll be prayin' for an alert to come and save your sorry - "
A klaxon sounded, and the roof suddenly flashed red. Both Titans froze, but Beast Boy recovered first, turning smirking as he turned back to Cyborg. "Nice one..."
"Oh shut up," said Cyborg as he punched the red button on his right arm. "Cyborg and Beast Boy here, what's goin' on."
Robin's face appeared on the screen. "Trouble downtown. Some kind of intruder at the bottling plant. We don't have any details. Grab David and meet us in the Garage. Star, Raven, and I are on the way."
"Roger," said Cyborg, and he shut the screen down before hitting another button. "Cyborg to Devastator. We got trouble downtown. Meet us at the T-car."
Cyborg got up and was running towards the stairwell after Beast Boy when he realized he hadn't heard a reply. He glanced back down at his arm, only to see a screenful of snowy static. Puzzled, he reset the communicator, to no effect at all.
"Cyborg to Devastator, you readin' me?"
"Dude, come on, we gotta go!" called Beast Boy from the stairs.
"Hey BB, try and raise David, will ya? I ain't gettin' nothin' from my comm."
Beast Boy pulled out his communicator. "Beast Boy to Devastator, come in." The sound of static told Cyborg everything he needed to know. Beast Boy tried several more times, then looked back over at Cyborg. "What gives?"
"I don't know," said Cyborg, already punching commands into his scanners. "My comm's reading right, so's yours. I'm tryin' to track him, but the scanners say he's not in the Tower. I don't get it. It's almost like..." He paused.
"Like what?"
"Like he's... not answerin'."
"But... why wouldn't he answer his communicator? Wouldn't he get the alert message?"
"Yeah," said Cyborg, looking confused. "The communicators automatically get the alert signals broadcast to 'em. Robin and I made sure he knows he's always gotta answer whenever one o' those goes off so..."
"So what's going on?"
"Cyborg shook his head. "I don't know, but we don't have time to sit around and figure it out. Call Robin, tell him we're comin' alone."
"Rob's not gonna be happy about that,"
"Yeah... he ain't the only one..."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, July 13th, 9:23 PM
July meant warm nights, and warm nights meant barbecues, baseball games, and a generally crowded atmosphere in Patriot Park. Families, kids, young couples and older ones were out, enjoying themselves and relaxing in celebration of the weekend's arrival. It was a bustling, happy, energetic crowd, the sort of crowd David adored to get lost in, to vanish within and be un-noticed and unseen.
That was not what he was doing now.
He had been forced to walk Robin's bicycle, as the crowds were too thick on the pathways to ride through, and he couldn't ride it effectively over the grass. Had the bicycle, bright red and stenciled with the Titans' logo not drawn attention, surely his brilliant red and orange uniform would have succeeded in doing so, complete as it was with a riot baton that, even if not presently on fire, still looked wicked enough. People stopped. People stared. He was not yet well known enough for everyone to identify him on sight, but some were able to, and he heard their whispers as he walked past. Most of the people did not pay that much attention. It was not at all uncommon to see the Titans out in public, but ordinarily even this little notoriety would have bothered him, made him timid and hesitant. Tonight, however he ignored them entirely, walking past their stares, brushing aside their whispers, for he was looking for only one thing.
And then he found it.
Ahead, through the mingling crowds was a series of picnic benches, and standing around one of them was a teenaged girl. Shortly after David spotted her, she spotted him, and smiled as she jogged over to meet him.
"There you are!" she said, "I was wondering if you were gonna show up." She glanced at his uniform. "Nice getup, I thought you didn't like the attention from this superhero stuff. C'mon, there's a barbecue going on in a couple..."
Carrie's voice faded out as she noticed the expression on David's face.
"Is... something wrong?"
David didn't respond in words. Instead he reached down into his pocket and drew out a crumpled up piece of paper with a picture printed on it. Smoothing it out on his uniform, he held it up with one hand in front of her, his eyes never leaving the blue-eyed, blond-haired girl standing in front of him as the color slowly drained from her face.
The picture was that of all five of the original Teen Titans posing for a snapshot from the local newspapers. With the five of them stood a sixth figure, dressed in a light-gray long-sleeved shirt with a darker vest on top of it, blue denim shorts, hiking boots and leather gloves, her long blond hair pinned up with a butterfly clip, her bright blue eyes sparkling from beneath tinted goggles mounted in a black latex frame.
David watched Carrie's expression pale as she realized what she was looking at, and her eyes flickered back to him as he lowered the piece of paper and dropped it on the ground.
"I... think we need to talk..." said David in a voice that was barely a hollow whisper. "... Terra."
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Nothing else existed.
The crowds around, the noise, the bustle, the hundreds of pairs of eyes that might or might not have been focused on the two teenagers standing on the grass in the middle of the park simply did not exist. Nothing existed, not the air around, not the water of the bay, not the city or the park, not the people within them, nothing. There was only the piece of paper he had dropped to the ground, and the girl standing in front of him with a face like a white sheet. He had told her that they needed to speak. He had meant it. But there was no question remaining to ask. He knew the instant he looked at her that it was no mistake, no trick of illusions or twin sisters or the light. The look in her eyes was that of horror, of fear, of dread...
... but not of surprise.
He had no idea what to do now. He had no idea what he could do now. The implications of the discovery he had made were too large, too widespread, dependent on too many factors that he knew too little about. He had rushed out here with no idea what to do once he got where he was going. Too many competing thoughts and sudden realizations crowded his head, and he could do nothing but sit there and stare, a cold mass forming in his stomach, heralding the catastrophe that he was suddenly in the middle of.
Carrie recovered before he did.
"David... I can - "
"... explain?" Carrie's voice brought David's back to life, though his eyes remained unblinking, and his mouth still hung open. "Where were you gonna start?" he croaked, his words running on their own accord, with no input from his brain. "The part where you lied to me, the part where you tried to kill the others, or the part where you came back from the dead?"
She looked away, turned away entirely, one hand over her face as she took a few steps away from him back towards the picnic table. "This isn't... you don't understand."
"No, I really don't." Bitterness was creeping into David's voice unbidden, his throat constricting as he spat his words out like mouthfuls of poison. "I don't know what the hell is going on here, but I think you'd better start explaining it."
His advice went unheeded, and she neither explained herself nor faced him, but instead raised one hand to her forehead, gripping her head like she was afraid it was going to fall apart as she leaned against the picnic table with the other "This isn't what I wanted," she said quietly, her voice thin, like a plea for mercy. "This... this isn't how I wanted it to be."
Perceptive as he usually was, David would normally have caught the rising panic in Carrie's voice, would have heard the warning implicit and heeded it, backing down once more, but his blood was thundering in his ears, drowning out the warnings that should have been as apparent to him as daylight, and instead of retreating, he stepped forward, closer to Carrie, his entire body quivering with emotion, his voice drawing the stares of the other bystanders, though for once he couldn't care less.
"Who are you?" he asked through clenched teeth. "What are you? How are you even alive?! Why did you pretend to be someone else?!"
"I didn't... I didn't have a - " Carrie caught herself in time to prevent from saying whatever she had meant to say, but David pressed on relentlessly.
"Didn't have what?" he demanded. "What didn't you have? A choice? Or were you gonna tell me that it was all co-incidence that you came back from the dead and then started hanging out with the one person from Titans Tower who couldn't recognize you? Just like it's supposed to be a coincidence that every single time we met up, something tried to kill me?!"
Carrie did not move or speak, giving no indication that she intended to reply, and David's frustration boiled over. "Terra, I'm talking to you!" he screamed, "Answer me!" The various conversations around him fell silent, and all eyes in the immediate vicinity moved to him and to Carrie. The whispers and stares should have thundered louder than a brass band in his head, but everything he had discovered was louder still, so loud in fact that he almost missed Carrie's quiet response.
"I'm sorry..."
David paused then, though not because he deemed that the reply was adequate to his questions, indeed quite the opposite. "You're... sorry?!" he asked incredulously. "Sorry for what?!"
The reply was little more than a whisper, a single, soft word spoken only at length, after a long deep breath, said with eyes closed and hands holding tightly to the lip of the picnic table. A word that, in an instant, changed everything about what David thought he was doing here.
"This."
And with the suddenness of a gunshot, the very ground David was standing on gave way and bucked upwards, a huge volume of loose dirt and rock slamming into his chest like a pile driver, flinging him through the air like toy before slamming him back down into the ground. And just before the quarter ton of earth and stone landed atop him, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a soft yellow glow encasing Carrie's hands, still clenched to the picnic table, and only then did he realize, all at a rush, what was in store.
As always, too little, too late.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"Maybe it's broken,"
Cyborg glared at Beast Boy, who shrank down in his seat. "I'm just sayin', it could be!"
"I'm pickin' up all of you," said Cyborg as he punched a command into his communicator. "I'm pickin' up the Tower. I'm even pickin' up the Titans East and the Honoraries. So why ain't I pickin' him up?"
Beast Boy shrugged. "How should I know, dude? Maybe he broke his, or lost it?"
"There's a killswitch inside every communicator," explained Cyborg as he drove. "If it stops broadcasting, it alerts the central computer and records where the last signal was from. If he got it smashed, it'd show up. It's like it's been switched off."
"And he knows he's not supposed to lose it," said Robin from the front passenger seat of the T-car. "I made sure of that."
Robin sounded angry. He was angry, not that it took psychic powers to figure that much out. He was staring out the passenger-side window of the T-car as though looking for something, though Raven knew it was more to give him something to look at than anything specific. Cyborg was annoyed too, but Cyborg hadn't spent days drilling into David's head the absolute necessity of responding to every alert that came in instantly, only to have this happen. Obviously they couldn't afford to wait around and hope that he'd show up. There was an alert to respond to at the bottling plant on the other side of town, a report of an intruder, and all of them were on their way now. There would be time to chew David out for this when they got back.
Raven sat on the passenger side as well, in the back seat, and also stared out the window, not actually registering anything that she saw. Next to her, Starfire and Beast Boy were quiet (for once), apparently not wishing to push Robin any further... or was it because of her eruption earlier tonight? Beast Boy had scarcely glanced in her direction since the alert had come in, as if his mere gaze could set off another incident. On a night like tonight, it might well have. She tried to repeat her mantra to herself quietly, tried to calm her thoughts as usual, but the best she could do was sit there and try not to make her discomfort too visible, sneaking occasional glances at the dashboard clock.
"9:26"
Two and a half more hours. It might as well have been two and a half months. Why in all the Hells couldn't this day just end already? The nightmare/hallucination thing from barely twenty minutes ago had been bad enough, and only the alert had saved her from having to explain everything to Robin. In that respect, David's failure to reply to the alert was almost a blessing. It meant the Boy Wonder was occupied with a different mystery than the reason why she had screamed.
It also meant she didn't have to face the car ride with David present.
"Here we are," said Cyborg, and he pulled the T-car into the parking lot of the plant. Raven phased through the door rather than pause long enough to open it, so eager was she to get out of the car, and get this alert over with. If any of the others noticed anything, they didn't say it, no doubt because they didn't want to wind up wearing parts of the T-car.
She suppressed the wave of regret that engendered. Beast Boy should have known better than to push her, after all. What was with him, anyways? Why the hell could he never leave well enough alone? He had never gotten the chance to admit it, but she knew that the surprise party had to have been his idea. Starfire barely understood what a birthday party was, and the others all knew better than to throw her a surprise party. She hated surprises. How could Beast Boy possibly spend all that time trying to get to know her and still not know that? There were times when she wondered if he had any...
"Raven?"
Beast Boy's voice snapped Raven out of her thoughts like a switch had been flipped, and she stopped and turned around, and only then realized that she had been about to walk straight into a wall, rather than the front entrance. She said nothing as she turned away and walked back towards the others, giving Beast Boy a sharp look that indicated exactly what sort of answer would be generated from a question of if "everything was okay".
The inside of the factory was cold, cold and dark and filled with noise. Automated machines chugged along oblivious to the Titans' presence on both sides, enormous pistons churning up and down, while further ahead a metal catwalk ran high above the floor near to a sequence of gigantic gears, large enough to run a clock tower. The entrance wall was covered in large spinning ventilation fans, pumping air in and out of the facility, and the metal grates that formed the floor resonated with every footstep. Steam and hydraulic power systems added their hissing and roiling noises to the din, such that when Cyborg spoke up, his booming voice had to compete with the background in order to be heard.
"So," said Cyborg, his voice more even than it had been in the car, all swagger and confidence. "Who's the bad guy 'du-jour'? Gizmo? Mad Mod? Killer Moth?"
Raven let the others take the lead, hanging back and peering into the shadows that cloaked the corners and nooks of the massive factory. She could feel that something else was here, something that shouldn't have been, but she couldn't tell what.
"The report simply stated there was an intruder," said Starfire, also glancing about for any sign of opposition.
Beast Boy (as always) had no such worries, confidently walking ahead right behind Robin. "Well whoever it is," he said with a grin, turning his head back to Cyborg and Raven, "we're totally gonna kick their - Oof!"
Robin had stopped all of a sudden, and Beast Boy, who wasn't looking where he was going, had walked right into him. He turned his head back, no doubt to make some kind of sarcastic comment, but Robin ignored him, his eyes fixed on something up above and ahead, in the shadows of the catwalks and rafters. The other four followed his gaze, and then they saw it.
"... no!"
Up above, a tall, lean figure stood cloaked in darkness on the end of a catwalk, leaning against a large utility pipe, its leg resting confidently atop the guardrail. Neither marking nor feature was visible from this far away, but no sooner had Raven set eyes upon the figure than she knew who it was, and all efforts to pretend that nothing was wrong flew right out the window. All five Titans stopped in their tracks as though frozen, staring up at the figure overhead with their mouths hanging down.
"It's been a long time, hasn't it, Titans?" said the figure in a deep, almost soothing voice that sent chills up Raven's spine. "A month? A year? A millennium? Far too long for my tastes anyway." The figure leaned forward slightly, the pale overhead light illuminating a brown facemask with a single dark eye. "I was beginning to think I'd never see your smiling faces again."
Raven floated a bare foot above the ground, motionless as if transfixed. Starfire floated next to her in something like the same state. The three boys stood like statues, staring up in disbelief and horror.
"You..." stammered Cyborg, all bravado extinguished like a flame doused in ice-water. "How did you survive?"
Beast Boy, no less shocked than the others, nevertheless managed to channel. "Terra took you down," he said, bitter anger bubbling up around the edge of his astonishment. "Way down!"
Raven herself could not speak. She could not even move. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, her heart frozen in place inside her chest. It couldn't be. Not today, of all days. This just couldn't be happening...
"Slade..."
Robin, as always, had recovered faster than any of them, and was staring up at his old nemesis with his fists clenched tightly. "I don't know where you've been," he said, "but you shouldn't have come back. I'm still ready."
The figure on the catwalks simply chuckled darkly, and a red symbol appeared on his forehead, a capital 'S' written in flames, wound around a pair of smaller markings. "That's precious, Robin," he said, leaning forward over the catwalk to gaze down at them as he clenched both hands into fists, "but... I didn't come back for you."
And then there was fire.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Civilians were running in every direction as Terra walked slowly towards the pile of loose dirt and rock that had landed on David. She took no notice of them, of their screams and cries for police, her fists encased in a yellow sheath as she advanced. The freshly dug pile of stone and earth showed no signs of movement, no indication that anything living was buried within, at least not at first glance. It wasn't until she had gotten within ten paces of the mound that she felt the crystallization of the water mixed in with the wet dirt near the center of the pile, and she had only a bare instant to raise a protective sheath of dirt from the ground before the entire mound exploded.
Dirt and chips of stone flew in every direction, colliding with her earthen shield with a series of wet "thumps", and the swirling dust occluded all vision until it finally thinned enough to see through. David was on one knee in the center of what had been the pile of dirt and rock, staring up at Terra with the anger of a moment ago now tempered by what had to be the realization of what he had just walked into the middle of. His face and his red-orange uniform were splattered with mud and dirt, and his hair was matted both with earth and with a trickle of blood from where a rock had hit him in the head. Either he didn’t notice or he didn’t care, for he made no attempt to stop the bleeding, simply sitting there in something approximating shock.
For a second or so, neither one moved, until as if by mutual consent, both acted at once.
With a wave of her hand, Terra pulled a lunchbox-sized rock up off the ground to shoulder height, and shoved her fist forward, hurling it at David's head as though it were launched from a sling. At the very same instant, David snatched at the baton still helpfully clipped to his belt, igniting the red aura that sheathed it like a flaming sword, and brought it up as though to ward off a blow. The rock quivered in mid air a bare moment before it exploded in mid-air like a bomb, sending chips of stone flying in every direction, peppering David, Terra, and the ground around them with a rain of tiny pebbles. She brought her other hand up to match, and another rock leapt into the air, but this time David was ready, and it exploded before it had gone more than a foot, the blast angled backwards, showering Terra in more bits of rock, and knocking her back a step. Though the blast wasn't potent enough to do more than this, it gave David a chance to get back on his feet, and by the time she had steadied herself, he was standing in front of the pile of dirt she had lately buried him beneath, crouched slightly, with his baton in-hand, flaming like a torch.
"Carrie," he said, and there was real fear in his voice this time, an almost desperate fear as he perceived what was now nearly certain to happen. "Carrie no... no, please... we don't have to do this."
"My name isn't Carrie," she said as the yellow aura flowed over her like a second skin, and she drank in the sensation of the earth and stone piled beneath her coming to life, feeling the embrace of billions of tons of material that waited for her commands, and her nerve settled, and her breath steadied, and she opened her eyes once more, and knew that it was time.
But David did not. Grasping at straws, he flailed about with his red baton, gesturing at the terrified crowds of civilians now fleeing from the site of yet another Metahuman engagement to come. "We can't do this, you can't do this! There's thousands of people around! We're kineticists! We'll destroy the entire park and everyone in it! You can't..."
"You think you’re a kineticist?" she asked curtly, levitating a dozen rocks and clods of dirt with a thought which began orbiting her like planets around a star. The horrified look in David's eyes only became more pronounced as the stones began orbiting faster and faster. "You don't even know what's going on here, do you? Besides, what makes you think I can't do this?"
David didn't reply, indeed she doubted that he could reply, she could see the hesitation in his eyes, in his expression, in the way his baton was held limply, drooping from its ready position, the same expression she had seen from him before that day on the waterfront...
"That’s what I thought," she said, and without a moment's warning she threw all dozen rocks straight at his head, counting on his hesitation to guarantee the hit. Two months ago it would have worked.
This wasn't then.
He reacted late, but he did react, bringing his baton up and acting semi-consciously, freezing a section of a large underground pipe and detonating it with an upwards slash of his baton. The ground burst open like a volcano, venting steam and bits of metal into the air, scattering the barrage of rocks in every which way. Without hesitation, she waved one hand and gouged two enormous handfuls of earth from the ground like a steam shovel, hurling them at David like a catapult. She honestly expected at least one to hit, but David threw himself to one side, ducking under the first projectile, which instead crashed into a tree and smashed it to splinters. He fell to the ground in a clumsy roll, but managed to bring his baton up in time, and practically impaled the second projectile with it an instant before it exploded back towards her, splattering her and everything within thirty feet with mud and wet earth.
Evidently Robin hadn't been wasting the intervening time.
"This isn't happening," said David, a sentiment she could understand at least, but he was staring at her with far too direct an intensity to have succumbed to mere panic, as he scrambled back to his feet and held his baton out like a holy symbol, backing slowly away from her as she followed. "This doesn't make any sense! You could've killed me any time you wanted to! The night with Adonis, the day Cinderblock attacked us! You could have done it any time, hit me in the head with a rock or something! Why wait until now?! Why wait until I know who you are and know how to fight back!"
"Because plans change," said Terra. She didn't know if David was asking these questions because he legitimately wanted to know, or if he was simply trying to buy time to let the civilians clear the area and for re-enforcements to arrive, and to be honest she didn't care. "Cinderblock was supposed to kill you, but he failed. Now it's my turn."
"But why?! Even if you wanted to kill me, you could have just done it then! Why now?!"
She could see he was desperate to keep her talking rather than fighting. She could see his left hand slowly moving towards the communicator on his belt, sense the flickering looks as he glanced around to try to come up with a plan, feel the desperate calculation running in his head as he tried to determine if he could stop her. "This isn't a cartoon," she said simply, "the bad guy doesn't explain his whole plan whenever you feel like it."
"You're not the bad guy!" he shouted desperately. "I read the articles, the after-action reports! I know how you died! You saved the Titans, you saved the entire city!"
"And believe it or not, David, that's exactly what I'm doing now."
He froze.
Perfect.
She let out a yell and shoved both hands forward, and a snake-like column of rock erupted from the ground beneath her feet and shot towards him like a missile. The last words she had spoken had stopped him short, and he reacted too late, the rock snake smashing into his chest and lifting him up into the air before reversing itself and driving him down on top of a picnic table, which shattered under the impact. She let the rock-snake fall, and crouching down, she raised both hands into the air as though carving something up from the earth itself. At her command, a boulder the size of a minivan dug itself loose from the ground and lifted into the air and floated over towards David as he coughed and clutched his chest and spat blood from his mouth and raised one hand in an automatic, paltry defense.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"Ever have one of those days where you just feel happy to be alive?"
Slade's mocking words filled Raven's ears as she desperately flew left and right and back left again, tongues of flame pursuing her every move. In and out of her shadow-raven soul form she shifted, feeling the flames at her back at all times as Slade flayed the very air with streams of fire. Somewhere below her, Beast Boy flew in the form of a hummingbird, dancing around the flames that Slade directed his way, falling back towards the others in a gesture she was only too happy to emulate. The flames sought to cut her off, but she simply vanished into a portal and re-appeared among the others at ground level, Beast Boy landing next to her in a crouch and re-assuming his human form.
"Dude..."
Not the most expressive of comments, but Beast Boy's wide eyes and stunned expression were enough to make his meaning clear with or without words, and right now Raven couldn't find the stomach to criticize him. "Since when can Slade do that?" asked Cyborg, speaking for all of them. Slade took no notice of the question, but confidently stepped onto the railing of the catwalk he was on and leapt off it like an acrobat, spinning in circles in mid-air and tracing trails of fire in a double-helix around him before making a perfect landing in a combat pose, and turning his head to stare Raven right in the eye. Such power was in his very gaze that Raven recoiled from it as if from a blow, though this time nobody noticed.
"Not sure," said Robin, who seemed as collected as ever, "but he won't be doing it for long. Titans, go!"
The familiar formula helped, and she took off into the air. Slade made no attempt to dodge or evade as Starfire and Cyborg opened fire with Starbolts and sonic cannons respectively, but before the shots could land, a swirling cloak of flames emerged from nothing, blocking them like a shield before lifting Slade into the air upon a column of fire. Robin did not hesitate, but pulled a half-dozen flash-freeze grenades from his utility belt and flung them into the fiery pillar, encasing it and Slade in ice. He landed, and Raven thought for a moment that he'd done it, but the pillar began to shake, and a second later, the ice around Slade shattered, and Slade leaped down from his frozen pedestal, back onto the floor.
A knot was growing in Raven's stomach, but she pushed it down and ignored it. Slade was always slippery, and although the fire was worrisome, it was conceivable that he'd developed some powers of his own in the intervening time. It need not have anything to do with her, or with the date. Accordingly she raised one hand and snatched up a dozen ice shards, flinging them at Slade like throwing knives, and tried to convince herself that Slade was just being his usual acrobatic self when he deftly evaded them all, leaping back up to the upper levels of the facility.
Beast Boy dove on him in the form of a gorilla, but his overhead smash was too little, too late, and Slade flipped out of the way as Beast Boy beat a six inch dent into the solid metal floor. Slade landed on his feet just in time to see Starfire unleashing a charged starbolt straight at him. Had he simply evaded it, Raven could have chalked it up to Slade's usual abilities, but he did not. As the bolt approached, Slade conjured a shield of fire in his hands and caught the starbolt in his shield, and though the impact shoved him back a dozen paces, no sooner had he stopped than he launched the shield and the starbolt within it back at Starfire, who was quite naturally not expecting anything of the sort. The energy struck her dead center, and she was knocked spiraling out of the air and out of sight.
And then things got very weird.
Cyborg, taking advantage of Slade's distraction, raced over to the side of the room and uprooted one of the enormous pistons that powered the machinery of the factory. With a swing that would make a baseball player proud, he brought the entire piston around to clobber Slade, swinging hard enough to bat the supervillain into the stratosphere.
He didn't even move.
A sheath of flame enveloped Slade at the last second, and the piston melted on contact like a stick of butter touching a blowtorch. The masked criminal barely twitched as the far half of the piston landed on the ground, its insides liquefied and melted to slag, leaving Cyborg holding the other end, staring in blank astonishment at what had just happened.
"... whoa," said Cyborg.
Slade turned his head. "Whoa?" he asked, looking almost disappointed. "That's it? No clever comment? I was looking forward to that..."
Undaunted, Cyborg threw down the useless remnants of the piston, and charged Slade directly, and Raven flew over to support him, but once again, Slade was too quick. Though Cyborg could punch through a bank vault door, Slade simply deflected his blow like it was that of an anemic child, and reached over to gently flick the half-metal Titan in the face. His finger hit Cyborg with the force of a cruise missile, and launched him into the air so fast that Raven didn't have time to get out of the way. Both Titans collided in mid-air, and plummeted to the ground, Cyborg landing on his back on the catwalks below, Raven crashing into the wall and sliding down it into a heap on the floor.
She rose back to her hands and knees, shaking her head to try and clear it. Somewhere overhead came the sounds of further fighting, catwalks shattering, metal striking metal of some sort, but for the moment, all she could do was try and see if Cyborg was okay. Scrambling to her feet, she wan over to Cyborg, who was laying flat on his back on the ground, eyes shut, unmoving. Quickly, she conjured up a healing spell, placing one hand on his chestplate as she commanded her powers to seek out the damage to his human parts and repair it, but all this would take time, and meanwhile Slade was continuing to rampage above her head, at least so her thundering sixth sense kept claiming.
It didn't help that it was also urging her to run.
She clutched her head with her free hand, trying to force herself to focus, and to come up with a plan, but the facts stared her in the face and refused to go away. Slade had returned, armed with powers unheard of, powers fifty times greater than what he had managed to display the last time they had met. He was immune, or essentially so, to everything they had thrown at him so far, and while this was the sort of thing that normally she would have taken in stride, the fact that it was Slade, and that it was happening today, of all days...
She closed her eyes and suppressed a scream. "I just want this day to end!"
"I think we both know this day is far from over..."
Raven's eyes bolted open, and she turned around in time to see Slade landing behind her, calm and collected as ever, not moving, simply standing there, looming overhead, but his mere presence was like a dagger made of ice had been driven into her chest. "Hello, birthday girl," said Slade in his eternally mocking voice, and Raven froze like a statue, unable to so much as twitch, as she realized with a sudden flash of understanding that her worst apprehensions for this day were coming to life before her eyes.
"No..." she whispered.
Slade simply took a step forward. "Ready for your present?"
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The most important part of having superpowers was learning how to control them. The most important part of using superpowers was learning how to control them 'creatively'.
A given power, even one that was not particularly effective at first glance, could be transformed into the most potent weapon imaginable through a simple exercise in creativity. That was one of the lessons that both Slade and Robin had imparted to Terra during her respective times spent training under them. It was one thing to control earth and stone. It was another to control earth and stone creatively. Armed with a given superpower, a particularly inventive meta-human could defeat someone objectively stronger than they were, simply by applying their unique abilities in a creative and inventive manner.
It was a simple but important lesson, one that Terra had never forgotten, not even after she had betrayed Robin and Slade both in turn, and one that she had always sought to put to use, and yet, in the seconds following what she thought would be the coup-de-grace in this little engagement, she could not help but remark to herself that she hadn't been the only one to learn that little lesson.
What she had judged to be a paltry attempt to defend himself from an incoming boulder the size of a Buick had actually been aimed, not at the rock, not even at her, but at an innocuous object located behind her that David had spotted and decided to wield as a weapon. Her first indication that he had done so was also her last, as something exploded like a bomb behind her, too far away for the blast to do much of anything, save that what David had detonated was something very specific.
A parking meter, stuffed with coins.
The meter blew up like a hand grenade, and ten thousand coins flew in every direction like bullets. Three dozen of them hit Terra in the back and side hard enough to stagger her, two of them cutting shallow gashes across her cheek and ear, another one hitting edge-on, and slicing right through her sweatshirt's sleeve to embed itself in her upper arm. If David's intention was to distract her (and it probably was), then it worked, for she bit stifled a cry and nearly fell over, and the rock under her control shook and swerved and landed two feet to the left of where it should have, giving David a chance to shakily get back to his feet, and turn to face her once again.
Biting back the pain of the flying coins, Terra clutched one hand to the side of her face, feeling blood oozing through her fingers. Frowning, she wiped her hand on her sweatshirt before turning back to David, who had blood smeared on the front of his uniform as well, staining the front of his bright red jumpsuit with a deeper red color. His baton was still in-hand, but rather than raising it and returning to the fight, he instead reached down and pulled the communicator off of his belt. He held it up, still closed, facing her, so that she could see the red light gently blinking on it.
"You know what this is," he said sharply, and it was not a question. He knew that she had once had one of these. "That's the panic light. I don't know how good you think you are, but I'd like to see you try and take on all six of us at once! They're already on their way!"
"Really?" asked Terra, "And what are they gonna do when they get here, do you think?"
"Keep on talking," said David, fighting tears back from what she assumed were broken ribs, his voice quivering, but a core of steel resounding within it. "You're about to find out what they're gonna do."
"You think they're going to attack me?" said Terra as calmly as she could. "Are you so sure that they're not going to come here and put you down instead? Or maybe both of us?"
David plainly had no interest in such crude tactics. "Don't even try it. Don't even try it, Terra!"
"I don't have to try anything, David," said Terra. "They're not coming either way."
"Yeah, keep telling yourself that!"
"Seriously, they're not. If you don't believe me, why don't you call them yourself?"
David hesitated at this one, and then slowly flipped the communicator open, not removing his eyes from Terra for one second. "Devastator to Titans," he said urgently. "Code Red Emergency, Patriot Park! Need help now!"
Nothing but static issued in reply. David waited a few seconds before pressing the "transmit" button again. "Devastator to Titans!" he practically yelled, "is anybody there?"
"They can't hear you," said Terra. "We're blocking your signal."
David spared an instant to glance at the screen of the communicator, but black and white static was all he could see, and slowly he lowered the communicator again, and turned back to Terra, obviously badly shaken, but still unwilling to show it, not that it wasn't obvious.
"It doesn't matter," he said carefully. "They can see us from the common room of the Tower." He gestured with his flaming baton across the water to Titans Tower, plainly visible in the distance. "The police already know there's a fight going on, and they'll call them even if I can't!"
Terra shook her head slowly, but said nothing, until David couldn't take it any longer. "What?!" he shouted, "what is it?!"
"David... don't you see what this is?"
"What are you talking about? What is this?!"
"The others aren't coming because they're not in the Tower. They're on the other side of the city, and they're under attack."
Terra could practically see David's heart stop for a moment, and while he hesitated again, this time she did not take advantage. She needed an opening greater than a moment's hesitation, and she knew how to get it.
"W... what are you... who's attacking them?"
"Someone very, very bad."
"Yeah?" he said, trying to bolster his own nerve, "Well good luck to him. The five of them can take on anything, you know that."
"Not this time," said Terra simply. "This time it's something else. In fact, they've probably been calling you for help for the last half hour, wondering where you are, why you're not picking up..."
"As soon as they see that you've been jamming the..."
"We're blocking your signals, David, not theirs. They can still read everything just fine, everything except you. To them, it looks like you're not even bothering to pick up the line."
David was so confused by now that he had forgotten to appear at all menacing. "Why the hell would you do that?"
She raised two more rocks from the ground with one hand, setting them to hover next to her shoulders. "Because I'm here to kill you, David. And because I wanted to make sure that even if I didn't, they would."
He needed a long moment to reply.
"You're insane..."
She simply smiled, an artfully-crafted smile, as sharp as a dagger. "Am I?"
Things exploded.
With a wide swipe, David brought his baton around and blasted both rocks out of the air, crying out with the effort or the pain as he did so, but Terra had anticipated it. She let the blasts push her backwards, rolling and springing back up to her feet before pulling a huge load of dirt out of the ground with one hand, crushing it into dense spikes with her mind, and hurling them at David. The Psychokinetic bounded forward, spires of rock and dirt crashing into the ground all around him, and he blotted two of the spires out of the air with a wave of his hand before Terra pulled a huge wall of rock up out of the ground like a curtain rising from the floor, blocking his path. A second later, a ten-foot-wide chunk of the curtain froze and exploded, and David rushed straight through, right at Terra, his baton brought back in preparation for a swing, but with a wave of her hand, she ripped open the ground in front of him and he had to slam on the breaks, barely skidding to a stop at the edge of a hundred-foot chasm.
"Come on, David," said Terra as the piece of ground she was standing on uprooted and floated into the air, "did you actually think it was gonna be that easy? Did you think you could just show up at the Tower one day and they'd take you in like an abandoned puppy? They'll never trust you, not after today. I've made sure of it."
"You don't know a goddamn thing about them or me," snarled back David, so livid now that the baton was trembling in his hand. "You never did!"
"Oh really? So Raven tried to kill you earlier today because she trusts you?"
"Raven doesn't trust anyone!"
"She trusts the others. She trusted me. Look where that got her. And now she and the others are gonna find out that after they saved your life, brought you into their home, and trained you for months, you decided to run off and hang out with one of their worst enemies instead of help them against the biggest threat they've ever faced when they needed your help the most. For all they know, you're ignoring them on purpose." She sighed and looked up at the sky for a moment, as though pondering some difficult question. "I wonder if they'll decide you were a traitor, or just an ungrateful coward? I guess it really doesn't matter..."
"Shut up!"
The hovering pedestal of ground under Terra's feet quivered and blew up, and she fell, snatching at a pair of fist-sized rocks that fell with her and using them to stop her fall. She hurled one at David and struck him in the shoulder just as he stabbed at the air with his baton, blasting the other one to dust, and flipping her into a free fall. Both teens crumpled to the ground, David clutching at his shoulder with his free hand, Terra shaking her head and climbing back to her feet, clearing her mind to raise yet another pedestal and resume the attack.
David recovered quicker than she had expected though, for as the new pedestal was rising from the ground, he lunged at it and managed to grab on, using the baton as a pick to jam into the soft dirt. The mass of earth shuddered with the extra weight, and before she could fully stabilize it, he had managed to scramble up on top, and eschewing his powers for the moment, swung the baton overhand, aiming to bring it down right on Terra's head. Terra jumped to the side in the nick of time, and he missed her, his swing carrying him forward onto his hands and knees, the head of the baton burying itself in the dirt. Before he could recover, before he could even get up, Terra pulled a fist-sized mass of earth into her waiting hand, fell to one knee, and smashed it as hard as she could onto the back of David's head, shattering the clod of dirt on his skull and knocking him prone, before mentally tilting the earthen pedestal and letting him fall off. Still stunned by the blow, he fell limply down, landing like a rag doll on the ground below.
"Did you think this was one of those stories where the plucky little orphan just gets to join up with the heroes for no reason at all?" asked Terra, floating high above on her pedestal, as David shook his head and moaned and tried to get back to his feet. "You think that communicator makes you part of their family? Did you think that you could just walk into a place you know nothing about and be accepted like an old friend, when you never even bothered to find out who they actually were?"
"I didn't know who you were!" cried David, to Terra or to someone else, it wasn't clear. He staggered back to his feet, retrieving the baton from the ground as he did so, as Terra lowered her pedestal to the ground and stepped off it.
"And when you did find out," she shouted, accusingly, "did you go running to them like you know you were supposed to? Did you tell them everything, and let them know that I was back, and probably a threat? Or were you so afraid of what they'd think if you told them that you'd been hanging out with me for months, that you panicked and ran out here all alone, and gave them no warning that there was anything at all wrong today?"
David stood in his ready position, but she could see the fear trickling into his look, feel him freezing up as his concentration, already hammered by his injuries and pain, faltered before the realization that, this time at least, she was telling the truth.
"Because, David," said Terra, spreading her arms out and shaking her head, "if they'd known I was alive again... well... I really doubt they would have all walked into Slade's trap that easily."
David could barely manage a whisper "... S... Slade?"
"Don't worry," she said, "If any of them do survive, they'll probably be too busy mourning the others to spend too much time getting angry with you. That's all you really care about, after all..."
She saw the shift come over David's eyes, saw him tensing up, saw his jaw clench and his fists shake and the flames on his baton pulsating like a living thing, and even before he opened his mouth to scream, she knew she had just done it.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"No!"
Raven swung her hand around like a boxer delivering an uppercut, and a blast of black energy shaped like a bird's talon caught Slade square in the chest and drove him upwards into the factory's ceiling. It dragged him along the rafters, dislodging tiles and rivets, carving a furrow in the roof before slamming the resurrected supervillain into a darkened corner. Sheathing her fists in black energy, she flew into the air, ready to deliver yet more punishment at need, but when the smoke and dust died away, there was no sign of Slade to be seen.
For a second or two, she thought she'd done it.
"I have a message for you..."
Slade emerged from the smoke like a nightmare given form, floating towards her without so much as lifting a finger. There was no sign of damage on his armored form, not one speck of paint out of place on his helmet from where she had dragged it along the metal roof and smashed him into the wall, and what's worse, in noticing this, she had let Slade get too close.
There was no time to avoid him, and so she opted for the best defense. A sheath of dark energy materialized around her hand, and she swung it at Slade, intending to simply smash him through the wall like a wrecking ball, but Slade moved even faster than she could, and though her energy sheath should have been strong enough to flay the flesh off his bones, he ignored it completely, and grabbed her wrist with an iron grip.
Her mind exploded.
Fire, searing, raging fire, burning through her skull like a whirling inferno. She clenched her teeth and eyes shut and bit back a scream as she tried to pull away, but Slade's hand was like a steel trap, and she could sooner have torn her own arm off at the shoulder as break it. She felt her wristguard melt to vapor, felt her sleeve smolder like burning leaves, felt her skin peeling and bubbling as though a branding iron was being applied, and just as she felt she could take it no longer, and was drawing breath to scream aloud, Slade simply released her, and she fell.
She fell for only a second, though it felt like longer, and she landed with a cry on her back on top of a massive horizontal gear. She sat up, clutching at her wrist where Slade had grabbed her, and when she opened her eyes she saw that her sleeve had been burnt back from her forearm, and that prominently stenciled on it was the same S-rune that Slade himself bore on his head.
And then she heard the crackling of electricity.
She turned back to Slade, still hovering overhead, and there was lightning dancing all over him as he extended his arms like a cross. His head was raised towards the sky, as energy coursed through him from sources unknown, buzzing and snapping the nearby air like a live wire, like a forest of live wires. Slade hovered there, inviolate, invulnerable, utterly unharmed by anything they had thrown at him, and he gazed upon her, and he spoke three words.
"It. Has. Begun."
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The crowds around, the noise, the bustle, the hundreds of pairs of eyes that might or might not have been focused on the two teenagers standing on the grass in the middle of the park simply did not exist. Nothing existed, not the air around, not the water of the bay, not the city or the park, not the people within them, nothing. There was only the piece of paper he had dropped to the ground, and the girl standing in front of him with a face like a white sheet. He had told her that they needed to speak. He had meant it. But there was no question remaining to ask. He knew the instant he looked at her that it was no mistake, no trick of illusions or twin sisters or the light. The look in her eyes was that of horror, of fear, of dread...
... but not of surprise.
He had no idea what to do now. He had no idea what he could do now. The implications of the discovery he had made were too large, too widespread, dependent on too many factors that he knew too little about. He had rushed out here with no idea what to do once he got where he was going. Too many competing thoughts and sudden realizations crowded his head, and he could do nothing but sit there and stare, a cold mass forming in his stomach, heralding the catastrophe that he was suddenly in the middle of.
Carrie recovered before he did.
"David... I can - "
"... explain?" Carrie's voice brought David's back to life, though his eyes remained unblinking, and his mouth still hung open. "Where were you gonna start?" he croaked, his words running on their own accord, with no input from his brain. "The part where you lied to me, the part where you tried to kill the others, or the part where you came back from the dead?"
She looked away, turned away entirely, one hand over her face as she took a few steps away from him back towards the picnic table. "This isn't... you don't understand."
"No, I really don't." Bitterness was creeping into David's voice unbidden, his throat constricting as he spat his words out like mouthfuls of poison. "I don't know what the hell is going on here, but I think you'd better start explaining it."
His advice went unheeded, and she neither explained herself nor faced him, but instead raised one hand to her forehead, gripping her head like she was afraid it was going to fall apart as she leaned against the picnic table with the other "This isn't what I wanted," she said quietly, her voice thin, like a plea for mercy. "This... this isn't how I wanted it to be."
Perceptive as he usually was, David would normally have caught the rising panic in Carrie's voice, would have heard the warning implicit and heeded it, backing down once more, but his blood was thundering in his ears, drowning out the warnings that should have been as apparent to him as daylight, and instead of retreating, he stepped forward, closer to Carrie, his entire body quivering with emotion, his voice drawing the stares of the other bystanders, though for once he couldn't care less.
"Who are you?" he asked through clenched teeth. "What are you? How are you even alive?! Why did you pretend to be someone else?!"
"I didn't... I didn't have a - " Carrie caught herself in time to prevent from saying whatever she had meant to say, but David pressed on relentlessly.
"Didn't have what?" he demanded. "What didn't you have? A choice? Or were you gonna tell me that it was all co-incidence that you came back from the dead and then started hanging out with the one person from Titans Tower who couldn't recognize you? Just like it's supposed to be a coincidence that every single time we met up, something tried to kill me?!"
Carrie did not move or speak, giving no indication that she intended to reply, and David's frustration boiled over. "Terra, I'm talking to you!" he screamed, "Answer me!" The various conversations around him fell silent, and all eyes in the immediate vicinity moved to him and to Carrie. The whispers and stares should have thundered louder than a brass band in his head, but everything he had discovered was louder still, so loud in fact that he almost missed Carrie's quiet response.
"I'm sorry..."
David paused then, though not because he deemed that the reply was adequate to his questions, indeed quite the opposite. "You're... sorry?!" he asked incredulously. "Sorry for what?!"
The reply was little more than a whisper, a single, soft word spoken only at length, after a long deep breath, said with eyes closed and hands holding tightly to the lip of the picnic table. A word that, in an instant, changed everything about what David thought he was doing here.
"This."
And with the suddenness of a gunshot, the very ground David was standing on gave way and bucked upwards, a huge volume of loose dirt and rock slamming into his chest like a pile driver, flinging him through the air like toy before slamming him back down into the ground. And just before the quarter ton of earth and stone landed atop him, he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a soft yellow glow encasing Carrie's hands, still clenched to the picnic table, and only then did he realize, all at a rush, what was in store.
As always, too little, too late.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"Maybe it's broken,"
Cyborg glared at Beast Boy, who shrank down in his seat. "I'm just sayin', it could be!"
"I'm pickin' up all of you," said Cyborg as he punched a command into his communicator. "I'm pickin' up the Tower. I'm even pickin' up the Titans East and the Honoraries. So why ain't I pickin' him up?"
Beast Boy shrugged. "How should I know, dude? Maybe he broke his, or lost it?"
"There's a killswitch inside every communicator," explained Cyborg as he drove. "If it stops broadcasting, it alerts the central computer and records where the last signal was from. If he got it smashed, it'd show up. It's like it's been switched off."
"And he knows he's not supposed to lose it," said Robin from the front passenger seat of the T-car. "I made sure of that."
Robin sounded angry. He was angry, not that it took psychic powers to figure that much out. He was staring out the passenger-side window of the T-car as though looking for something, though Raven knew it was more to give him something to look at than anything specific. Cyborg was annoyed too, but Cyborg hadn't spent days drilling into David's head the absolute necessity of responding to every alert that came in instantly, only to have this happen. Obviously they couldn't afford to wait around and hope that he'd show up. There was an alert to respond to at the bottling plant on the other side of town, a report of an intruder, and all of them were on their way now. There would be time to chew David out for this when they got back.
Raven sat on the passenger side as well, in the back seat, and also stared out the window, not actually registering anything that she saw. Next to her, Starfire and Beast Boy were quiet (for once), apparently not wishing to push Robin any further... or was it because of her eruption earlier tonight? Beast Boy had scarcely glanced in her direction since the alert had come in, as if his mere gaze could set off another incident. On a night like tonight, it might well have. She tried to repeat her mantra to herself quietly, tried to calm her thoughts as usual, but the best she could do was sit there and try not to make her discomfort too visible, sneaking occasional glances at the dashboard clock.
"9:26"
Two and a half more hours. It might as well have been two and a half months. Why in all the Hells couldn't this day just end already? The nightmare/hallucination thing from barely twenty minutes ago had been bad enough, and only the alert had saved her from having to explain everything to Robin. In that respect, David's failure to reply to the alert was almost a blessing. It meant the Boy Wonder was occupied with a different mystery than the reason why she had screamed.
It also meant she didn't have to face the car ride with David present.
"Here we are," said Cyborg, and he pulled the T-car into the parking lot of the plant. Raven phased through the door rather than pause long enough to open it, so eager was she to get out of the car, and get this alert over with. If any of the others noticed anything, they didn't say it, no doubt because they didn't want to wind up wearing parts of the T-car.
She suppressed the wave of regret that engendered. Beast Boy should have known better than to push her, after all. What was with him, anyways? Why the hell could he never leave well enough alone? He had never gotten the chance to admit it, but she knew that the surprise party had to have been his idea. Starfire barely understood what a birthday party was, and the others all knew better than to throw her a surprise party. She hated surprises. How could Beast Boy possibly spend all that time trying to get to know her and still not know that? There were times when she wondered if he had any...
"Raven?"
Beast Boy's voice snapped Raven out of her thoughts like a switch had been flipped, and she stopped and turned around, and only then realized that she had been about to walk straight into a wall, rather than the front entrance. She said nothing as she turned away and walked back towards the others, giving Beast Boy a sharp look that indicated exactly what sort of answer would be generated from a question of if "everything was okay".
The inside of the factory was cold, cold and dark and filled with noise. Automated machines chugged along oblivious to the Titans' presence on both sides, enormous pistons churning up and down, while further ahead a metal catwalk ran high above the floor near to a sequence of gigantic gears, large enough to run a clock tower. The entrance wall was covered in large spinning ventilation fans, pumping air in and out of the facility, and the metal grates that formed the floor resonated with every footstep. Steam and hydraulic power systems added their hissing and roiling noises to the din, such that when Cyborg spoke up, his booming voice had to compete with the background in order to be heard.
"So," said Cyborg, his voice more even than it had been in the car, all swagger and confidence. "Who's the bad guy 'du-jour'? Gizmo? Mad Mod? Killer Moth?"
Raven let the others take the lead, hanging back and peering into the shadows that cloaked the corners and nooks of the massive factory. She could feel that something else was here, something that shouldn't have been, but she couldn't tell what.
"The report simply stated there was an intruder," said Starfire, also glancing about for any sign of opposition.
Beast Boy (as always) had no such worries, confidently walking ahead right behind Robin. "Well whoever it is," he said with a grin, turning his head back to Cyborg and Raven, "we're totally gonna kick their - Oof!"
Robin had stopped all of a sudden, and Beast Boy, who wasn't looking where he was going, had walked right into him. He turned his head back, no doubt to make some kind of sarcastic comment, but Robin ignored him, his eyes fixed on something up above and ahead, in the shadows of the catwalks and rafters. The other four followed his gaze, and then they saw it.
"... no!"
Up above, a tall, lean figure stood cloaked in darkness on the end of a catwalk, leaning against a large utility pipe, its leg resting confidently atop the guardrail. Neither marking nor feature was visible from this far away, but no sooner had Raven set eyes upon the figure than she knew who it was, and all efforts to pretend that nothing was wrong flew right out the window. All five Titans stopped in their tracks as though frozen, staring up at the figure overhead with their mouths hanging down.
"It's been a long time, hasn't it, Titans?" said the figure in a deep, almost soothing voice that sent chills up Raven's spine. "A month? A year? A millennium? Far too long for my tastes anyway." The figure leaned forward slightly, the pale overhead light illuminating a brown facemask with a single dark eye. "I was beginning to think I'd never see your smiling faces again."
Raven floated a bare foot above the ground, motionless as if transfixed. Starfire floated next to her in something like the same state. The three boys stood like statues, staring up in disbelief and horror.
"You..." stammered Cyborg, all bravado extinguished like a flame doused in ice-water. "How did you survive?"
Beast Boy, no less shocked than the others, nevertheless managed to channel. "Terra took you down," he said, bitter anger bubbling up around the edge of his astonishment. "Way down!"
Raven herself could not speak. She could not even move. Her eyes and mouth were wide open, her heart frozen in place inside her chest. It couldn't be. Not today, of all days. This just couldn't be happening...
"Slade..."
Robin, as always, had recovered faster than any of them, and was staring up at his old nemesis with his fists clenched tightly. "I don't know where you've been," he said, "but you shouldn't have come back. I'm still ready."
The figure on the catwalks simply chuckled darkly, and a red symbol appeared on his forehead, a capital 'S' written in flames, wound around a pair of smaller markings. "That's precious, Robin," he said, leaning forward over the catwalk to gaze down at them as he clenched both hands into fists, "but... I didn't come back for you."
And then there was fire.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Civilians were running in every direction as Terra walked slowly towards the pile of loose dirt and rock that had landed on David. She took no notice of them, of their screams and cries for police, her fists encased in a yellow sheath as she advanced. The freshly dug pile of stone and earth showed no signs of movement, no indication that anything living was buried within, at least not at first glance. It wasn't until she had gotten within ten paces of the mound that she felt the crystallization of the water mixed in with the wet dirt near the center of the pile, and she had only a bare instant to raise a protective sheath of dirt from the ground before the entire mound exploded.
Dirt and chips of stone flew in every direction, colliding with her earthen shield with a series of wet "thumps", and the swirling dust occluded all vision until it finally thinned enough to see through. David was on one knee in the center of what had been the pile of dirt and rock, staring up at Terra with the anger of a moment ago now tempered by what had to be the realization of what he had just walked into the middle of. His face and his red-orange uniform were splattered with mud and dirt, and his hair was matted both with earth and with a trickle of blood from where a rock had hit him in the head. Either he didn’t notice or he didn’t care, for he made no attempt to stop the bleeding, simply sitting there in something approximating shock.
For a second or so, neither one moved, until as if by mutual consent, both acted at once.
With a wave of her hand, Terra pulled a lunchbox-sized rock up off the ground to shoulder height, and shoved her fist forward, hurling it at David's head as though it were launched from a sling. At the very same instant, David snatched at the baton still helpfully clipped to his belt, igniting the red aura that sheathed it like a flaming sword, and brought it up as though to ward off a blow. The rock quivered in mid air a bare moment before it exploded in mid-air like a bomb, sending chips of stone flying in every direction, peppering David, Terra, and the ground around them with a rain of tiny pebbles. She brought her other hand up to match, and another rock leapt into the air, but this time David was ready, and it exploded before it had gone more than a foot, the blast angled backwards, showering Terra in more bits of rock, and knocking her back a step. Though the blast wasn't potent enough to do more than this, it gave David a chance to get back on his feet, and by the time she had steadied herself, he was standing in front of the pile of dirt she had lately buried him beneath, crouched slightly, with his baton in-hand, flaming like a torch.
"Carrie," he said, and there was real fear in his voice this time, an almost desperate fear as he perceived what was now nearly certain to happen. "Carrie no... no, please... we don't have to do this."
"My name isn't Carrie," she said as the yellow aura flowed over her like a second skin, and she drank in the sensation of the earth and stone piled beneath her coming to life, feeling the embrace of billions of tons of material that waited for her commands, and her nerve settled, and her breath steadied, and she opened her eyes once more, and knew that it was time.
But David did not. Grasping at straws, he flailed about with his red baton, gesturing at the terrified crowds of civilians now fleeing from the site of yet another Metahuman engagement to come. "We can't do this, you can't do this! There's thousands of people around! We're kineticists! We'll destroy the entire park and everyone in it! You can't..."
"You think you’re a kineticist?" she asked curtly, levitating a dozen rocks and clods of dirt with a thought which began orbiting her like planets around a star. The horrified look in David's eyes only became more pronounced as the stones began orbiting faster and faster. "You don't even know what's going on here, do you? Besides, what makes you think I can't do this?"
David didn't reply, indeed she doubted that he could reply, she could see the hesitation in his eyes, in his expression, in the way his baton was held limply, drooping from its ready position, the same expression she had seen from him before that day on the waterfront...
"That’s what I thought," she said, and without a moment's warning she threw all dozen rocks straight at his head, counting on his hesitation to guarantee the hit. Two months ago it would have worked.
This wasn't then.
He reacted late, but he did react, bringing his baton up and acting semi-consciously, freezing a section of a large underground pipe and detonating it with an upwards slash of his baton. The ground burst open like a volcano, venting steam and bits of metal into the air, scattering the barrage of rocks in every which way. Without hesitation, she waved one hand and gouged two enormous handfuls of earth from the ground like a steam shovel, hurling them at David like a catapult. She honestly expected at least one to hit, but David threw himself to one side, ducking under the first projectile, which instead crashed into a tree and smashed it to splinters. He fell to the ground in a clumsy roll, but managed to bring his baton up in time, and practically impaled the second projectile with it an instant before it exploded back towards her, splattering her and everything within thirty feet with mud and wet earth.
Evidently Robin hadn't been wasting the intervening time.
"This isn't happening," said David, a sentiment she could understand at least, but he was staring at her with far too direct an intensity to have succumbed to mere panic, as he scrambled back to his feet and held his baton out like a holy symbol, backing slowly away from her as she followed. "This doesn't make any sense! You could've killed me any time you wanted to! The night with Adonis, the day Cinderblock attacked us! You could have done it any time, hit me in the head with a rock or something! Why wait until now?! Why wait until I know who you are and know how to fight back!"
"Because plans change," said Terra. She didn't know if David was asking these questions because he legitimately wanted to know, or if he was simply trying to buy time to let the civilians clear the area and for re-enforcements to arrive, and to be honest she didn't care. "Cinderblock was supposed to kill you, but he failed. Now it's my turn."
"But why?! Even if you wanted to kill me, you could have just done it then! Why now?!"
She could see he was desperate to keep her talking rather than fighting. She could see his left hand slowly moving towards the communicator on his belt, sense the flickering looks as he glanced around to try to come up with a plan, feel the desperate calculation running in his head as he tried to determine if he could stop her. "This isn't a cartoon," she said simply, "the bad guy doesn't explain his whole plan whenever you feel like it."
"You're not the bad guy!" he shouted desperately. "I read the articles, the after-action reports! I know how you died! You saved the Titans, you saved the entire city!"
"And believe it or not, David, that's exactly what I'm doing now."
He froze.
Perfect.
She let out a yell and shoved both hands forward, and a snake-like column of rock erupted from the ground beneath her feet and shot towards him like a missile. The last words she had spoken had stopped him short, and he reacted too late, the rock snake smashing into his chest and lifting him up into the air before reversing itself and driving him down on top of a picnic table, which shattered under the impact. She let the rock-snake fall, and crouching down, she raised both hands into the air as though carving something up from the earth itself. At her command, a boulder the size of a minivan dug itself loose from the ground and lifted into the air and floated over towards David as he coughed and clutched his chest and spat blood from his mouth and raised one hand in an automatic, paltry defense.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"Ever have one of those days where you just feel happy to be alive?"
Slade's mocking words filled Raven's ears as she desperately flew left and right and back left again, tongues of flame pursuing her every move. In and out of her shadow-raven soul form she shifted, feeling the flames at her back at all times as Slade flayed the very air with streams of fire. Somewhere below her, Beast Boy flew in the form of a hummingbird, dancing around the flames that Slade directed his way, falling back towards the others in a gesture she was only too happy to emulate. The flames sought to cut her off, but she simply vanished into a portal and re-appeared among the others at ground level, Beast Boy landing next to her in a crouch and re-assuming his human form.
"Dude..."
Not the most expressive of comments, but Beast Boy's wide eyes and stunned expression were enough to make his meaning clear with or without words, and right now Raven couldn't find the stomach to criticize him. "Since when can Slade do that?" asked Cyborg, speaking for all of them. Slade took no notice of the question, but confidently stepped onto the railing of the catwalk he was on and leapt off it like an acrobat, spinning in circles in mid-air and tracing trails of fire in a double-helix around him before making a perfect landing in a combat pose, and turning his head to stare Raven right in the eye. Such power was in his very gaze that Raven recoiled from it as if from a blow, though this time nobody noticed.
"Not sure," said Robin, who seemed as collected as ever, "but he won't be doing it for long. Titans, go!"
The familiar formula helped, and she took off into the air. Slade made no attempt to dodge or evade as Starfire and Cyborg opened fire with Starbolts and sonic cannons respectively, but before the shots could land, a swirling cloak of flames emerged from nothing, blocking them like a shield before lifting Slade into the air upon a column of fire. Robin did not hesitate, but pulled a half-dozen flash-freeze grenades from his utility belt and flung them into the fiery pillar, encasing it and Slade in ice. He landed, and Raven thought for a moment that he'd done it, but the pillar began to shake, and a second later, the ice around Slade shattered, and Slade leaped down from his frozen pedestal, back onto the floor.
A knot was growing in Raven's stomach, but she pushed it down and ignored it. Slade was always slippery, and although the fire was worrisome, it was conceivable that he'd developed some powers of his own in the intervening time. It need not have anything to do with her, or with the date. Accordingly she raised one hand and snatched up a dozen ice shards, flinging them at Slade like throwing knives, and tried to convince herself that Slade was just being his usual acrobatic self when he deftly evaded them all, leaping back up to the upper levels of the facility.
Beast Boy dove on him in the form of a gorilla, but his overhead smash was too little, too late, and Slade flipped out of the way as Beast Boy beat a six inch dent into the solid metal floor. Slade landed on his feet just in time to see Starfire unleashing a charged starbolt straight at him. Had he simply evaded it, Raven could have chalked it up to Slade's usual abilities, but he did not. As the bolt approached, Slade conjured a shield of fire in his hands and caught the starbolt in his shield, and though the impact shoved him back a dozen paces, no sooner had he stopped than he launched the shield and the starbolt within it back at Starfire, who was quite naturally not expecting anything of the sort. The energy struck her dead center, and she was knocked spiraling out of the air and out of sight.
And then things got very weird.
Cyborg, taking advantage of Slade's distraction, raced over to the side of the room and uprooted one of the enormous pistons that powered the machinery of the factory. With a swing that would make a baseball player proud, he brought the entire piston around to clobber Slade, swinging hard enough to bat the supervillain into the stratosphere.
He didn't even move.
A sheath of flame enveloped Slade at the last second, and the piston melted on contact like a stick of butter touching a blowtorch. The masked criminal barely twitched as the far half of the piston landed on the ground, its insides liquefied and melted to slag, leaving Cyborg holding the other end, staring in blank astonishment at what had just happened.
"... whoa," said Cyborg.
Slade turned his head. "Whoa?" he asked, looking almost disappointed. "That's it? No clever comment? I was looking forward to that..."
Undaunted, Cyborg threw down the useless remnants of the piston, and charged Slade directly, and Raven flew over to support him, but once again, Slade was too quick. Though Cyborg could punch through a bank vault door, Slade simply deflected his blow like it was that of an anemic child, and reached over to gently flick the half-metal Titan in the face. His finger hit Cyborg with the force of a cruise missile, and launched him into the air so fast that Raven didn't have time to get out of the way. Both Titans collided in mid-air, and plummeted to the ground, Cyborg landing on his back on the catwalks below, Raven crashing into the wall and sliding down it into a heap on the floor.
She rose back to her hands and knees, shaking her head to try and clear it. Somewhere overhead came the sounds of further fighting, catwalks shattering, metal striking metal of some sort, but for the moment, all she could do was try and see if Cyborg was okay. Scrambling to her feet, she wan over to Cyborg, who was laying flat on his back on the ground, eyes shut, unmoving. Quickly, she conjured up a healing spell, placing one hand on his chestplate as she commanded her powers to seek out the damage to his human parts and repair it, but all this would take time, and meanwhile Slade was continuing to rampage above her head, at least so her thundering sixth sense kept claiming.
It didn't help that it was also urging her to run.
She clutched her head with her free hand, trying to force herself to focus, and to come up with a plan, but the facts stared her in the face and refused to go away. Slade had returned, armed with powers unheard of, powers fifty times greater than what he had managed to display the last time they had met. He was immune, or essentially so, to everything they had thrown at him so far, and while this was the sort of thing that normally she would have taken in stride, the fact that it was Slade, and that it was happening today, of all days...
She closed her eyes and suppressed a scream. "I just want this day to end!"
"I think we both know this day is far from over..."
Raven's eyes bolted open, and she turned around in time to see Slade landing behind her, calm and collected as ever, not moving, simply standing there, looming overhead, but his mere presence was like a dagger made of ice had been driven into her chest. "Hello, birthday girl," said Slade in his eternally mocking voice, and Raven froze like a statue, unable to so much as twitch, as she realized with a sudden flash of understanding that her worst apprehensions for this day were coming to life before her eyes.
"No..." she whispered.
Slade simply took a step forward. "Ready for your present?"
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The most important part of having superpowers was learning how to control them. The most important part of using superpowers was learning how to control them 'creatively'.
A given power, even one that was not particularly effective at first glance, could be transformed into the most potent weapon imaginable through a simple exercise in creativity. That was one of the lessons that both Slade and Robin had imparted to Terra during her respective times spent training under them. It was one thing to control earth and stone. It was another to control earth and stone creatively. Armed with a given superpower, a particularly inventive meta-human could defeat someone objectively stronger than they were, simply by applying their unique abilities in a creative and inventive manner.
It was a simple but important lesson, one that Terra had never forgotten, not even after she had betrayed Robin and Slade both in turn, and one that she had always sought to put to use, and yet, in the seconds following what she thought would be the coup-de-grace in this little engagement, she could not help but remark to herself that she hadn't been the only one to learn that little lesson.
What she had judged to be a paltry attempt to defend himself from an incoming boulder the size of a Buick had actually been aimed, not at the rock, not even at her, but at an innocuous object located behind her that David had spotted and decided to wield as a weapon. Her first indication that he had done so was also her last, as something exploded like a bomb behind her, too far away for the blast to do much of anything, save that what David had detonated was something very specific.
A parking meter, stuffed with coins.
The meter blew up like a hand grenade, and ten thousand coins flew in every direction like bullets. Three dozen of them hit Terra in the back and side hard enough to stagger her, two of them cutting shallow gashes across her cheek and ear, another one hitting edge-on, and slicing right through her sweatshirt's sleeve to embed itself in her upper arm. If David's intention was to distract her (and it probably was), then it worked, for she bit stifled a cry and nearly fell over, and the rock under her control shook and swerved and landed two feet to the left of where it should have, giving David a chance to shakily get back to his feet, and turn to face her once again.
Biting back the pain of the flying coins, Terra clutched one hand to the side of her face, feeling blood oozing through her fingers. Frowning, she wiped her hand on her sweatshirt before turning back to David, who had blood smeared on the front of his uniform as well, staining the front of his bright red jumpsuit with a deeper red color. His baton was still in-hand, but rather than raising it and returning to the fight, he instead reached down and pulled the communicator off of his belt. He held it up, still closed, facing her, so that she could see the red light gently blinking on it.
"You know what this is," he said sharply, and it was not a question. He knew that she had once had one of these. "That's the panic light. I don't know how good you think you are, but I'd like to see you try and take on all six of us at once! They're already on their way!"
"Really?" asked Terra, "And what are they gonna do when they get here, do you think?"
"Keep on talking," said David, fighting tears back from what she assumed were broken ribs, his voice quivering, but a core of steel resounding within it. "You're about to find out what they're gonna do."
"You think they're going to attack me?" said Terra as calmly as she could. "Are you so sure that they're not going to come here and put you down instead? Or maybe both of us?"
David plainly had no interest in such crude tactics. "Don't even try it. Don't even try it, Terra!"
"I don't have to try anything, David," said Terra. "They're not coming either way."
"Yeah, keep telling yourself that!"
"Seriously, they're not. If you don't believe me, why don't you call them yourself?"
David hesitated at this one, and then slowly flipped the communicator open, not removing his eyes from Terra for one second. "Devastator to Titans," he said urgently. "Code Red Emergency, Patriot Park! Need help now!"
Nothing but static issued in reply. David waited a few seconds before pressing the "transmit" button again. "Devastator to Titans!" he practically yelled, "is anybody there?"
"They can't hear you," said Terra. "We're blocking your signal."
David spared an instant to glance at the screen of the communicator, but black and white static was all he could see, and slowly he lowered the communicator again, and turned back to Terra, obviously badly shaken, but still unwilling to show it, not that it wasn't obvious.
"It doesn't matter," he said carefully. "They can see us from the common room of the Tower." He gestured with his flaming baton across the water to Titans Tower, plainly visible in the distance. "The police already know there's a fight going on, and they'll call them even if I can't!"
Terra shook her head slowly, but said nothing, until David couldn't take it any longer. "What?!" he shouted, "what is it?!"
"David... don't you see what this is?"
"What are you talking about? What is this?!"
"The others aren't coming because they're not in the Tower. They're on the other side of the city, and they're under attack."
Terra could practically see David's heart stop for a moment, and while he hesitated again, this time she did not take advantage. She needed an opening greater than a moment's hesitation, and she knew how to get it.
"W... what are you... who's attacking them?"
"Someone very, very bad."
"Yeah?" he said, trying to bolster his own nerve, "Well good luck to him. The five of them can take on anything, you know that."
"Not this time," said Terra simply. "This time it's something else. In fact, they've probably been calling you for help for the last half hour, wondering where you are, why you're not picking up..."
"As soon as they see that you've been jamming the..."
"We're blocking your signals, David, not theirs. They can still read everything just fine, everything except you. To them, it looks like you're not even bothering to pick up the line."
David was so confused by now that he had forgotten to appear at all menacing. "Why the hell would you do that?"
She raised two more rocks from the ground with one hand, setting them to hover next to her shoulders. "Because I'm here to kill you, David. And because I wanted to make sure that even if I didn't, they would."
He needed a long moment to reply.
"You're insane..."
She simply smiled, an artfully-crafted smile, as sharp as a dagger. "Am I?"
Things exploded.
With a wide swipe, David brought his baton around and blasted both rocks out of the air, crying out with the effort or the pain as he did so, but Terra had anticipated it. She let the blasts push her backwards, rolling and springing back up to her feet before pulling a huge load of dirt out of the ground with one hand, crushing it into dense spikes with her mind, and hurling them at David. The Psychokinetic bounded forward, spires of rock and dirt crashing into the ground all around him, and he blotted two of the spires out of the air with a wave of his hand before Terra pulled a huge wall of rock up out of the ground like a curtain rising from the floor, blocking his path. A second later, a ten-foot-wide chunk of the curtain froze and exploded, and David rushed straight through, right at Terra, his baton brought back in preparation for a swing, but with a wave of her hand, she ripped open the ground in front of him and he had to slam on the breaks, barely skidding to a stop at the edge of a hundred-foot chasm.
"Come on, David," said Terra as the piece of ground she was standing on uprooted and floated into the air, "did you actually think it was gonna be that easy? Did you think you could just show up at the Tower one day and they'd take you in like an abandoned puppy? They'll never trust you, not after today. I've made sure of it."
"You don't know a goddamn thing about them or me," snarled back David, so livid now that the baton was trembling in his hand. "You never did!"
"Oh really? So Raven tried to kill you earlier today because she trusts you?"
"Raven doesn't trust anyone!"
"She trusts the others. She trusted me. Look where that got her. And now she and the others are gonna find out that after they saved your life, brought you into their home, and trained you for months, you decided to run off and hang out with one of their worst enemies instead of help them against the biggest threat they've ever faced when they needed your help the most. For all they know, you're ignoring them on purpose." She sighed and looked up at the sky for a moment, as though pondering some difficult question. "I wonder if they'll decide you were a traitor, or just an ungrateful coward? I guess it really doesn't matter..."
"Shut up!"
The hovering pedestal of ground under Terra's feet quivered and blew up, and she fell, snatching at a pair of fist-sized rocks that fell with her and using them to stop her fall. She hurled one at David and struck him in the shoulder just as he stabbed at the air with his baton, blasting the other one to dust, and flipping her into a free fall. Both teens crumpled to the ground, David clutching at his shoulder with his free hand, Terra shaking her head and climbing back to her feet, clearing her mind to raise yet another pedestal and resume the attack.
David recovered quicker than she had expected though, for as the new pedestal was rising from the ground, he lunged at it and managed to grab on, using the baton as a pick to jam into the soft dirt. The mass of earth shuddered with the extra weight, and before she could fully stabilize it, he had managed to scramble up on top, and eschewing his powers for the moment, swung the baton overhand, aiming to bring it down right on Terra's head. Terra jumped to the side in the nick of time, and he missed her, his swing carrying him forward onto his hands and knees, the head of the baton burying itself in the dirt. Before he could recover, before he could even get up, Terra pulled a fist-sized mass of earth into her waiting hand, fell to one knee, and smashed it as hard as she could onto the back of David's head, shattering the clod of dirt on his skull and knocking him prone, before mentally tilting the earthen pedestal and letting him fall off. Still stunned by the blow, he fell limply down, landing like a rag doll on the ground below.
"Did you think this was one of those stories where the plucky little orphan just gets to join up with the heroes for no reason at all?" asked Terra, floating high above on her pedestal, as David shook his head and moaned and tried to get back to his feet. "You think that communicator makes you part of their family? Did you think that you could just walk into a place you know nothing about and be accepted like an old friend, when you never even bothered to find out who they actually were?"
"I didn't know who you were!" cried David, to Terra or to someone else, it wasn't clear. He staggered back to his feet, retrieving the baton from the ground as he did so, as Terra lowered her pedestal to the ground and stepped off it.
"And when you did find out," she shouted, accusingly, "did you go running to them like you know you were supposed to? Did you tell them everything, and let them know that I was back, and probably a threat? Or were you so afraid of what they'd think if you told them that you'd been hanging out with me for months, that you panicked and ran out here all alone, and gave them no warning that there was anything at all wrong today?"
David stood in his ready position, but she could see the fear trickling into his look, feel him freezing up as his concentration, already hammered by his injuries and pain, faltered before the realization that, this time at least, she was telling the truth.
"Because, David," said Terra, spreading her arms out and shaking her head, "if they'd known I was alive again... well... I really doubt they would have all walked into Slade's trap that easily."
David could barely manage a whisper "... S... Slade?"
"Don't worry," she said, "If any of them do survive, they'll probably be too busy mourning the others to spend too much time getting angry with you. That's all you really care about, after all..."
She saw the shift come over David's eyes, saw him tensing up, saw his jaw clench and his fists shake and the flames on his baton pulsating like a living thing, and even before he opened his mouth to scream, she knew she had just done it.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"No!"
Raven swung her hand around like a boxer delivering an uppercut, and a blast of black energy shaped like a bird's talon caught Slade square in the chest and drove him upwards into the factory's ceiling. It dragged him along the rafters, dislodging tiles and rivets, carving a furrow in the roof before slamming the resurrected supervillain into a darkened corner. Sheathing her fists in black energy, she flew into the air, ready to deliver yet more punishment at need, but when the smoke and dust died away, there was no sign of Slade to be seen.
For a second or two, she thought she'd done it.
"I have a message for you..."
Slade emerged from the smoke like a nightmare given form, floating towards her without so much as lifting a finger. There was no sign of damage on his armored form, not one speck of paint out of place on his helmet from where she had dragged it along the metal roof and smashed him into the wall, and what's worse, in noticing this, she had let Slade get too close.
There was no time to avoid him, and so she opted for the best defense. A sheath of dark energy materialized around her hand, and she swung it at Slade, intending to simply smash him through the wall like a wrecking ball, but Slade moved even faster than she could, and though her energy sheath should have been strong enough to flay the flesh off his bones, he ignored it completely, and grabbed her wrist with an iron grip.
Her mind exploded.
Fire, searing, raging fire, burning through her skull like a whirling inferno. She clenched her teeth and eyes shut and bit back a scream as she tried to pull away, but Slade's hand was like a steel trap, and she could sooner have torn her own arm off at the shoulder as break it. She felt her wristguard melt to vapor, felt her sleeve smolder like burning leaves, felt her skin peeling and bubbling as though a branding iron was being applied, and just as she felt she could take it no longer, and was drawing breath to scream aloud, Slade simply released her, and she fell.
She fell for only a second, though it felt like longer, and she landed with a cry on her back on top of a massive horizontal gear. She sat up, clutching at her wrist where Slade had grabbed her, and when she opened her eyes she saw that her sleeve had been burnt back from her forearm, and that prominently stenciled on it was the same S-rune that Slade himself bore on his head.
And then she heard the crackling of electricity.
She turned back to Slade, still hovering overhead, and there was lightning dancing all over him as he extended his arms like a cross. His head was raised towards the sky, as energy coursed through him from sources unknown, buzzing and snapping the nearby air like a live wire, like a forest of live wires. Slade hovered there, inviolate, invulnerable, utterly unharmed by anything they had thrown at him, and he gazed upon her, and he spoke three words.
"It. Has. Begun."
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
It began.
David screamed, screamed loud enough to wake the dead, and when he swung his baton towards Terra, the very earth quaked with the power of the blast he unleashed. She had no idea what he was detonating, a sewer pipe, an underground power line, perhaps the very bedrock itself, but as he swung, he carved a massive furrow through the dirt, and a snake-like series of explosions cut through the air like a volcanic channel bursting to life. She threw herself to one side, letting the blast pass to her left, and from the flying dust and dirt she formed a packed ball as large as a car and hurled it at him with a cry. He did not so much as flinch, but lashed out at it, swinging his baton overhand like it was an executioner's axe, and the dirt-ball cracked in half and flew apart, one half plunging into the bay, the other smashing a parked car on the road next to the park, overturning it and spilling shattered glass into the street. Terra fell back, raising a shield of rock to protect herself with, but no sooner had she done so than the rock itself froze, and she flung it away in just the nick of time before it too exploded.
She reached out and grabbed the ground under David's feet with her mind, hurtling it into the air and flinging him off balance, but no sooner did he hit the ground than an explosion to her right stole her attention. She gasped as a manhole cover made of solid iron was blown into the air by some underground explosion, flipping end over end as it rose to its apex, before part of the cover itself blew up, rocketing the rest of it straight towards her like a gigantic ninja star. She raised another shield, this time of packed earth, and the manhole cover embedded itself in it and stopped, only to detonate like a bomb a second later, blasting the shield to pieces, and knocking her off her feet, back onto the ground.
She scrambled over to a tree, grabbing one of its branches and using it to stand back up, but when she turned around to face David, she had to dive back to the side to avoid the baton he was already swinging at her face. Once again, he missed by inches, and the baton hit the tree with a hollow "thud". Terra landed on one hand, and lashed out with her foot, hitting David in the back of his knee and knocking his legs out from under him. He landed on his hands and knees, but before he could rise anew, Terra mentally seized a shovelful of dirt from the ground and shot it upwards, slamming it into David's throat, and encasing it in a collar made of stone and soil. Staggering back to her feet, she loomed over him, both arms glowing bright yellow as she pantomimed crushing something between her hands. The earth obeyed her commands, squeezing David's throat like a vice, as he gurgled and choked and desperately clawed at the dirt.
"You're in way over your head, David," she said as she bared her teeth, shoving as hard as she could. "It's like you told me when we first met. You're not a superhero."
David didn't reply. He couldn't reply. He couldn't speak or even breathe, and Terra remorselessly poured on the power, intending to crush his windpipe like a grape, and yet before she could, David gave a half-lunge forward with his baton, and with a flash, the entire oak tree behind her burst like an over-inflated balloon and exploded to matchsticks. Bits of wood as small as a splinter and as large as an oar pelted her, knocking her over, shattering her concentration, and the dirt choker crumbled to dust, leaving David gasping for air. She felt like her back was on fire, and blood ran down the back of her shoulder from where the flying wood shrapnel had drawn it, and yet she could not stop any more than he could, and both of them shakily managed to get back to their feet and turn to one another again, their respective powers swirling around them as...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... lightning flew from Slade's hand, and struck one of the pistons at its base, amputating it instantly and toppling it onto the other pistons, which immediately misfired and began to disintegrate. Raven covered her ears as explosions rocked the entire factory while Slade calmly turned a complete circle, sending bolts of eldritch energy arcing out at everything in sight. Valves burst, pipes shattered, gears derailed and spun out of control as the delicate machinery that regulated them was torn to bits. Cyborg had by now woken up, and only barely managed to get back to his feet before he had to leap back to avoid the massive rocks that...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... neatly decapitated the parked car David was crouching behind and bounced down the street before smashing into a storefront window display. Neither David nor Terra watched it go, for Terra was already tearing another stone out of the ground, but before she could release this one, David blew a nearby mailbox to ribbons, sending the rivets that held it together flying out at Terra like bullets. Most weren't anywhere near her, but one at least was on target and hit her in the side before she could so much as move a muscle. She heard her rib crack as the rivet bounced off of her, felt the stabbing pain like a knife in her lungs, and clutched her side with a hiss as she instinctively threw the stone she had carved up at David. This one...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... would have crushed Beast Boy like an egg, save that Starfire grabbed him by one hand and pulled him out of the way of the falling debris in just the nick of time. The entire facility was flying to pieces before Raven's eyes, but there was nothing she could do to stop it, nothing she could even think of to halt the trail of destruction that enveloped them. Robin fired his grappling gun just in the nick of time, as the nook he was standing in moments ago was torn apart by repeated explosions. With a groan, the casings that kept the pistons in place on either side of the room gave way, and the enormous cylinders toppled onto the factory floor, utterly crushing everything in their path like enormous...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... craters gouged in the street from the flying boulders, from the segments of ground she had torn up to hurl at him, and from the explosions he had conjured in his own defense. She could no longer see the sky, for the pall of dust and smoke that occluded everything blocked her vision. She had no difficulty seeing David however, nor him her, as the fiery orange flames encircling his battered and dented baton served her as good a reference point just as the yellow sheath encasing her did for him. This time she raised three narrow columns of solid bedrock and shot them at David like spears. One missed right, another was snapped in half by a conjured blast, but the last one caught him right in the sternum, hard enough to lift him off the ground and shove him back into the wall of the convenience store he was standing in front of. He doubled over, his face contorted in pain, his free hand clutching his stomach barely able to lift his baton anymore, yet she did not press her attack but readied what defenses she could to receive the counterattack she knew he would unleash, as he raised his baton...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... and tore the largest gear in the factory from its mounting, tilting and spilling it over onto the catwalk where Robin and Cyborg were trying to run away. It landed on its edge like a coin rolling across a tabletop, and bent the catwalk double. Cyborg made a running leap and managed to reach safer ground, but Robin was further back, and hadn't seen the blow landing. The catwalk buckled under his feet, and he fell, sliding back down towards the gear as it rolled towards him. He scrambled to find a footing, a leverage point, any kind of purchase on the collapsing catwalk, but it was being crushed under the enormous weight of the solid metal gear, and nothing of the sort was to be found. Raven's heart caught and her throat seized as Robin rolled over onto his back and raised one arm as one of the gear's teeth plunged down towards him and...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... then, all of a sudden, it was over.
One instant, David had been lashing out yet again with his baton, preparing to detonate a car door or a park bench or an entire tree, or the very ground she was standing upon. The next instant, before her very eyes, David's shout turned into a scream of unmistakable pain, and he aborted his slash in mid-strike and seized his head with both hands and stumbled backwards blindly, as though he was expecting his very head to explode a moment later. Terra hesitated, not wishing to leave herself open should this prove to be a momentary lapse, but the cry of pain was too haunting to be anything but genuine, and when he finally opened his eyes, and half-heartedly stabbed at the air with the baton, nothing happened, save for a fresh jolt of pain that staggered him anew, forcing tears from his clenched eyelids.
She did not act immediately, watching for a time, letting her own pain die down, and her energy re-collect, taking a few deep breaths as she prepared herself for what had to happen now. But by the time he had finally managed to suppress the migraine to a manageable level, and snuck a glance at her out of the corner of his eye, she had a mass of earth as large as a medicine ball floating over one hand, and was gazing at him evenly.
"T... Terra..." he managed to stammer between sharp breaths. "Terra... please..."
Terra raised her other hand, and two dozen more masses of earth rose from the broken ground. David's eyes filled with fear as she slowly closed her fist and shook her head.
"I'm sorry, David"
With one mental shove, all twenty-five packed clumps of earth, ranging in size from a lunchbox to a mailbox, flew towards David at once. He had just enough time to throw his arms up in front of his face before they all hit, shattering on impact, instantly occluding everything behind a cloud of dust and dirt. Terra was taking no chances. Once all the clumps were expended, she uprooted more, ripping rocks and fill from the ground and hurling them blindly into the cloud of dust, until she was absolutely certain. Still she raised several more rocks, holding them ready as the dust and smoke blew away in the ocean breeze.
She needn't have bothered.
The dust parted, and revealed David, standing in front of a wall that had been scoured and plastered over with dirt and small bits of rock. He stood motionless, his arms at his side, his face and uniform covered in dirt and blood and grime, his eyes staring directly at Terra, his face wearing an expression of simple shock, for any number of possible reasons. The baton was still in his hand, held loosely at his side, but no flame or aura encased it, and as Terra watched, his grip slackened, and it slid from his hand and clattered to the pavement. His lips trembled, as though he was trying to say something, but couldn't quite remember how, and then, as if he had all the time in the world, he tipped forward slightly, fell to his knees on the sidewalk, teetered for a second, and pitched over onto the ground, landing face-down on the pavement, twitched several times, and then was still.
Carefully, Terra approached David, keeping the rocks she had raised on-hand in case this should prove ephemeral, and when she reached where he was laying, she tilted the ground beneath him, rolling him over onto his back. Up close, it was clear that this was no clever ruse. Blood leaked from the corners of David's eyes, from the deep gash on his forehead, from his mouth. His eyes were unfocused, staring upwards, as he breathed shallowly and with great difficulty. His hand quivered, as though seeking something, perhaps his baton, and she kicked it aside, down the street, even as she lowered all but the largest rock, a solid piece of limestone the size of a computer monitor, heavy enough to stave in David's ribs or skull with but one gesture.
Perhaps he recognized the danger, perhaps he was already too far gone to recognize anything, but he blinked several times and apparently tried to speak again, but succeeded only in weakly coughing blood up onto the ground next to his head. He could not raise a hand in his own defense, could not so much as move, and Terra extended her own hand, letting the rock float into position above David's head and chest, then paused for a second. There was no more need for play-acting or incitement. It was over. When she spoke, her words held bitterness, reserve, even sadness, but no more anger.
It was no longer necessary.
"For what it's worth, David," she said, not sure if he could hear her or not, "I'm... sorry that it had to be like this."
David mouthed several words, none of which she could make out, and he appeared to be crying, or at least there were tears mixed with the blood running down his face. There was no point in delaying it any further. "I wish there was another way," she said, as she raised her hand, lifting the rock overhead as she did so. It hovered there, waiting for her command, for only a second.
"Goodbye."
She swung her hand down, and the rock plunged to earth like a meteor.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
And at that same instant, miles away, on the other side of town, Raven sat atop a perch near the roof of the factory, and watched an enormous gear descending to crush Robin like an insect and smear his body all over the catwalk he was trapped upon. Had she been thinking clearly, she might have snatched him aside with her powers, or thrown the catwalk away from the oncoming gear, or even sought to halt the gear itself, for heavy as it was, her powers were mighty, and she could have brought it down or thrown it aside. She did neither. Her mind was not clear, it was fraying at the edges, the symbol on her wrist burning like the brand it was, and fear driving her to act recklessly and impulsively, the exact opposite of what she should have been doing. She felt her powers surging within her, beating at the walls of her control, raging to be let out, and for once she could not remember how to contain them Seeing her friend about to be crushed to jam was the final straw, and she clenched both fists and her eyes and teeth together and tried to suppress the primal scream that boiled up from within her unbidden, nothing coherent, just a cry, a plea for mercy, a command to the very powers of the universe to let this accursed, hellish, thrice-damned day come to an end.
Or... failing that...
"STOP!!"
David screamed, screamed loud enough to wake the dead, and when he swung his baton towards Terra, the very earth quaked with the power of the blast he unleashed. She had no idea what he was detonating, a sewer pipe, an underground power line, perhaps the very bedrock itself, but as he swung, he carved a massive furrow through the dirt, and a snake-like series of explosions cut through the air like a volcanic channel bursting to life. She threw herself to one side, letting the blast pass to her left, and from the flying dust and dirt she formed a packed ball as large as a car and hurled it at him with a cry. He did not so much as flinch, but lashed out at it, swinging his baton overhand like it was an executioner's axe, and the dirt-ball cracked in half and flew apart, one half plunging into the bay, the other smashing a parked car on the road next to the park, overturning it and spilling shattered glass into the street. Terra fell back, raising a shield of rock to protect herself with, but no sooner had she done so than the rock itself froze, and she flung it away in just the nick of time before it too exploded.
She reached out and grabbed the ground under David's feet with her mind, hurtling it into the air and flinging him off balance, but no sooner did he hit the ground than an explosion to her right stole her attention. She gasped as a manhole cover made of solid iron was blown into the air by some underground explosion, flipping end over end as it rose to its apex, before part of the cover itself blew up, rocketing the rest of it straight towards her like a gigantic ninja star. She raised another shield, this time of packed earth, and the manhole cover embedded itself in it and stopped, only to detonate like a bomb a second later, blasting the shield to pieces, and knocking her off her feet, back onto the ground.
She scrambled over to a tree, grabbing one of its branches and using it to stand back up, but when she turned around to face David, she had to dive back to the side to avoid the baton he was already swinging at her face. Once again, he missed by inches, and the baton hit the tree with a hollow "thud". Terra landed on one hand, and lashed out with her foot, hitting David in the back of his knee and knocking his legs out from under him. He landed on his hands and knees, but before he could rise anew, Terra mentally seized a shovelful of dirt from the ground and shot it upwards, slamming it into David's throat, and encasing it in a collar made of stone and soil. Staggering back to her feet, she loomed over him, both arms glowing bright yellow as she pantomimed crushing something between her hands. The earth obeyed her commands, squeezing David's throat like a vice, as he gurgled and choked and desperately clawed at the dirt.
"You're in way over your head, David," she said as she bared her teeth, shoving as hard as she could. "It's like you told me when we first met. You're not a superhero."
David didn't reply. He couldn't reply. He couldn't speak or even breathe, and Terra remorselessly poured on the power, intending to crush his windpipe like a grape, and yet before she could, David gave a half-lunge forward with his baton, and with a flash, the entire oak tree behind her burst like an over-inflated balloon and exploded to matchsticks. Bits of wood as small as a splinter and as large as an oar pelted her, knocking her over, shattering her concentration, and the dirt choker crumbled to dust, leaving David gasping for air. She felt like her back was on fire, and blood ran down the back of her shoulder from where the flying wood shrapnel had drawn it, and yet she could not stop any more than he could, and both of them shakily managed to get back to their feet and turn to one another again, their respective powers swirling around them as...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... lightning flew from Slade's hand, and struck one of the pistons at its base, amputating it instantly and toppling it onto the other pistons, which immediately misfired and began to disintegrate. Raven covered her ears as explosions rocked the entire factory while Slade calmly turned a complete circle, sending bolts of eldritch energy arcing out at everything in sight. Valves burst, pipes shattered, gears derailed and spun out of control as the delicate machinery that regulated them was torn to bits. Cyborg had by now woken up, and only barely managed to get back to his feet before he had to leap back to avoid the massive rocks that...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... neatly decapitated the parked car David was crouching behind and bounced down the street before smashing into a storefront window display. Neither David nor Terra watched it go, for Terra was already tearing another stone out of the ground, but before she could release this one, David blew a nearby mailbox to ribbons, sending the rivets that held it together flying out at Terra like bullets. Most weren't anywhere near her, but one at least was on target and hit her in the side before she could so much as move a muscle. She heard her rib crack as the rivet bounced off of her, felt the stabbing pain like a knife in her lungs, and clutched her side with a hiss as she instinctively threw the stone she had carved up at David. This one...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... would have crushed Beast Boy like an egg, save that Starfire grabbed him by one hand and pulled him out of the way of the falling debris in just the nick of time. The entire facility was flying to pieces before Raven's eyes, but there was nothing she could do to stop it, nothing she could even think of to halt the trail of destruction that enveloped them. Robin fired his grappling gun just in the nick of time, as the nook he was standing in moments ago was torn apart by repeated explosions. With a groan, the casings that kept the pistons in place on either side of the room gave way, and the enormous cylinders toppled onto the factory floor, utterly crushing everything in their path like enormous...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... craters gouged in the street from the flying boulders, from the segments of ground she had torn up to hurl at him, and from the explosions he had conjured in his own defense. She could no longer see the sky, for the pall of dust and smoke that occluded everything blocked her vision. She had no difficulty seeing David however, nor him her, as the fiery orange flames encircling his battered and dented baton served her as good a reference point just as the yellow sheath encasing her did for him. This time she raised three narrow columns of solid bedrock and shot them at David like spears. One missed right, another was snapped in half by a conjured blast, but the last one caught him right in the sternum, hard enough to lift him off the ground and shove him back into the wall of the convenience store he was standing in front of. He doubled over, his face contorted in pain, his free hand clutching his stomach barely able to lift his baton anymore, yet she did not press her attack but readied what defenses she could to receive the counterattack she knew he would unleash, as he raised his baton...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... and tore the largest gear in the factory from its mounting, tilting and spilling it over onto the catwalk where Robin and Cyborg were trying to run away. It landed on its edge like a coin rolling across a tabletop, and bent the catwalk double. Cyborg made a running leap and managed to reach safer ground, but Robin was further back, and hadn't seen the blow landing. The catwalk buckled under his feet, and he fell, sliding back down towards the gear as it rolled towards him. He scrambled to find a footing, a leverage point, any kind of purchase on the collapsing catwalk, but it was being crushed under the enormous weight of the solid metal gear, and nothing of the sort was to be found. Raven's heart caught and her throat seized as Robin rolled over onto his back and raised one arm as one of the gear's teeth plunged down towards him and...
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
... then, all of a sudden, it was over.
One instant, David had been lashing out yet again with his baton, preparing to detonate a car door or a park bench or an entire tree, or the very ground she was standing upon. The next instant, before her very eyes, David's shout turned into a scream of unmistakable pain, and he aborted his slash in mid-strike and seized his head with both hands and stumbled backwards blindly, as though he was expecting his very head to explode a moment later. Terra hesitated, not wishing to leave herself open should this prove to be a momentary lapse, but the cry of pain was too haunting to be anything but genuine, and when he finally opened his eyes, and half-heartedly stabbed at the air with the baton, nothing happened, save for a fresh jolt of pain that staggered him anew, forcing tears from his clenched eyelids.
She did not act immediately, watching for a time, letting her own pain die down, and her energy re-collect, taking a few deep breaths as she prepared herself for what had to happen now. But by the time he had finally managed to suppress the migraine to a manageable level, and snuck a glance at her out of the corner of his eye, she had a mass of earth as large as a medicine ball floating over one hand, and was gazing at him evenly.
"T... Terra..." he managed to stammer between sharp breaths. "Terra... please..."
Terra raised her other hand, and two dozen more masses of earth rose from the broken ground. David's eyes filled with fear as she slowly closed her fist and shook her head.
"I'm sorry, David"
With one mental shove, all twenty-five packed clumps of earth, ranging in size from a lunchbox to a mailbox, flew towards David at once. He had just enough time to throw his arms up in front of his face before they all hit, shattering on impact, instantly occluding everything behind a cloud of dust and dirt. Terra was taking no chances. Once all the clumps were expended, she uprooted more, ripping rocks and fill from the ground and hurling them blindly into the cloud of dust, until she was absolutely certain. Still she raised several more rocks, holding them ready as the dust and smoke blew away in the ocean breeze.
She needn't have bothered.
The dust parted, and revealed David, standing in front of a wall that had been scoured and plastered over with dirt and small bits of rock. He stood motionless, his arms at his side, his face and uniform covered in dirt and blood and grime, his eyes staring directly at Terra, his face wearing an expression of simple shock, for any number of possible reasons. The baton was still in his hand, held loosely at his side, but no flame or aura encased it, and as Terra watched, his grip slackened, and it slid from his hand and clattered to the pavement. His lips trembled, as though he was trying to say something, but couldn't quite remember how, and then, as if he had all the time in the world, he tipped forward slightly, fell to his knees on the sidewalk, teetered for a second, and pitched over onto the ground, landing face-down on the pavement, twitched several times, and then was still.
Carefully, Terra approached David, keeping the rocks she had raised on-hand in case this should prove ephemeral, and when she reached where he was laying, she tilted the ground beneath him, rolling him over onto his back. Up close, it was clear that this was no clever ruse. Blood leaked from the corners of David's eyes, from the deep gash on his forehead, from his mouth. His eyes were unfocused, staring upwards, as he breathed shallowly and with great difficulty. His hand quivered, as though seeking something, perhaps his baton, and she kicked it aside, down the street, even as she lowered all but the largest rock, a solid piece of limestone the size of a computer monitor, heavy enough to stave in David's ribs or skull with but one gesture.
Perhaps he recognized the danger, perhaps he was already too far gone to recognize anything, but he blinked several times and apparently tried to speak again, but succeeded only in weakly coughing blood up onto the ground next to his head. He could not raise a hand in his own defense, could not so much as move, and Terra extended her own hand, letting the rock float into position above David's head and chest, then paused for a second. There was no more need for play-acting or incitement. It was over. When she spoke, her words held bitterness, reserve, even sadness, but no more anger.
It was no longer necessary.
"For what it's worth, David," she said, not sure if he could hear her or not, "I'm... sorry that it had to be like this."
David mouthed several words, none of which she could make out, and he appeared to be crying, or at least there were tears mixed with the blood running down his face. There was no point in delaying it any further. "I wish there was another way," she said, as she raised her hand, lifting the rock overhead as she did so. It hovered there, waiting for her command, for only a second.
"Goodbye."
She swung her hand down, and the rock plunged to earth like a meteor.
*-------------------------------------------------------------------------*
And at that same instant, miles away, on the other side of town, Raven sat atop a perch near the roof of the factory, and watched an enormous gear descending to crush Robin like an insect and smear his body all over the catwalk he was trapped upon. Had she been thinking clearly, she might have snatched him aside with her powers, or thrown the catwalk away from the oncoming gear, or even sought to halt the gear itself, for heavy as it was, her powers were mighty, and she could have brought it down or thrown it aside. She did neither. Her mind was not clear, it was fraying at the edges, the symbol on her wrist burning like the brand it was, and fear driving her to act recklessly and impulsively, the exact opposite of what she should have been doing. She felt her powers surging within her, beating at the walls of her control, raging to be let out, and for once she could not remember how to contain them Seeing her friend about to be crushed to jam was the final straw, and she clenched both fists and her eyes and teeth together and tried to suppress the primal scream that boiled up from within her unbidden, nothing coherent, just a cry, a plea for mercy, a command to the very powers of the universe to let this accursed, hellish, thrice-damned day come to an end.
Or... failing that...
"STOP!!"
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 23: Ex Cathedra
"Fear... and panic in the air.
I want to be free, from Desolation and Despair,
And I feel... like everything I sow,
Has been swept away,
Well I refuse to let you go..."
- Muse, Map of the Problematique
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"Arise,"
Figures flitted through the shadows and the clouds, emerging and receding like waves on the shore. Glimpses, a second, half a second, less, no time to examine, no time to consider. A young woman standing on a balcony, a blazing scepter held in one hand as she gazed down upon a city of gleaming crystal and polished stone. An old man in blackened armor, drinking blood from a chalice of carved ruby, seated on an obsidian throne atop a mound of piled corpses. An amorphous creature of tentacles and numberless mouths, all screaming silently in the midst of a lightless pit. A girl of eight, bound to a tree and crying out in a language that made no sense as men and women danced in a circle about her, and the world shook and twisted in agony. A hooded monk, serene and content, sitting cross-legged in a chamber filled with light. A giant man with a red beard, mechanically painting a landscape onto a canvas, striving to derive feeling from it. A cowering woman, huddled with her children on the dirt floor of a tiny hovel, as armed men with cruel faces surrounded her, leering and gesturing salaciously in preparation for worse acts to come.
Stars wheeled overhead, mountains and oceans spilled like paint over an infinite easel. Image after image, context-free, urgent and unimportant, meaningless and evocative, all at once. Fire danced and spun in the air, like a puppet attached to a mad puppeteer. Great rivers flowed through inky voids, some of gold, some of starlight, some of boiling blood. Seven-pointed stars seared themselves into nonexistent ground like branding irons wielded by gods. And as the images began to coalesce into something only slightly more coherent, their intensity seemed only to increase, like a volume control dialed up and up and yet further up. Cities on fire, mountains of corpses, screams in tongues too alien to comprehend. And above all, a citadel of ivory and pearl, like a spike penetrating the very heavens, atop which sat an open chamber, thin air whistling through it as beings in robes stood in circles and chanted hymns to unknown gods.
"Arise,"
Seven there were, at points of a star, green-scaled figures like dinosaurs writ as men, and in the center of them all, a dias onto which a bright light was shining, but from what source? The figures moaned and chanted and swayed as the sounds of anguish crept through the chamber from the burning city below, and as they did, the white light in the center split, as though broken by a prism, and all the colors of the rainbow arrayed themselves around the chamber, spinning like a carousel before slowing, and coming to a halt, one beam of colored light resting upon each of the robed saurians. Violet there was, and indigo, and blue and green and yellow and orange too and even red, a rainbow of light dazzling to behold, drowning the vision of all else, and one by one the figures stood stock still as if transfixed, and some cried, and some were silent, and some raised their hands in joy and ecstasy, and others sagged as though burdened by a great weight. One by one the figures stood and reacted, enraptured, through all the colors of the rainbow down to the very last, who stood within the red light that engulfed him and said nothing, and moved not. And the others gazed upon him for a long time, as though awaiting pronouncement or reaction, until at the last he suddenly threw back his hood, revealing his reptillian head and features, and shouted aloud a cry of joy or pain or fear or triumph or perhaps all of the above, a cry that had more in common with the keening of a hawk than it did the vocalizations of a man.
And then everything went black.
And then everything went white again...
"Arise..."
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Everything hurt.
David had no idea how long he had been awake, or even aware of where he was. There was no discrete moment of waking, only a vague realization that gradually crawled over him that he was in fact alive, and that he was in fact in pain. Terrible pain.
He could not move. He was absolutely certain of that. The pain of merely lying on the ground was enough to overshadow everything else, and to move was to invite certain death. He could not tell what his injuries were, only that they were legion, nor where the pain was localized, for it was everywhere at once. How long he lay there was impossible to tell. He had no future, no past, no sense of the passage of time, only that he was hurt, that he was dying.
That he wasn't yet dead.
Why wasn't he dead?
It was the first thought he'd had in a million years that wasn't related to the pain he was in, and he pursued it like a drowning man pursuing a distant lifeboat. He knew that he was supposed to be dead, that that was the reason he was in such pain, but he could not remember the reason why he wasn't. He tried to focus on that question, that mystery, as flashes of everything that had happened came back. He remembered being in the Tower. He remembered being in the park. He remembered fighting, and being angry, so terribly angry that he had destroyed things without question or hesitation or worry about what anyone would think, and that it had not been enough. He remembered pain, pain of a different sort, stabbing him through the head like an icepick, and he remembered falling as a barrage of rocks struck home, and his last view of the world as Terra drove a boulder towards his head so as to stave it in.
"Terra..."
His own voice brought him partly around, though it was too quiet for anyone to hear besides him, and he remembered, all in a rush, that he had fallen in the street, that Terra had thrown a rock at his head, and was trying to kill him. She had said so. She was part of the conspiracy, part of the plot to get him and kill him and destroy him and his friends who were all...
His breath caught.
He twitched, and bit back the pain that caused, and slowly, agonizingly-so almost, he opened his eyes to admit the light, and found that he was still laying on the street, and staring at a boulder.
A floating boulder.
The incongruous sight was enough to banish the pain and the fear of death to the back of his mind and just force him to stare, for a boulder the size of a motorcycle was floating in mid-air bare inches in front of him, as perfectly still as if it had been a painting hung on a wall somewhere. A bright yellow aura enveloped the boulder, but rather than flicker, it too sat stock still, waiting for some unknown signal to propel the rock on its way and crush him to pulp. David's heart began thundering in his ears again, loud enough to block out all other sounds, and though he knew that he should be doing something, anything, moving or screaming or trying to fight back, he also knew equally well that such a thing was well beyond him at this stage, but he couldn't just sit here and wait to be crushed, could he?
Could he?
Apparently he could.
He lay on the ground in a puddle of his own blood, and stared up at the hovering rock, expecting any instant for it to come crashing down on his head. Seconds ticked by, each one as long as a lifetime, and yet the rock did not move, and the aura did not flicker, and the only sound David could hear was that of his own shallow breathing and ragged heartbeat. Only after many such breaths, and many such beats, his only means of measuring the passing of time, did he finally muster the will and the strength to move. Gradually, with infinite pain and care, he managed to slide himself over, across the rough asphalt he was laying upon, sliding himself out from under the path of the boulder, lest it should spontaneously begin to move again. It did not, and after a minute's work, David finally collapsed against the curb of the sidewalk, where he lay motionless for a few minutes, like a boned fish.
And then he noticed something very wrong.
At the very end of his fight with Terra, years ago or bare moments, he could no longer tell, the geokinetic had summoned a swarm of boulders to fling into him, only to cast most of them away when she realized that he was beaten and that only one would be needed. These cast-off rocks had been flung to the side, and hit the ground, and shattered, flinging bits of rock shrapnel into in every direction. This would not have been anything worth noticing normally, for the entire area was completely covered in bits of rock and discarded debris, yet another war zone to add to his ever-growing repertoire, except that from where he was laying now, he could see the shattered fragments.
They were still in the air, and they weren't moving.
It took his broken, addled mind a second to process that. Hundreds of fragments of rock were hovering sedately in the air, some high, some low, some frozen in the process of skittering over the ground. One had crashed into a plate glass window and shattered it, but the glass fragments still held in mid-air, as motionless as if glued into place. His gaze slowly panned across the scene of ruin that he and Terra had wrought, the pain of his injuries beginning to fade, replaced with a cold fear as he realized that something else was horribly wrong. A severed fire hydrant's waterspout hung in the air like an ice sculpture, every drop glistening in the sun, neither falling back to earth, nor shooting into the air, fixed like the stars overhead. Smoke hovered above burning cars, neither wafting on the wind, nor billowing into the sky, a shroud as solid and permanent as a store awning, cloaking fires whose flames neither flickered nor burned, but stood stock still like wax sculptures, emitting neither heat, nor sound, nor smoke beyond that which already hung. Birds flying through the hazy air were likewise frozen in place in mid-wingbeat, as were insects and even a police helicopter, its rotors motionless, yet sufficing somehow to support the machine aloft. From where David was laying, he could see one of the policemen leaning out the window to watch the ground below, a pair of binoculars frozen to his head in mute salute.
And then there was Terra herself.
The geokinetic was standing in the middle of the street where he had last seen her, and like everything else, she was as motionless as a statue. Her arm was extended palm outwards, a yellow sheath enveloping it and her, her other hand pressed tightly against her side, as though holding in some sort of injury, which given everything, wasn't too unlikely. Her head was lowered, turned slightly away from where he had been laying, her gaze averted as if unwilling to witness the fruits of her own handiwork.
Gradually, David pushed himself up onto the curb of the sidewalk, trying to move as little as possible as he did so, for his shattered ribs, broken arm, and other injuries, less obvious but no less painful, tortured him at every turn, forcing tears from his eyes and reducing his breathing to sharp, pained whimpers and gasps. He had no idea what was going on, no idea if he was alive or dead, hallucinating some fantasy in the moments before his brain stopped working, or transported into a shadow realm beyond the living world. All he knew is that everything, everyone, every object in sight had frozen solid. Everything except him.
He pulled himself into a sitting position, each breath stabbing him like a knife between his ribs. The air was cold, bitingly cold, in a way he didn't remember it having been, and he shivered, and shivering made his entire body ache and scream in protest. Blood was smeared all over his uniform, darkening the fabric from red-orange to crimson. It ran from cuts on his forehead, getting into his eyes, running down his arms, dripping from his fingers. He had no idea what to do, where to run to, how to escape what was happening. The pain in his stomach was growing worse and worse, the chill in the air becoming more and more pronounced. His head swam with the effort required to take every breath, barely able to stay seated, let alone stand, and yet somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that he needed to stand, needed to walk, needed to crawl if necessary, but needed to get out of here, back to the tower, back to the others, back anywhere really. He needed to get out of this surrealist nightmare and back to the others, or he was dead.
Merely standing up took five tries, for his arm was broken, and every bit of weight he applied to it to try and get on his hands and knees or stabilize himself sent a white-hot jolt of pain through him strong enough to blur his vision and make him scream aloud. When finally he shakily reached his feet, he tottered there for a while, then managed to take a step, paused, catching his breath, then took another, and another, and another, like a climber ascending Mt. Everest, with every pace an excruciating ordeal. In such a manner, one arm hanging limp, the other clutched over his stomach as though holding his guts inside, David slowly limped forwards. He could not run, he could barely even walk, staggering like a drunk into each successive street sight, lamp post, or railing, grabbing onto them as though they represented life itself, steadying himself and coughing up enough blood to fill his lungs with air again, and then moving onto the next, on and on until he finally disappeared into the inky stillness of the frozen city.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The silence was worse than the sound.
Raven stood amidst a factory devoid of noise, devoid of motion, devoid of life, and stared at her friends, all of whom were arrayed before her like still images on a matte painting, frozen like the rest of the exploding factory. Broken machinery heavy enough to sink an ocean liner was hovering in mid-air without the slightest support, as the air chilled to a frosty sheen and the flames themselves about her seemed to flash-freeze. Her heart beat mercilessly within her chest, thundering like an avalanche, and she rubbed her upper arms unconsciously as she looked around the factory in fear and wonder.
"How did I...?"
"You might be able to stop time, birthday girl," came the haunting reply in Slade's ever-calm voice, "but you can't stop me. You can't stop any of it, really."
Raven whirled about and looked up into the air, where Slade had been hanging moments before. There he hung now, but unlike everything else about her, he was neither frozen nor motionless, having turned back to face her, sheathed in a red aura as if all the fires of Hell were burning within him.
It reminded her of...
"I have to say, Raven," said Slade, floating down towards her as she backed away slowly, as if from a dangerous predator, "when I found out the truth, I was very impressed." He shoved bits of debris out of his way as he advanced, strolling along through the air without a care in the world, not in the least bit placed out of sorts by the fact that Raven had apparently just halted the physical laws of the universe in their tracks around him. "All this time," he remarked, his voice as smooth as silk and deadly as a rattlesnake's hiss, "I had no idea. The power lurking inside you. The glorious destiny that awaits." He paused and seemed to smirk. "It's always the quiet ones, isn't it?"
This could not be happening. It was bad enough that Slade was immune to everything they had thrown a him, she had just frozen time and still he pursued her! What was he? What had he been turned into?! Her heart beat inside her chest so hard that she could feel it hammering away at the inside of her skull, and she clutched both hands to her head to try and block it out, backing up a fallen girder to keep away from him.
Slade followed at his even pace. "But honestly, Raven," he said, "did you actually think you could just blow out the candles and wish it all away?" He folded his arms across his chest, like a schoolmaster scolding a truant girl, moving up the girder after her, and leaning forward to ensure she caught every single word. "Today is the day it begins," he explained darkly. "You've known it all your life. It is going to happen. And no matter what you wish, no matter where you go, no matter how you squirm, there is nothing you can do to stop it."
She phased through the wall.
She did it without even thinking, panic clawing at her throat as she did so, and before she knew what was happening, she had plunged herself into shadow and emerged from the other side of the wall in the form of a space-black raven. She had no idea where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there, but in the back of her mind loomed a half-formed plan, to grab the others somehow, dispel the effect of her semi-intentional magic on them, and then to get out as quickly as she could and find somewhere to hide or to go to escape from Slade. Her mind raced with fragments of ideas as to where that might be, and so it was that she was not paying any attention to where she was going until she finally landed next to Robin.
... or... wait a minute.
She had meant to land next to Robin. Robin was the closest to where she was after all, and moreover there was a gear the size of a small house looming over him, ready to crush him to paste the instant she aborted her temporal spell. Besides, whatever the circumstance, no matter how bad it was, Robin had a plan for it, as he had a plan for everything. She had intended, or semi-intended, to pull him out from under the gear, and then take off, freeing the others on the way out. But as she blinked back into reality, she realized she had not landed next to Robin, nor anywhere near Robin. In her panic, her subconscious had been at the wheel, and rather than do what she had intended, she had put down next to Beast Boy instead.
For a second she hesitated, unsure of if she should go back and grab Robin as she had previously meant to, confused as to why she had wound up here of all places, and looking about to locate Slade again. When she found him however, she knew that it was too late, for Slade was hovering above Robin's position, casually walking through the air towards her as he spoke with an air of weary annoyance. "Running won't save you, birthday girl," he said, "nothing will."
It was too late to ponder her subconscious' motives, too late to do anything but run as quickly as she could. She turned to Beast Boy, who had been frozen mid-transformation, and laid a hand on his side, letting the temporal energy she had stolen from him and everything flow back into him. Moments later, his pallor returned, and he fell out of the air where he had been leaping, landing on the ground in the form of a very confused leopard. For a second he seemed to not know where he was, blinking silently as he looked around at his frozen surroundings. And then, as he figured out slowly that he was still both alive and located within the factory, the green changeling reverted to his human form, and slowly stood up, scratching the back of his head with one gloved hand, his eyes wide as he beheld the frozen machinery and flames, as well as the motionless forms of the other Titans.
"What..."
He did not have a chance to finish his sentence, for Raven had no sooner freed him than she turned back and raised both arms. Tendrils of pure darkness emerged from the ground before her, and they wrapped themselves around the enormous gear that was threatening to crush Robin to mulch. The gear was solid iron, machine-forged and face-hardened, but Raven's tendrils tore it apart like clay, shattering the enormous gear and casting its fragments left and right, with several of the larger chunks flung at Slade for good measure. And then without another instant's hesitation, she turned back to Beast Boy, seized him with one hand by the shoulder, and conjured up a black portal that enveloped them both, then morphed into another bird of purified shadow, which took to the air and phased straight through the ceiling, leaving nothing behind.
The bird soared out into the silent city, down the streets and around the corners, propelled by act of pure will, passing over frozen cars, people, and animals, before finally coming to a stop in the middle of a large and empty street. There the bird hesitated for a moment, raising its wings and head up like an eagle on a flag or seal, and ejecting Beast Boy unceremoniously onto the street below it. Moments later the bird seemed to dissolve, the shadows collapsing inwards, resolving finally onto Raven, who landed as lightly as a feather on the ground, lowering her arms as her cloak fluttered down around her in the windless chill of the timeless air.
Beast Boy picked himself up off the street slowly, brushing the dirt and gravel off of his uniform unconsciously as he stared in wide-eyed astonishment at everything nearby, the birds like paintings in a false sky, the pedestrians halted in mid-step like mannequins, before slowly turning his eyes back to Raven in a mixture of wordless wonder and fear.
"Raven?"
Raven shut her eyes as wave of reproach washed through her. She should have brought Robin out, and she knew it. Robin, whose head she had already been inside. Robin, who understood her better than anyone else in the Tower. Robin, who she could imagine herself conceivably explaining all of this to, not Beast Boy, who didn't even have the sense to leave her alone whenever she was...
She practically had to slap herself out of the unworthy flash of anger that brought up. She had not brought Robin out, but Beast Boy, and even if she didn't know why, there was no going back now, and so she took a deep breath, and opened her eyes once again, to find Beast Boy still staring at her, saying nothing, but clearly seeking for answers of some kind.
"What happened?" asked Beast Boy, his voice raspy and subdued. "Did... did you do all this?"
"I..." stammered Raven. Where could she even begin? She had precious few answers here. "I'm not sure," she said, raising her torn sleeve and staring at the rune imprinted on her wrist, which in the obscure frozen twilight overhead was beginning to fade out. "I... I never wanted this day to come. And when it did, I just wanted it to stop." She stepped past him, surveying the petrified city, a chill running up and down her spine that could not be entirely due to the cold of the air. "I... guess I got my wish..." she commented lamely.
She expected him to ask what she was talking about. It was what Robin would have done, tried to identify the problem as quickly as he could, and then solve it. It was how Robin worked, but it was not what Beast Boy did. Though he could not have been anything less than completely perplexed, he did not explode or beg her for more information, and his soft footsteps behind her were followed by the soft touch of his gloved hand resting on her shoulder. "It's okay," he said as gently as he could, and while she caught the fear in his words, she caught something else there too, something she couldn't place. "We're gonna be okay. We'll... figure something out."
She wanted to ask him what in the hell they were gonna figure out, wanted to round on him angrily for being naive and ignorant about what was actually happening, but instead she just lowered her head and cursed herself silently for having dragged him and all the others into this terrible situation. "I don't think so," she said.
"Raven, you just stopped time," said Beast Boy in a voice that was surprisingly confident, given everything, and even contained the barest hint of a smile. "If you can do that, then you can totally crush Slade, especially with my help."
His logic was so ridiculous as to be absurd, and yet it made a depraved sort of sense. Moreover it was so perfectly... Beast Boy that her train of thought derailed on the spot and she turned her head around to face him, and saw that he was smiling.
How the hell did he do that?
She shook her head slowly. "Beast Boy," she said, "I -"
She froze.
Behind Beast Boy, down at the intersection of the next cross-street, something had stumbled around the corner, something that made her eyes fly open as the blood froze in her veins. Her breath caught, her fists clenched, the aura of darkness that was her semi-constant companion flared back to life around her, and even as Beast Boy noticed in her eyes that something was wrong, she opened her mouth and croaked out a strangled cry.
" - Great Azar... no!"
And then before Beast Boy could so much as move, she shoved him aside with one hand, even as she stepped forward and raised the other one, fist closed like a cannon. Her magic words spilled from her lips in a panic as the black energy around her swelled up before forming into a beam of coherent void, and flying down the road towards her target.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Everything hurt.
Seriously, everything hurt.
David staggered down the street away from where he had left the motionless form of Terra, along with what had to be more than a quart of his own blood. More of it was dripping along a trail from there to here, these few city blocks that he had traversed in the agonizing minutes since he had awoken on the ground in the middle of what was either a near-death hallucination or another dimension.
No matter how far he stumbled, no matter how far he tried to flee, nothing was alive, nothing was moving. People, birds, dogs, everything was in some kind of stasis. The air itself was chilled as though preparing to freeze, the sun hung motionless in the sky, and he had to actually brush the smoke out of his face like cobwebs as he gradually, painfully made his way down the street.
Where was he going? He had no idea. The world had taken a sharp turn for the surreal, and while he had no idea if it was the product of his injuries or some new aspect of reality he had never been briefed on, he simply had no idea of what else to do. His entire body was on fire, but the pain in his stomach was growing worse and worse with each passing minute. He was bleeding inside, his head swimming more and more with each step, to the point where all he wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep. He retained enough lucidity to know that this was a trap, but only barely, and so he made he way along, staggering, crawling, dragging himself along with parked cars and street signs, moving in the vague direction of the Tower and the presupposed sanctuary that it offered, though had he been thinking clearly, he would have realized that with the world itself frozen, likely all he would be able to do would be to die there, rather than here.
He had to stop every couple steps to wheeze and force air into his lungs, and rub the mixture of blood and tears from his eyes. It was far too much for him to think over, everything that had happened. He could not even commence questioning how it was that Terra had come back to life for the purposes of meeting him and killing him, how the entire world had come to a halt save for himself, how all of these terrible things had happened without explanation or reason. All he could do was stop, and then stumble forward again, and then stop, pushed on by nothing more than force of habit, and the desire not to die in the middle of a frozen world in an abandoned street.
And those things could only keep him going so long.
He slipped, he tumbled, he fell, and in falling he reached out with his broken arm to arrest his fall, and his arm gave way and he hit the ground hard, and would have screamed if he had possessed the strength. Instead he could do nothing but lay on the ground and sob weakly, his body racked with pain and spasm, his blood soaking into the asphalt below. He knew he should get up, move, that to stay here was to die, but he simply could not. Terra had bludgeoned him like a formless sack of potatoes, and his body was broken and spent. He made one more lunge forward, and then lay still, semi-conscious, barely able to keep his eyes open.
Sounds flitted around his head like insects, like buzzards preparing to feast on a fresh kill. Voices, those of people he hadn't seen in years, of people he'd seen only weeks before, all of them recognizable if only vaguely, speaking nonsense, gibberish, words that held no meaning, but he listened to them anyway. Above all of the cacophony though, there were five specific voices, five voices that orbited his mind like planets around a dying star. A fog was descending over everything, thick and impermeable, and all the other voices faded to nothingness, but the five remained, reciting snatches of conversations from months before, their meanings abandoned, their mere presence something of a comfort. The pain was nearly gone now, the chill in the air forgotten, the blood ebbing from his body beginning to thin, and he could no longer keep his eyes open, but slowly slid them closed, listening to the sound of the five voices around him as one by one they slowly faded away.
Save two.
Two voices, mere whispers in the dark remained, and he listened to them, for it was all he could still do. He listened without understanding, and he waited for them to vanish, and to leave him alone, as the others had done. And yet they did not, continuing for reasons unknown, speaking on and on for what seemed like hours. He was puzzled as to why. Why were they still there, soft and yet intelligible in the oppressive silence of the frozen city, still speaking in terms that if he had only possessed the mental wherewithal, he might have been able to interpret. There was some element to this that he was missing, and he knew it, and it bothered him that he couldn't understand, and he tried to focus on the words, to figure out their meaning and who was speaking.
"Raven, you just stopped time,"
His breath caught. The voice was raspy and instantly recognizable, even in his broken state, as was the name it had uttered. And it occurred to him all of a sudden, like a flash of insight, that the reason the other voices hadn't vanished was because they weren't in his head.
They were nearby.
The realization galvanized what little force was still left in his broken frame, and he forced his eyes open again, and lifted his head like it weighed a hundred pounds. The sound was definitely coming from somewhere nearby, not from some vague place within his head. It was Beast Boy, and from his words it was also Raven, and they were near, and they were alive.
It took effort, real effort, to convince himself to move, and yet deep inside, some burning core of his being refused to die here in the gutter if he had any other option available to him. If Beast Boy and Raven were somehow still active in the midst of all this, he knew he had to find them, even if nothing then could be done. Even if they were in worse shape than he was, in fact especially if they were in worse shape than he was. There was nothing else for it. No other option was acceptable. He moved.
The pain came back with a vengeance as he moved, rising unsteadily to his hands and knees and crawling down the street until he reached a telephone pole that he could use to slowly, painfully get back to his feet. The pain this time was a help more than a hindrance though, for it banished the remaining shreds of unconsciousness that still dragged at his mind, and forced him to act, somehow, to alleviate it. For this reason and a hundred others, all related, he dragged himself to the corner of the nearest intersection, around which the sounds were coming. He paused, and breathed in and out and in and out and finally shuffled around the corner. Ahead, no more than fifty paces away, a few seconds' run at any other time, Beast Boy and Raven stood with their backs to him, their breaths puffing in the chilly air. Beast Boy's hand was on Raven's shoulder, and Raven's head was drooping. They spoke still, but now he could not overhear them, for his own wheezing was too loud to hear whispers at distance over. He could not cry out, could not so much as scream, but he did cough as he shuffled towards them, and Raven's head came around and she saw him.
And she went white
Her eyes nearly burst from her head and her entire body went rigid as she mouthed an exclamation to herself, and then thrusting Beast Boy aside and stepping forward, she raised one hand, which glowed with black energy and suddenly burst forth as a river of violent death, streaking across the intervening space in a heartbeat. It was no act of his that saved him, but a what little restraint Raven had left in her, for the beam of blackness struck the ground two feet in front of him and scoured it to bedrock in seconds. Stone chips flew in every direction, and David reflexively brought his hand up to his face to shield it, and stopped in his tracks, which appeared to have been Raven's goal.
"No..." she said, and there was horror in her voice, like she was staring at some kind of monster raised from the pits of damnation to devour her very soul. "No," she repeated, "no... stay back! Don't come any closer or..."
"Raven!" shouted Beast Boy, who had been momentarily stunned by all the goings on, but now recovered his powers of speach. "What are you doing?" he turned back to face David and his eyes widened. "Dude!" he exclaimed in his own inimitable style. "What happened?! Are you okay?!" The changeling took several steps towards David, who looked no doubt like he was about to pitch over dead onto the ground, but Raven grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
"No," she said deadpan, her other hand still cloaked in black energy, her voice as dry and deadly as the growl of a leopard, "don't go near him. He's with Slade."
David's mouth dropped, as did Beast Boy's, and the changeling turned back to Raven, blinking incredulously. "... what?" asked Beast Boy, faster than David could cough it out, but Raven's gaze didn't deviate, nor did she give any indication that they had mis-heard her. "Raven..." said Beast Boy carefully, almost gingerly, "... this... this is David. He's not with Slade, he's our friend. He's... he's hurt, we need to help him..."
"He's not our friend," said Raven urgently, her eyes fixed on David like guided missiles. "He never was. He's been part of this whole thing since the beginning!"
David wasn't sure if this was a nightmare or if he was actually dead, and this was the torture he was being made to undergo in Hell. Neither would have surprised him at this point. "I..." he managed to cough up weakly, "I'm not... I never..."
"I froze time," snapped Raven, her tone angry beyond words, angrier than David had ever heard it before, angry enough that even Beast Boy backed away from her. "I froze the flow of time itself. It worked on everything in the universe, except it didn't work on Slade, and it didn't work on you." She raised her other hand, encasing it too in black energy, even as she steadied herself to unleash it at a moment's notice. "So either you're some kind of god, or you're exactly like Slade."
David blinked, unable to process what was happening, unwilling to believe his own eyes. After everything that had occurred on this horrible day, this nightmare brought to life and enacted before his eyes was like the overture of a symphony of pain and shock that he had been listening to all night. He had been beaten nearly to death by someone he had thought was his friend, dragged himself back from the brink out of sheer stubornness, only to face this?
Thoughtlessly, he took a halting step forward, raising his empty hands, trying to come up with some kind of explanation. Raven wasn't having it. "I said stay back!" she yelled, and released a blast of eldritch energy from her hand. This one was aimed true, and slammed into David's chest and throat like a wrecking ball as he cringed and cried out and raised his hands in a useless defense against her magic.
And the magic failed.
The blast struck David full force, and blinked out of existence the very instant it did so, leaving not a trace of it behind. David, who had clenched his eyes shut and turned away, slowly cracked them open as he realized that he was not hurt (further), and blinking in confusion for a moment, looked up at Raven, who was staring at him as though unable to believe what she had just seen. Beast Boy too was staring, at both of them, as wonder followed upon wonder, and he did not know what to do. David did not know what to do either, and nor apparently did Raven, and they stood there and stared at one another, until finally David made another attempt to walk over to them, to explain somehow, to...
"No!" shouted Raven and there was genuine fear in her voice. Before Beast Boy or David could do anything, she backed up a pace and let fly her powers, the same way David had seen her unleash them on a hundred villains and criminals over the course of his months at the Tower. A barrage of black energy flew at him like a hailstorm turned sideways, and he cried out as the blasts struck him by the dozens, and yet when the smoke cleared, and her shots spent, not one single blast of hers had done so much as singe his uniform. Every single shot had dissolved to vapor the very instant it touched his shirt.
Slowly, David looked down at his blood-smeared uniform, and with his good hand, gently felt the wet fabric. No sign of injury or damage could he detect, at least none other than the ones that had previously been there. His addled mind was still trying to process what had just happened, refusing to accept that Raven, no matter how angry or scared she might be, no matter what evidence she might have thought she had found, could possibly have done what she appeared to have just done. She... she had...
He looked back up at her, standing forty paces away, her gaze blank and empty, like she was staring right through him at some monster behind, and a roiling, bitter anger boiled up from within him like a bilious poison. His face turned red, his vision turned red, and with one swift movement he grabbed the baton still hanging from his belt and tore it from its connector, feeling it flare to life as the red flames encased it. He stepped forward, brandishing the baton like a flaming sword of vengeance, intending to bring it down and detonate the very ground beneath Raven's feet, to detonate anything, to retaliate somehow against yet another person he had thought a friend who had turned against him for no reason and sought to kill him as part of this hellacious day's events. Formless destruction he sought, out of pain and fear and rage and betrayal, and already he was forming the molecular patterns in his mind, as he stepped forward, and brought the baton down...
... and buckled.
A spear of white-hot pain impaled him, and his movement was cut off in mid-lash by a stifled cry, and his grip went limp, and the baton fell from his hand like a severed branch on a tree. He staggered forward a step or two, and fell to his knees, clutching his stomach, his face contorted in pain, and then pitched over onto his side, landing in a fetal position, unable to move so much as another foot.
And now Beast Boy acted. The changeling rushed forward even as Raven shouted for him not to, and by the time David had landed, Beast Boy was right there, bent over him on one knee, gently rolling him over onto his back on the street as he moaned softly. "Dude..." he said softly, in a tone of almost wonder, at the terrible sight before him, and it took him several moments to snap back out of it. "You're... you're gonna be okay," he said, "don't worry about it. We're gonna get you back to the Tower and get you fixed up, okay? It's no big deal."
Beast Boy was a terrible liar, as always. Even in his semi-delirious state, David knew that Beast Boy had no idea what to do, and was just saying that to make it all sound better. The changeling did not dwell however on the lies he had told, and turned his head back to Raven. "Raven, hurry up, he needs help."
Raven approached cautiously, her hands still sheathed in darkness, and she knelt down opposite Beast Boy as though preparing to handle a poisonous snake. "Keep the baton away from him," she instructed Beast Boy as she tried to determine what to do now.
Beast Boy might have laughed had the situation not been so serious. "Raven, stop worrying about what he's gonna do! He needs help!"
"He's Slade's partner," said Raven, even as a blue glow began to replace the blackness around her hands, "and he can hurt us. Keep the baton away from him." Beast Boy grabbed the baton and hooked it to his own belt, even as Raven lightly put her hand on David's chest, and tried to calm her powers enough to start the healing process. "This is crazy," she said. "Slade will be after us soon, and he's immune to my magic, we already proved that."
"But... I mean you've healed him before, haven't you?" protested Beast Boy. "He wasn't immune then, was he? Just try it. He could die..."
"I am trying, shut up!"
David moaned softly as Raven pumped the energy from her healing spell into his body, seeking out the most dangerous damage and repairing it as best she could. To her magical eye, David looked like he'd been pulverized by a rock crusher, his ribs shattered, his organs punctured, blood pooling within his abdominal and chest cavities. She dared not try to envision what could possibly have happened to him. She didn't have time.
Even had she wanted to, she could not possibly have repaired all of this damage in a minute, nor in an hour, nor even in a week. She did instead the best she could, staunching the bleeding and forcing the pooled blood back into his arteries, repairing the most obvious damage to his lungs and spine, and re-aligning the bones in his fractured arm. The psychokinetic or whatever the hell he was shuddered several times, and then relaxed as his breathing became more regular and less congested, and he slowly opened his eyes back up, pain still written on his face, but not as overtly as before.
"Dude," said Beast Boy, a note of relief in his voice. "What happened to you?"
"Did Slade get mad that you hadn't killed us all yet?" asked Raven with venom in her voice. "Or was this from some other convenient accident?"
"Raven, c'mon!" said Beast Boy. "If he was Slade's apprentice, why would Slade beat him up like this?" asked Beast Boy.
"He was hurting Terra while she was working for him, remember?!" snapped Raven back.
"Terra..." whispered David semi-coherently.
"Yes, Terra," said Raven savagely, and the ground beneath them quivered with the force of her anger. "I told you that if I found out you were lying to us, it would be the last thing you ever did."
"I... I never lied..." objected David weakly.
"You lied about everything!" shouted Raven. "You lied to us and tried to kill us, and now you're working with Slade!"
"Raven!" yelled Beast Boy desperately, afraid she was about to pronounce some kind of summary judgment here and now. "This is crazy, even if he was working for Slade, why would Slade send David here like this? Is he supposed to bleed on us or something?"
"Actually, he's just here to slow you down, and give me a chance to catch up and deliver my message."
Raven and Beast Boy stared at one another for a moment, their faces fading to horror, before turning their heads to look down the street.
Slade stood in the intersection, where moments ago no person had been. His arms were crossed as he surveyed the three teens with equanimity.
"Slade..." said Beast Boy as he stood back up. Raven remained crouched, and David lifted his head weakly to see who was talking, but Slade reacted to none of them, slowly walking towards the three of them, as though he was on a mere afternoon stroll.
"I hope I'm not interrupting anything," said Slade. "You were saying something about the last thing he does?"
"It's gonna be the last thing you do, if you come any closer!" insisted Beast Boy.
"Changeling, you have no conception of what you are dealing with here. I would advise you to run, and leave Raven and I alone with my new apprentice."
Raven's eyes widened. "Apprentice?"
"Isn't it obvious?" said Slade. "Young Mr. Foster here has been working with me for many months in preparation for this. Keeping tabs on all of you, making sure that everything was ready. But now the hour has arrived, and I'm afraid I have no more use for him."
David could barely believe what he was hearing. "You..." he managed to stammer, "you're a... a liar!"
"You've been smoked out, Devastator," said Slade in a preternaturally-calm tone. "Have the dignity to admit it and take your punishment like an adult, rather than a foolish child. I must say, I'm rather disappointed with you. I would have liked to see you maintain your cover all the way through to the end."
"That's enough!" shouted Beast Boy in a passable imitation of Robin. "I dunno how Terra didn't kill you, but you leave Raven and the rest of us alone, and get out of here, or I'll finish what she started!"
Slade merely chuckled, and resumed walking towards Raven, and Beast Boy clenched his fists and shifted into the form of a Rhinoceros. With a loud roar, he charged full-speed towards Slade, who made no attempt to evade the coming impact, walking on without a care in the world, moments before Beast Boy hit him at thirty five miles per hour with three tons of solid mass. A blink-of-an-eye later, Beast Boy was laying on his side next to an overturned car, having bounced off of Slade like a rubber ball and crashed into the vehicle. He groaned softly as though hung-over, and Slade ignored him.
Raven now stood up as Slade advanced towards her, and with a wave of her hand she tore parking meters and mailboxes from the ground and flung them at him like grenades. The void-shrouded objects all hit home, but none of them made the slightest impact, not even when Raven threw a parked car at the approaching supervillain.
"Skies will burn," said Slade as Raven tore a sewer pipe from the ground and wrapped it around him, only to have him shatter it with a mere flick of his arm. "Flesh will become stone. The sun will set on your world, never to rise again." The unstoppable supervillain advanced further, and David could do no more than watch, barely able to lift his head. Raven too seemed to not know what to do, and she hesitated as he advanced, letting him get too close, when suddenly he shot forward and grabbed her upper arms with both hands. Raven cringed and writhed as though being electrocuted, and an instant later, Slade let her go, and she fell back onto the ground, the fabric over her upper arms having been incinerated, revealing two red brands on her upper arms, which she immediately clutched, as though they burned her.
"Time won't wait forever," said Slade, staring down at Raven, now barely five feet from David, "You can't run away from who you are."
Raven turned her head back to Slade, sneering at him as she spat the words at him like a challenge.
"I can try."
The ground heaved, and a pair of enormous chunks of asphalt folded up around Slade like the petals of a flower, smashing him to (apparent) jelly between two slabs of road and rock. Instantly she was back on her feet, racing over to Beast Boy, who was only now starting to get back up to his feet, having resumed human form. "I'm okay..." he said as Raven quickly helped him up. "Is he..."
"No," she said quickly. "We have to get out of here."
For a second, David thought that they were about to leave him here on the street, but no sooner had Beast Boy nodded to Raven than he ran over to David and grabbed his good arm, helping him weakly to his feet, and this time at least, Raven made no move to hinder him. "Can you walk?" asked Beast Boy, and David had to reply that he didn't know, but Beast Boy took most of the weight, and Raven hurried along on his other side in case he slipped, though her furtive glances were filled with the same malice and anger she had been displaying when she shot him with her powers moments ago. He guessed that he had received only a temporary reprieve, as they made their way towards a large church or cathedral that was sitting at the end of the street ahead.
And so it proved.
They had no sooner entered the church, and Beast Boy had barred the entrance, than Raven shoved David roughly down into one of the pews, towering over him like a monster from some fairy tale. Her question was a demand, quick, to the point, and held only barely in check.
"Are you working for Slade?"
David coughed several times, propping himself up on his elbow as he gazed up at Raven. "No..." he croaked. "I've... I've never seen... seen him before..."
Raven was unsatisfied.
Like a diving falcon, she reached down and grabbed David by his collar, practically hoisting him out of the pew she had just moments ago shoved him into. Shoving him up against a pillar, she pinned him against the wall with one hand as her other hand drew back, flaring with energy.
"Are you working for Slade?!"
"I... I told you already, a hundred times! I'm not... not... working for Slade or anyone else!" There were tears in his eyes as he insisted on this, but Raven did not release him.
"Why should I believe you?!" she demanded. "Why?! Everything you do, everything you are, points to you being a traitor! Everything!"
"That's why you should believe him."
Beast Boy's remark was calm, a complete 180 from everything else being said, and the contrast was such that both David and Raven turned to look at him. The changeling was standing by the door, watching Raven with worry in his eyes, his gloved hands cupped together nervously.
"Everything's all weird, and doesn't make any sense, right?" asked Beast Boy. "So if he was a traitor, wouldn't Slade want to make it look like he wasn't? How come he'd let there be all this stuff that makes us think he's a traitor?"
Raven was so astonished at the fact that Beast Boy was not reacting to this by shouting or waving his hands, but by trying to be calm, that she completely forgot to remind him that his skill at strategy and riddle-solving was barely that of a house plant's. She turned slowly back to David, whom she still had pinned to the column, and her look was filled with indecision and fear. "He wasn't frozen in time, and my powers don't work on him, just like Slade. His powers don't work like anything else in the world..."
"But..." interjected Beast Boy, "but I thought... you said that you..."
"I know what I said. They don't! You don't know what I've seen, okay, they don't. Nobody else in the world has powers like his. Not ever. And sometimes the bad guys seem to want to kill him, and sometimes they seem to want to keep him with the rest of us! He was the only one who knew that we were gonna stop in Yosemete that time we got attacked except the five of us, he's got no records, nothing to corroborate his story with, and today he shows up by surprise with the same powers that Slade has, at the same time that Slade does, and Slade himself tells us he's his apprentice! Can you explain any of that?! Any of it?!"
Tears of fear and pain and other things besides ran down David's face, but he forced his voice to remain as calm as it could. "You... know I can't..." he said carefully. "You know I can't explain... any of it."
"So why should I believe you?!" screamed Raven, and the windows of the church rattled and cracked with the power of her unbridled emotions. "Why should I believe you're not working for Slade?!"
David forced himself to stare her in the eyes. "Because I'm not."
For a few seconds, none of the three of them moved, and then slowly, carefully, with rigid control of every muscle lest she allow some explosion to happen, Raven withdrew her hand, and David slid down the column onto the floor, and seemed to deflate. Raven stepped back, and collapsed into one of the pews, looking drained of all energy, and moments later, Beast Boy was at her side, sitting down next to her without a word, staring at her with worry in his eyes. She did not protest. She barely even noticed.
"... Raven?"
"Why can't this day just be over...?"
"What... what is today?" asked Beast Boy. "It can't just be your birthday. This didn't happen last year."
"It's not," said Raven in a hollow voice drained of feeling. "It's... a special birthday. It's the day the prophecy starts to come true."
"Prophecy?" Beast Boy glanced quizzically at David, who could only shake his head in ignorance, as ever.
Raven nodded slowly. "The prophecy of my birth. This was all foretold. It's all written down, what's going to happen."
The question was begged, and Beast Boy asked it. "What's going to happen?"
Raven lowered her head. "Something bad. Something very bad."
There was a hollow knock at the door.
Instantly, Raven was on her feet, and so was Beast Boy, both turned around to face the entrance to the church. Something hit the wooden doors and they shook despite the bar Beast Boy had laid across it. David tried to emulate the others, but succeeded only in getting partway up before his strength gave out, and he fell back to the ground. Beast Boy and Raven looked at one another fearfully, and Beast Boy asked the question foremost on everyone's mind.
"What do we do now?"
"I... I don't know..." said Raven, and it was obvious that she did not, for she kept glancing back at David, who had made another attempt to rise, with the same result as the first.
"We... we can't just leave him here," said Beast Boy, apparently worried that Raven was considering doing just that, "even if we think he is working for Slade, which he's not."
Raven simply nodded slowly. "No," she said, "we cant. And we can't take him with us. He'd slow us down too much, and Slade would catch us."
There was something altogether unsettling about the way Raven had said that, but as another blow struck the church's doors, Raven crouched down in front of David, who watched her apprehensively, perceiving a threat here, but not seeing it.
"Raven..." he said, with a note of desperation to his voice, "I'm... I'm not... I'm not working for Slade."
"Maybe you're not, and maybe you are," she said. "But we have to do something."
"What... what are you gonna do?" asked Beast Boy, now looking very worried himself.
Raven's hand encased itself in magical energy once more. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and though David couldn't be at all sure, he was fairly certain he saw her lips moving, almost as though she was whispering a prayer.
"This,"
She reached out all of a sudden as quick as a mongoose, and grabbed David by the wrist, releasing all the energy of one of her most powerful spells into him at once, and as Beast Boy watched in mixed astonishment and horror, David threw his head back and opened his mouth and screamed...
"Fear... and panic in the air.
I want to be free, from Desolation and Despair,
And I feel... like everything I sow,
Has been swept away,
Well I refuse to let you go..."
- Muse, Map of the Problematique
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"Arise,"
Figures flitted through the shadows and the clouds, emerging and receding like waves on the shore. Glimpses, a second, half a second, less, no time to examine, no time to consider. A young woman standing on a balcony, a blazing scepter held in one hand as she gazed down upon a city of gleaming crystal and polished stone. An old man in blackened armor, drinking blood from a chalice of carved ruby, seated on an obsidian throne atop a mound of piled corpses. An amorphous creature of tentacles and numberless mouths, all screaming silently in the midst of a lightless pit. A girl of eight, bound to a tree and crying out in a language that made no sense as men and women danced in a circle about her, and the world shook and twisted in agony. A hooded monk, serene and content, sitting cross-legged in a chamber filled with light. A giant man with a red beard, mechanically painting a landscape onto a canvas, striving to derive feeling from it. A cowering woman, huddled with her children on the dirt floor of a tiny hovel, as armed men with cruel faces surrounded her, leering and gesturing salaciously in preparation for worse acts to come.
Stars wheeled overhead, mountains and oceans spilled like paint over an infinite easel. Image after image, context-free, urgent and unimportant, meaningless and evocative, all at once. Fire danced and spun in the air, like a puppet attached to a mad puppeteer. Great rivers flowed through inky voids, some of gold, some of starlight, some of boiling blood. Seven-pointed stars seared themselves into nonexistent ground like branding irons wielded by gods. And as the images began to coalesce into something only slightly more coherent, their intensity seemed only to increase, like a volume control dialed up and up and yet further up. Cities on fire, mountains of corpses, screams in tongues too alien to comprehend. And above all, a citadel of ivory and pearl, like a spike penetrating the very heavens, atop which sat an open chamber, thin air whistling through it as beings in robes stood in circles and chanted hymns to unknown gods.
"Arise,"
Seven there were, at points of a star, green-scaled figures like dinosaurs writ as men, and in the center of them all, a dias onto which a bright light was shining, but from what source? The figures moaned and chanted and swayed as the sounds of anguish crept through the chamber from the burning city below, and as they did, the white light in the center split, as though broken by a prism, and all the colors of the rainbow arrayed themselves around the chamber, spinning like a carousel before slowing, and coming to a halt, one beam of colored light resting upon each of the robed saurians. Violet there was, and indigo, and blue and green and yellow and orange too and even red, a rainbow of light dazzling to behold, drowning the vision of all else, and one by one the figures stood stock still as if transfixed, and some cried, and some were silent, and some raised their hands in joy and ecstasy, and others sagged as though burdened by a great weight. One by one the figures stood and reacted, enraptured, through all the colors of the rainbow down to the very last, who stood within the red light that engulfed him and said nothing, and moved not. And the others gazed upon him for a long time, as though awaiting pronouncement or reaction, until at the last he suddenly threw back his hood, revealing his reptillian head and features, and shouted aloud a cry of joy or pain or fear or triumph or perhaps all of the above, a cry that had more in common with the keening of a hawk than it did the vocalizations of a man.
And then everything went black.
And then everything went white again...
"Arise..."
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Everything hurt.
David had no idea how long he had been awake, or even aware of where he was. There was no discrete moment of waking, only a vague realization that gradually crawled over him that he was in fact alive, and that he was in fact in pain. Terrible pain.
He could not move. He was absolutely certain of that. The pain of merely lying on the ground was enough to overshadow everything else, and to move was to invite certain death. He could not tell what his injuries were, only that they were legion, nor where the pain was localized, for it was everywhere at once. How long he lay there was impossible to tell. He had no future, no past, no sense of the passage of time, only that he was hurt, that he was dying.
That he wasn't yet dead.
Why wasn't he dead?
It was the first thought he'd had in a million years that wasn't related to the pain he was in, and he pursued it like a drowning man pursuing a distant lifeboat. He knew that he was supposed to be dead, that that was the reason he was in such pain, but he could not remember the reason why he wasn't. He tried to focus on that question, that mystery, as flashes of everything that had happened came back. He remembered being in the Tower. He remembered being in the park. He remembered fighting, and being angry, so terribly angry that he had destroyed things without question or hesitation or worry about what anyone would think, and that it had not been enough. He remembered pain, pain of a different sort, stabbing him through the head like an icepick, and he remembered falling as a barrage of rocks struck home, and his last view of the world as Terra drove a boulder towards his head so as to stave it in.
"Terra..."
His own voice brought him partly around, though it was too quiet for anyone to hear besides him, and he remembered, all in a rush, that he had fallen in the street, that Terra had thrown a rock at his head, and was trying to kill him. She had said so. She was part of the conspiracy, part of the plot to get him and kill him and destroy him and his friends who were all...
His breath caught.
He twitched, and bit back the pain that caused, and slowly, agonizingly-so almost, he opened his eyes to admit the light, and found that he was still laying on the street, and staring at a boulder.
A floating boulder.
The incongruous sight was enough to banish the pain and the fear of death to the back of his mind and just force him to stare, for a boulder the size of a motorcycle was floating in mid-air bare inches in front of him, as perfectly still as if it had been a painting hung on a wall somewhere. A bright yellow aura enveloped the boulder, but rather than flicker, it too sat stock still, waiting for some unknown signal to propel the rock on its way and crush him to pulp. David's heart began thundering in his ears again, loud enough to block out all other sounds, and though he knew that he should be doing something, anything, moving or screaming or trying to fight back, he also knew equally well that such a thing was well beyond him at this stage, but he couldn't just sit here and wait to be crushed, could he?
Could he?
Apparently he could.
He lay on the ground in a puddle of his own blood, and stared up at the hovering rock, expecting any instant for it to come crashing down on his head. Seconds ticked by, each one as long as a lifetime, and yet the rock did not move, and the aura did not flicker, and the only sound David could hear was that of his own shallow breathing and ragged heartbeat. Only after many such breaths, and many such beats, his only means of measuring the passing of time, did he finally muster the will and the strength to move. Gradually, with infinite pain and care, he managed to slide himself over, across the rough asphalt he was laying upon, sliding himself out from under the path of the boulder, lest it should spontaneously begin to move again. It did not, and after a minute's work, David finally collapsed against the curb of the sidewalk, where he lay motionless for a few minutes, like a boned fish.
And then he noticed something very wrong.
At the very end of his fight with Terra, years ago or bare moments, he could no longer tell, the geokinetic had summoned a swarm of boulders to fling into him, only to cast most of them away when she realized that he was beaten and that only one would be needed. These cast-off rocks had been flung to the side, and hit the ground, and shattered, flinging bits of rock shrapnel into in every direction. This would not have been anything worth noticing normally, for the entire area was completely covered in bits of rock and discarded debris, yet another war zone to add to his ever-growing repertoire, except that from where he was laying now, he could see the shattered fragments.
They were still in the air, and they weren't moving.
It took his broken, addled mind a second to process that. Hundreds of fragments of rock were hovering sedately in the air, some high, some low, some frozen in the process of skittering over the ground. One had crashed into a plate glass window and shattered it, but the glass fragments still held in mid-air, as motionless as if glued into place. His gaze slowly panned across the scene of ruin that he and Terra had wrought, the pain of his injuries beginning to fade, replaced with a cold fear as he realized that something else was horribly wrong. A severed fire hydrant's waterspout hung in the air like an ice sculpture, every drop glistening in the sun, neither falling back to earth, nor shooting into the air, fixed like the stars overhead. Smoke hovered above burning cars, neither wafting on the wind, nor billowing into the sky, a shroud as solid and permanent as a store awning, cloaking fires whose flames neither flickered nor burned, but stood stock still like wax sculptures, emitting neither heat, nor sound, nor smoke beyond that which already hung. Birds flying through the hazy air were likewise frozen in place in mid-wingbeat, as were insects and even a police helicopter, its rotors motionless, yet sufficing somehow to support the machine aloft. From where David was laying, he could see one of the policemen leaning out the window to watch the ground below, a pair of binoculars frozen to his head in mute salute.
And then there was Terra herself.
The geokinetic was standing in the middle of the street where he had last seen her, and like everything else, she was as motionless as a statue. Her arm was extended palm outwards, a yellow sheath enveloping it and her, her other hand pressed tightly against her side, as though holding in some sort of injury, which given everything, wasn't too unlikely. Her head was lowered, turned slightly away from where he had been laying, her gaze averted as if unwilling to witness the fruits of her own handiwork.
Gradually, David pushed himself up onto the curb of the sidewalk, trying to move as little as possible as he did so, for his shattered ribs, broken arm, and other injuries, less obvious but no less painful, tortured him at every turn, forcing tears from his eyes and reducing his breathing to sharp, pained whimpers and gasps. He had no idea what was going on, no idea if he was alive or dead, hallucinating some fantasy in the moments before his brain stopped working, or transported into a shadow realm beyond the living world. All he knew is that everything, everyone, every object in sight had frozen solid. Everything except him.
He pulled himself into a sitting position, each breath stabbing him like a knife between his ribs. The air was cold, bitingly cold, in a way he didn't remember it having been, and he shivered, and shivering made his entire body ache and scream in protest. Blood was smeared all over his uniform, darkening the fabric from red-orange to crimson. It ran from cuts on his forehead, getting into his eyes, running down his arms, dripping from his fingers. He had no idea what to do, where to run to, how to escape what was happening. The pain in his stomach was growing worse and worse, the chill in the air becoming more and more pronounced. His head swam with the effort required to take every breath, barely able to stay seated, let alone stand, and yet somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that he needed to stand, needed to walk, needed to crawl if necessary, but needed to get out of here, back to the tower, back to the others, back anywhere really. He needed to get out of this surrealist nightmare and back to the others, or he was dead.
Merely standing up took five tries, for his arm was broken, and every bit of weight he applied to it to try and get on his hands and knees or stabilize himself sent a white-hot jolt of pain through him strong enough to blur his vision and make him scream aloud. When finally he shakily reached his feet, he tottered there for a while, then managed to take a step, paused, catching his breath, then took another, and another, and another, like a climber ascending Mt. Everest, with every pace an excruciating ordeal. In such a manner, one arm hanging limp, the other clutched over his stomach as though holding his guts inside, David slowly limped forwards. He could not run, he could barely even walk, staggering like a drunk into each successive street sight, lamp post, or railing, grabbing onto them as though they represented life itself, steadying himself and coughing up enough blood to fill his lungs with air again, and then moving onto the next, on and on until he finally disappeared into the inky stillness of the frozen city.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The silence was worse than the sound.
Raven stood amidst a factory devoid of noise, devoid of motion, devoid of life, and stared at her friends, all of whom were arrayed before her like still images on a matte painting, frozen like the rest of the exploding factory. Broken machinery heavy enough to sink an ocean liner was hovering in mid-air without the slightest support, as the air chilled to a frosty sheen and the flames themselves about her seemed to flash-freeze. Her heart beat mercilessly within her chest, thundering like an avalanche, and she rubbed her upper arms unconsciously as she looked around the factory in fear and wonder.
"How did I...?"
"You might be able to stop time, birthday girl," came the haunting reply in Slade's ever-calm voice, "but you can't stop me. You can't stop any of it, really."
Raven whirled about and looked up into the air, where Slade had been hanging moments before. There he hung now, but unlike everything else about her, he was neither frozen nor motionless, having turned back to face her, sheathed in a red aura as if all the fires of Hell were burning within him.
It reminded her of...
"I have to say, Raven," said Slade, floating down towards her as she backed away slowly, as if from a dangerous predator, "when I found out the truth, I was very impressed." He shoved bits of debris out of his way as he advanced, strolling along through the air without a care in the world, not in the least bit placed out of sorts by the fact that Raven had apparently just halted the physical laws of the universe in their tracks around him. "All this time," he remarked, his voice as smooth as silk and deadly as a rattlesnake's hiss, "I had no idea. The power lurking inside you. The glorious destiny that awaits." He paused and seemed to smirk. "It's always the quiet ones, isn't it?"
This could not be happening. It was bad enough that Slade was immune to everything they had thrown a him, she had just frozen time and still he pursued her! What was he? What had he been turned into?! Her heart beat inside her chest so hard that she could feel it hammering away at the inside of her skull, and she clutched both hands to her head to try and block it out, backing up a fallen girder to keep away from him.
Slade followed at his even pace. "But honestly, Raven," he said, "did you actually think you could just blow out the candles and wish it all away?" He folded his arms across his chest, like a schoolmaster scolding a truant girl, moving up the girder after her, and leaning forward to ensure she caught every single word. "Today is the day it begins," he explained darkly. "You've known it all your life. It is going to happen. And no matter what you wish, no matter where you go, no matter how you squirm, there is nothing you can do to stop it."
She phased through the wall.
She did it without even thinking, panic clawing at her throat as she did so, and before she knew what was happening, she had plunged herself into shadow and emerged from the other side of the wall in the form of a space-black raven. She had no idea where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there, but in the back of her mind loomed a half-formed plan, to grab the others somehow, dispel the effect of her semi-intentional magic on them, and then to get out as quickly as she could and find somewhere to hide or to go to escape from Slade. Her mind raced with fragments of ideas as to where that might be, and so it was that she was not paying any attention to where she was going until she finally landed next to Robin.
... or... wait a minute.
She had meant to land next to Robin. Robin was the closest to where she was after all, and moreover there was a gear the size of a small house looming over him, ready to crush him to paste the instant she aborted her temporal spell. Besides, whatever the circumstance, no matter how bad it was, Robin had a plan for it, as he had a plan for everything. She had intended, or semi-intended, to pull him out from under the gear, and then take off, freeing the others on the way out. But as she blinked back into reality, she realized she had not landed next to Robin, nor anywhere near Robin. In her panic, her subconscious had been at the wheel, and rather than do what she had intended, she had put down next to Beast Boy instead.
For a second she hesitated, unsure of if she should go back and grab Robin as she had previously meant to, confused as to why she had wound up here of all places, and looking about to locate Slade again. When she found him however, she knew that it was too late, for Slade was hovering above Robin's position, casually walking through the air towards her as he spoke with an air of weary annoyance. "Running won't save you, birthday girl," he said, "nothing will."
It was too late to ponder her subconscious' motives, too late to do anything but run as quickly as she could. She turned to Beast Boy, who had been frozen mid-transformation, and laid a hand on his side, letting the temporal energy she had stolen from him and everything flow back into him. Moments later, his pallor returned, and he fell out of the air where he had been leaping, landing on the ground in the form of a very confused leopard. For a second he seemed to not know where he was, blinking silently as he looked around at his frozen surroundings. And then, as he figured out slowly that he was still both alive and located within the factory, the green changeling reverted to his human form, and slowly stood up, scratching the back of his head with one gloved hand, his eyes wide as he beheld the frozen machinery and flames, as well as the motionless forms of the other Titans.
"What..."
He did not have a chance to finish his sentence, for Raven had no sooner freed him than she turned back and raised both arms. Tendrils of pure darkness emerged from the ground before her, and they wrapped themselves around the enormous gear that was threatening to crush Robin to mulch. The gear was solid iron, machine-forged and face-hardened, but Raven's tendrils tore it apart like clay, shattering the enormous gear and casting its fragments left and right, with several of the larger chunks flung at Slade for good measure. And then without another instant's hesitation, she turned back to Beast Boy, seized him with one hand by the shoulder, and conjured up a black portal that enveloped them both, then morphed into another bird of purified shadow, which took to the air and phased straight through the ceiling, leaving nothing behind.
The bird soared out into the silent city, down the streets and around the corners, propelled by act of pure will, passing over frozen cars, people, and animals, before finally coming to a stop in the middle of a large and empty street. There the bird hesitated for a moment, raising its wings and head up like an eagle on a flag or seal, and ejecting Beast Boy unceremoniously onto the street below it. Moments later the bird seemed to dissolve, the shadows collapsing inwards, resolving finally onto Raven, who landed as lightly as a feather on the ground, lowering her arms as her cloak fluttered down around her in the windless chill of the timeless air.
Beast Boy picked himself up off the street slowly, brushing the dirt and gravel off of his uniform unconsciously as he stared in wide-eyed astonishment at everything nearby, the birds like paintings in a false sky, the pedestrians halted in mid-step like mannequins, before slowly turning his eyes back to Raven in a mixture of wordless wonder and fear.
"Raven?"
Raven shut her eyes as wave of reproach washed through her. She should have brought Robin out, and she knew it. Robin, whose head she had already been inside. Robin, who understood her better than anyone else in the Tower. Robin, who she could imagine herself conceivably explaining all of this to, not Beast Boy, who didn't even have the sense to leave her alone whenever she was...
She practically had to slap herself out of the unworthy flash of anger that brought up. She had not brought Robin out, but Beast Boy, and even if she didn't know why, there was no going back now, and so she took a deep breath, and opened her eyes once again, to find Beast Boy still staring at her, saying nothing, but clearly seeking for answers of some kind.
"What happened?" asked Beast Boy, his voice raspy and subdued. "Did... did you do all this?"
"I..." stammered Raven. Where could she even begin? She had precious few answers here. "I'm not sure," she said, raising her torn sleeve and staring at the rune imprinted on her wrist, which in the obscure frozen twilight overhead was beginning to fade out. "I... I never wanted this day to come. And when it did, I just wanted it to stop." She stepped past him, surveying the petrified city, a chill running up and down her spine that could not be entirely due to the cold of the air. "I... guess I got my wish..." she commented lamely.
She expected him to ask what she was talking about. It was what Robin would have done, tried to identify the problem as quickly as he could, and then solve it. It was how Robin worked, but it was not what Beast Boy did. Though he could not have been anything less than completely perplexed, he did not explode or beg her for more information, and his soft footsteps behind her were followed by the soft touch of his gloved hand resting on her shoulder. "It's okay," he said as gently as he could, and while she caught the fear in his words, she caught something else there too, something she couldn't place. "We're gonna be okay. We'll... figure something out."
She wanted to ask him what in the hell they were gonna figure out, wanted to round on him angrily for being naive and ignorant about what was actually happening, but instead she just lowered her head and cursed herself silently for having dragged him and all the others into this terrible situation. "I don't think so," she said.
"Raven, you just stopped time," said Beast Boy in a voice that was surprisingly confident, given everything, and even contained the barest hint of a smile. "If you can do that, then you can totally crush Slade, especially with my help."
His logic was so ridiculous as to be absurd, and yet it made a depraved sort of sense. Moreover it was so perfectly... Beast Boy that her train of thought derailed on the spot and she turned her head around to face him, and saw that he was smiling.
How the hell did he do that?
She shook her head slowly. "Beast Boy," she said, "I -"
She froze.
Behind Beast Boy, down at the intersection of the next cross-street, something had stumbled around the corner, something that made her eyes fly open as the blood froze in her veins. Her breath caught, her fists clenched, the aura of darkness that was her semi-constant companion flared back to life around her, and even as Beast Boy noticed in her eyes that something was wrong, she opened her mouth and croaked out a strangled cry.
" - Great Azar... no!"
And then before Beast Boy could so much as move, she shoved him aside with one hand, even as she stepped forward and raised the other one, fist closed like a cannon. Her magic words spilled from her lips in a panic as the black energy around her swelled up before forming into a beam of coherent void, and flying down the road towards her target.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Everything hurt.
Seriously, everything hurt.
David staggered down the street away from where he had left the motionless form of Terra, along with what had to be more than a quart of his own blood. More of it was dripping along a trail from there to here, these few city blocks that he had traversed in the agonizing minutes since he had awoken on the ground in the middle of what was either a near-death hallucination or another dimension.
No matter how far he stumbled, no matter how far he tried to flee, nothing was alive, nothing was moving. People, birds, dogs, everything was in some kind of stasis. The air itself was chilled as though preparing to freeze, the sun hung motionless in the sky, and he had to actually brush the smoke out of his face like cobwebs as he gradually, painfully made his way down the street.
Where was he going? He had no idea. The world had taken a sharp turn for the surreal, and while he had no idea if it was the product of his injuries or some new aspect of reality he had never been briefed on, he simply had no idea of what else to do. His entire body was on fire, but the pain in his stomach was growing worse and worse with each passing minute. He was bleeding inside, his head swimming more and more with each step, to the point where all he wanted to do was lie down and go to sleep. He retained enough lucidity to know that this was a trap, but only barely, and so he made he way along, staggering, crawling, dragging himself along with parked cars and street signs, moving in the vague direction of the Tower and the presupposed sanctuary that it offered, though had he been thinking clearly, he would have realized that with the world itself frozen, likely all he would be able to do would be to die there, rather than here.
He had to stop every couple steps to wheeze and force air into his lungs, and rub the mixture of blood and tears from his eyes. It was far too much for him to think over, everything that had happened. He could not even commence questioning how it was that Terra had come back to life for the purposes of meeting him and killing him, how the entire world had come to a halt save for himself, how all of these terrible things had happened without explanation or reason. All he could do was stop, and then stumble forward again, and then stop, pushed on by nothing more than force of habit, and the desire not to die in the middle of a frozen world in an abandoned street.
And those things could only keep him going so long.
He slipped, he tumbled, he fell, and in falling he reached out with his broken arm to arrest his fall, and his arm gave way and he hit the ground hard, and would have screamed if he had possessed the strength. Instead he could do nothing but lay on the ground and sob weakly, his body racked with pain and spasm, his blood soaking into the asphalt below. He knew he should get up, move, that to stay here was to die, but he simply could not. Terra had bludgeoned him like a formless sack of potatoes, and his body was broken and spent. He made one more lunge forward, and then lay still, semi-conscious, barely able to keep his eyes open.
Sounds flitted around his head like insects, like buzzards preparing to feast on a fresh kill. Voices, those of people he hadn't seen in years, of people he'd seen only weeks before, all of them recognizable if only vaguely, speaking nonsense, gibberish, words that held no meaning, but he listened to them anyway. Above all of the cacophony though, there were five specific voices, five voices that orbited his mind like planets around a dying star. A fog was descending over everything, thick and impermeable, and all the other voices faded to nothingness, but the five remained, reciting snatches of conversations from months before, their meanings abandoned, their mere presence something of a comfort. The pain was nearly gone now, the chill in the air forgotten, the blood ebbing from his body beginning to thin, and he could no longer keep his eyes open, but slowly slid them closed, listening to the sound of the five voices around him as one by one they slowly faded away.
Save two.
Two voices, mere whispers in the dark remained, and he listened to them, for it was all he could still do. He listened without understanding, and he waited for them to vanish, and to leave him alone, as the others had done. And yet they did not, continuing for reasons unknown, speaking on and on for what seemed like hours. He was puzzled as to why. Why were they still there, soft and yet intelligible in the oppressive silence of the frozen city, still speaking in terms that if he had only possessed the mental wherewithal, he might have been able to interpret. There was some element to this that he was missing, and he knew it, and it bothered him that he couldn't understand, and he tried to focus on the words, to figure out their meaning and who was speaking.
"Raven, you just stopped time,"
His breath caught. The voice was raspy and instantly recognizable, even in his broken state, as was the name it had uttered. And it occurred to him all of a sudden, like a flash of insight, that the reason the other voices hadn't vanished was because they weren't in his head.
They were nearby.
The realization galvanized what little force was still left in his broken frame, and he forced his eyes open again, and lifted his head like it weighed a hundred pounds. The sound was definitely coming from somewhere nearby, not from some vague place within his head. It was Beast Boy, and from his words it was also Raven, and they were near, and they were alive.
It took effort, real effort, to convince himself to move, and yet deep inside, some burning core of his being refused to die here in the gutter if he had any other option available to him. If Beast Boy and Raven were somehow still active in the midst of all this, he knew he had to find them, even if nothing then could be done. Even if they were in worse shape than he was, in fact especially if they were in worse shape than he was. There was nothing else for it. No other option was acceptable. He moved.
The pain came back with a vengeance as he moved, rising unsteadily to his hands and knees and crawling down the street until he reached a telephone pole that he could use to slowly, painfully get back to his feet. The pain this time was a help more than a hindrance though, for it banished the remaining shreds of unconsciousness that still dragged at his mind, and forced him to act, somehow, to alleviate it. For this reason and a hundred others, all related, he dragged himself to the corner of the nearest intersection, around which the sounds were coming. He paused, and breathed in and out and in and out and finally shuffled around the corner. Ahead, no more than fifty paces away, a few seconds' run at any other time, Beast Boy and Raven stood with their backs to him, their breaths puffing in the chilly air. Beast Boy's hand was on Raven's shoulder, and Raven's head was drooping. They spoke still, but now he could not overhear them, for his own wheezing was too loud to hear whispers at distance over. He could not cry out, could not so much as scream, but he did cough as he shuffled towards them, and Raven's head came around and she saw him.
And she went white
Her eyes nearly burst from her head and her entire body went rigid as she mouthed an exclamation to herself, and then thrusting Beast Boy aside and stepping forward, she raised one hand, which glowed with black energy and suddenly burst forth as a river of violent death, streaking across the intervening space in a heartbeat. It was no act of his that saved him, but a what little restraint Raven had left in her, for the beam of blackness struck the ground two feet in front of him and scoured it to bedrock in seconds. Stone chips flew in every direction, and David reflexively brought his hand up to his face to shield it, and stopped in his tracks, which appeared to have been Raven's goal.
"No..." she said, and there was horror in her voice, like she was staring at some kind of monster raised from the pits of damnation to devour her very soul. "No," she repeated, "no... stay back! Don't come any closer or..."
"Raven!" shouted Beast Boy, who had been momentarily stunned by all the goings on, but now recovered his powers of speach. "What are you doing?" he turned back to face David and his eyes widened. "Dude!" he exclaimed in his own inimitable style. "What happened?! Are you okay?!" The changeling took several steps towards David, who looked no doubt like he was about to pitch over dead onto the ground, but Raven grabbed his arm and pulled him back.
"No," she said deadpan, her other hand still cloaked in black energy, her voice as dry and deadly as the growl of a leopard, "don't go near him. He's with Slade."
David's mouth dropped, as did Beast Boy's, and the changeling turned back to Raven, blinking incredulously. "... what?" asked Beast Boy, faster than David could cough it out, but Raven's gaze didn't deviate, nor did she give any indication that they had mis-heard her. "Raven..." said Beast Boy carefully, almost gingerly, "... this... this is David. He's not with Slade, he's our friend. He's... he's hurt, we need to help him..."
"He's not our friend," said Raven urgently, her eyes fixed on David like guided missiles. "He never was. He's been part of this whole thing since the beginning!"
David wasn't sure if this was a nightmare or if he was actually dead, and this was the torture he was being made to undergo in Hell. Neither would have surprised him at this point. "I..." he managed to cough up weakly, "I'm not... I never..."
"I froze time," snapped Raven, her tone angry beyond words, angrier than David had ever heard it before, angry enough that even Beast Boy backed away from her. "I froze the flow of time itself. It worked on everything in the universe, except it didn't work on Slade, and it didn't work on you." She raised her other hand, encasing it too in black energy, even as she steadied herself to unleash it at a moment's notice. "So either you're some kind of god, or you're exactly like Slade."
David blinked, unable to process what was happening, unwilling to believe his own eyes. After everything that had occurred on this horrible day, this nightmare brought to life and enacted before his eyes was like the overture of a symphony of pain and shock that he had been listening to all night. He had been beaten nearly to death by someone he had thought was his friend, dragged himself back from the brink out of sheer stubornness, only to face this?
Thoughtlessly, he took a halting step forward, raising his empty hands, trying to come up with some kind of explanation. Raven wasn't having it. "I said stay back!" she yelled, and released a blast of eldritch energy from her hand. This one was aimed true, and slammed into David's chest and throat like a wrecking ball as he cringed and cried out and raised his hands in a useless defense against her magic.
And the magic failed.
The blast struck David full force, and blinked out of existence the very instant it did so, leaving not a trace of it behind. David, who had clenched his eyes shut and turned away, slowly cracked them open as he realized that he was not hurt (further), and blinking in confusion for a moment, looked up at Raven, who was staring at him as though unable to believe what she had just seen. Beast Boy too was staring, at both of them, as wonder followed upon wonder, and he did not know what to do. David did not know what to do either, and nor apparently did Raven, and they stood there and stared at one another, until finally David made another attempt to walk over to them, to explain somehow, to...
"No!" shouted Raven and there was genuine fear in her voice. Before Beast Boy or David could do anything, she backed up a pace and let fly her powers, the same way David had seen her unleash them on a hundred villains and criminals over the course of his months at the Tower. A barrage of black energy flew at him like a hailstorm turned sideways, and he cried out as the blasts struck him by the dozens, and yet when the smoke cleared, and her shots spent, not one single blast of hers had done so much as singe his uniform. Every single shot had dissolved to vapor the very instant it touched his shirt.
Slowly, David looked down at his blood-smeared uniform, and with his good hand, gently felt the wet fabric. No sign of injury or damage could he detect, at least none other than the ones that had previously been there. His addled mind was still trying to process what had just happened, refusing to accept that Raven, no matter how angry or scared she might be, no matter what evidence she might have thought she had found, could possibly have done what she appeared to have just done. She... she had...
He looked back up at her, standing forty paces away, her gaze blank and empty, like she was staring right through him at some monster behind, and a roiling, bitter anger boiled up from within him like a bilious poison. His face turned red, his vision turned red, and with one swift movement he grabbed the baton still hanging from his belt and tore it from its connector, feeling it flare to life as the red flames encased it. He stepped forward, brandishing the baton like a flaming sword of vengeance, intending to bring it down and detonate the very ground beneath Raven's feet, to detonate anything, to retaliate somehow against yet another person he had thought a friend who had turned against him for no reason and sought to kill him as part of this hellacious day's events. Formless destruction he sought, out of pain and fear and rage and betrayal, and already he was forming the molecular patterns in his mind, as he stepped forward, and brought the baton down...
... and buckled.
A spear of white-hot pain impaled him, and his movement was cut off in mid-lash by a stifled cry, and his grip went limp, and the baton fell from his hand like a severed branch on a tree. He staggered forward a step or two, and fell to his knees, clutching his stomach, his face contorted in pain, and then pitched over onto his side, landing in a fetal position, unable to move so much as another foot.
And now Beast Boy acted. The changeling rushed forward even as Raven shouted for him not to, and by the time David had landed, Beast Boy was right there, bent over him on one knee, gently rolling him over onto his back on the street as he moaned softly. "Dude..." he said softly, in a tone of almost wonder, at the terrible sight before him, and it took him several moments to snap back out of it. "You're... you're gonna be okay," he said, "don't worry about it. We're gonna get you back to the Tower and get you fixed up, okay? It's no big deal."
Beast Boy was a terrible liar, as always. Even in his semi-delirious state, David knew that Beast Boy had no idea what to do, and was just saying that to make it all sound better. The changeling did not dwell however on the lies he had told, and turned his head back to Raven. "Raven, hurry up, he needs help."
Raven approached cautiously, her hands still sheathed in darkness, and she knelt down opposite Beast Boy as though preparing to handle a poisonous snake. "Keep the baton away from him," she instructed Beast Boy as she tried to determine what to do now.
Beast Boy might have laughed had the situation not been so serious. "Raven, stop worrying about what he's gonna do! He needs help!"
"He's Slade's partner," said Raven, even as a blue glow began to replace the blackness around her hands, "and he can hurt us. Keep the baton away from him." Beast Boy grabbed the baton and hooked it to his own belt, even as Raven lightly put her hand on David's chest, and tried to calm her powers enough to start the healing process. "This is crazy," she said. "Slade will be after us soon, and he's immune to my magic, we already proved that."
"But... I mean you've healed him before, haven't you?" protested Beast Boy. "He wasn't immune then, was he? Just try it. He could die..."
"I am trying, shut up!"
David moaned softly as Raven pumped the energy from her healing spell into his body, seeking out the most dangerous damage and repairing it as best she could. To her magical eye, David looked like he'd been pulverized by a rock crusher, his ribs shattered, his organs punctured, blood pooling within his abdominal and chest cavities. She dared not try to envision what could possibly have happened to him. She didn't have time.
Even had she wanted to, she could not possibly have repaired all of this damage in a minute, nor in an hour, nor even in a week. She did instead the best she could, staunching the bleeding and forcing the pooled blood back into his arteries, repairing the most obvious damage to his lungs and spine, and re-aligning the bones in his fractured arm. The psychokinetic or whatever the hell he was shuddered several times, and then relaxed as his breathing became more regular and less congested, and he slowly opened his eyes back up, pain still written on his face, but not as overtly as before.
"Dude," said Beast Boy, a note of relief in his voice. "What happened to you?"
"Did Slade get mad that you hadn't killed us all yet?" asked Raven with venom in her voice. "Or was this from some other convenient accident?"
"Raven, c'mon!" said Beast Boy. "If he was Slade's apprentice, why would Slade beat him up like this?" asked Beast Boy.
"He was hurting Terra while she was working for him, remember?!" snapped Raven back.
"Terra..." whispered David semi-coherently.
"Yes, Terra," said Raven savagely, and the ground beneath them quivered with the force of her anger. "I told you that if I found out you were lying to us, it would be the last thing you ever did."
"I... I never lied..." objected David weakly.
"You lied about everything!" shouted Raven. "You lied to us and tried to kill us, and now you're working with Slade!"
"Raven!" yelled Beast Boy desperately, afraid she was about to pronounce some kind of summary judgment here and now. "This is crazy, even if he was working for Slade, why would Slade send David here like this? Is he supposed to bleed on us or something?"
"Actually, he's just here to slow you down, and give me a chance to catch up and deliver my message."
Raven and Beast Boy stared at one another for a moment, their faces fading to horror, before turning their heads to look down the street.
Slade stood in the intersection, where moments ago no person had been. His arms were crossed as he surveyed the three teens with equanimity.
"Slade..." said Beast Boy as he stood back up. Raven remained crouched, and David lifted his head weakly to see who was talking, but Slade reacted to none of them, slowly walking towards the three of them, as though he was on a mere afternoon stroll.
"I hope I'm not interrupting anything," said Slade. "You were saying something about the last thing he does?"
"It's gonna be the last thing you do, if you come any closer!" insisted Beast Boy.
"Changeling, you have no conception of what you are dealing with here. I would advise you to run, and leave Raven and I alone with my new apprentice."
Raven's eyes widened. "Apprentice?"
"Isn't it obvious?" said Slade. "Young Mr. Foster here has been working with me for many months in preparation for this. Keeping tabs on all of you, making sure that everything was ready. But now the hour has arrived, and I'm afraid I have no more use for him."
David could barely believe what he was hearing. "You..." he managed to stammer, "you're a... a liar!"
"You've been smoked out, Devastator," said Slade in a preternaturally-calm tone. "Have the dignity to admit it and take your punishment like an adult, rather than a foolish child. I must say, I'm rather disappointed with you. I would have liked to see you maintain your cover all the way through to the end."
"That's enough!" shouted Beast Boy in a passable imitation of Robin. "I dunno how Terra didn't kill you, but you leave Raven and the rest of us alone, and get out of here, or I'll finish what she started!"
Slade merely chuckled, and resumed walking towards Raven, and Beast Boy clenched his fists and shifted into the form of a Rhinoceros. With a loud roar, he charged full-speed towards Slade, who made no attempt to evade the coming impact, walking on without a care in the world, moments before Beast Boy hit him at thirty five miles per hour with three tons of solid mass. A blink-of-an-eye later, Beast Boy was laying on his side next to an overturned car, having bounced off of Slade like a rubber ball and crashed into the vehicle. He groaned softly as though hung-over, and Slade ignored him.
Raven now stood up as Slade advanced towards her, and with a wave of her hand she tore parking meters and mailboxes from the ground and flung them at him like grenades. The void-shrouded objects all hit home, but none of them made the slightest impact, not even when Raven threw a parked car at the approaching supervillain.
"Skies will burn," said Slade as Raven tore a sewer pipe from the ground and wrapped it around him, only to have him shatter it with a mere flick of his arm. "Flesh will become stone. The sun will set on your world, never to rise again." The unstoppable supervillain advanced further, and David could do no more than watch, barely able to lift his head. Raven too seemed to not know what to do, and she hesitated as he advanced, letting him get too close, when suddenly he shot forward and grabbed her upper arms with both hands. Raven cringed and writhed as though being electrocuted, and an instant later, Slade let her go, and she fell back onto the ground, the fabric over her upper arms having been incinerated, revealing two red brands on her upper arms, which she immediately clutched, as though they burned her.
"Time won't wait forever," said Slade, staring down at Raven, now barely five feet from David, "You can't run away from who you are."
Raven turned her head back to Slade, sneering at him as she spat the words at him like a challenge.
"I can try."
The ground heaved, and a pair of enormous chunks of asphalt folded up around Slade like the petals of a flower, smashing him to (apparent) jelly between two slabs of road and rock. Instantly she was back on her feet, racing over to Beast Boy, who was only now starting to get back up to his feet, having resumed human form. "I'm okay..." he said as Raven quickly helped him up. "Is he..."
"No," she said quickly. "We have to get out of here."
For a second, David thought that they were about to leave him here on the street, but no sooner had Beast Boy nodded to Raven than he ran over to David and grabbed his good arm, helping him weakly to his feet, and this time at least, Raven made no move to hinder him. "Can you walk?" asked Beast Boy, and David had to reply that he didn't know, but Beast Boy took most of the weight, and Raven hurried along on his other side in case he slipped, though her furtive glances were filled with the same malice and anger she had been displaying when she shot him with her powers moments ago. He guessed that he had received only a temporary reprieve, as they made their way towards a large church or cathedral that was sitting at the end of the street ahead.
And so it proved.
They had no sooner entered the church, and Beast Boy had barred the entrance, than Raven shoved David roughly down into one of the pews, towering over him like a monster from some fairy tale. Her question was a demand, quick, to the point, and held only barely in check.
"Are you working for Slade?"
David coughed several times, propping himself up on his elbow as he gazed up at Raven. "No..." he croaked. "I've... I've never seen... seen him before..."
Raven was unsatisfied.
Like a diving falcon, she reached down and grabbed David by his collar, practically hoisting him out of the pew she had just moments ago shoved him into. Shoving him up against a pillar, she pinned him against the wall with one hand as her other hand drew back, flaring with energy.
"Are you working for Slade?!"
"I... I told you already, a hundred times! I'm not... not... working for Slade or anyone else!" There were tears in his eyes as he insisted on this, but Raven did not release him.
"Why should I believe you?!" she demanded. "Why?! Everything you do, everything you are, points to you being a traitor! Everything!"
"That's why you should believe him."
Beast Boy's remark was calm, a complete 180 from everything else being said, and the contrast was such that both David and Raven turned to look at him. The changeling was standing by the door, watching Raven with worry in his eyes, his gloved hands cupped together nervously.
"Everything's all weird, and doesn't make any sense, right?" asked Beast Boy. "So if he was a traitor, wouldn't Slade want to make it look like he wasn't? How come he'd let there be all this stuff that makes us think he's a traitor?"
Raven was so astonished at the fact that Beast Boy was not reacting to this by shouting or waving his hands, but by trying to be calm, that she completely forgot to remind him that his skill at strategy and riddle-solving was barely that of a house plant's. She turned slowly back to David, whom she still had pinned to the column, and her look was filled with indecision and fear. "He wasn't frozen in time, and my powers don't work on him, just like Slade. His powers don't work like anything else in the world..."
"But..." interjected Beast Boy, "but I thought... you said that you..."
"I know what I said. They don't! You don't know what I've seen, okay, they don't. Nobody else in the world has powers like his. Not ever. And sometimes the bad guys seem to want to kill him, and sometimes they seem to want to keep him with the rest of us! He was the only one who knew that we were gonna stop in Yosemete that time we got attacked except the five of us, he's got no records, nothing to corroborate his story with, and today he shows up by surprise with the same powers that Slade has, at the same time that Slade does, and Slade himself tells us he's his apprentice! Can you explain any of that?! Any of it?!"
Tears of fear and pain and other things besides ran down David's face, but he forced his voice to remain as calm as it could. "You... know I can't..." he said carefully. "You know I can't explain... any of it."
"So why should I believe you?!" screamed Raven, and the windows of the church rattled and cracked with the power of her unbridled emotions. "Why should I believe you're not working for Slade?!"
David forced himself to stare her in the eyes. "Because I'm not."
For a few seconds, none of the three of them moved, and then slowly, carefully, with rigid control of every muscle lest she allow some explosion to happen, Raven withdrew her hand, and David slid down the column onto the floor, and seemed to deflate. Raven stepped back, and collapsed into one of the pews, looking drained of all energy, and moments later, Beast Boy was at her side, sitting down next to her without a word, staring at her with worry in his eyes. She did not protest. She barely even noticed.
"... Raven?"
"Why can't this day just be over...?"
"What... what is today?" asked Beast Boy. "It can't just be your birthday. This didn't happen last year."
"It's not," said Raven in a hollow voice drained of feeling. "It's... a special birthday. It's the day the prophecy starts to come true."
"Prophecy?" Beast Boy glanced quizzically at David, who could only shake his head in ignorance, as ever.
Raven nodded slowly. "The prophecy of my birth. This was all foretold. It's all written down, what's going to happen."
The question was begged, and Beast Boy asked it. "What's going to happen?"
Raven lowered her head. "Something bad. Something very bad."
There was a hollow knock at the door.
Instantly, Raven was on her feet, and so was Beast Boy, both turned around to face the entrance to the church. Something hit the wooden doors and they shook despite the bar Beast Boy had laid across it. David tried to emulate the others, but succeeded only in getting partway up before his strength gave out, and he fell back to the ground. Beast Boy and Raven looked at one another fearfully, and Beast Boy asked the question foremost on everyone's mind.
"What do we do now?"
"I... I don't know..." said Raven, and it was obvious that she did not, for she kept glancing back at David, who had made another attempt to rise, with the same result as the first.
"We... we can't just leave him here," said Beast Boy, apparently worried that Raven was considering doing just that, "even if we think he is working for Slade, which he's not."
Raven simply nodded slowly. "No," she said, "we cant. And we can't take him with us. He'd slow us down too much, and Slade would catch us."
There was something altogether unsettling about the way Raven had said that, but as another blow struck the church's doors, Raven crouched down in front of David, who watched her apprehensively, perceiving a threat here, but not seeing it.
"Raven..." he said, with a note of desperation to his voice, "I'm... I'm not... I'm not working for Slade."
"Maybe you're not, and maybe you are," she said. "But we have to do something."
"What... what are you gonna do?" asked Beast Boy, now looking very worried himself.
Raven's hand encased itself in magical energy once more. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and though David couldn't be at all sure, he was fairly certain he saw her lips moving, almost as though she was whispering a prayer.
"This,"
She reached out all of a sudden as quick as a mongoose, and grabbed David by the wrist, releasing all the energy of one of her most powerful spells into him at once, and as Beast Boy watched in mixed astonishment and horror, David threw his head back and opened his mouth and screamed...
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 23, Cont'd
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The door shattered, flying off its hinges and into a million pieces that were all swiftly consumed by the tongues of flame that coursed about the entrance to the church, and then, with a gait like a conquering hero, Slade strode in. Beast Boy and Raven stood in the aisles of the church, halfway between him and the altar, facing him down, fear clouding their gazes, but holding their ground like western gunfighters. Slade allowed himself a smirk as he stepped into the church proper. "An odd venue, don't you think?" he commented as he walked in. "It's not like either of you are particularly welcome in one of these, now is it?"
Neither teen responded, and he shrugged. "I see you decided to dispose of my latest apprentice though." He sighed theatrically. "And here I thought Titans didn't kill..."
The reply did not come from either Beast Boy or Raven. It came from behind, from the tiny alcove in the wall that was completely invisible from the doorway, but that out of the corner of Slade's eye, could now be seen to hold a flickering red light.
"Guess again..."
And then the floor exploded.
The stone floor of the church blew up like a land mine had been planted, strong enough to toss Slade into the air like a rag doll, and the instant it did, Raven thew back her cloak and raised her arms. "Azarath, Metrion Zinthos!" she shouted, and at her command, the entire altar was ripped from its moorings and hurled into Slade in mid-air, the stone shattering like glass against his body and flinging him into the back wall. Beast Boy, instantly assuming the form of a snorting bull, charged after Slade, slamming into him at top speed as he landed with both horns.
It did not work.
Slade roared as he grabbed the bull by the horns, literally, and threw Beast Boy to the side with as little force as he would use to throw a frisbee. He rounded on Raven and lunged towards her, but one of the columns next to him was snapped in half by a shaped charge blast, and fell, breaking over his head as it did so, and while it did not stop Slade, he did come to a halt as he turned to face the agent of that blast.
David stood at the entrance to the alcove, his baton held in hand, blood soaking his clothes and daubed all over his face, and yet he was standing, and wielding his baton, and made no show of being broken and half-dead. He stared at Slade like he was staring at the devil himself, and both his fists were clenched as tightly as they could be, one over the baton's handle, one over nothing at all.
"That was very stupid," said Slade.
"Nobody asked you," replied David.
Slade threw both hands out at David, who dove to the side just in time to avoid being incinerated by the snakelike flames that he emitted from both palms. As David hit the ground and rolled, he brought his baton around and sliced the air with it, firing several bricks out of the wall behind him at Slade like miniature cannonballs. The bricks shattered against his armored hide, but they distracted him long enough for Raven to raise a candlestick from the ground and stab it into Slade's back like a spear, hard enough to crush it flat, and yet no mark was left on Slade's person, and he batted the crushed candlestick aside with a contemptuous slap.
"You're making this far harder than it has to be."
"That's what we do," came the reply from Beast Boy.
Beast Boy smashed into Slade from the side in the form of a Tyrannosaur, but Slade, as before, failed to budge, and turned around with a roundhouse kick that send the massive dinosaur flying into and through the wall of the church. Raven tried to envelop him in her black tendrils, but he shredded them as though they were paper, and replied by sending a blast of fire too large to dodge straight at her, flinging her like a toy back into the place where the altar had once stood. David tried to knock a piece of the roof down onto Slade's head, but Slade simply spun about and parried the falling debris by kicking it straight at David like a soccer player. The debris hit him right in the solar plexus, and he went down, gasping for air.
"This sort of thing never gets old."
Beast Boy had by now crawled his way back into the church, and Raven and David slowly got back to their feet, but Slade made no move, merely smirking as they regrouped at the back of the church as best they could.
"I assure you," said Slade, "there is nothing you or any of your little friends can do to stop this message. It would be much simpler to give up."
"We're never giving up to you!" replied Beast Boy defiantly, but all it produced from Slade was a cold smile.
"I was rather hoping you'd say that."
With a shout that transformed into a roar, Beast Boy shifted into an Ankylosaurus, spinning around as the other two ducked and swinging his club-tail into Slade as hard as he could. This blow had an effect, knocking Slade back into the wall next to the door. No sooner had that happened than Raven tore up a section of the floor the size of a safe with her powers, and hurled it into Slade, before ripping up another section and hurling that as well. Beast Boy meanwhile shifted from dinosaur to gorilla, and began snatching up everything within reach to throw alongside Raven. David, for his part, threw nothing, but stood beside them both with his baton flaring, and as each object landed, he blew it to pieces directly on top of Slade, hitting him again and again and again and again, dozens of blows and blasts, raining down upon Slade in an unending hail. And then finally, after there was nothing left to throw at Slade, and after Raven had torn up all of the floor she could, David finished by bisecting two more column, and bringing an entire corner of the building crashing down on top of Slade's motionless form.
All three Titans, exhausted and beaten, watched as the dust began to clear, revealing a mountain of loose debris and shrapnel laying atop the place Slade had stood moments ago. All three held their breath, afraid that saying a word or even exhaling would be rewarded with Slade returning to life once more.
They were wrong. It took nothing to do that.
The mountain of debris exploded on its own accord, knocking all three of them down, and by the time they stood back up, coughing and peering through the smoke, Slade was visible, standing with his arms crossed, his frame and figure completely unscathed by any of the blasts or assaults he had been subjected to. He twisted his neck around a bit, causing the sounds of vertebrae cracking to resonate throughout the church, and the he raised his hands, and the entire church exploded into fire.
David felt himself being knocked off his feel, and saw the others vanish behind curtains of flame. He landed hard on the floor of the church, and felt flames all around him, though he did not burn. He staggered back up, and saw Slade advancing towards something unseen, and he raised his baton once more to blow the ground out from under him, but suddenly Slade melted into orange smoke, and as David stood there blinking, reappeared right behind David, and grabbed him, spun him around, and lifted him with one hand into the air by his throat.
"You complete fool" snarled Slade, his voice seething in anger all of a sudden, a total contrast to his calm, almost bored tone of before. "You have no idea what you've done."
David hit at Slade's arm with his baton to no avail, as Slade slammed him into the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him.
"You had the chance to spare them all such grief. All you needed to do was to die. But you refused, and now you've doomed them all."
So unexpected was this that David could do little more than gawk up at Slade. "What are... what are you talking about?"
Slade seemed disinclined to explain. Instead he raised his hands and fire danced through the air, and a moment later, a massive pile of burning timbers and smashed rubble fell out of the ceiling and landed on top of David, instantly burying him beneath half a ton of material. Crushed, broken anew, and unable to breathe, David could do nothing but watch as Slade bent down and stared him in the eye.
"You will live to regret living..." he said, "... Devastator."
Carefully, Slade brushed the most extraneous debris away from David's head and shoulders, and then stood back up, turned and walked away, leaving David still pinned to the ground, but very much alive. And before he had a chance to figure out why Slade had done that, the spell Raven had applied began to wear off, and he passed out.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Beast Boy groaned and rubbed his head as he sat up in front of the pile of debris Slade had nearly crushed him with. "Dude..." he said carefully, "how long was I out?"
Nobody answered him.
His memory flashed back to what had happened just before Slade had knocked him out. He remembered Raven shouting his name, and being unable to answer, and then a wall of fire cutting him off from everything else, and then... blackness.
He had woken up about five or six minutes before, and found himself pinned to the ground by a pile of debris. Shifting into an earthworm had enabled him to work his way free, and now he was sitting on the floor of the crushed and ruined church. He carefully got up, looking around, trying to find where Raven and David and Slade had gone to.
The gigantic hole melted in the back of the church seemed like a good indication.
He was about to storm out of the church when a soft moan crossed his ears, and he turned, and moved around a fallen column, and saw...
"David!". He raced over to the pile of detritus that David was buried beneath. By some miracle, only David's head and shoulders had not been crushed under the pile, and a quick check revealed that the teen was still alive, though not by a vast amount. He shifted into a gorilla and threw the debris off of David by the armful, and then back into a human so as to pull David out of the debris field as gently as he could. He was unconscious, which was probably a mercy, but in his sleep he was muttering words to himself, over and over again.
"I didn't know..."
Beast Boy didn't know what to make of that, and so made nothing of it, and reached instead for his communicator, and then remembered that not only had it gotten smashed during the fight with Slade, but the others were probably still frozen in time. He reminded himself to remind himself to get...
There was a scream.
Beast Boy's head shot up as he heard the scream, for though he had barely ever heard that voice screaming before, he knew whose it was, and he was halfway to his feet before he remembered that he had to look after David, who was very badly injured. That at least was what Robin would have said. He couldn't after all just leave David lying there, not when there was a risk of...
Another scream, just as bloodchilling as the first, and twice as intense. Beast Boy stared out at the slagged hole in the church, and looked back down at David, and knew instantly that he was about to do exactly the wrong thing, and knew also that he had no choice.
"I'm... sorry dude. I'll... I'll be back as soon as I can. Don't... don't go anywhere."
And with that, Beast Boy jumped to his feet, transformed into a hawk, and flew out of the hole towards the direction of the scream, leaving David lying unconscious on the ground, whispering some anguished confession over and over to himself.
"I didn't know..." he said, "... I didn't know it was her..."
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Beast Boy however did not hear this, for he was racing as fast as his wings could carry him towards a large tower near the center of town, atop which was a revolving restaurant, which he gauged, based on the sound, to be the source of the screams. He did not need to get too close before he realized he was right, and his heart nearly froze.
Raven and Slade were there, standing atop the restaurant near the very edge of its roof, and Beast Boy could scarcely believe his eyes. Raven's leotard had practically disintegrated as if by some terrible force, the remaining scraps of cloth hanging off her body like rags. Her eyes were closed, and her body limp, and Slade was holding her up by her shoulders, leaning over and whispering something to her. She made no move to shake him off or escape or otherwise to move at all, asleep or drugged or unconscious, he could not tell. Red runes covered her exposed skin from her feet to her forehead and down both arms, and her violet hair was suddenly waist-length, rather than her usual shoulder-length. How all this had come to pass, Beast Boy did not know, but he flew towards her with every ounce of speed he could muster, unsure of what at all he would do when he got there, turn into an elephant perhaps and throw Slade off the roof, but he knew he had to do something, right now, or else...
Slade looked up with one eye, and he might or might not have seen Beast Boy, but whatever his cause, he released Raven from his grasp, and Beast Boy's heart froze as the sorceress fall limply off the restaurant's roof and plummeted towards the ground below.
Beast Boy dove.
He dove like a missile in re-entry, his wings beating at the air to push himself faster than gravity would allow, paying no heed to the looming ground below him. His size expanded tenfold, transforming into a giant-sized eagle, and even as he dove at more than 130 feet per second, he reached out with both talons, and very very lightly grabbed Raven's limp body by her shoulders, before pulling up as hard as he could. With absolutely no room to spare, he managed to arrest his dive and drop Raven lightly onto a nearby roof, setting down himself right next to her, and resuming human form.
He scrambled over to Raven, afraid for a moment that he'd been too late, and that Slade had dropped a dead body off the roof, but when he reached her, he saw that she was breathing at least, and he grabbed her and pulled her towards him, laying her head and shoulders in his lap, and trying to think of what he should do now. "Raven?" he asked, almost breathlessly. "Raven, can you hear me? It's... me. C'mon Rae, please... wake up... Raven?"
He shook her gently, and to his surprise, she woke.
She took a sharp breath, and her eyes slowly cracked open and she moaned softly blinked a few times, trying to resolve the image before her. "B... Beast... Boy?" she asked weakly, and just hearing her say his name was enough to take a thousand-pound load off of his chest, and he smiled.
"Hey," he said gently. "It's okay. Slade's... gone." He glanced up at the roof to confirm this, and there was indeed no sign of invulnerable supervillain to be seen. He looked back down at her with relief. "He's gone. You're okay now... sort of." Raven was in a state of what might be termed "mild undress", but there was nothing for that, and she seemed to be disinclined, for once, from blasting him to ash for the presumption of touching her. Indeed, she slowly sat up, still groggy from whatever in the world Slade had done to her (he refused to consider the possibilities), and shook her head, and looked around, and only then seemed to really notice he was there. "Beast Boy?" she asked, as though surprised to see him, and he rubbed the back of his head and smiled, and was about to make up some kind of explanation when she hugged him.
She actually hugged him. Out of the blue, out of nowhere, she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder and she cried, cried like there were tears pent up from five years of sorrow inside her, which might well have been the case. They were both still sitting on the rooftop, and she was shaking, shaking like a leaf in the wind, like she was scared and frightened and other terms which meant the same thing, and didn't know what else to do. And surprised as he was, he wasn't so surprised that he didn't remember to hug her back, gently as he could of course, because she was in a bad state, and he knew it, and knew that she would get over it if given time because she was Raven after all. And right then he was torn between an intense desire to find Slade and claw his guts out, and one no less intense to just sit here and gently hold Raven. And with a choice like that, there really was no choice.
It was only a few minutes before Raven ran dry, and slowly sat back up, wiping her face with the back of her hand, and trying as much as she could to appear once more collected and calm, and impermeable. He didn't say anything, mostly because he knew that opening his stupid mouth was probably the exact worst thing to do, and yet finally as he stood up and helped her to her feet, he did manage just one small phrase.
"Let's all go home."
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Everything hurt.
The pain was muted and dulled, but it was still there, waiting for the painkillers to wear off so as to lay claim to him once more. For the moment though, David didn't much care. The novel feelings of not being covered in blood, not feeling his organs leaking into one another, not bleeding to death internally, all these were fascinating and new, and he was very much enjoying them as he lay there, half asleep and half awake, with the soft sound of heart rate monitors and breath machines humming about. It was getting to be almost normal.
"You missed the party."
David opened his eyes, slowly, and found that one of them was nearly swollen shut. He turned his head weakly, and found, rather to his surprise, that his ears had not deceived him, and that Raven had spoken just a moment ago, floating in cross-legged position fairly near to his bed, a crisp new uniform on, and her shoulder-length hair falling behind her ears.
"Party?" he whispered.
"Beast Boy saved my life," she said, as though this were a perfectly normal thing (which it might have been). "I thought the least I could do was let him have his party."
David coughed softly and raised his head a bit. "I thought... it was... your... party..."
"I don't have parties."
He nodded quietly, and then changed the subject with a certain degree of abruptness.
"What.. happened?"
"I'm not sure yet," said Raven, "a lot of things, I think." There was a tone behind her voice that was not at all calm, but merely a tone. She did not let it disturb her appearance, as ever.
"So... when were you going to tell us that Terra was the one that nearly beat you to death?" asked Raven.
David's eyes flew open, and he turned his head sharply enough for his neck to ache. Raven shook her head. "Relax. It's all right."
"How... how did you..."
"I've seen injuries like these before," she said simply. "And you've spent the last two hours muttering over and over how you 'didn't know it was her'. I put two and two together."
David took a long slow breath and released it. "I... I didn't know..."
"I know," said Raven.
"I couldn't..." he stirred slightly and bit back the pain it caused. "I couldn't... I couldn't beat... she was too powerful..."
"She beat me too once. I know. Don't worry about it. You're pretty badly hurt, but I think you'll be okay."
He said nothing for a moment or two, and when he did speak, it was with a soft sigh.
"I'm sorry... about everything that happened."
"No," she said, and he cracked an eye back open and looked over at her. "No, I'm sorry. I was... afraid... of everything that was happening. I shouldn't... I shouldn't have done what I did. I'm sorry, David. I'm... actually really sorry."
Her tone was calm, but there was a sincerity to those words apparent to any listener, and certainly to him, and he smiled. "Well... you can just... make it... make it up to me by.. saving my life again, I guess."
She smirked. "I already owe you one of those from what you did in the church."
He shook his head and sighed. "I couldn't stop Slade either," he said. "I couldn't stop any of it."
"You tried," she replied. "Even though I'd called you a traitor and threatened to kill you, you still tried. That was more than I deserved right then."
Another smile crossed his face. "Less than I owe you though. All of you. But... hang on. Does... that mean you... you don't think I'm part of this whole plot?"
"No," she replied, "you're definitely part of this plot. But I don't think you're a traitor, and I don't think you're working for Slade."
"But then... how am I..."
"You're a part of it just like I am. Everything points to it. Your powers, your immunities, the fact that you didn't get frozen in time. You say you don't know anything about it all, and I believe you, but there's something causing it, and it has something to do with me, and with Slade, and with whoever's trying to kill you, if it isn't Slade.
He nodded slowly. "So you don't think I'm a traitor?"
"I just said I didn't."
"But... you did, before, right?
She did not answer immediately.
"What... made you change your mind?" he asked carefully.
"Nothing did," came the reply. "Nothing specific at least."
"But... you gave me... that... that spell. The one that healed me for a little while..."
Raven sighed. "It might have been more dangerous, but... I had to make a choice if you were for real or not. And I decided I'd rather be wrong about you being our friend, than decide you weren't one, and then find out you had been."
David didn't reply with words, but gradually drew his hand out from under the covers. "So then... you think... friends?"
She smirked, and lightly took his hand, and shook it. "Friends."
David laid back again, feeling a bit more relaxed at least. Still there was something else apparently on Raven's mind.
"Um... David..."
"Yeah?"
"About Terra..."
"What about her?"
"... this is... gonna sound strange..."
"What?"
"I'm the only one who knows so far. You're gonna have to tell Robin, he needs to know these things."
"... but?"
"But... I was hoping you'd consider... not telling Beast Boy."
David blinked. "... what?"
"I know... I know... but..." Raven sighed. "You... you don't know what this is gonna do to him, to know that she's back. You weren't here for the first time."
"Raven, I... I can't... not tell Beast Boy."
"You... can, actually. He doesn't watch the news if we don't shove it in his face, he wouldn't find out by himself. Look... I know... it doesn't sound like a good plan, but... you have no idea what it's gonna be like. You have no idea what she did to him."
"And... if they use it to sneak up on him or something? Or to trap him?"
"How would they do that?"
"I didn't know who Terra was, and they did it to me, didn't they?"
Raven sighed, and shook her head. "He'll tear the city apart looking for her."
"Well," replied David, "for... for her sake, she'd better hope he finds her... before I do."
There was something in his tone that pricked her. "What do you mean?"
David's voice was perfectly calm, albeit weak. "I mean... if I see her again... I'm... I'm gonna kill her."
She stared at him for a few moments.
"You know we don't do that, right?"
Slowly he turned his head back to face her. "Is... that why you tried to crush Slade between two halves of the street?"
She did not reply.
"Still... I... I'd like you to..."
"I'll think about it."
It would have to do.
There was the sound of footsteps approaching, and a few seconds later, Beast Boy entered the medical bay. "Hey uh, Raven?" he said, "Rob said I should come down and... oh sweet! He's awake!" Beast Boy bounded over to the side of the bed. "Hey dude! How you feelin'?"
David smiled and suppressed a laugh. It hurt too much. "I've been better... I think."
Raven shook her head. "I'm going to bed. Wake me up if you need me down here." She did not include her usual caveats for what constituted a 'need'. It had been a long night.
David watched her disappear off into the darkness and heard her soft footsteps as she left, and only after she was out of earshot, that he stopped Beast Boy in the middle of his round of questions as to whether or not David needed anything whatsoever.
"Beast Boy..." he said, and Beast Boy caught the tone of the words, and stopped talking.
"Yeah?"
David took a deep breath and let it out slowly, nervously. "There's... something I've gotta tell you..."
And in the stairwell next to the garage/medical bay, Raven lowered her head, and pulled her knees up to her chin as she sat, and listened quietly as David told Beast Boy a story about a girl named 'Carrie', and as she was listening very, very intently, she was fairly certain she could hear the exact moment when Beast Boy's heart froze.
Only she didn't know that this was the second time tonight that it had done so.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The door shattered, flying off its hinges and into a million pieces that were all swiftly consumed by the tongues of flame that coursed about the entrance to the church, and then, with a gait like a conquering hero, Slade strode in. Beast Boy and Raven stood in the aisles of the church, halfway between him and the altar, facing him down, fear clouding their gazes, but holding their ground like western gunfighters. Slade allowed himself a smirk as he stepped into the church proper. "An odd venue, don't you think?" he commented as he walked in. "It's not like either of you are particularly welcome in one of these, now is it?"
Neither teen responded, and he shrugged. "I see you decided to dispose of my latest apprentice though." He sighed theatrically. "And here I thought Titans didn't kill..."
The reply did not come from either Beast Boy or Raven. It came from behind, from the tiny alcove in the wall that was completely invisible from the doorway, but that out of the corner of Slade's eye, could now be seen to hold a flickering red light.
"Guess again..."
And then the floor exploded.
The stone floor of the church blew up like a land mine had been planted, strong enough to toss Slade into the air like a rag doll, and the instant it did, Raven thew back her cloak and raised her arms. "Azarath, Metrion Zinthos!" she shouted, and at her command, the entire altar was ripped from its moorings and hurled into Slade in mid-air, the stone shattering like glass against his body and flinging him into the back wall. Beast Boy, instantly assuming the form of a snorting bull, charged after Slade, slamming into him at top speed as he landed with both horns.
It did not work.
Slade roared as he grabbed the bull by the horns, literally, and threw Beast Boy to the side with as little force as he would use to throw a frisbee. He rounded on Raven and lunged towards her, but one of the columns next to him was snapped in half by a shaped charge blast, and fell, breaking over his head as it did so, and while it did not stop Slade, he did come to a halt as he turned to face the agent of that blast.
David stood at the entrance to the alcove, his baton held in hand, blood soaking his clothes and daubed all over his face, and yet he was standing, and wielding his baton, and made no show of being broken and half-dead. He stared at Slade like he was staring at the devil himself, and both his fists were clenched as tightly as they could be, one over the baton's handle, one over nothing at all.
"That was very stupid," said Slade.
"Nobody asked you," replied David.
Slade threw both hands out at David, who dove to the side just in time to avoid being incinerated by the snakelike flames that he emitted from both palms. As David hit the ground and rolled, he brought his baton around and sliced the air with it, firing several bricks out of the wall behind him at Slade like miniature cannonballs. The bricks shattered against his armored hide, but they distracted him long enough for Raven to raise a candlestick from the ground and stab it into Slade's back like a spear, hard enough to crush it flat, and yet no mark was left on Slade's person, and he batted the crushed candlestick aside with a contemptuous slap.
"You're making this far harder than it has to be."
"That's what we do," came the reply from Beast Boy.
Beast Boy smashed into Slade from the side in the form of a Tyrannosaur, but Slade, as before, failed to budge, and turned around with a roundhouse kick that send the massive dinosaur flying into and through the wall of the church. Raven tried to envelop him in her black tendrils, but he shredded them as though they were paper, and replied by sending a blast of fire too large to dodge straight at her, flinging her like a toy back into the place where the altar had once stood. David tried to knock a piece of the roof down onto Slade's head, but Slade simply spun about and parried the falling debris by kicking it straight at David like a soccer player. The debris hit him right in the solar plexus, and he went down, gasping for air.
"This sort of thing never gets old."
Beast Boy had by now crawled his way back into the church, and Raven and David slowly got back to their feet, but Slade made no move, merely smirking as they regrouped at the back of the church as best they could.
"I assure you," said Slade, "there is nothing you or any of your little friends can do to stop this message. It would be much simpler to give up."
"We're never giving up to you!" replied Beast Boy defiantly, but all it produced from Slade was a cold smile.
"I was rather hoping you'd say that."
With a shout that transformed into a roar, Beast Boy shifted into an Ankylosaurus, spinning around as the other two ducked and swinging his club-tail into Slade as hard as he could. This blow had an effect, knocking Slade back into the wall next to the door. No sooner had that happened than Raven tore up a section of the floor the size of a safe with her powers, and hurled it into Slade, before ripping up another section and hurling that as well. Beast Boy meanwhile shifted from dinosaur to gorilla, and began snatching up everything within reach to throw alongside Raven. David, for his part, threw nothing, but stood beside them both with his baton flaring, and as each object landed, he blew it to pieces directly on top of Slade, hitting him again and again and again and again, dozens of blows and blasts, raining down upon Slade in an unending hail. And then finally, after there was nothing left to throw at Slade, and after Raven had torn up all of the floor she could, David finished by bisecting two more column, and bringing an entire corner of the building crashing down on top of Slade's motionless form.
All three Titans, exhausted and beaten, watched as the dust began to clear, revealing a mountain of loose debris and shrapnel laying atop the place Slade had stood moments ago. All three held their breath, afraid that saying a word or even exhaling would be rewarded with Slade returning to life once more.
They were wrong. It took nothing to do that.
The mountain of debris exploded on its own accord, knocking all three of them down, and by the time they stood back up, coughing and peering through the smoke, Slade was visible, standing with his arms crossed, his frame and figure completely unscathed by any of the blasts or assaults he had been subjected to. He twisted his neck around a bit, causing the sounds of vertebrae cracking to resonate throughout the church, and the he raised his hands, and the entire church exploded into fire.
David felt himself being knocked off his feel, and saw the others vanish behind curtains of flame. He landed hard on the floor of the church, and felt flames all around him, though he did not burn. He staggered back up, and saw Slade advancing towards something unseen, and he raised his baton once more to blow the ground out from under him, but suddenly Slade melted into orange smoke, and as David stood there blinking, reappeared right behind David, and grabbed him, spun him around, and lifted him with one hand into the air by his throat.
"You complete fool" snarled Slade, his voice seething in anger all of a sudden, a total contrast to his calm, almost bored tone of before. "You have no idea what you've done."
David hit at Slade's arm with his baton to no avail, as Slade slammed him into the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of him.
"You had the chance to spare them all such grief. All you needed to do was to die. But you refused, and now you've doomed them all."
So unexpected was this that David could do little more than gawk up at Slade. "What are... what are you talking about?"
Slade seemed disinclined to explain. Instead he raised his hands and fire danced through the air, and a moment later, a massive pile of burning timbers and smashed rubble fell out of the ceiling and landed on top of David, instantly burying him beneath half a ton of material. Crushed, broken anew, and unable to breathe, David could do nothing but watch as Slade bent down and stared him in the eye.
"You will live to regret living..." he said, "... Devastator."
Carefully, Slade brushed the most extraneous debris away from David's head and shoulders, and then stood back up, turned and walked away, leaving David still pinned to the ground, but very much alive. And before he had a chance to figure out why Slade had done that, the spell Raven had applied began to wear off, and he passed out.
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Beast Boy groaned and rubbed his head as he sat up in front of the pile of debris Slade had nearly crushed him with. "Dude..." he said carefully, "how long was I out?"
Nobody answered him.
His memory flashed back to what had happened just before Slade had knocked him out. He remembered Raven shouting his name, and being unable to answer, and then a wall of fire cutting him off from everything else, and then... blackness.
He had woken up about five or six minutes before, and found himself pinned to the ground by a pile of debris. Shifting into an earthworm had enabled him to work his way free, and now he was sitting on the floor of the crushed and ruined church. He carefully got up, looking around, trying to find where Raven and David and Slade had gone to.
The gigantic hole melted in the back of the church seemed like a good indication.
He was about to storm out of the church when a soft moan crossed his ears, and he turned, and moved around a fallen column, and saw...
"David!". He raced over to the pile of detritus that David was buried beneath. By some miracle, only David's head and shoulders had not been crushed under the pile, and a quick check revealed that the teen was still alive, though not by a vast amount. He shifted into a gorilla and threw the debris off of David by the armful, and then back into a human so as to pull David out of the debris field as gently as he could. He was unconscious, which was probably a mercy, but in his sleep he was muttering words to himself, over and over again.
"I didn't know..."
Beast Boy didn't know what to make of that, and so made nothing of it, and reached instead for his communicator, and then remembered that not only had it gotten smashed during the fight with Slade, but the others were probably still frozen in time. He reminded himself to remind himself to get...
There was a scream.
Beast Boy's head shot up as he heard the scream, for though he had barely ever heard that voice screaming before, he knew whose it was, and he was halfway to his feet before he remembered that he had to look after David, who was very badly injured. That at least was what Robin would have said. He couldn't after all just leave David lying there, not when there was a risk of...
Another scream, just as bloodchilling as the first, and twice as intense. Beast Boy stared out at the slagged hole in the church, and looked back down at David, and knew instantly that he was about to do exactly the wrong thing, and knew also that he had no choice.
"I'm... sorry dude. I'll... I'll be back as soon as I can. Don't... don't go anywhere."
And with that, Beast Boy jumped to his feet, transformed into a hawk, and flew out of the hole towards the direction of the scream, leaving David lying unconscious on the ground, whispering some anguished confession over and over to himself.
"I didn't know..." he said, "... I didn't know it was her..."
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Beast Boy however did not hear this, for he was racing as fast as his wings could carry him towards a large tower near the center of town, atop which was a revolving restaurant, which he gauged, based on the sound, to be the source of the screams. He did not need to get too close before he realized he was right, and his heart nearly froze.
Raven and Slade were there, standing atop the restaurant near the very edge of its roof, and Beast Boy could scarcely believe his eyes. Raven's leotard had practically disintegrated as if by some terrible force, the remaining scraps of cloth hanging off her body like rags. Her eyes were closed, and her body limp, and Slade was holding her up by her shoulders, leaning over and whispering something to her. She made no move to shake him off or escape or otherwise to move at all, asleep or drugged or unconscious, he could not tell. Red runes covered her exposed skin from her feet to her forehead and down both arms, and her violet hair was suddenly waist-length, rather than her usual shoulder-length. How all this had come to pass, Beast Boy did not know, but he flew towards her with every ounce of speed he could muster, unsure of what at all he would do when he got there, turn into an elephant perhaps and throw Slade off the roof, but he knew he had to do something, right now, or else...
Slade looked up with one eye, and he might or might not have seen Beast Boy, but whatever his cause, he released Raven from his grasp, and Beast Boy's heart froze as the sorceress fall limply off the restaurant's roof and plummeted towards the ground below.
Beast Boy dove.
He dove like a missile in re-entry, his wings beating at the air to push himself faster than gravity would allow, paying no heed to the looming ground below him. His size expanded tenfold, transforming into a giant-sized eagle, and even as he dove at more than 130 feet per second, he reached out with both talons, and very very lightly grabbed Raven's limp body by her shoulders, before pulling up as hard as he could. With absolutely no room to spare, he managed to arrest his dive and drop Raven lightly onto a nearby roof, setting down himself right next to her, and resuming human form.
He scrambled over to Raven, afraid for a moment that he'd been too late, and that Slade had dropped a dead body off the roof, but when he reached her, he saw that she was breathing at least, and he grabbed her and pulled her towards him, laying her head and shoulders in his lap, and trying to think of what he should do now. "Raven?" he asked, almost breathlessly. "Raven, can you hear me? It's... me. C'mon Rae, please... wake up... Raven?"
He shook her gently, and to his surprise, she woke.
She took a sharp breath, and her eyes slowly cracked open and she moaned softly blinked a few times, trying to resolve the image before her. "B... Beast... Boy?" she asked weakly, and just hearing her say his name was enough to take a thousand-pound load off of his chest, and he smiled.
"Hey," he said gently. "It's okay. Slade's... gone." He glanced up at the roof to confirm this, and there was indeed no sign of invulnerable supervillain to be seen. He looked back down at her with relief. "He's gone. You're okay now... sort of." Raven was in a state of what might be termed "mild undress", but there was nothing for that, and she seemed to be disinclined, for once, from blasting him to ash for the presumption of touching her. Indeed, she slowly sat up, still groggy from whatever in the world Slade had done to her (he refused to consider the possibilities), and shook her head, and looked around, and only then seemed to really notice he was there. "Beast Boy?" she asked, as though surprised to see him, and he rubbed the back of his head and smiled, and was about to make up some kind of explanation when she hugged him.
She actually hugged him. Out of the blue, out of nowhere, she wrapped her arms around his neck and buried her face in his shoulder and she cried, cried like there were tears pent up from five years of sorrow inside her, which might well have been the case. They were both still sitting on the rooftop, and she was shaking, shaking like a leaf in the wind, like she was scared and frightened and other terms which meant the same thing, and didn't know what else to do. And surprised as he was, he wasn't so surprised that he didn't remember to hug her back, gently as he could of course, because she was in a bad state, and he knew it, and knew that she would get over it if given time because she was Raven after all. And right then he was torn between an intense desire to find Slade and claw his guts out, and one no less intense to just sit here and gently hold Raven. And with a choice like that, there really was no choice.
It was only a few minutes before Raven ran dry, and slowly sat back up, wiping her face with the back of her hand, and trying as much as she could to appear once more collected and calm, and impermeable. He didn't say anything, mostly because he knew that opening his stupid mouth was probably the exact worst thing to do, and yet finally as he stood up and helped her to her feet, he did manage just one small phrase.
"Let's all go home."
*-----------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Everything hurt.
The pain was muted and dulled, but it was still there, waiting for the painkillers to wear off so as to lay claim to him once more. For the moment though, David didn't much care. The novel feelings of not being covered in blood, not feeling his organs leaking into one another, not bleeding to death internally, all these were fascinating and new, and he was very much enjoying them as he lay there, half asleep and half awake, with the soft sound of heart rate monitors and breath machines humming about. It was getting to be almost normal.
"You missed the party."
David opened his eyes, slowly, and found that one of them was nearly swollen shut. He turned his head weakly, and found, rather to his surprise, that his ears had not deceived him, and that Raven had spoken just a moment ago, floating in cross-legged position fairly near to his bed, a crisp new uniform on, and her shoulder-length hair falling behind her ears.
"Party?" he whispered.
"Beast Boy saved my life," she said, as though this were a perfectly normal thing (which it might have been). "I thought the least I could do was let him have his party."
David coughed softly and raised his head a bit. "I thought... it was... your... party..."
"I don't have parties."
He nodded quietly, and then changed the subject with a certain degree of abruptness.
"What.. happened?"
"I'm not sure yet," said Raven, "a lot of things, I think." There was a tone behind her voice that was not at all calm, but merely a tone. She did not let it disturb her appearance, as ever.
"So... when were you going to tell us that Terra was the one that nearly beat you to death?" asked Raven.
David's eyes flew open, and he turned his head sharply enough for his neck to ache. Raven shook her head. "Relax. It's all right."
"How... how did you..."
"I've seen injuries like these before," she said simply. "And you've spent the last two hours muttering over and over how you 'didn't know it was her'. I put two and two together."
David took a long slow breath and released it. "I... I didn't know..."
"I know," said Raven.
"I couldn't..." he stirred slightly and bit back the pain it caused. "I couldn't... I couldn't beat... she was too powerful..."
"She beat me too once. I know. Don't worry about it. You're pretty badly hurt, but I think you'll be okay."
He said nothing for a moment or two, and when he did speak, it was with a soft sigh.
"I'm sorry... about everything that happened."
"No," she said, and he cracked an eye back open and looked over at her. "No, I'm sorry. I was... afraid... of everything that was happening. I shouldn't... I shouldn't have done what I did. I'm sorry, David. I'm... actually really sorry."
Her tone was calm, but there was a sincerity to those words apparent to any listener, and certainly to him, and he smiled. "Well... you can just... make it... make it up to me by.. saving my life again, I guess."
She smirked. "I already owe you one of those from what you did in the church."
He shook his head and sighed. "I couldn't stop Slade either," he said. "I couldn't stop any of it."
"You tried," she replied. "Even though I'd called you a traitor and threatened to kill you, you still tried. That was more than I deserved right then."
Another smile crossed his face. "Less than I owe you though. All of you. But... hang on. Does... that mean you... you don't think I'm part of this whole plot?"
"No," she replied, "you're definitely part of this plot. But I don't think you're a traitor, and I don't think you're working for Slade."
"But then... how am I..."
"You're a part of it just like I am. Everything points to it. Your powers, your immunities, the fact that you didn't get frozen in time. You say you don't know anything about it all, and I believe you, but there's something causing it, and it has something to do with me, and with Slade, and with whoever's trying to kill you, if it isn't Slade.
He nodded slowly. "So you don't think I'm a traitor?"
"I just said I didn't."
"But... you did, before, right?
She did not answer immediately.
"What... made you change your mind?" he asked carefully.
"Nothing did," came the reply. "Nothing specific at least."
"But... you gave me... that... that spell. The one that healed me for a little while..."
Raven sighed. "It might have been more dangerous, but... I had to make a choice if you were for real or not. And I decided I'd rather be wrong about you being our friend, than decide you weren't one, and then find out you had been."
David didn't reply with words, but gradually drew his hand out from under the covers. "So then... you think... friends?"
She smirked, and lightly took his hand, and shook it. "Friends."
David laid back again, feeling a bit more relaxed at least. Still there was something else apparently on Raven's mind.
"Um... David..."
"Yeah?"
"About Terra..."
"What about her?"
"... this is... gonna sound strange..."
"What?"
"I'm the only one who knows so far. You're gonna have to tell Robin, he needs to know these things."
"... but?"
"But... I was hoping you'd consider... not telling Beast Boy."
David blinked. "... what?"
"I know... I know... but..." Raven sighed. "You... you don't know what this is gonna do to him, to know that she's back. You weren't here for the first time."
"Raven, I... I can't... not tell Beast Boy."
"You... can, actually. He doesn't watch the news if we don't shove it in his face, he wouldn't find out by himself. Look... I know... it doesn't sound like a good plan, but... you have no idea what it's gonna be like. You have no idea what she did to him."
"And... if they use it to sneak up on him or something? Or to trap him?"
"How would they do that?"
"I didn't know who Terra was, and they did it to me, didn't they?"
Raven sighed, and shook her head. "He'll tear the city apart looking for her."
"Well," replied David, "for... for her sake, she'd better hope he finds her... before I do."
There was something in his tone that pricked her. "What do you mean?"
David's voice was perfectly calm, albeit weak. "I mean... if I see her again... I'm... I'm gonna kill her."
She stared at him for a few moments.
"You know we don't do that, right?"
Slowly he turned his head back to face her. "Is... that why you tried to crush Slade between two halves of the street?"
She did not reply.
"Still... I... I'd like you to..."
"I'll think about it."
It would have to do.
There was the sound of footsteps approaching, and a few seconds later, Beast Boy entered the medical bay. "Hey uh, Raven?" he said, "Rob said I should come down and... oh sweet! He's awake!" Beast Boy bounded over to the side of the bed. "Hey dude! How you feelin'?"
David smiled and suppressed a laugh. It hurt too much. "I've been better... I think."
Raven shook her head. "I'm going to bed. Wake me up if you need me down here." She did not include her usual caveats for what constituted a 'need'. It had been a long night.
David watched her disappear off into the darkness and heard her soft footsteps as she left, and only after she was out of earshot, that he stopped Beast Boy in the middle of his round of questions as to whether or not David needed anything whatsoever.
"Beast Boy..." he said, and Beast Boy caught the tone of the words, and stopped talking.
"Yeah?"
David took a deep breath and let it out slowly, nervously. "There's... something I've gotta tell you..."
And in the stairwell next to the garage/medical bay, Raven lowered her head, and pulled her knees up to her chin as she sat, and listened quietly as David told Beast Boy a story about a girl named 'Carrie', and as she was listening very, very intently, she was fairly certain she could hear the exact moment when Beast Boy's heart froze.
Only she didn't know that this was the second time tonight that it had done so.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 24: The Ties that Bind
"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.
Thou hast spoken right, 'tis true;
The wheel is come full circle: I am here."
- William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, Scene 3
*----------------------------------------------------------*
Raven was certain of one thing. The tower shouldn’t have been this quiet.
The Tower was oppressively silent, like a living organism not daring to breathe, the very machines that surrounded her idling or going about their business with the barest minimum of noise. The digital clock on the wall even denied her the rhythm of its ticking, and the double-paned, shatter-proof glass of the common room windows blocked out the barest peep of the sounds from outside. She had a book with her, and a mug of tea, but she did not even pretend to be interested in either, the book laying unopened on the table in front of her, the tea cold and ignored. All too familiar.
Two weeks had passed since Slade and Terra had made their dramatic joint return-from-the-dead, setting to their usual business of beating the Titans half to death as though making up for lost time. Once again, the Titans had gotten off lucky, in a sense. Despite Slade and Terra's best efforts, all of them were still alive, though the margins had been more uncomfortably close for some than for others, and despite wild speculations by the media to the contrary, neither Slade nor Terra had shown so much as a hair of themselves since the event.
It should have been something of a relief that they had faded back into the darkness from whence they had come, a weight off Raven's mind, a sense that perhaps there had been a reprieve. It was not.
"This will come to pass. I will make sure of it."
The voice haunted her dreams, resonating down the corridors of her memory night after endless night. Meditation, mental exercise, even the prayers to Azar she had learned as a child did no good, for every evening he was waiting for her, unblemished, unstoppable, unrelenting in his pursuit. Every night she fought Slade anew in her dreams, and every night she lost, borne down by the weight of prophecy and damnation, until inevitably Slade's cold and iron-clad hands would grab her by the shoulders, and his emotionless mask of a face would stare her in the eye, and he would whisper to her the same words yet again.
"You're going to destroy the world. It's written all over your face."
Every night she woke up screaming.
Raven didn't sleep much to begin with. A hybrid of demon and human, only half of her even required it. For the other half, meditation was just as good. Often enough she would be up before any of the others, even Robin, whose nocturnal habits were as deeply ingrained as his mentor's. Still, there was only so much she could do with meditation alone, and no matter what she tried, every night Slade was waiting for her again, waiting to win and announce his message and bring her one more day closer to the end of the world. Small wonder that she had started to dread going to sleep, like a small child frightened of monsters under the bed. The only difference was where her monsters were located... and what they wanted.
For the fifth time this afternoon, Raven tried to pick up her book where she had left it off. For the fifth time this afternoon, she failed. The words would not sink in, for her mind was elsewhere, and the terrible stillness of the air around her only made it worse. For all the time she spent begging and praying and practically screaming for a bit of quiet around the Tower, the few rare times she ever received it were worse than the most annoying noise. In her current state, she just couldn't concentrate, not on the book, not on meditation, not on anything.
Not even on Slade.
A soft 'thud' shook through the tower from deep below her, barely discernible even in the midst of the silence. Five or six seconds passed, and then another one made the tea in her mug quiver, like a construction equipment being operated far away. Briefly she hesitated, wondering if this might be yet another emergency to respond to, but as the impacts (or whatever they were) settled down into a more regular rhythm, she simply sighed softly in mild annoyance, and stood up from the couch, leaving her mug and book where they sat. There were three other people in the Tower at present, and she certainly didn't have to go running off to investigate every weird noise, but right now she needed something to do, if only to clear her head. If only to stop her from thinking about...
She walked down the hall towards the elevator, feeling the near-silent tremors of whatever was making the sound through the metal floor beneath her feet. Already she was fairly sure she knew what was their cause, and who, but instead of taking her communicator and calling the person in question, she rode the elevator down to the training level near the base of the Tower, the sounds growing stronger as she approached them. She exited the elevator, and moved straight ahead towards the training room, punching in a keypad combination to override the seal on the door, and letting it slide open.
The training room was largely empty, the extraneous equipment that the various Titans used to test themselves against withdrawn into the walls or the floor. The only objects in the room were a series of large stone blocks, sitting lined against the far wall, and a single small computer terminal and chair extended against the wall. The floor was covered in gravel and bits of rock, scattered around randomly like a handful of sand cast over a table. And in the center of all of it stood a small figure in a bright red-orange suit, holding a metal baton that was presently on fire, or at least appeared to be. He stood still, like a conductor preparing to lead an orchestra, and then with a sudden movement, he swung the baton around as though swinging a polo mallet, and one of the rocks burst like a firecracker, showering bits of debris all over the room, rattling and rolling like a rainmaker until they finally lay still.
"Shouldn't you be in bed?"
David jumped, and turned around rapidly enough that he nearly lost his balance on the debris-covered floor, staggering and tripping over the rubble until Raven peremptorily swept it all aside with a wave of her hand. Once he had caught both his balance and his breath, the psychokinetic raised his eyes, or rather his eye, to face Raven. There were bandages wrapped around his head, covering his right eye, with a white eyepatch strapped over it to protect against the light. His left arm was in a cast from the forearm to the wrist, and held in a sling around his neck. A steel cane lay on the ground next to David's feet, and he slowly clipped his baton back onto his belt and picked it up before taking a few uneasy limping steps towards the computer terminal on the wall.
Raven entered the room, casting a quick glance over the carpet of stone fragments. "You shouldn't be down here," she said evenly.
David reached the computer and paused, rubbing his side with his good arm and wincing as he massaged the broken ribs that were still stitching themselves together. "I know," he said, and he pressed a button on the computer, causing the remaining intact rocks to withdraw into the walls and the floor. "I just..." He trailed off, not bothering to actually explain why he had felt the need to make his way down to the training room and start detonating a series of rocks. The choice of targets alone made it clear enough.
"Robin gave all of us the week off," said Raven, crossing her arms. "Besides, you're in no shape to be playing with rocks."
David didn't respond immediately, taking a deep breath and lowering his head. "Yeah," he said finally, "I know. That's kind of the point."
Raven resisted the urge to groan as she rolled her eyes. "Don't tell me you're thinking of - "
"I'm not suicidal," snapped David, glancing back at the sorceress, before returning his gaze to the computer screen. "If I couldn't beat her when I was 100, what kind of a chance would I have now? She'd tear me apart, even if I could find her."
Given what had happened, that seemed logical enough to Raven, but the talk of 'finding' Terra only served to remind her of what she was trying to avoid thinking about by coming down here, and her breath caught involuntarily. She tried to pass it off as nothing, but evidently David either noticed, or his own thoughts took him to the same place. "Have you heard from Beast Boy?" he asked suddenly, and she closed her eyes a moment before replying
"Not today," she said, and she opened her eyes and fixed them on the back of David's head, trying to maintain her facade of detached control. "Cyborg said he was still looking."
David didn't reply immediately. When he did, his voice was quieter than it had been before, and his head had lowered to the point where he was clearly no longer looking at the screen.
"I had to tell him," he said quietly. "You know that."
"No, you didn't," replied Raven, equally quietly, but with considerably more force behind the words. "You could have trusted me when I told you not to tell him. You could have decided to wait like I asked you to, instead of - "
"Instead of telling him that someone that tried to kill him and me and all the rest of you guys was back from the dead?" David turned around slowly, leaning on the cane as he did so, looking at Raven semi-incredulously. "You actually wanted me to hide that from him?"
"Look what it did to him," hissed Raven. "Look at what happened."
David lowered his head again, rubbing at his face with his hand, as if trying to scratch off the eyepatch strapped to his head. "Beast Boy's my friend," he said, almost lamely. "I'm wasn't gonna lie to him, not about something like this. What was I supposed to - "
"You were supposed to think about what was best for him, not what made you feel safer," said Raven. She barely knew what she was saying, but the words poured out of her mouth unbidden, and she did not stop them. "He's not some playground schoolteacher that you run off and tell everything to. Terra destroyed him, and it was a month before he pulled out of it. You weren't there, you don't know what happened, and you have no idea what he's going through now, thanks to you."
She did not get a chance to consider if perhaps she had gone too far, for David didn't react by wilting and falling silent, nor by becoming angry and screaming or denouncing her. Instead he raised his head slowly, his one intact eye returning Raven's stare unblinkingly. "Thanks to me?"
"You know what I mean," replied Raven, her voice unwavering.
"No, I don't." said David, and his voice did not waver either, a far rarer occurrence in his case. "Are you actually saying that I told Beast Boy that Terra was back because I was trying to hide behind him or something?"
"I don't know what you were trying to do," said Raven more savagely than she had intended, "but you wouldn't listen to me, and you obviously didn't care if he got hurt."
David recoiled as if he'd been slapped in the face, and there was such a look of shock in his eye that he didn't even have to reply. Raven said nothing, indeed she hadn't even meant to say that much, and the two of them watched one another for a bit, letting silence dampen down the emotions that Raven could feel coursing through the room like pyroclastic clouds.
"What if it had been you?" asked David suddenly, breaking the silence. "What if I'd run into some villain or monster from your past, someone you'd cared about or who'd tried to kill you? I'm sure there's somebody. What would you have done, Raven, if I decided not to tell you that someone you knew was back from the dead?" David's one-eyed stare was more intense than anything he'd fixed on her before, and while he wasn't shouting, his voice was dead serious. He did not even give her a chance to answer before continuing. "You'd have nailed me to the wall if I lied to you about something like that, and you'd probably be right to do it. And don't try to tell me you wouldn't."
Raven hesitated, unsure of what to say, and as her brain debated what reply to give, her mouth replied on its own accord. "He didn't need to know," she said hoarsely, her voice lowered to a raspy whisper.
"Since when do you get to make that call?" asked David. "Since when do any of us? I owe Beast Boy more than I can ever repay him, just like I owe you, and all the others. Do you actually think I'm about to turn around and lie to him after everything? After you told me how many times what would happen if I lied to any of you?"
"So you put him through all this again instead? That's real gratitude there..."
Her sarcasm fell on deaf ears. "You think I wanted that?" he replied. "You think I wanted to come back and tell him that Terra'd come back to life and was trying to kill me and had vanished? I read the reports, Raven, I know what happened between him and her..."
"You don't know anything about what happened."
"Maybe not, but I'm not stupid. I knew they were..." he hesitated and shook his head. "I knew he'd want to know she was alive."
"And what if it's a trap?" asked Raven, folding her arms. "They trapped you, it's happened before. What if they were counting on you to tell him that she was back so that they could get their hands on him? What then?"
There was only the slightest pause before David replied.
"Then you'll probably kill me."
Raven half-sighed, half-groaned, and lowered her head and shut her eyes. She needed a few moments to steady herself once again, and when she raised her head, David had slumped down into the chair in front of the computer terminal, and was rubbing his eyepatch with his good hand, the baton on his belt tapping quietly against the side of the chair, cold and lifeless.
"I'm not going to kill you," she said. "So stop it."
Another pause. "I know," said David quietly.
Neither David nor Raven said anything for a moment, and the terrible stillness that Raven had been trying to get away from embraced her once more. She shook her head irritatedly to drive it away, and finally resorted to asking another question. "Why did you even tell him?"
David didn't look up. "Because I had to."
She pressed on. "Why did you have to tell him?"
"Because I did, okay?" exclaimed David, leaning forward and raising his head once more. "Because whatever you say, he was going to find out eventually, and even if he wasn't, because I owe him - "
"Oh for the love of..." interrupted Raven, throwing her hands up and groaning. "Will you give this 'owing us' thing a rest already? It's just stupid."
David froze in mid-word, looking almost surprised, and when he replied, his voice was raised and angry. "I don't care if you think it's stupid, it's got nothing to do with you! And if you don't want the answer, don't ask the goddamn question!"
The two superheroes stared daggers at one another for several seconds, before David broke his gaze and groaned softly, lowering his head again and shaking it. Raven remained unmoved, her arms crossed in front of her chest, and she said nothing, waiting instead for David to finish.
"I told him because he's my friend, okay?" he said finally, chancing a glance back up at Raven. "I never had many of those, at the centers, and never any like you guys, and I... won't lie to him, or to you, or to any of the others just because you think I should. I know it hurt him, and I'm sorry, and I wish it hadn't or that I could have done something about it," she opened her mouth to cut him off but he cut her off first, raising his hand in protest, "and I know you're gonna say that I could have just not told him, but I couldn't do that, Raven, all right? He's my friend, and I'm not gonna keep things like this from him, not for you, not for anybody. Period."
David shut his eye for a second and breathed raggedly, his fists clenched shut on the armrests of the chair, and Raven could feel the anger and the bewilderment and most of all the frustration pouring off him empathically like the smoke from a candle, mingling with her own. At a loss for what to do, she settled for simply taking a deep breath and pushing the empathic cloud away from her as David clammed up again for a few moments, before blurting out an addendum.
"I just... I don't know what's going on, or what all this... this stuff is that keeps happening, and I know that... I'm... a part of it somehow, but not why... and I don't know if you know, or not, or if you'd tell me if you did know, or..." he trailed off, groaning and clutching his good arm lightly over his stomach as he grimaced. "I'm just... tired of getting attacked and ambushed and all of these plots and mysteries and I won't..." he paused once again, and gathered his breath, and exhaled, and steadied his voice, "I won't add to it all by hiding things from Beast Boy... or from you."
Raven tried to think of something to say in reply, some kind of demand that David be more circumspect in what he say in the future, but she simply did not have the stomach for it any longer. David's fear and frustration was bleeding over into hers, feeding the parts of her psyche she was desperately trying to keep contained, and so instead she simply nodded and turned away slowly. "I really wish you hadn't told him," she said after a moment, and left it at that.
"I wish I hadn't needed to," was his reply, and she said nothing to it, but simply walked towards the door. She was barely three paces from it when David's voice stopped her.
"Raven?"
She paused and sighed, and turned around, suddenly very eager to be anywhere but here, and when she did, she saw that he was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his face in one hand. "What is it?" she asked, and he did not look up as he answered.
"If I hadn't told Beast Boy, you weren't going to, right?"
"No, I wasn't," she said, unsure how he could possibly have had a doubt in his mind on that account.
As it turned out, he didn't. "Why not?" he asked.
"What do you mean 'why not?'"
"Why weren't you gonna tell him?"
Raven hesitated for a moment, unsure if this was some kind of trick. "Because I knew what it would do to him," she said. "I knew what Terra did to him back before she turned to stone, and what she'd do to him now. I knew he'd go looking for her and that he might get himself killed, and even if he didn't that he was going to be hurt all over again and I didn't want that. Okay? I know you don't think he is, but he's a friend of mine, and unlike you, I don't let my friends get hurt when I have the choice."
David didn't say anything, but slowly sat up and back, and crossed his good arm with his injured one, and stared quietly at her with his one good eye in a fashion that was most unsettling for no reason that she could discern. Restlessly, she tapped her foot on the ground. "What?" she asked.
David took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and his voice was calm and quiet as he responded with words that froze her blood.
"Is that why you didn't tell me that you found something in my mind?"
Raven did not, could not reply for several seconds, frozen still like a statue, the hairs on the back of her neck sticking up straight as she returned David's stare. She knew that the look on her face was enough to confirm every suspicion he'd ever had, but he did not scream or shout or get angry again, but just sat there and slowly explained.
"I've only ever heard you scream twice," he said carefully, slowly. "Once when Adonis tried to eat you, and once when you woke up from that trip into my mind. You screamed and you practically ran out the door, and you nearly gave Beast Boy a heart attack. You tried to say after that it was just... feedback or something, and that I was a normal kinetic, and you showed me how to use this baton... but back there in the church when... when you thought I might be working for Slade, you said that you had no idea how my powers worked or where they came from." He uncrossed his arms and sat up a bit straighter. "If I was a normal kinetic, like you said I was, you'd know exactly how they worked. You said you found out how they worked when you went into my head."
He paused only for an instant as he leaned forward towards her, long enough for all of this to sink in, but not long enough for her to reply. His voice remained calm, albeit a bit afraid, as if he wasn't certain if she was about to blast him to ash.
"Ever since you went in my mind, there's been something about me that scares the hell out of you, and I don't know what it is, but that night you woke up you were more scared than I've ever seen you get, except once. And I don't have the first clue what it would take to scare you, I'm not sure I want to know what that takes, but I think you found something inside me that scared you half to death." He paused and let his breath go slowly. "And... you didn't tell me about it."
Raven's voice had failed her, but she managed to pull it together long enough to cough out a reply. "You... you knew?" she stammered, not even realizing that it was a confession.
David, to her surprise, actually chuckled, and then grimaced as his ribs began to ache again. "I know you think I'm oblivious," he said, "but you're not anywhere near as hard to read as you think you are. I knew you'd found something the moment you woke up. Why do you think I was hiding up on the roof when you and Cyborg came to give me that baton? I don't know what you found, or why you didn't tell me about it, but I know it scared you to death, and I know you decided to hide it from me.
Raven didn't say a word, didn't move a muscle, didn't even twitch as David slowly and painfully stood up from his chair, picking the cane up as he did so and steadying himself before facing Raven again.
"And... you know what?" he said calmly, looking her in the eye. "That's okay."
She blinked.
"You don't have to tell me what it was," said David, slowly limping forward. "I don't know if I'd even understand it if you did, or if it would just scare the living hell out of me too. If you've got some reason for not wanting to tell me... then that's all right, because you don't owe me an explanation, and you don't owe me a bunch of secrets, in fact you don't owe me anything at all. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't make you tell me, but I don't want to, because despite what you think, I actually do trust your judgment." He shook his head slowly and lowered it. "More than mine at least." He sighed and lifted his head and trudged over to her. "If you don't want to tell me, you don't have to, and you don't even have to tell me why. I trust your judgment, and I trust you."
He stopped right in front of her, leaning on the cane and obviously trying to pretend like he wasn't in several kinds of pain.
"But don't ever ask me to hide something from Beast Boy or any of the others, Raven, because I won't do it, and I don't care if it's bad for the team or not, or if you think it would hurt them or not. You guys are the only ones who have any idea what's going on here, at least compared to me, and I can't make the decision of what is and isn't important for you guys to know. And even if all that wasn't true, I won't hide something from Beast Boy for your sake, or for anybody else's."
He stepped to the side, and walked past her towards the door, his cane tapping on the ground as he went. "Not even for mine."
The door slid open and Raven heard David walking out of it, but before it closed, it was her turn to stop him.
"David?"
She did not turn her head, but she heard him pause, and then turn around carefully.
"What was the other time?"
There was a hesitation. "... what other time?"
"The other time you saw me get that afraid?"
The hesitation was more pronounced, lasting several seconds, before David replied simply.
"Ever since I told him about Terra."
She said nothing to that, and after a few more moments, David turned away and the door closed being him, leaving Raven standing in the empty training room, listening to the soft sound of his footsteps and the tapping of his cane as he made his way down the hall, until finally the sound vanished into more silence. This time however, she did not notice it, and neither moved nor spoke nor raised her eyes, her mind adrift within itself, like meditation but unfocused and unbidden. And when finally a minute or an hour had passed, she didn't know which, Raven closed her eyes tight and shook like she was in a snowstorm and wrapped her cloak around her. And as she whispered to herself a simple word in a dead language, a black sheath enveloped her entire body, and she suddenly vanished into nothing.
*----------------------------------------------------------*
The stone quarry was as quiet and dark, long abandoned for the night by the workers who operated it. A huge terraced pit delved into the side of a mountain of granite and marble, the place was as barren as the surface of an alien world, indeed it could well have been mistaken for such a thing, save for the heavy machinery, the pile drivers and steam shovels, the rock crushers and bulldozers, the debris trucks, water cannons, and pneumatic drills that all lay silent now, left where they were for the morning when the quarry workers would return and bring the place to life once more. For now there was nothing but the occasional insect or molerat to disturb the rattling of pebbles pushed about by the wind.
And none of the critters in question noticed an addition to their numbers, not even a green one.
A single small rodent, a rat perhaps or a mole or miniature badger, striped evergreen over emerald with pale eyes that blinked in the night sky crept from its perch beneath an earth-mover, and cautiously moved forward into the floor of the rock pit. The rodent made no noise, looking left and right before moving a bit further, sniffing at the ground every few steps, paying no mind to the owls that circled overhead, who were occasionally darting down to snatch a field mouse for their evening meal. None of them would target a discolored rodent, nor one that smelled and moved as strangely as this one, and the rodent appeared to know it, for it moved heedlessly into the center of the broad quarry floor before suddenly increasing in volume a hundredfold, and standing up as a green-skinned, pointy-eared, purple-clad human.
Beast Boy looked around the empty rock quarry with his once-more human eyes and sighed softly, kicking a few pebbles across the quarry as he crouched down again and examined the dirt for signs of disturbance, fissures in the rocks, anything, everything, a single sign of what he was looking for.
Nothing.
Quarries and caves, crevices and riverbeds, slag heaps and rock gardens, and nothing, not a trace or indication that Terra had visited any of them. He had tried everything he could, returning to every place he had ever been with Terra, every secret hideaway she had ever told him about, and half a dozen others she hadn't told anyone, but that he had known about through Robin's surveillance or Cyborg's tracers or simply through guesswork of his own. Robin might have done it methodically, patiently, with techniques of search and detection honed over years, but Beast Boy neither knew any such things nor cared to. He had spent days roaming the city nearly at random, then the suburbs, then the rural areas outside Jump. He had traveled to places that Terra had only mentioned in passing, places she had commented always wanting to go, places that had no connection at all to her save for rock and stone. The Grand Canyon, hundreds of miles away a thousand miles long, he had surveyed over three days from the air, not because of clues or indications or evidence, but because of the day that they had sat up on the roof of the tower and she had told him about how amazing the river valley was, and how much she had loved floating down the canyon and feeling the rocks and the earth surrounding her. He had laughed then, and said that one day they'd have to go back, her on her rock and him as a swallow. This time he had gone as a swallow, but there was no floating rock with her perched on it waiting for him, nor anything but the sun and the wind and the occasional carload of tourists trying to identify a forest-green bird in their guidebooks.
Nothing.
For three days now, he had gone back to basics, borrowing Robin's files on Terra from before she had tried to murder them all, files so comprehensive that they contained information even Beast Boy had never known, about sightings of Terra prior to her arrival in Jump, reconnaissance reports from national park rangers and the Bureau of Land Management. He had not asked Robin for the files, but had simply taken them. Robin had not stopped him. Nobody had.
One by one he had gone to every place mentioned in those reports within five hundred miles of Jump City, a cave in Joshua Tree Forest, an artificial hill in Golden Gate Park, a small castle near the edge of Death Valley, an abandoned Borax mine outside Tehachapi, place after place, sighting after sighting, and yet all that was waiting for him in each successive place was stillness, and quiet, and lifeless stone.
And so it was again.
Terra had been seen near Aesir Construction's rock quarry some time in the distant past, but she was not here now, or rather if she was, he could find no hint of it. In previous searches, he had shifted into a mole or earthworm to explore the very ground beneath the sites in question, but he could not do so here, not with solid rock beneath his feet. Eight places he had been today, and at all eight, like the eighty before, there was nothing. He indulged his frustrations in a savage kick at the side of a five-ton forklift and was rewarded with a minute or two of hopping on one leg, grabbing at his hurt foot. When the pain finally subsided, he growled to himself and made another round of the quarry, level by level, not sure at all what he was looking for, but knowing he wasn't finding it, not here at least. Top to bottom and bottom to top again he went, before shifting back into a bird and flying back down into the center of the quarry. Another pang of the pain of loss that had been shooting through him ever since David had told him of Terra's return struck him as he landed, and he shouted out to the empty quarry, heedless of whether or not it was a good idea.
"Terra!"
Nothing.
The echoes of his own voice died down and he slumped down onto the ground, leaning against the forklift he had previously struck, and caught his breath slowly, his eyes clenched shut, his gloved hands holding his face. Several minutes passed before he could raise his head again, and reached down to the PDA on his belt that he had downloaded Robin's files to, and brought up the next reference, a cliff overlooking a vineyard near the coast north of Jump. Terra had mentioned to a reporter for a newspaper as having passed by there once, eight and a half months ago.
It was his best remaining lead.
He sighed softly and pulled his knees up against his chest, working up the will to overcome how tired he was and fly off to the north, and trying to figure out what he was going to say to Cyborg or Robin when he checked in later tonight. He was at the point of getting up and flying off when he suddenly heard a loud 'POP', like a paper bag overfilled with air being struck by a golf club, and a rush of wind and small pebbles rolled over the forklift. A second later, Beast Boy was on his feet, racing around the heavy machinery. "Terra?!" he asked breathlessly, not even pausing to think of how it was that Terra would have suddenly appeared, but a second later he ground to a halt, blinked several times, and raised an eyebrow.
"... Raven?"
Raven was standing where nobody had been an instant ago, having apparently appeared out of nowhere (as she often did). She was looking around at her surroundings, and seemed almost surprised as to see Beast Boy appear as he had been to see her show up. Indeed, such was their mutual astonishment that Beast Boy was the first to speak.
"What are you doing here?"
The question seemed to galvanize Raven's capacity to speak. "I... wanted to see how it was going."
Beast Boy blinked several times, utterly unprepared to answer that question, at least from Raven. Robin and Cyborg had been asking him that daily of course, but Raven had been, as usual, avoiding him in the brief times when he was back at the tower, usually whenever he had run out of places to look. As such, he stammered for a few moments before answering. "Um... it's uh... it's going okay..." he said. "I mean... I haven't found her yet but..."
Raven glanced around the empty quarry. "You thought she might be here?"
Beast Boy breathed a soft sigh of relief that he had not had to finish the previous sentence. "Robin's stuff said that there was some kinda earthquake around here a few weeks ago, and I thought... you know..."
"Yeah," said Raven, though she certainly didn't sound convinced. "So... was she..."
"Um..." said Beast Boy almost nervously, like he was admitting to some kind of indiscretion, "... no. I mean... it doesn't look like it..."
Raven only nodded. "So what are you gonna do now?"
Still wondering what was behind her sudden interest in all of this, Beast Boy scratched the back of his head with one hand. "Well... there's this place up north where she said once that she went to, so I thought I'd go check that out."
Raven seemed less than overwhelmed with the brilliance of this plan, but she refrained, at least for the moment, from disparaging it openly. In fact, she seemed rather reluctant to speak at all, which only made this all the weirder.
"Where is it?"
"Like I said, it's up north. A place called 'San Simon' I think, next to a - "
"San Simeon?" asked Raven all of a sudden, and she sounded surprised, of all things
Beast Boy hesitated before replying. "Uh, yeah... I think..."
"Beast Boy, that's three hundred miles away, at least."
The number landed on his head like a weight. He had not imagined it was anything like that far off. "Oh," he said, expressive as always. "Um... well... I guess I'll have to check it out tomorrow then. I can get halfway there tonight and then make the rest of... the trip... in... Raven?"
He hadn't noticed before, a product of his own surprise and the bad light, but Raven looked... different than she normally did. It was nothing physical, her hood and cloak and belt and uniform and everything else was just as it had been before on a hundred different days, but there was something in her expression, her look, that was off. There was something in her eyes that was not normally present, and he couldn't tell what. It wasn't an intensity exactly, or anything else specific that he knew how to describe, but he had seen it before, once or twice. He just wished he could remember where...
All this took a fraction of a second, as Raven replied in normal time. "... what?"
"Are... is everything okay?"
"I'm fine," she said, though she sounded just the slightest bit unsure. "But... San Simeon?"
Beast Boy shrugged. "It's... kinda the next place on the list, you know? I mean she's gotta be somewhere, right?" He tried to laugh, and managed only a nervous grin, one which he could tell had not fooled Raven, in fact if anything whatever the indescribable something was that was surrounding her only seemed to deepen. Was it worry?
"You're going to San Simeon because Terra passed by it once, months ago?"
The question could easily have been phrased with Raven's signature dry wit, calculated to make everyone around her (and particularly Beast Boy) sound like an idiot, but it was not. Indeed, it sounded like a real question, and there was an ever-so-soft note of... surprise in her voice? That couldn't be right.
Still, when she put it like that, it didn't sound all that promising, and he frowned. "Well unless you've got a better idea, yeah. I've already looked everywhere near Jump. Maybe she's hiding somewhere further out?" It sounded more likely the way he put it. He preferred that.
"Beast Boy..." said Raven, and this time he was sure that something was wrong. Her voice sounded thin and weak, like it had that night many months ago after the incident with Malchior, though why it should sound that way was beyond him. "... she's... Terra's not in San Simeon."
He shrugged. "I won't know unless I look," he said, trying to pass it off as a joke. As before, he failed, the empty feeling in the pit of his stomach robbing him of all mirth, and even of the capacity to fake it.
"She's not there," said Raven with all the certainty of someone predicting the sunrise, a hint of desperation to her voice. "She's not in any of those places."
Beast Boy's fake smile vanished, replaced with a cold stare. "I don't even wanna hear it, Raven. She's somewhere, and I'm gonna find her. If you're here to try to talk me out of it, you're wasting your time. Cyborg already tried, okay?"
"You can't find her, nobody can now. She's with Slade."
"I found her before when she was with Slade," retorted the Changeling, "remember? Right before she sacrificed herself to save the whole city?"
"But this time she's not just going to be sitting around waiting to be found," insisted Raven. "She tried to kill David in broad daylight and then vanished. Even Robin hasn't been able to find a trace of her since then. Wherever she is now, you're not gonna find her running around quarries and mountainsides three hundred miles from home."
"How do you know that?!" shouted Beast Boy angrily. "How do you know what she's gonna do? Maybe she wants to be found, huh? Maybe Slade's making her do this stuff again and she doesn't have a choice and she's waiting for one of us to come and help her! Maybe it was all a misunderstanding!"
"Maybe," said Raven, and her voice did not rise, though the look in her eyes that he still couldn't identify did, "but even if she is, do you really think you're gonna find her doing this?"
"Well at least I'm trying!" yelled Beast Boy back at Raven, his blood running hot and clouding over what little judgment he had. "At least I'm still trying to find her instead of forgetting about her as soon as she's out of sight!"
"I never forgot about Terra!" retorted Raven, shouting this time, not so much angrily as desperately. "But you're running around trying to find something that isn't there! You... you have to stop this."
"Oh yeah? Why?"
Despite the fact that it was the obvious response to her demand that he stop, Raven appeared to not be expecting that question, and she hesitated before answering. "Because..." she said, clearly scrambling for an answer. "Because you're not gonna find her."
"I'll find her," said Beast Boy as solemnly as he could. "I don't care what it takes, I'll find her."
"The rest of us do care what it takes, Beast Boy. We need you in Jump City, not in San Simeon or wherever else you're gonna run off to once you find out she's not there!"
He scoffed. "I've got my communicator. If anything happens, Robin's gonna call me."
"That's not what I mean," said Raven. "We don't need your help, we need you." He did not even get the chance to consider what she might mean by that before she had abruptly moved on. "What happens if you don't find Terra tomorrow, or this week, or next? How long are you gonna look for her?"
Beast Boy had refused to even consider the answer to that question, and so he ducked it. "Until I find her!" he declared defiantly, as though an expression of determination was enough to summon Terra to his presence.
"And if you do find her? What if she is working for Slade? What if she tries to kill you?"
"She's not working for Slade!" shouted Beast Boy. "She killed Slade, she saved the entire city by sacrificing herself! Whatever happened with David was... I don't know what it was, but she's not working for Slade!"
"How do you know that?"
"Because I know Terra! I know her better than any of you, and I know she's not like that. None of you would believe me before, when I told you that she wasn't evil, and now it's happening again!"
There was actual desperation in Raven's voice as she replied. "Beast Boy, she tried to murder David!"
Beast Boy didn't even blink. "So did you!"
His words hit Raven like a shovel to the face, and she lost whatever train of thought she had previously been running with. Beast Boy by now was beyond upset, and he stepped forward and pointed a gloved finger at her like a dagger.
"You know what I think, Raven?" he yelled, spitting the words out of his mouth like bitter venom. "I think you're afraid I will find her, and that we're all gonna see just how wrong you were about her! You never liked her! You were always trying to talk about how she was a coward or a traitor - "
"She was a traitor!"
"Not at the end!" shouted Beast Boy, feeling hot tears forming up in his eyes, and he stabbed at the air with his finger like a fire poker. "You said so yourself, she was more than just a traitor! She was our friend, she was my friend, and I won't give up on her just because you think I should!" Some part of Beast Boy wanted to stop himself and stem the words that were flowing unbidden from his mouth, but he had as much chance of that as he did of bailing out the tide with a bucket, and he continued unabated. "You don't trust anyone! Not Terra, not David, not me, nobody! You always hated her and now you want me to just forget about her, like she's just some other criminal again!"
"That's not what I - "
"Then what do you want, Raven?!" continued Beast Boy, "Why do you care if I go looking for her? It's not like I made any of you guys come help me! You don't even like having me around, so what gives?"
Of all the things he had said, this was the one that plainly caught Raven off balance. Her gaze faltered, and she stammered for a second and then fell silent, her expression a mixture of surprise and what might have been fear in anyone but Raven. He looked her in the eyes, and waited for her to reply to his question with some talk of duty or danger or the risk he was taking, but instead she said none of those things, indeed she said nothing at all, and slowly the expression that could have been fear in anyone else and that in Raven was just inexplicable grew until it was all that was there. And before Beast Boy could ask what was the matter, or even process that there was something the matter, Raven looked away, closing her eyes and lowering her head, and saying nothing at all.
Beast Boy had no idea how to respond to Raven's non-reply, but he was still angry enough to come up with something at least. "I don't care if the rest of you guys have given up on her, she needs our help, and I'm gonna find her and help her, even if you won't." He turned away, more for effect than for any other reason. "So you go do whatever you want, Raven," he said back to her bitterly. "I won't be bugging you or messing with you or getting in your hair at all until I find her, so if you're right and she's somewhere I can't find, then you should be happy."
Silence greeted his last remarks, and he let it sit for some time, before finally walking away from Raven towards the other end of the quarry. He was about to shift into a bird and fly off, when all of a sudden, Raven spoke up.
"She doesn't want to be found."
The words were practically whisper-quiet, to the point where even Beast Boy's hearing could barely detect them, yet unmistakably she had meant for him to hear. The tone was as un-Raven as it could have been without being filled with mirth, soft and hollow and hurt, but by what, he could not tell. It was sufficiently out of the ordinary for him to stop, and turn back, and see that Raven's head was lowered and her eyes shut.
"What?"
"She doesn't want to be found, or else you would have found her."
His blood rose again. "You don't know that," he hissed through his clenched fangs. "You can't know that!"
"Yes I do," said Raven, and she opened her eyes and lifted them slightly, peering at Beast Boy from under her eyelashes, almost furtively, as though she dreaded what was about to happen. "And so do you."
"That's not true!" said Beast Boy. "She's scared and confused and she's made some terrible - "
"She's been back for four months."
The comment was unexpected enough to stop Beast Boy short. "... what?" he asked, not seeing the implication Raven was trying to make. "Wait a minute... you... you knew she was back?!"
"Of course not," said Raven, though her voice remained quiet. "But David said that the first time he met her was the night Adonis attacked us, when he left to go looking for us by himself. That was four and a half months ago."
Something in what Raven was saying very much did not sit well. "... so... so what?" he said. "So she's been back for a while, what's that got to do with anything?"
"She's been watching the Tower for four months, watching what all of us do."
"How do you know what she's been up to?!"
"David left the Tower that night without telling anybody. He didn't have a communicator, didn't even know he was going to leave until a second before he did, and she still managed to run into him. She or Slade had to have been watching the Tower, waiting for him to show his face, right?"
"M... maybe...?" stammered Beast Boy, afraid of what Raven's conclusion might be, even though he couldn't see it himself just yet.
"So in all that time watching the Tower and waiting for David to show his face" said Raven, as her voice weakened even further, "if she wanted our help, or wanted to talk to any of us, don't you think she could have found a way to contact us?" Raven raised her head slowly, looking Beast Boy in the eye as she continued. "One little earthquake would have been enough."
"W.. what are you saying?"
"She watched us for four months, watched us close enough to know whenever one of us left the Tower," said Raven, "and she never tried to contact us or let us know she was alive."
"Raven..."
"She could have left you a sign that she was still alive whenever you went down to visit her."
"Raven... stop it..."
"She could have passed us a message through David, even a coded one."
"Stop it!"
"She didn't!" Raven sounded and looked teary-eyed as well now, and her voice picked up strength as she went along. "She let you... all of us... think she was dead for months. She only showed up long enough to try to kill David while the rest of us weren't there. Any time she wanted, she could have let us know she was back, and you'd have come running, but she didn't do it!"
"That doesn't mean she's - "
"It means she doesn't want to be found, Beast Boy!" exclaimed Raven, with far more emotion behind the words than anything Beast Boy ever remembered hearing. "She doesn't want to talk to us, or want our help, and she doesn't want you to find her, or you would have already! And if she doesn't want to be found, then you're never going to find her, and you know it. She could be a hundred miles underground or six thousand miles away or at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean."
"That's not true!"
"It is true. She tried to kill David right in the middle of everyone. She had to know you'd go looking for her as soon as you found out she was alive. David told you the first chance he got, and you've been looking ever since." She gestured around at the quarry. "Did you find anything? Did she leave you any trace?"
"Slade could be forcing her to work for him!" insisted Beast Boy, desperately grasping at anything that sounded plausible. "Like he did with Robin before!"
"Robin found a way to break free, or at least give us a sign." said Raven. "In four months... Terra didn't?"
The words landed on Beast Boy like a load of concrete, and he clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut hard enough to make his head quiver. "Why are you doing this?!" he demanded of Raven. "Why are you even here?! What do you care if I go looking for Terra?" With his eyes closed, he could not see the hesitation creep back into Raven's face, nor could he see her open and shut her mouth several times, as though trying to come up with an answer for a question that had none, or at least none that she was willing to commit to speech.
She might have answered, given time, she might not. In the end, she was not given it, for before Raven could come up with an appropriate answer, Beast Boy practically exploded. "I don't wanna hear it!" he shouted suddenly, not indicating exactly what it was he didn't want to hear. "I don't wanna hear any more! She's... she wouldn't... she can't be..."
Raven's voice had a pleading sound to it. "Beast Boy..."
"Leave me alone!" he yelled at her, opening his eyes and stepping back away from his teammate. "Just... just leave me alone!" And without another word, Beast Boy shifted into a hawk, and took off into the air, spiraling up out of the quarry, before turning away and flying off, out of sight, leaving Raven to watch him disappear over the lip of the enormous pit.
*----------------------------------------------------------*
"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices
Make instruments to plague us:
The dark and vicious place where thee he got
Cost him his eyes.
Thou hast spoken right, 'tis true;
The wheel is come full circle: I am here."
- William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, Scene 3
*----------------------------------------------------------*
Raven was certain of one thing. The tower shouldn’t have been this quiet.
The Tower was oppressively silent, like a living organism not daring to breathe, the very machines that surrounded her idling or going about their business with the barest minimum of noise. The digital clock on the wall even denied her the rhythm of its ticking, and the double-paned, shatter-proof glass of the common room windows blocked out the barest peep of the sounds from outside. She had a book with her, and a mug of tea, but she did not even pretend to be interested in either, the book laying unopened on the table in front of her, the tea cold and ignored. All too familiar.
Two weeks had passed since Slade and Terra had made their dramatic joint return-from-the-dead, setting to their usual business of beating the Titans half to death as though making up for lost time. Once again, the Titans had gotten off lucky, in a sense. Despite Slade and Terra's best efforts, all of them were still alive, though the margins had been more uncomfortably close for some than for others, and despite wild speculations by the media to the contrary, neither Slade nor Terra had shown so much as a hair of themselves since the event.
It should have been something of a relief that they had faded back into the darkness from whence they had come, a weight off Raven's mind, a sense that perhaps there had been a reprieve. It was not.
"This will come to pass. I will make sure of it."
The voice haunted her dreams, resonating down the corridors of her memory night after endless night. Meditation, mental exercise, even the prayers to Azar she had learned as a child did no good, for every evening he was waiting for her, unblemished, unstoppable, unrelenting in his pursuit. Every night she fought Slade anew in her dreams, and every night she lost, borne down by the weight of prophecy and damnation, until inevitably Slade's cold and iron-clad hands would grab her by the shoulders, and his emotionless mask of a face would stare her in the eye, and he would whisper to her the same words yet again.
"You're going to destroy the world. It's written all over your face."
Every night she woke up screaming.
Raven didn't sleep much to begin with. A hybrid of demon and human, only half of her even required it. For the other half, meditation was just as good. Often enough she would be up before any of the others, even Robin, whose nocturnal habits were as deeply ingrained as his mentor's. Still, there was only so much she could do with meditation alone, and no matter what she tried, every night Slade was waiting for her again, waiting to win and announce his message and bring her one more day closer to the end of the world. Small wonder that she had started to dread going to sleep, like a small child frightened of monsters under the bed. The only difference was where her monsters were located... and what they wanted.
For the fifth time this afternoon, Raven tried to pick up her book where she had left it off. For the fifth time this afternoon, she failed. The words would not sink in, for her mind was elsewhere, and the terrible stillness of the air around her only made it worse. For all the time she spent begging and praying and practically screaming for a bit of quiet around the Tower, the few rare times she ever received it were worse than the most annoying noise. In her current state, she just couldn't concentrate, not on the book, not on meditation, not on anything.
Not even on Slade.
A soft 'thud' shook through the tower from deep below her, barely discernible even in the midst of the silence. Five or six seconds passed, and then another one made the tea in her mug quiver, like a construction equipment being operated far away. Briefly she hesitated, wondering if this might be yet another emergency to respond to, but as the impacts (or whatever they were) settled down into a more regular rhythm, she simply sighed softly in mild annoyance, and stood up from the couch, leaving her mug and book where they sat. There were three other people in the Tower at present, and she certainly didn't have to go running off to investigate every weird noise, but right now she needed something to do, if only to clear her head. If only to stop her from thinking about...
She walked down the hall towards the elevator, feeling the near-silent tremors of whatever was making the sound through the metal floor beneath her feet. Already she was fairly sure she knew what was their cause, and who, but instead of taking her communicator and calling the person in question, she rode the elevator down to the training level near the base of the Tower, the sounds growing stronger as she approached them. She exited the elevator, and moved straight ahead towards the training room, punching in a keypad combination to override the seal on the door, and letting it slide open.
The training room was largely empty, the extraneous equipment that the various Titans used to test themselves against withdrawn into the walls or the floor. The only objects in the room were a series of large stone blocks, sitting lined against the far wall, and a single small computer terminal and chair extended against the wall. The floor was covered in gravel and bits of rock, scattered around randomly like a handful of sand cast over a table. And in the center of all of it stood a small figure in a bright red-orange suit, holding a metal baton that was presently on fire, or at least appeared to be. He stood still, like a conductor preparing to lead an orchestra, and then with a sudden movement, he swung the baton around as though swinging a polo mallet, and one of the rocks burst like a firecracker, showering bits of debris all over the room, rattling and rolling like a rainmaker until they finally lay still.
"Shouldn't you be in bed?"
David jumped, and turned around rapidly enough that he nearly lost his balance on the debris-covered floor, staggering and tripping over the rubble until Raven peremptorily swept it all aside with a wave of her hand. Once he had caught both his balance and his breath, the psychokinetic raised his eyes, or rather his eye, to face Raven. There were bandages wrapped around his head, covering his right eye, with a white eyepatch strapped over it to protect against the light. His left arm was in a cast from the forearm to the wrist, and held in a sling around his neck. A steel cane lay on the ground next to David's feet, and he slowly clipped his baton back onto his belt and picked it up before taking a few uneasy limping steps towards the computer terminal on the wall.
Raven entered the room, casting a quick glance over the carpet of stone fragments. "You shouldn't be down here," she said evenly.
David reached the computer and paused, rubbing his side with his good arm and wincing as he massaged the broken ribs that were still stitching themselves together. "I know," he said, and he pressed a button on the computer, causing the remaining intact rocks to withdraw into the walls and the floor. "I just..." He trailed off, not bothering to actually explain why he had felt the need to make his way down to the training room and start detonating a series of rocks. The choice of targets alone made it clear enough.
"Robin gave all of us the week off," said Raven, crossing her arms. "Besides, you're in no shape to be playing with rocks."
David didn't respond immediately, taking a deep breath and lowering his head. "Yeah," he said finally, "I know. That's kind of the point."
Raven resisted the urge to groan as she rolled her eyes. "Don't tell me you're thinking of - "
"I'm not suicidal," snapped David, glancing back at the sorceress, before returning his gaze to the computer screen. "If I couldn't beat her when I was 100, what kind of a chance would I have now? She'd tear me apart, even if I could find her."
Given what had happened, that seemed logical enough to Raven, but the talk of 'finding' Terra only served to remind her of what she was trying to avoid thinking about by coming down here, and her breath caught involuntarily. She tried to pass it off as nothing, but evidently David either noticed, or his own thoughts took him to the same place. "Have you heard from Beast Boy?" he asked suddenly, and she closed her eyes a moment before replying
"Not today," she said, and she opened her eyes and fixed them on the back of David's head, trying to maintain her facade of detached control. "Cyborg said he was still looking."
David didn't reply immediately. When he did, his voice was quieter than it had been before, and his head had lowered to the point where he was clearly no longer looking at the screen.
"I had to tell him," he said quietly. "You know that."
"No, you didn't," replied Raven, equally quietly, but with considerably more force behind the words. "You could have trusted me when I told you not to tell him. You could have decided to wait like I asked you to, instead of - "
"Instead of telling him that someone that tried to kill him and me and all the rest of you guys was back from the dead?" David turned around slowly, leaning on the cane as he did so, looking at Raven semi-incredulously. "You actually wanted me to hide that from him?"
"Look what it did to him," hissed Raven. "Look at what happened."
David lowered his head again, rubbing at his face with his hand, as if trying to scratch off the eyepatch strapped to his head. "Beast Boy's my friend," he said, almost lamely. "I'm wasn't gonna lie to him, not about something like this. What was I supposed to - "
"You were supposed to think about what was best for him, not what made you feel safer," said Raven. She barely knew what she was saying, but the words poured out of her mouth unbidden, and she did not stop them. "He's not some playground schoolteacher that you run off and tell everything to. Terra destroyed him, and it was a month before he pulled out of it. You weren't there, you don't know what happened, and you have no idea what he's going through now, thanks to you."
She did not get a chance to consider if perhaps she had gone too far, for David didn't react by wilting and falling silent, nor by becoming angry and screaming or denouncing her. Instead he raised his head slowly, his one intact eye returning Raven's stare unblinkingly. "Thanks to me?"
"You know what I mean," replied Raven, her voice unwavering.
"No, I don't." said David, and his voice did not waver either, a far rarer occurrence in his case. "Are you actually saying that I told Beast Boy that Terra was back because I was trying to hide behind him or something?"
"I don't know what you were trying to do," said Raven more savagely than she had intended, "but you wouldn't listen to me, and you obviously didn't care if he got hurt."
David recoiled as if he'd been slapped in the face, and there was such a look of shock in his eye that he didn't even have to reply. Raven said nothing, indeed she hadn't even meant to say that much, and the two of them watched one another for a bit, letting silence dampen down the emotions that Raven could feel coursing through the room like pyroclastic clouds.
"What if it had been you?" asked David suddenly, breaking the silence. "What if I'd run into some villain or monster from your past, someone you'd cared about or who'd tried to kill you? I'm sure there's somebody. What would you have done, Raven, if I decided not to tell you that someone you knew was back from the dead?" David's one-eyed stare was more intense than anything he'd fixed on her before, and while he wasn't shouting, his voice was dead serious. He did not even give her a chance to answer before continuing. "You'd have nailed me to the wall if I lied to you about something like that, and you'd probably be right to do it. And don't try to tell me you wouldn't."
Raven hesitated, unsure of what to say, and as her brain debated what reply to give, her mouth replied on its own accord. "He didn't need to know," she said hoarsely, her voice lowered to a raspy whisper.
"Since when do you get to make that call?" asked David. "Since when do any of us? I owe Beast Boy more than I can ever repay him, just like I owe you, and all the others. Do you actually think I'm about to turn around and lie to him after everything? After you told me how many times what would happen if I lied to any of you?"
"So you put him through all this again instead? That's real gratitude there..."
Her sarcasm fell on deaf ears. "You think I wanted that?" he replied. "You think I wanted to come back and tell him that Terra'd come back to life and was trying to kill me and had vanished? I read the reports, Raven, I know what happened between him and her..."
"You don't know anything about what happened."
"Maybe not, but I'm not stupid. I knew they were..." he hesitated and shook his head. "I knew he'd want to know she was alive."
"And what if it's a trap?" asked Raven, folding her arms. "They trapped you, it's happened before. What if they were counting on you to tell him that she was back so that they could get their hands on him? What then?"
There was only the slightest pause before David replied.
"Then you'll probably kill me."
Raven half-sighed, half-groaned, and lowered her head and shut her eyes. She needed a few moments to steady herself once again, and when she raised her head, David had slumped down into the chair in front of the computer terminal, and was rubbing his eyepatch with his good hand, the baton on his belt tapping quietly against the side of the chair, cold and lifeless.
"I'm not going to kill you," she said. "So stop it."
Another pause. "I know," said David quietly.
Neither David nor Raven said anything for a moment, and the terrible stillness that Raven had been trying to get away from embraced her once more. She shook her head irritatedly to drive it away, and finally resorted to asking another question. "Why did you even tell him?"
David didn't look up. "Because I had to."
She pressed on. "Why did you have to tell him?"
"Because I did, okay?" exclaimed David, leaning forward and raising his head once more. "Because whatever you say, he was going to find out eventually, and even if he wasn't, because I owe him - "
"Oh for the love of..." interrupted Raven, throwing her hands up and groaning. "Will you give this 'owing us' thing a rest already? It's just stupid."
David froze in mid-word, looking almost surprised, and when he replied, his voice was raised and angry. "I don't care if you think it's stupid, it's got nothing to do with you! And if you don't want the answer, don't ask the goddamn question!"
The two superheroes stared daggers at one another for several seconds, before David broke his gaze and groaned softly, lowering his head again and shaking it. Raven remained unmoved, her arms crossed in front of her chest, and she said nothing, waiting instead for David to finish.
"I told him because he's my friend, okay?" he said finally, chancing a glance back up at Raven. "I never had many of those, at the centers, and never any like you guys, and I... won't lie to him, or to you, or to any of the others just because you think I should. I know it hurt him, and I'm sorry, and I wish it hadn't or that I could have done something about it," she opened her mouth to cut him off but he cut her off first, raising his hand in protest, "and I know you're gonna say that I could have just not told him, but I couldn't do that, Raven, all right? He's my friend, and I'm not gonna keep things like this from him, not for you, not for anybody. Period."
David shut his eye for a second and breathed raggedly, his fists clenched shut on the armrests of the chair, and Raven could feel the anger and the bewilderment and most of all the frustration pouring off him empathically like the smoke from a candle, mingling with her own. At a loss for what to do, she settled for simply taking a deep breath and pushing the empathic cloud away from her as David clammed up again for a few moments, before blurting out an addendum.
"I just... I don't know what's going on, or what all this... this stuff is that keeps happening, and I know that... I'm... a part of it somehow, but not why... and I don't know if you know, or not, or if you'd tell me if you did know, or..." he trailed off, groaning and clutching his good arm lightly over his stomach as he grimaced. "I'm just... tired of getting attacked and ambushed and all of these plots and mysteries and I won't..." he paused once again, and gathered his breath, and exhaled, and steadied his voice, "I won't add to it all by hiding things from Beast Boy... or from you."
Raven tried to think of something to say in reply, some kind of demand that David be more circumspect in what he say in the future, but she simply did not have the stomach for it any longer. David's fear and frustration was bleeding over into hers, feeding the parts of her psyche she was desperately trying to keep contained, and so instead she simply nodded and turned away slowly. "I really wish you hadn't told him," she said after a moment, and left it at that.
"I wish I hadn't needed to," was his reply, and she said nothing to it, but simply walked towards the door. She was barely three paces from it when David's voice stopped her.
"Raven?"
She paused and sighed, and turned around, suddenly very eager to be anywhere but here, and when she did, she saw that he was leaning forward in his chair, his elbows on his knees, his face in one hand. "What is it?" she asked, and he did not look up as he answered.
"If I hadn't told Beast Boy, you weren't going to, right?"
"No, I wasn't," she said, unsure how he could possibly have had a doubt in his mind on that account.
As it turned out, he didn't. "Why not?" he asked.
"What do you mean 'why not?'"
"Why weren't you gonna tell him?"
Raven hesitated for a moment, unsure if this was some kind of trick. "Because I knew what it would do to him," she said. "I knew what Terra did to him back before she turned to stone, and what she'd do to him now. I knew he'd go looking for her and that he might get himself killed, and even if he didn't that he was going to be hurt all over again and I didn't want that. Okay? I know you don't think he is, but he's a friend of mine, and unlike you, I don't let my friends get hurt when I have the choice."
David didn't say anything, but slowly sat up and back, and crossed his good arm with his injured one, and stared quietly at her with his one good eye in a fashion that was most unsettling for no reason that she could discern. Restlessly, she tapped her foot on the ground. "What?" she asked.
David took a deep breath and let it out slowly, and his voice was calm and quiet as he responded with words that froze her blood.
"Is that why you didn't tell me that you found something in my mind?"
Raven did not, could not reply for several seconds, frozen still like a statue, the hairs on the back of her neck sticking up straight as she returned David's stare. She knew that the look on her face was enough to confirm every suspicion he'd ever had, but he did not scream or shout or get angry again, but just sat there and slowly explained.
"I've only ever heard you scream twice," he said carefully, slowly. "Once when Adonis tried to eat you, and once when you woke up from that trip into my mind. You screamed and you practically ran out the door, and you nearly gave Beast Boy a heart attack. You tried to say after that it was just... feedback or something, and that I was a normal kinetic, and you showed me how to use this baton... but back there in the church when... when you thought I might be working for Slade, you said that you had no idea how my powers worked or where they came from." He uncrossed his arms and sat up a bit straighter. "If I was a normal kinetic, like you said I was, you'd know exactly how they worked. You said you found out how they worked when you went into my head."
He paused only for an instant as he leaned forward towards her, long enough for all of this to sink in, but not long enough for her to reply. His voice remained calm, albeit a bit afraid, as if he wasn't certain if she was about to blast him to ash.
"Ever since you went in my mind, there's been something about me that scares the hell out of you, and I don't know what it is, but that night you woke up you were more scared than I've ever seen you get, except once. And I don't have the first clue what it would take to scare you, I'm not sure I want to know what that takes, but I think you found something inside me that scared you half to death." He paused and let his breath go slowly. "And... you didn't tell me about it."
Raven's voice had failed her, but she managed to pull it together long enough to cough out a reply. "You... you knew?" she stammered, not even realizing that it was a confession.
David, to her surprise, actually chuckled, and then grimaced as his ribs began to ache again. "I know you think I'm oblivious," he said, "but you're not anywhere near as hard to read as you think you are. I knew you'd found something the moment you woke up. Why do you think I was hiding up on the roof when you and Cyborg came to give me that baton? I don't know what you found, or why you didn't tell me about it, but I know it scared you to death, and I know you decided to hide it from me.
Raven didn't say a word, didn't move a muscle, didn't even twitch as David slowly and painfully stood up from his chair, picking the cane up as he did so and steadying himself before facing Raven again.
"And... you know what?" he said calmly, looking her in the eye. "That's okay."
She blinked.
"You don't have to tell me what it was," said David, slowly limping forward. "I don't know if I'd even understand it if you did, or if it would just scare the living hell out of me too. If you've got some reason for not wanting to tell me... then that's all right, because you don't owe me an explanation, and you don't owe me a bunch of secrets, in fact you don't owe me anything at all. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't make you tell me, but I don't want to, because despite what you think, I actually do trust your judgment." He shook his head slowly and lowered it. "More than mine at least." He sighed and lifted his head and trudged over to her. "If you don't want to tell me, you don't have to, and you don't even have to tell me why. I trust your judgment, and I trust you."
He stopped right in front of her, leaning on the cane and obviously trying to pretend like he wasn't in several kinds of pain.
"But don't ever ask me to hide something from Beast Boy or any of the others, Raven, because I won't do it, and I don't care if it's bad for the team or not, or if you think it would hurt them or not. You guys are the only ones who have any idea what's going on here, at least compared to me, and I can't make the decision of what is and isn't important for you guys to know. And even if all that wasn't true, I won't hide something from Beast Boy for your sake, or for anybody else's."
He stepped to the side, and walked past her towards the door, his cane tapping on the ground as he went. "Not even for mine."
The door slid open and Raven heard David walking out of it, but before it closed, it was her turn to stop him.
"David?"
She did not turn her head, but she heard him pause, and then turn around carefully.
"What was the other time?"
There was a hesitation. "... what other time?"
"The other time you saw me get that afraid?"
The hesitation was more pronounced, lasting several seconds, before David replied simply.
"Ever since I told him about Terra."
She said nothing to that, and after a few more moments, David turned away and the door closed being him, leaving Raven standing in the empty training room, listening to the soft sound of his footsteps and the tapping of his cane as he made his way down the hall, until finally the sound vanished into more silence. This time however, she did not notice it, and neither moved nor spoke nor raised her eyes, her mind adrift within itself, like meditation but unfocused and unbidden. And when finally a minute or an hour had passed, she didn't know which, Raven closed her eyes tight and shook like she was in a snowstorm and wrapped her cloak around her. And as she whispered to herself a simple word in a dead language, a black sheath enveloped her entire body, and she suddenly vanished into nothing.
*----------------------------------------------------------*
The stone quarry was as quiet and dark, long abandoned for the night by the workers who operated it. A huge terraced pit delved into the side of a mountain of granite and marble, the place was as barren as the surface of an alien world, indeed it could well have been mistaken for such a thing, save for the heavy machinery, the pile drivers and steam shovels, the rock crushers and bulldozers, the debris trucks, water cannons, and pneumatic drills that all lay silent now, left where they were for the morning when the quarry workers would return and bring the place to life once more. For now there was nothing but the occasional insect or molerat to disturb the rattling of pebbles pushed about by the wind.
And none of the critters in question noticed an addition to their numbers, not even a green one.
A single small rodent, a rat perhaps or a mole or miniature badger, striped evergreen over emerald with pale eyes that blinked in the night sky crept from its perch beneath an earth-mover, and cautiously moved forward into the floor of the rock pit. The rodent made no noise, looking left and right before moving a bit further, sniffing at the ground every few steps, paying no mind to the owls that circled overhead, who were occasionally darting down to snatch a field mouse for their evening meal. None of them would target a discolored rodent, nor one that smelled and moved as strangely as this one, and the rodent appeared to know it, for it moved heedlessly into the center of the broad quarry floor before suddenly increasing in volume a hundredfold, and standing up as a green-skinned, pointy-eared, purple-clad human.
Beast Boy looked around the empty rock quarry with his once-more human eyes and sighed softly, kicking a few pebbles across the quarry as he crouched down again and examined the dirt for signs of disturbance, fissures in the rocks, anything, everything, a single sign of what he was looking for.
Nothing.
Quarries and caves, crevices and riverbeds, slag heaps and rock gardens, and nothing, not a trace or indication that Terra had visited any of them. He had tried everything he could, returning to every place he had ever been with Terra, every secret hideaway she had ever told him about, and half a dozen others she hadn't told anyone, but that he had known about through Robin's surveillance or Cyborg's tracers or simply through guesswork of his own. Robin might have done it methodically, patiently, with techniques of search and detection honed over years, but Beast Boy neither knew any such things nor cared to. He had spent days roaming the city nearly at random, then the suburbs, then the rural areas outside Jump. He had traveled to places that Terra had only mentioned in passing, places she had commented always wanting to go, places that had no connection at all to her save for rock and stone. The Grand Canyon, hundreds of miles away a thousand miles long, he had surveyed over three days from the air, not because of clues or indications or evidence, but because of the day that they had sat up on the roof of the tower and she had told him about how amazing the river valley was, and how much she had loved floating down the canyon and feeling the rocks and the earth surrounding her. He had laughed then, and said that one day they'd have to go back, her on her rock and him as a swallow. This time he had gone as a swallow, but there was no floating rock with her perched on it waiting for him, nor anything but the sun and the wind and the occasional carload of tourists trying to identify a forest-green bird in their guidebooks.
Nothing.
For three days now, he had gone back to basics, borrowing Robin's files on Terra from before she had tried to murder them all, files so comprehensive that they contained information even Beast Boy had never known, about sightings of Terra prior to her arrival in Jump, reconnaissance reports from national park rangers and the Bureau of Land Management. He had not asked Robin for the files, but had simply taken them. Robin had not stopped him. Nobody had.
One by one he had gone to every place mentioned in those reports within five hundred miles of Jump City, a cave in Joshua Tree Forest, an artificial hill in Golden Gate Park, a small castle near the edge of Death Valley, an abandoned Borax mine outside Tehachapi, place after place, sighting after sighting, and yet all that was waiting for him in each successive place was stillness, and quiet, and lifeless stone.
And so it was again.
Terra had been seen near Aesir Construction's rock quarry some time in the distant past, but she was not here now, or rather if she was, he could find no hint of it. In previous searches, he had shifted into a mole or earthworm to explore the very ground beneath the sites in question, but he could not do so here, not with solid rock beneath his feet. Eight places he had been today, and at all eight, like the eighty before, there was nothing. He indulged his frustrations in a savage kick at the side of a five-ton forklift and was rewarded with a minute or two of hopping on one leg, grabbing at his hurt foot. When the pain finally subsided, he growled to himself and made another round of the quarry, level by level, not sure at all what he was looking for, but knowing he wasn't finding it, not here at least. Top to bottom and bottom to top again he went, before shifting back into a bird and flying back down into the center of the quarry. Another pang of the pain of loss that had been shooting through him ever since David had told him of Terra's return struck him as he landed, and he shouted out to the empty quarry, heedless of whether or not it was a good idea.
"Terra!"
Nothing.
The echoes of his own voice died down and he slumped down onto the ground, leaning against the forklift he had previously struck, and caught his breath slowly, his eyes clenched shut, his gloved hands holding his face. Several minutes passed before he could raise his head again, and reached down to the PDA on his belt that he had downloaded Robin's files to, and brought up the next reference, a cliff overlooking a vineyard near the coast north of Jump. Terra had mentioned to a reporter for a newspaper as having passed by there once, eight and a half months ago.
It was his best remaining lead.
He sighed softly and pulled his knees up against his chest, working up the will to overcome how tired he was and fly off to the north, and trying to figure out what he was going to say to Cyborg or Robin when he checked in later tonight. He was at the point of getting up and flying off when he suddenly heard a loud 'POP', like a paper bag overfilled with air being struck by a golf club, and a rush of wind and small pebbles rolled over the forklift. A second later, Beast Boy was on his feet, racing around the heavy machinery. "Terra?!" he asked breathlessly, not even pausing to think of how it was that Terra would have suddenly appeared, but a second later he ground to a halt, blinked several times, and raised an eyebrow.
"... Raven?"
Raven was standing where nobody had been an instant ago, having apparently appeared out of nowhere (as she often did). She was looking around at her surroundings, and seemed almost surprised as to see Beast Boy appear as he had been to see her show up. Indeed, such was their mutual astonishment that Beast Boy was the first to speak.
"What are you doing here?"
The question seemed to galvanize Raven's capacity to speak. "I... wanted to see how it was going."
Beast Boy blinked several times, utterly unprepared to answer that question, at least from Raven. Robin and Cyborg had been asking him that daily of course, but Raven had been, as usual, avoiding him in the brief times when he was back at the tower, usually whenever he had run out of places to look. As such, he stammered for a few moments before answering. "Um... it's uh... it's going okay..." he said. "I mean... I haven't found her yet but..."
Raven glanced around the empty quarry. "You thought she might be here?"
Beast Boy breathed a soft sigh of relief that he had not had to finish the previous sentence. "Robin's stuff said that there was some kinda earthquake around here a few weeks ago, and I thought... you know..."
"Yeah," said Raven, though she certainly didn't sound convinced. "So... was she..."
"Um..." said Beast Boy almost nervously, like he was admitting to some kind of indiscretion, "... no. I mean... it doesn't look like it..."
Raven only nodded. "So what are you gonna do now?"
Still wondering what was behind her sudden interest in all of this, Beast Boy scratched the back of his head with one hand. "Well... there's this place up north where she said once that she went to, so I thought I'd go check that out."
Raven seemed less than overwhelmed with the brilliance of this plan, but she refrained, at least for the moment, from disparaging it openly. In fact, she seemed rather reluctant to speak at all, which only made this all the weirder.
"Where is it?"
"Like I said, it's up north. A place called 'San Simon' I think, next to a - "
"San Simeon?" asked Raven all of a sudden, and she sounded surprised, of all things
Beast Boy hesitated before replying. "Uh, yeah... I think..."
"Beast Boy, that's three hundred miles away, at least."
The number landed on his head like a weight. He had not imagined it was anything like that far off. "Oh," he said, expressive as always. "Um... well... I guess I'll have to check it out tomorrow then. I can get halfway there tonight and then make the rest of... the trip... in... Raven?"
He hadn't noticed before, a product of his own surprise and the bad light, but Raven looked... different than she normally did. It was nothing physical, her hood and cloak and belt and uniform and everything else was just as it had been before on a hundred different days, but there was something in her expression, her look, that was off. There was something in her eyes that was not normally present, and he couldn't tell what. It wasn't an intensity exactly, or anything else specific that he knew how to describe, but he had seen it before, once or twice. He just wished he could remember where...
All this took a fraction of a second, as Raven replied in normal time. "... what?"
"Are... is everything okay?"
"I'm fine," she said, though she sounded just the slightest bit unsure. "But... San Simeon?"
Beast Boy shrugged. "It's... kinda the next place on the list, you know? I mean she's gotta be somewhere, right?" He tried to laugh, and managed only a nervous grin, one which he could tell had not fooled Raven, in fact if anything whatever the indescribable something was that was surrounding her only seemed to deepen. Was it worry?
"You're going to San Simeon because Terra passed by it once, months ago?"
The question could easily have been phrased with Raven's signature dry wit, calculated to make everyone around her (and particularly Beast Boy) sound like an idiot, but it was not. Indeed, it sounded like a real question, and there was an ever-so-soft note of... surprise in her voice? That couldn't be right.
Still, when she put it like that, it didn't sound all that promising, and he frowned. "Well unless you've got a better idea, yeah. I've already looked everywhere near Jump. Maybe she's hiding somewhere further out?" It sounded more likely the way he put it. He preferred that.
"Beast Boy..." said Raven, and this time he was sure that something was wrong. Her voice sounded thin and weak, like it had that night many months ago after the incident with Malchior, though why it should sound that way was beyond him. "... she's... Terra's not in San Simeon."
He shrugged. "I won't know unless I look," he said, trying to pass it off as a joke. As before, he failed, the empty feeling in the pit of his stomach robbing him of all mirth, and even of the capacity to fake it.
"She's not there," said Raven with all the certainty of someone predicting the sunrise, a hint of desperation to her voice. "She's not in any of those places."
Beast Boy's fake smile vanished, replaced with a cold stare. "I don't even wanna hear it, Raven. She's somewhere, and I'm gonna find her. If you're here to try to talk me out of it, you're wasting your time. Cyborg already tried, okay?"
"You can't find her, nobody can now. She's with Slade."
"I found her before when she was with Slade," retorted the Changeling, "remember? Right before she sacrificed herself to save the whole city?"
"But this time she's not just going to be sitting around waiting to be found," insisted Raven. "She tried to kill David in broad daylight and then vanished. Even Robin hasn't been able to find a trace of her since then. Wherever she is now, you're not gonna find her running around quarries and mountainsides three hundred miles from home."
"How do you know that?!" shouted Beast Boy angrily. "How do you know what she's gonna do? Maybe she wants to be found, huh? Maybe Slade's making her do this stuff again and she doesn't have a choice and she's waiting for one of us to come and help her! Maybe it was all a misunderstanding!"
"Maybe," said Raven, and her voice did not rise, though the look in her eyes that he still couldn't identify did, "but even if she is, do you really think you're gonna find her doing this?"
"Well at least I'm trying!" yelled Beast Boy back at Raven, his blood running hot and clouding over what little judgment he had. "At least I'm still trying to find her instead of forgetting about her as soon as she's out of sight!"
"I never forgot about Terra!" retorted Raven, shouting this time, not so much angrily as desperately. "But you're running around trying to find something that isn't there! You... you have to stop this."
"Oh yeah? Why?"
Despite the fact that it was the obvious response to her demand that he stop, Raven appeared to not be expecting that question, and she hesitated before answering. "Because..." she said, clearly scrambling for an answer. "Because you're not gonna find her."
"I'll find her," said Beast Boy as solemnly as he could. "I don't care what it takes, I'll find her."
"The rest of us do care what it takes, Beast Boy. We need you in Jump City, not in San Simeon or wherever else you're gonna run off to once you find out she's not there!"
He scoffed. "I've got my communicator. If anything happens, Robin's gonna call me."
"That's not what I mean," said Raven. "We don't need your help, we need you." He did not even get the chance to consider what she might mean by that before she had abruptly moved on. "What happens if you don't find Terra tomorrow, or this week, or next? How long are you gonna look for her?"
Beast Boy had refused to even consider the answer to that question, and so he ducked it. "Until I find her!" he declared defiantly, as though an expression of determination was enough to summon Terra to his presence.
"And if you do find her? What if she is working for Slade? What if she tries to kill you?"
"She's not working for Slade!" shouted Beast Boy. "She killed Slade, she saved the entire city by sacrificing herself! Whatever happened with David was... I don't know what it was, but she's not working for Slade!"
"How do you know that?"
"Because I know Terra! I know her better than any of you, and I know she's not like that. None of you would believe me before, when I told you that she wasn't evil, and now it's happening again!"
There was actual desperation in Raven's voice as she replied. "Beast Boy, she tried to murder David!"
Beast Boy didn't even blink. "So did you!"
His words hit Raven like a shovel to the face, and she lost whatever train of thought she had previously been running with. Beast Boy by now was beyond upset, and he stepped forward and pointed a gloved finger at her like a dagger.
"You know what I think, Raven?" he yelled, spitting the words out of his mouth like bitter venom. "I think you're afraid I will find her, and that we're all gonna see just how wrong you were about her! You never liked her! You were always trying to talk about how she was a coward or a traitor - "
"She was a traitor!"
"Not at the end!" shouted Beast Boy, feeling hot tears forming up in his eyes, and he stabbed at the air with his finger like a fire poker. "You said so yourself, she was more than just a traitor! She was our friend, she was my friend, and I won't give up on her just because you think I should!" Some part of Beast Boy wanted to stop himself and stem the words that were flowing unbidden from his mouth, but he had as much chance of that as he did of bailing out the tide with a bucket, and he continued unabated. "You don't trust anyone! Not Terra, not David, not me, nobody! You always hated her and now you want me to just forget about her, like she's just some other criminal again!"
"That's not what I - "
"Then what do you want, Raven?!" continued Beast Boy, "Why do you care if I go looking for her? It's not like I made any of you guys come help me! You don't even like having me around, so what gives?"
Of all the things he had said, this was the one that plainly caught Raven off balance. Her gaze faltered, and she stammered for a second and then fell silent, her expression a mixture of surprise and what might have been fear in anyone but Raven. He looked her in the eyes, and waited for her to reply to his question with some talk of duty or danger or the risk he was taking, but instead she said none of those things, indeed she said nothing at all, and slowly the expression that could have been fear in anyone else and that in Raven was just inexplicable grew until it was all that was there. And before Beast Boy could ask what was the matter, or even process that there was something the matter, Raven looked away, closing her eyes and lowering her head, and saying nothing at all.
Beast Boy had no idea how to respond to Raven's non-reply, but he was still angry enough to come up with something at least. "I don't care if the rest of you guys have given up on her, she needs our help, and I'm gonna find her and help her, even if you won't." He turned away, more for effect than for any other reason. "So you go do whatever you want, Raven," he said back to her bitterly. "I won't be bugging you or messing with you or getting in your hair at all until I find her, so if you're right and she's somewhere I can't find, then you should be happy."
Silence greeted his last remarks, and he let it sit for some time, before finally walking away from Raven towards the other end of the quarry. He was about to shift into a bird and fly off, when all of a sudden, Raven spoke up.
"She doesn't want to be found."
The words were practically whisper-quiet, to the point where even Beast Boy's hearing could barely detect them, yet unmistakably she had meant for him to hear. The tone was as un-Raven as it could have been without being filled with mirth, soft and hollow and hurt, but by what, he could not tell. It was sufficiently out of the ordinary for him to stop, and turn back, and see that Raven's head was lowered and her eyes shut.
"What?"
"She doesn't want to be found, or else you would have found her."
His blood rose again. "You don't know that," he hissed through his clenched fangs. "You can't know that!"
"Yes I do," said Raven, and she opened her eyes and lifted them slightly, peering at Beast Boy from under her eyelashes, almost furtively, as though she dreaded what was about to happen. "And so do you."
"That's not true!" said Beast Boy. "She's scared and confused and she's made some terrible - "
"She's been back for four months."
The comment was unexpected enough to stop Beast Boy short. "... what?" he asked, not seeing the implication Raven was trying to make. "Wait a minute... you... you knew she was back?!"
"Of course not," said Raven, though her voice remained quiet. "But David said that the first time he met her was the night Adonis attacked us, when he left to go looking for us by himself. That was four and a half months ago."
Something in what Raven was saying very much did not sit well. "... so... so what?" he said. "So she's been back for a while, what's that got to do with anything?"
"She's been watching the Tower for four months, watching what all of us do."
"How do you know what she's been up to?!"
"David left the Tower that night without telling anybody. He didn't have a communicator, didn't even know he was going to leave until a second before he did, and she still managed to run into him. She or Slade had to have been watching the Tower, waiting for him to show his face, right?"
"M... maybe...?" stammered Beast Boy, afraid of what Raven's conclusion might be, even though he couldn't see it himself just yet.
"So in all that time watching the Tower and waiting for David to show his face" said Raven, as her voice weakened even further, "if she wanted our help, or wanted to talk to any of us, don't you think she could have found a way to contact us?" Raven raised her head slowly, looking Beast Boy in the eye as she continued. "One little earthquake would have been enough."
"W.. what are you saying?"
"She watched us for four months, watched us close enough to know whenever one of us left the Tower," said Raven, "and she never tried to contact us or let us know she was alive."
"Raven..."
"She could have left you a sign that she was still alive whenever you went down to visit her."
"Raven... stop it..."
"She could have passed us a message through David, even a coded one."
"Stop it!"
"She didn't!" Raven sounded and looked teary-eyed as well now, and her voice picked up strength as she went along. "She let you... all of us... think she was dead for months. She only showed up long enough to try to kill David while the rest of us weren't there. Any time she wanted, she could have let us know she was back, and you'd have come running, but she didn't do it!"
"That doesn't mean she's - "
"It means she doesn't want to be found, Beast Boy!" exclaimed Raven, with far more emotion behind the words than anything Beast Boy ever remembered hearing. "She doesn't want to talk to us, or want our help, and she doesn't want you to find her, or you would have already! And if she doesn't want to be found, then you're never going to find her, and you know it. She could be a hundred miles underground or six thousand miles away or at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean."
"That's not true!"
"It is true. She tried to kill David right in the middle of everyone. She had to know you'd go looking for her as soon as you found out she was alive. David told you the first chance he got, and you've been looking ever since." She gestured around at the quarry. "Did you find anything? Did she leave you any trace?"
"Slade could be forcing her to work for him!" insisted Beast Boy, desperately grasping at anything that sounded plausible. "Like he did with Robin before!"
"Robin found a way to break free, or at least give us a sign." said Raven. "In four months... Terra didn't?"
The words landed on Beast Boy like a load of concrete, and he clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut hard enough to make his head quiver. "Why are you doing this?!" he demanded of Raven. "Why are you even here?! What do you care if I go looking for Terra?" With his eyes closed, he could not see the hesitation creep back into Raven's face, nor could he see her open and shut her mouth several times, as though trying to come up with an answer for a question that had none, or at least none that she was willing to commit to speech.
She might have answered, given time, she might not. In the end, she was not given it, for before Raven could come up with an appropriate answer, Beast Boy practically exploded. "I don't wanna hear it!" he shouted suddenly, not indicating exactly what it was he didn't want to hear. "I don't wanna hear any more! She's... she wouldn't... she can't be..."
Raven's voice had a pleading sound to it. "Beast Boy..."
"Leave me alone!" he yelled at her, opening his eyes and stepping back away from his teammate. "Just... just leave me alone!" And without another word, Beast Boy shifted into a hawk, and took off into the air, spiraling up out of the quarry, before turning away and flying off, out of sight, leaving Raven to watch him disappear over the lip of the enormous pit.
*----------------------------------------------------------*
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 24, Cont'd
The cavern's floor was uneven, a product of its creation no doubt, and the sound of dripping condensation from stalactites overhead formed a chorus around Raven, but she kept her feet steady and her eyes forward, and slowly made her way through. She could of course have floated or flown or phased right through the rock, but she did none of those things. Clambering over the rocks gave her something to think about, and she desperately needed something to think about right now.
Moreso than ever, in fact.
She had gone to the quarry to... Great Azar, she had no idea why she had gone to the quarry at all. She had not gotten further in her reasoning than trying to help Beast Boy somehow before she was suddenly there, and trying to make up a reason to have come. How she could have imagined that he would listen to her telling him that Terra wasn't coming back this time was beyond her, but she had tried, and predictably enough, he had rejected it out of hand. His pained expression, tears running down his emerald face as he tried to assure himself that Terra wasn't actually trying to kill them all, that this was all some kind of mis-understanding, danced before her eyes hours after the fact. She had teleported back to the Tower, tried to meditate, tried to do anything to forget what had just happened, and she had failed. The spike of pain, of distress, of hurt and anguish and betrayal that had emanated from Beast Boy when he had finally turned and run away had been strong enough to nearly knock her over, and it was only hours after the fact that she had realized that as Beast Boy had left her there, he hadn't been flying North, towards San Simeon, but South-West, back towards Jump City.
It was then that she had realized where he was going.
She had not been back to this place in more than seven months, and it had not improved in her absence. The igneous stone had covered most of the evidence of what had taken place here, save for the occasional bit of metal or piece of rusted equipment still sticking up from the rock like a spike. She avoided these carefully, moving slowly so as not to trip, and periodically feeling ahead with her empathic sense, looking for a small spark of life within this dead cave.
Every time it was up ahead, and every time it hadn't moved.
She came around the final corner at last, and ahead there was light. A flashlight, to be precise, held by a figure cloaked in shadows, who was standing before a large dais. Atop the pedestal was mounted an incredibly lifelike statue, beneath which sat a metal plaque, engraved with words that Raven remembered all too well:
Terra
A Teen Titan
A True Friend
The cavern was cloaked in utter silence, save for the distant sounds of water drops echoing through it. The figure staring forlornly at the statue made no noise at all, indeed, he scarcely seemed to be breathing. The flashlight held lightly in his hand drooped, forgotten, its light aimed at nothing, casting the statue into inky shadow. No word or movement or gesture did its holder make, yet to Raven, the empathic noise was as loud as a brass band.
She stepped forward.
Her footsteps made no appreciable noise, and yet Beast Boy's ears perked up, and he turned his head slowly to see her entering the cave. Confusion was written on his tear-streaked face, but he said nothing, and asked no questions, and did not seem either as surprised or as angry as she had assumed he would be. Indeed, for some reason, the waves of mental pain flowing off of him seemed to lessen as he saw her, even as he turned slowly back to face the statue.
She finally reached the flatter part of the cave on which the dais and statue was mounted, and softly she walked up alongside Beast Boy, looking up at the frozen still-image of Terra, arms spread wide, legs braced, hair forming a wavy halo around her head as she looked up into the air with unblinking stone eyes. Raven wasn't sure what had expected to find down here, perhaps an empty dais now that Terra was apparently back, but then Beast Boy still frequented this place every so often, and if Terra had truly not wanted her return to be known, she would have had to replace the statue with another, perfect copy. Raven had no trouble imagining that such a feat was well within the Geokinetic's powers.
"D'you remember that time... Mumbo tried to rob the federal bank?"
There was a soft, wistful quality to Beast Boy's voice, so out of tune with the waves of empathic pain that Raven could feel emanating from him. She had planned on saying something, what she wasn't sure, but something, anything to try and help him, but the intervening hours had not produced anything specific, and she was thus content to simply play along.
"I think so," she said. Mumbo had tried to rob the federal bank several times, but she was fairly sure she knew which occasion he was talking about.
"Mumbo thought he'd got away," said Beast Boy, and there was even a hint of a smile on his face. "He'd busted by Rob, and I tried to stop him but he hit me with some kinda glue from his flower squirter. I remember chasing him out the door, and he sorta turned back to laugh at us or something, and... right then Terra hit him right in the face with a big dirt fist from outta the ground." He shook his head and definitely smiled this time, though the waves did not stop. "Mumbo still doesn't know what hit him."
The changeling lapsed back into silence, still looking up at Terra, and after a few moments' silence, Raven tried her best to reciprocate.
"I remember one time," she said, "Starfire got her hands on some fashion magazine with a bunch of advice columns in it, and decided to get Terra and me to have a 'girl talk' with her." Raven smirked despite herself at the memory. "It wasn't designed for aliens or people who lived in caves, so it turned into an hour of Terra trying to explain to Starfire what everything in the magazine meant... after Starfire ate the perfume ads."
The recollection elicited a soft chuckle from Beast Boy. "Hehe, yeah... that was priceless."
Raven raised an eyebrow. "You weren't there."
"Oh," said Beast Boy. "Um... I er... sorta was listening in. Fly on the wall?" He laughed nervously and glanced at Raven, who, for the moment refrained from smacking him upside the head as she normally would.
Silence fell over both of them again, and Raven heard Beast Boy taking several deep breaths, as her empathy registered every swell of deep-seated pain that coursed through him. "You... you think maybe... maybe she didn't really come back?" he asked her tentatively. "Maybe this... this is really her, and whoever attacked David was somebody else, pretending to be her? Like a... a clone or... or a robot of Slade's... or something?"
Raven found the idea completely preposterous, but she did not say so. "Maybe," was the best she would do, not wishing to provide false hope, but neither wishing to antagonize him any further tonight. Not after everything.
He seemed to sense what she meant, and his breath caught as he tried to hold the tears back in his eyes. "I can't... I just can't believe she'd... come back and..." his throat caught, "and..."
It was the strangest thing...
The various people living in Titans' Tower affected her empathic abilities in different ways. Robin, closed off as he usually was, was a blank to her, save on the rare occasions when he was exceptionally upset or forced to open up. Cyborg's level-headed stability, anger issues aside, was always a reassuring, calming force in the Tower, one she had come to depend on. Starfire wore her emotions on her sleeve, figuratively and otherwise, but her spirits were irrepressible and her alien mind reacted very differently to Raven's powers than did the others. David, though externally shy and quiet, often gave off spikes of emotion, usually fear or awe. Among them all however, Beast Boy was by far the most prolific, showering the air around him with empathic feelings, be they feral rage, child-like glee, or deep sorrow, to the point where she usually had to actively suppress her own powers around him constantly to avoid being inundated, which was part of the reason he so easily frustrated her.
But this was different.
In the silence of the cave, alone with Beast Boy, she could actually feel it as he began to cry, and it was then that she realized that for all Beast Boy's emotional immaturity, and capacity to get upset over the stupidest thing (alphabetized music CDs for instance), she had never before seen him do so. Not even when Terra had betrayed them. Not even when Terra had died. She knew he was crying before he made a sound, before he even knew it himself, felt his sorrow and pain wrapping around her like a shroud, and without really even thinking about it or about how foolish it would look or how he might make fun of her for it the next day, she slowly stepped over to him, wrapped her arms around him, and held him in a tight embrace.
On another day, he might have died of shock. On this day, he simply melted.
She felt him go limp as he began to cry into her shoulder, his legs giving out beneath him, and she held him up, as he had done for her once. His entire body was shaking and shivering as the tears rolled down his face unhindered, staining the dark fabric of her uniform an even darker shade, and he reached around and held onto her with both hands, clinging to her as she had more than once clung to him, pouring out his grief and sorrow and regret and the bitter pain of this fresh betrayal, that Terra was alive, and returned, and yet was not here. She felt his emotions wafting off of him like steam from a pot of boiling water, clouding her own thoughts and feelings, and in that instant she cursed herself for being unable to think of anything to do besides this, for being unable to help or offer succor as Beast Boy, the joker, the goofy changeling, the albatross around her neck that never would go away, wept like a small child in her arms.
Slowly, Raven guided Beast Boy over to the side of the cavern, to where the walls were worn smooth by some geological force acting upon them. She sat down slowly against the wall, carrying Beast Boy with her as she did, sliding down until they were seated side by side, with her arms around his shoulders, and his weight leaning against her. She had expected him to go on crying for quite some time, for she could feel everything fueling it, and yet slowly the waterworks began to sputter to a stop, replaced by, of all things, a soul-crushing fatigue that Raven recognized like she would an old friend, the product of countless sleepless nights that she had been having, and that obviously he had too. The both of them were clearly worn out, him by his tireless search for Terra, and her by...
... well... to be honest with herself... by the same, exact, literal thing.
And... somehow... admitting that much to herself galvanized her enough to make the suggestion she did.
"If you want," she said softly, trying not to let Beast Boy's pain leach into her own words, "I'll... go with you... to San Simeon, or... wherever you want to look." The very prospect of spending any time searching for Terra after everything that had happened filled her mouth with bile and caused her emotions to boil with rage and protest, yet effortlessly she swallowed her bile, and stifled her raging emotions, for the sudden silence from Beast Boy, and the slow decline of the pain flowing off him was worth every sacrifice she could make, and she did not have the slightest idea why.
Slowly Beast Boy looked up at her, and his eyes were red from the tears. "You... you will?" he asked, his voice more scratchy than usual. He sniffed back more tears. "I... I'd like that..." he said, fatigue becoming more apparent on his voice with every word he spoke. "Maybe... maybe tomorrow?" He didn't say it, but she knew, as certainly as she knew that the Earth was turning, that right now he did not want to stir from where he was, just as she knew, with absolute equal certainty, that she did not wish to stir either.
She made an effort to convince herself that it was just the fatigue.
She failed.
No more tears emerged to follow the ones he had already shed, but Beast Boy did not sit up, did not move, did not suggest they go home to the Tower. Bit by bit, his eyelids began to droop, and his breathing became more regular, and less choked on his own quiet sobs. He still held onto her with tenacity and force though, shifting very slightly to get closer and closer to her, his head laying on her shoulder, his gloved hands clasped around her chest. Perhaps it was spillover from Beast Boy, or perhaps it was her own stored-up fatigue, but Raven felt her owneyelids becoming heavier with each passing moment, and her head slowly fell over onto its side, resting against Beast Boy's. Her arms were wrapped around his shoulders, and he made no effort to dislodge them, nor she his, until soon enough both of them had their eyes closed, and Beast Boy's sobs had fallen to the softest and most gentle of shudders.
"I miss her," he whispered, half-asleep already.
Her reply was the only thing it could be. "Me too,"
And so it was that on that night, in a cavern far beneath the streets of Jump City, Raven lay propped against a smooth rock wall, with Beast Boy held in her arms, and she held in his, fast asleep.
And for the first time in weeks, she did not dream...
...
... at least, not of Slade.
The cavern's floor was uneven, a product of its creation no doubt, and the sound of dripping condensation from stalactites overhead formed a chorus around Raven, but she kept her feet steady and her eyes forward, and slowly made her way through. She could of course have floated or flown or phased right through the rock, but she did none of those things. Clambering over the rocks gave her something to think about, and she desperately needed something to think about right now.
Moreso than ever, in fact.
She had gone to the quarry to... Great Azar, she had no idea why she had gone to the quarry at all. She had not gotten further in her reasoning than trying to help Beast Boy somehow before she was suddenly there, and trying to make up a reason to have come. How she could have imagined that he would listen to her telling him that Terra wasn't coming back this time was beyond her, but she had tried, and predictably enough, he had rejected it out of hand. His pained expression, tears running down his emerald face as he tried to assure himself that Terra wasn't actually trying to kill them all, that this was all some kind of mis-understanding, danced before her eyes hours after the fact. She had teleported back to the Tower, tried to meditate, tried to do anything to forget what had just happened, and she had failed. The spike of pain, of distress, of hurt and anguish and betrayal that had emanated from Beast Boy when he had finally turned and run away had been strong enough to nearly knock her over, and it was only hours after the fact that she had realized that as Beast Boy had left her there, he hadn't been flying North, towards San Simeon, but South-West, back towards Jump City.
It was then that she had realized where he was going.
She had not been back to this place in more than seven months, and it had not improved in her absence. The igneous stone had covered most of the evidence of what had taken place here, save for the occasional bit of metal or piece of rusted equipment still sticking up from the rock like a spike. She avoided these carefully, moving slowly so as not to trip, and periodically feeling ahead with her empathic sense, looking for a small spark of life within this dead cave.
Every time it was up ahead, and every time it hadn't moved.
She came around the final corner at last, and ahead there was light. A flashlight, to be precise, held by a figure cloaked in shadows, who was standing before a large dais. Atop the pedestal was mounted an incredibly lifelike statue, beneath which sat a metal plaque, engraved with words that Raven remembered all too well:
Terra
A Teen Titan
A True Friend
The cavern was cloaked in utter silence, save for the distant sounds of water drops echoing through it. The figure staring forlornly at the statue made no noise at all, indeed, he scarcely seemed to be breathing. The flashlight held lightly in his hand drooped, forgotten, its light aimed at nothing, casting the statue into inky shadow. No word or movement or gesture did its holder make, yet to Raven, the empathic noise was as loud as a brass band.
She stepped forward.
Her footsteps made no appreciable noise, and yet Beast Boy's ears perked up, and he turned his head slowly to see her entering the cave. Confusion was written on his tear-streaked face, but he said nothing, and asked no questions, and did not seem either as surprised or as angry as she had assumed he would be. Indeed, for some reason, the waves of mental pain flowing off of him seemed to lessen as he saw her, even as he turned slowly back to face the statue.
She finally reached the flatter part of the cave on which the dais and statue was mounted, and softly she walked up alongside Beast Boy, looking up at the frozen still-image of Terra, arms spread wide, legs braced, hair forming a wavy halo around her head as she looked up into the air with unblinking stone eyes. Raven wasn't sure what had expected to find down here, perhaps an empty dais now that Terra was apparently back, but then Beast Boy still frequented this place every so often, and if Terra had truly not wanted her return to be known, she would have had to replace the statue with another, perfect copy. Raven had no trouble imagining that such a feat was well within the Geokinetic's powers.
"D'you remember that time... Mumbo tried to rob the federal bank?"
There was a soft, wistful quality to Beast Boy's voice, so out of tune with the waves of empathic pain that Raven could feel emanating from him. She had planned on saying something, what she wasn't sure, but something, anything to try and help him, but the intervening hours had not produced anything specific, and she was thus content to simply play along.
"I think so," she said. Mumbo had tried to rob the federal bank several times, but she was fairly sure she knew which occasion he was talking about.
"Mumbo thought he'd got away," said Beast Boy, and there was even a hint of a smile on his face. "He'd busted by Rob, and I tried to stop him but he hit me with some kinda glue from his flower squirter. I remember chasing him out the door, and he sorta turned back to laugh at us or something, and... right then Terra hit him right in the face with a big dirt fist from outta the ground." He shook his head and definitely smiled this time, though the waves did not stop. "Mumbo still doesn't know what hit him."
The changeling lapsed back into silence, still looking up at Terra, and after a few moments' silence, Raven tried her best to reciprocate.
"I remember one time," she said, "Starfire got her hands on some fashion magazine with a bunch of advice columns in it, and decided to get Terra and me to have a 'girl talk' with her." Raven smirked despite herself at the memory. "It wasn't designed for aliens or people who lived in caves, so it turned into an hour of Terra trying to explain to Starfire what everything in the magazine meant... after Starfire ate the perfume ads."
The recollection elicited a soft chuckle from Beast Boy. "Hehe, yeah... that was priceless."
Raven raised an eyebrow. "You weren't there."
"Oh," said Beast Boy. "Um... I er... sorta was listening in. Fly on the wall?" He laughed nervously and glanced at Raven, who, for the moment refrained from smacking him upside the head as she normally would.
Silence fell over both of them again, and Raven heard Beast Boy taking several deep breaths, as her empathy registered every swell of deep-seated pain that coursed through him. "You... you think maybe... maybe she didn't really come back?" he asked her tentatively. "Maybe this... this is really her, and whoever attacked David was somebody else, pretending to be her? Like a... a clone or... or a robot of Slade's... or something?"
Raven found the idea completely preposterous, but she did not say so. "Maybe," was the best she would do, not wishing to provide false hope, but neither wishing to antagonize him any further tonight. Not after everything.
He seemed to sense what she meant, and his breath caught as he tried to hold the tears back in his eyes. "I can't... I just can't believe she'd... come back and..." his throat caught, "and..."
It was the strangest thing...
The various people living in Titans' Tower affected her empathic abilities in different ways. Robin, closed off as he usually was, was a blank to her, save on the rare occasions when he was exceptionally upset or forced to open up. Cyborg's level-headed stability, anger issues aside, was always a reassuring, calming force in the Tower, one she had come to depend on. Starfire wore her emotions on her sleeve, figuratively and otherwise, but her spirits were irrepressible and her alien mind reacted very differently to Raven's powers than did the others. David, though externally shy and quiet, often gave off spikes of emotion, usually fear or awe. Among them all however, Beast Boy was by far the most prolific, showering the air around him with empathic feelings, be they feral rage, child-like glee, or deep sorrow, to the point where she usually had to actively suppress her own powers around him constantly to avoid being inundated, which was part of the reason he so easily frustrated her.
But this was different.
In the silence of the cave, alone with Beast Boy, she could actually feel it as he began to cry, and it was then that she realized that for all Beast Boy's emotional immaturity, and capacity to get upset over the stupidest thing (alphabetized music CDs for instance), she had never before seen him do so. Not even when Terra had betrayed them. Not even when Terra had died. She knew he was crying before he made a sound, before he even knew it himself, felt his sorrow and pain wrapping around her like a shroud, and without really even thinking about it or about how foolish it would look or how he might make fun of her for it the next day, she slowly stepped over to him, wrapped her arms around him, and held him in a tight embrace.
On another day, he might have died of shock. On this day, he simply melted.
She felt him go limp as he began to cry into her shoulder, his legs giving out beneath him, and she held him up, as he had done for her once. His entire body was shaking and shivering as the tears rolled down his face unhindered, staining the dark fabric of her uniform an even darker shade, and he reached around and held onto her with both hands, clinging to her as she had more than once clung to him, pouring out his grief and sorrow and regret and the bitter pain of this fresh betrayal, that Terra was alive, and returned, and yet was not here. She felt his emotions wafting off of him like steam from a pot of boiling water, clouding her own thoughts and feelings, and in that instant she cursed herself for being unable to think of anything to do besides this, for being unable to help or offer succor as Beast Boy, the joker, the goofy changeling, the albatross around her neck that never would go away, wept like a small child in her arms.
Slowly, Raven guided Beast Boy over to the side of the cavern, to where the walls were worn smooth by some geological force acting upon them. She sat down slowly against the wall, carrying Beast Boy with her as she did, sliding down until they were seated side by side, with her arms around his shoulders, and his weight leaning against her. She had expected him to go on crying for quite some time, for she could feel everything fueling it, and yet slowly the waterworks began to sputter to a stop, replaced by, of all things, a soul-crushing fatigue that Raven recognized like she would an old friend, the product of countless sleepless nights that she had been having, and that obviously he had too. The both of them were clearly worn out, him by his tireless search for Terra, and her by...
... well... to be honest with herself... by the same, exact, literal thing.
And... somehow... admitting that much to herself galvanized her enough to make the suggestion she did.
"If you want," she said softly, trying not to let Beast Boy's pain leach into her own words, "I'll... go with you... to San Simeon, or... wherever you want to look." The very prospect of spending any time searching for Terra after everything that had happened filled her mouth with bile and caused her emotions to boil with rage and protest, yet effortlessly she swallowed her bile, and stifled her raging emotions, for the sudden silence from Beast Boy, and the slow decline of the pain flowing off him was worth every sacrifice she could make, and she did not have the slightest idea why.
Slowly Beast Boy looked up at her, and his eyes were red from the tears. "You... you will?" he asked, his voice more scratchy than usual. He sniffed back more tears. "I... I'd like that..." he said, fatigue becoming more apparent on his voice with every word he spoke. "Maybe... maybe tomorrow?" He didn't say it, but she knew, as certainly as she knew that the Earth was turning, that right now he did not want to stir from where he was, just as she knew, with absolute equal certainty, that she did not wish to stir either.
She made an effort to convince herself that it was just the fatigue.
She failed.
No more tears emerged to follow the ones he had already shed, but Beast Boy did not sit up, did not move, did not suggest they go home to the Tower. Bit by bit, his eyelids began to droop, and his breathing became more regular, and less choked on his own quiet sobs. He still held onto her with tenacity and force though, shifting very slightly to get closer and closer to her, his head laying on her shoulder, his gloved hands clasped around her chest. Perhaps it was spillover from Beast Boy, or perhaps it was her own stored-up fatigue, but Raven felt her owneyelids becoming heavier with each passing moment, and her head slowly fell over onto its side, resting against Beast Boy's. Her arms were wrapped around his shoulders, and he made no effort to dislodge them, nor she his, until soon enough both of them had their eyes closed, and Beast Boy's sobs had fallen to the softest and most gentle of shudders.
"I miss her," he whispered, half-asleep already.
Her reply was the only thing it could be. "Me too,"
And so it was that on that night, in a cavern far beneath the streets of Jump City, Raven lay propped against a smooth rock wall, with Beast Boy held in her arms, and she held in his, fast asleep.
And for the first time in weeks, she did not dream...
...
... at least, not of Slade.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 25: The Clockwork Butterfly
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
two roads converged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference
- Robert Frost, Road Not Taken
*------------------------------------------------------------*
A hundred yards wide and a quarter mile long, the primary cavern of the Los Palmas diamond mining complex was large enough to house a small warship, yet at present it was dark and nearly empty, save for the distant glow of the strung lights hanging above the cavern floor. Mine carts and laser drills lay scattered about the rock enclosure, some on their sides, some with smoking rents torn in them. Figures in black armor, energy rifles still in hand, lay crumpled alongside the mining equipment, soft moans, or the lack thereof, indicating which ones were still semi-conscious, and which ones were out cold.
The three dozen figures striding through the middle of the cavern did not pay the fallen soldiers the slightest attention, and what few sounds the troops made were masked by mechanical whirings, heavy footfalls, and, of course, witty banter.
... well... banter at least.
"See, what'd ah tell y'all?!" remarked the red-suited figure in the lead to an identical red-suited figure walking alongside him. "Nobody ever beats Billy Numerous!"
A chorus of enthusiastic replies from the dozens of exact replicas of the speaker only added to the surreality of the situation, but the four people walking along who weren't clones of the crimson-clad southerner took it all in stride, for while Billy was congratulating himself for having made such a mess of the security guards who had tried to stop them, Gizmo and Mammoth were engaged in what was apparently a much more important pass-time: Whining.
"Are we there yet?"
"Yeah, how much further we goin'?"
"Shut up, both of you," said Jinx, glancing left and right through the forest of Billys as she tried to pick out the appropriate path.
"We've been down here forever!" said Gizmo, "I need to recharge my batteries!"
"I told you to bring extra, didn't I? And what are you complaining about? You're not even walking!"
Gizmo crossed his arms and muttered something under his breath, as the two jets emerging from his backpack harness floated him over fallen guards and debris. Jinx chose to pretend she hadn't heard what he'd said as she consulted the map in her hands.
"Should be around... somewhere..."
A grin crossed her face a moment later as she spotted a small tunnel branching out from the main cavern and running deeper into the mine. Without a word, she walked quickly towards it, leaving the others to follow. The line of electric lights hung overhead led directly into the corridor, as did a rail cart line, marking it out as a location of some importance within the underground maze.
"Yo, Jinx?"
Jinx glanced back absentmindedly as See-More caught up to her, leaving Mammoth and Gizmo to bring up the rear along with Billy Numerous, once more re-united with all of his selves.
"What is it?" Jinx asked, inflecting her voice with fatigue to signal how little she wanted to hear any more complaints.
"Relax," said See-More, "I was just wonderin' what we're doin' down here. You said we were gonna take Billy for a test, but why here?"
"We're in a diamond mine, genius," said Jinx deadpan. "What do you think we're here for?"
"Yeah," replied See-More, still confused, "but I don't see any diamonds. Are we s'possed to be diggin' em out of the wall or somethin'?"
Jinx sighed and growled to herself. "When they dig the diamonds out of the ground, they store them in a secure place inside the mine before they ship them to the jewelcutters. We're gonna raid it."
See-More let a smile cross his face. "Sounds good. So where is it?"
"If this map is worth anything, then it should be right about... there."
Ahead, the tunnel divided into two different shafts, the lights splitting and proceeding in both directions. The rail tracks however led left only, and from the fork in the tunnel, Jinx could see that the leftmost branch came to an abrupt halt ten yards further down, where the way was blocked by a solid steel door. Jinx turned and waved up the other Hivers, and stood back to watch as See-More confirmed that there was a vault of some sort behind the barrier, Gizmo went to work trying to open it, and Mammoth and Billy watched for any further interference from whatever guards might still be poking around.
Gizmo reported that the door was "trivial" to hack, and would be open in a couple minutes, and Jinx allowed herself to think about the real purpose of this heist for a moment. She glanced back at Billy Numerous, who was, she was displeased to note, blabbering with Mammoth over the proper way to deep fry a whole turkey. No genius, that one, but he'd managed to hold his own pretty well with the guards on the way in, and he didn't seem too annoying. Of the six or seven replacements the Hive Five had tested out to replace Private Hive (who had up and left after the disaster with Mother May-Eye), Billy seemed to be the best prospect.
That said more about the others than it did about Billy himself, but Jinx supposed she was lucky not to have attracted another Superhero on deep cover...
"Ha! Got it!"
As usual, all she needed to do was give Gizmo a computer to hack, and all complaints vanished. She adopted a feral grin as Gizmo pushed the door open and flew into the vault. Jinx and the others followed him in, finding themselves inside a metal cube twenty feet to a side, the walls covered in locked metal boxes, like the safety deposit boxes in a bank. On the opposite wall was a special box, three times larger than the others, fitted with a combination lock, clearly holding something important, and she walked straight over to it as the others began to burn, cut, tear, or pry their way into the various smaller boxes to get at the valuables inside. With a wave of her hand, she smashed the lock on the front of the larger box, and opened the door.
Jackpot.
Inside the metal box sat a single diamond the size of a small peach. Oblong and flat, like an enormous beetle, it positively glowed a pale blue in the fluorescent light of the vault. Carefully, she plucked it out of the small safe, and held it up to the light, letting it sparkle as she turned it slowly this way and that. The others all stopped what they were doing as they saw the enormous gemstone, and whistled, chuckled or simply gazed on appreciatively.
"Whoa!"
"Look at that!"
"Hot damn..."
"That's gotta be worth a lot!"
The last comment engendered a smirk from Jinx. "We're not fencing this one," she said, clearly uninterested in hearing objections. "This one's mine."
Puzzled looks were exchanged. "What?" asked Gizmo. "Why? That thing's gotta be worth millions!"
"Yeah," asked See-More, more confused than upset. "What do you want with that?"
"None of your business, okay?" she snapped, clasping the diamond in her fist. "Finish up here and let's get going."
Her orders did not quite carry the note of command she might have hoped for, as all four of the others rolled their eyes (or eye), and chuckled. See-More even nudged Mammoth with his elbow. "I guess diamonds really are a girl's - "
Jinx whirled around, shooting See-More a look of pure venom. "Finish that sentence and watch what happens. I dare you."
See-More took one look at his team leader and elected to refrain from further comment, and Jinx did not stick around to hear the rest, stepping out of the bank vault to wait for the others to finish with their rounds of theft. In no time at all, all five of them (more if you counted Billy's doubles) were walking back the way they had come, all but Jinx loaded down with diamonds of all shapes and colors, bragging to one another about the amazing stuff they were to buy with their shares. Jinx alone remained silent and unburdened, the brilliant gemstone held safely in her pocket as she let Mammoth and Gizmo take the lead, and tried to trace the shortest route back to the surface on her map.
"Yo, Jinx?" asked See-More. "How're we gettin' outta here?"
"In handcuffs."
Jinx had only a bare second to register that someone else had answered before she walked straight into Mammoth, who had come to an abrupt halt in front of her. Bouncing off of him, she stopped as well as she saw the one thing she had hoped most of all not to see tonight.
Or rather the six things.
All six of the Teen Titans were standing in the middle of the enormous cavern the Hivers had been traversing only five minutes before. Robin stood out in front, his staff held like a flagpole, his perpetual smirk of smug superiority written on his face. To his left and right were arrayed the other Titans in a line. Raven, cloaked in shadow like a living nightmare, floating several inches above the ground with dark energy sheathing her hands. Starfire, her eyes and fists blazing a radioactive green, poised on the balls of her feet to launch either into the air or directly into one of the Hivers. Cyborg, looming larger even than Mammoth, arms crossed, feet planted wide, scowling at them as if the Hive were less than dirt beneath his metal feet, a gross inconvenience to his time. Beast Boy, crouched down like a coiled spring, a wicked grin on his face, standing far enough from his teammates that Jinx knew he was already planning on assuming some gargantuan form and ripping into them. Last of all, nearest to Robin, a boy she didn't recognize in person but knew to be Devastator, the newest Titan, decked out in red and orange and holding at his side a baton made of flaming steel like a branding iron hot off the coals, whose gaze was darting from one Hiver to the next too quickly for her to read.
Robin, as always, commanded all the attention, stepping forward with just the slightest swagger and flipping his staff around into a ready position. "Give it up, Jinx," he said in the tough-guy voice he had to have learned from Batman. "You're outmatched this time."
They were, Jinx knew, but Mammoth took a step forward himself and clenched his fists. "You guys can't stop us!" he thundered back at the Boy Wonder. "Go crawl back to your tower before we break your legs!"
"Yeah," chimed in See-More, sliding his visor's adjustment knob over to a combat setting. "This stuff's ours now. You want it, you're gonna have to come and take it from us!"
Despite her best attempts, Jinx couldn't help but smile a bit. No matter that the last five times they had faced the Titans had all turned into disasters, her friends were all ready for round six at the drop of a hat.
Cyborg scoffed at the other Hivers, par for the course for him as his human and robotic eyes both fell on Billy. "Doin' some recruiting?" he asked.
Jinx stepped past Mammoth and See-More as Gizmo and Billy stepped out to form a line on either side of her. "If you can," she said, giving Devastator her most disparaging look, and grinning as she saw him flinch, "so can we."
"Always one step behind," said Robin, and the smug satisfaction written on his face as he said it gave Jinx the urge to cave his it in. "We've got you six on five. Give up the goods and come quietly."
She didn't even have to glance over at Billy, for he took his own cue, stepping forward with a grin. "Now you listen here, stop-light. Nobody outnumbers Billy Numerous..."
Three seconds later, a small army of clones stood all about the cavern, encircling both Titans and Hivers, the former blinking in disbelief, the latter cackling to themselves as they faced down their nemeses. This had not been what Jinx had had in mind when she had decided to take Billy on a field test, but given the circumstances, it would do.
"What was that about us leaving in handcuffs?" asked Jinx, relishing the look of undisguised astonishment on Cyborg's face more than she had imagined humanly possible. She snapped her fingers, more for effect than anything else. That would come later.
"Take 'em down."
Her teammates obliged.
As always in these sorts of fights, complete anarchy ensued. She knew the Titans usually tried to coordinate, but coordinating the Hive was like herding cats... deaf cats. Accordingly, she let the others pick their targets and go to work while she chose one for herself. With no time to sit back and formulate even a personal plan, she simply conjured a hex and flung it into the midst of the Titans to scatter them. The sea of Billy Numerouses (Numeri?) enveloped her a second later, blocking off her view of what was going on, and she lightly flipped up into the air to try and get a better picture. A starbolt nearly took her head off, and she aborted her jump, landing hard atop an overturned forklift, and whirled about to fire back, but Starfire was already gone, flipping through the air like a gnat, trying to avoid See-More's laser beam as it carved random patterns into the cavern wall in pursuit of her.
A blueish glow lit up the immediate area and half a dozen of Billy's doubles went flying about like bowling pins as Cyborg's sonic cannon cut a swathe through the sea of red around him. Cyborg himself, standing out as always ('not as always, actually', she thought with a grimace), had his back to her, a perfect target almost as large as the proverbial broadside of a barn. She summoned another hex and another and another, and hurled them down at Cyborg like a vengeful goddess hurling thunderbolts, pelting the ground around him and upsetting his balance, sending him toppling over. Allowing herself a triumphant cackle, she gathered up the entropic energy she wielded for yet another strike, and was preparing to unleash it when the forklift blew up.
Had something hit the forklift, she could have dealt with it, but instead the entire machine went off like a bomb with no warning whatsoever, and the next thing she knew she was flying through the air before slamming into the rock wall of the cavern and sliding to the ground. The surprise was worse than the impact itself, and she sat up and looked around for the culprit even as she gathered her energy about her. For a second she thought Robin had tossed an explosive birdarang her way, but Robin was on the other side of the cavern dealing with Mammoth and a half dozen Billies. So who could...
... oh right... him.
Devastator was standing a good fifty paces away, keeping near to Cyborg, but while Cyborg was facing away from her, trying to fight off part of Billy's one-man army, Devastator was looking straight at her, his baton still smoldering red and pieces of the detonated forklift laying all around him. She scrambled back to her feet, thankful that the newest Titan hadn't had the presence of mind to follow up his attack, and flipped open her Hive communicator. Devastator was small potatoes.
"Gizmo," she said, "deal with the newbie. I want Cyborg."
For once, Gizmo didn't respond with a smart remark. "Got it," he said, "he's toast," and Jinx saw Gizmo fire a barrage of rockets at Raven to keep her occupied while he disengaged and turned around to actually follow orders. Miracles never ceased.
Then again, it was hardly miraculous for Gizmo to want to show off, and show off he proceeded to do, screaming his own brand of garbled insults and launching another hail of micro-missiles out of his harness at Devastator, who prudently sought shelter behind a massive stalagmite, the front half of which disintegrated beneath Gizmo's assault. Jinx shook the rock fragments off of her shoulders and sprinted towards Cyborg, who spotted her as he was turning to support Devastator, and opened fire with his sonic cannon. Too little, too late. Jinx easily sidestepped the blue beam and flung a hex at the ceiling above Cyborg, which crumbled like stale bread. Cyborg had no choice but to fall back or be crushed, and selected the former option, diving backwards as a piece of rock the size of a car shattered against the spot he had just been standing. Jinx laughed again, and prepared to follow up her attack when she heard a series of blasts from her left, and turned to see something she had not expected.
Gizmo was laying on the ground on his back, screaming nonsensical epithets at Devastator, who, confronted with Gizmo's rocket assault, had apparently targeted the pair of jet boosters the pre-teen gear-head was using to fly with, and blown both of them to bits. A small carpet of debris rained down around Gizmo as he tried to struggle back to his feet, held down by the unaided weight of his own harness. He pressed a button, and four mechanical spider legs emerged from his backpack, hoisting him back into the air with a flourish, but before Gizmo could so much as gloat over this accomplishment, Devastator stepped forward and swung his baton like an orchestra conductor, up, down, left and right, and blew all four limbs off at the roots, dumping Gizmo unceremoniously back onto the ground.
Gizmo, understandably enough, was livid. "You snot-guzzling, crud-munching..."
"Next time, don't use pure titanium," said Devastator as he moved forward, presumably to finish the job. Though smallest of the Titans, Devastator was still much bigger than Gizmo, and had a flaming metal baton to boot, while Gizmo was laying on his back like an overturned turtle. Much as Jinx wanted to to get some payback from Cyborg, this decision was open and shut.
Devastator never knew what hit him as Jinx blindsided him with a wave of entropy, tossing him back away from Gizmo into the mouth of the tunnel that led to the vault they had just ransacked. In retrospect, she realized with a frown, sending Gizmo after Devastator was a mistake. She should have handled him herself before dealing with Cyborg. Fortunately, there was time enough to rectify that little error...
Devastator stood back up with a groan as Jinx moved past Gizmo to face him down. He froze as he saw who was advancing towards him, an understandable reaction maybe, but one that would cost him, as she instantly took the opportunity to blast him again. The pink wave of energy hit him square in the chest and threw him fifteen feet down the tunnel, near to where the tunnel forked into two branches. Rapidly, he scrambled back to his feet, narrowly evading a third energy wave and snapping his baton like a tennis player. Jinx had no idea what he was targeting, but she did not wait around to find out, and rolled forward, narrowly avoiding the chorus of explosions that erupted from the ground behind her, and coming up with yet another entropic blast, which caught Devastator in the stomach and slammed him back into the wall, hard enough to shake dust loose from the light fixtures above.
"Should'a stayed home, newbie," said Jinx with a grin as Devastator moaned softly, holding his stomach with one hand as he lifted his baton and swung it around again. Jinx heard the wall behind Devastator's head creak as a lunchbox-sized chunk of it was blasted towards her like a cannonball. The rock would have clocked her right in the nose, but with a flick of her wrist, her entropic powers shattered it to pebbles. Brushing them out of her face, she raised her other hand and blasted Devastator's baton from his grip, instantly extinguishing its flames as she tossed it down one of the two tunnel branches.
The rest of the fight still raged behind her, and thus there was no time for the customary bragging that normally would have gone on. Shorn of his weapon, Devastator had a bit of a deer-in-headlights look to him as he stared at Jinx, unsure of what he ought to do.
"Who taught you how to fight?" she asked, "your grandmother?" She knew the real answer of course. Devastator's stance, his mannerisms, everything smacked of Robin's tutelage, but this kid was no Robin, and to prove the point, she conjured forth another hex in one hand and casually pitched it right at Devastator, planning to knock him unconscious in a single solid blow.
The plan was working perfectly right up until the point where the floor exploded under her feet.
What with the flames and all, Jinx had rather assumed that the baton was integral to Devastator's powers. It appeared however that this assumption had been in error, for no sooner had she reached forward to blast him than he aimed his hand out at the ground beneath her and the rail car tracks she was standing on blew apart, throwing her into the air like a rag doll. Her hex, already in mid-launch, flew upwards and back as she flipped end over end, slamming not into Devastator, but into the tunnel ceiling behind her, which shattered like a pane of glass, weakened already by the repeated impacts and shocks of the raging battle. With a roar like a raging waterfall, the tunnel supports gave way, and the entire ceiling came crashing down in an avalanche of rock and dirt. Jinx managed to hit the ground rolling, narrowly avoiding being crushed under thirty tons of rubble, and blindly scrambled ahead as the entire tunnel section imploded. Desperately lunging forward to get out of the way of the cascading debris, she hit the ground just as a fist-sized rock smashed into the back of her head, and everything went black.
*------------------------------------------------------------*
Jinx woke up with a splitting headache.
She was laying on the bare ground up against the side of the mining tunnel, completely covered in dirt, the black shawl around her shoulders torn and flecked with bits of crystal. Her hair was matted with what she hoped wasn't blood, and her entire right side was on fire from where she had slid across the uneven rock floor. With one hand to her head, she carefully picked herself up off the dirt. Her sleeve was torn, her arm scraped raw, but nothing seemed to be broken, and though scuffed and bruised, she didn't appear to be bleeding. Still, her arm throbbed mercilessly, and she grimaced as she rubbed it with her other hand, blinking in the dim light cast by what few overhead bulbs were still working as she tried to figure out what the hell had happened.
By the look of things, the broad tunnel between the main cavern and the fork that led to the diamond vault had completely collapsed, a massive wall of dirt and rock blocking the passage from end to end. The fork itself was still clear, the supports having held, but the way back to her teammates was sealed by tons and tons of debris. She was standing on one side of the tunnel fork, staring at what could well have been fifty solid yards of imploded debris, so thick that she could hear nothing of what was happening on the other side of it. Around the corner to her right lay the diamond vault they had just robbed, but already she knew that was a dead end, while behind her, the tunnel stretched on deeper into the dark reaches of the mining complex.
"David, come in! Can you hear me?"
Jinx' eyes shot open, for though the voice that had just spoken was soft and distorted and cross-cut with static, she recognized it instantly as Cyborg's, and she froze as still as a statue and did nothing but listen and try to pinpoint where it was coming from. There was a shuffling sound from around the corner, from the other fork of the tunnel that led to the diamond vault, and Jinx heard someone stand up with a groan and the soft click of a communicator flipping on.
"Cyborg? Hello? Is anyone there?"
The reply from Cyborg's tinned voice was almost instantaneous, and the relief in his tone was obvious even through the static. "Goddamn," he said, "are you all right, man?"
There was a soft groan and a rattling of small pebbles as whoever was speaking shook himself off. "I think so," came the reply, followed by a moment's silence. "The... the tunnel's blocked off."
"Yeah," said Cyborg, "Jinx brought the whole thing down when you blasted her. Where are you?"
"I'm... I'm not sure, lemme look around." Jinx heard the sound of shuffling and footsteps turning in place, and very, very carefully, she made her way towards the corner of the fork in the tunnel. Even had she not recognized the voice from before, Jinx already knew who it was that would be waiting for her around the corner. Her suspicion was confirmed a moment later when she peered around into the tunnel that led to the vault, and saw a red and orange-suited figure standing with her back mostly to her. Quickly she ducked down behind the corner, barely peeking around it so as not to be seen in the low light of the hallway.
Devastator turned around several times, clearly without a clue in the world that he was not the only one who had survived the cave-in. "I'm in front of a... metal door of some kind."
"That's the vault door," said Cyborg. "There should be a fork in the tunnel near you..."
"Yeah... I think I see it," said Devastator as he continued to describe his surroundings to Cyborg. Jinx ducked back entirely to avoid being spotted as she tried to decide what to do with this Titan. Much as she relished the idea of beating his head in while Cyborg watched helplessly over the communicator, Devastator was, as before, small potatoes. She had the diamond after all, and nothing else was...
Jinx froze, her hand held over her unexpectedly empty pocket, as the conversation between Cyborg and Devastator filtered back to the forefront of her mind, and she peered once more around the corner.
"... tip said somethin' about a jewel heist," said Cyborg. "The Hive are idiots, but they wouldn't'a just left a four hundred carat diamond behind. One of 'em musta taken it from the vault."
"Yeah, well, whoever had it, they don't anymore," said Devastator back as he reached down into his own pocket and pulled out the very diamond Jinx had expected to find safe in hers. She realized with a curt groan that it must have fallen loose when she had dove to avoid being crushed by the collapsing tunnel. Just great...
Despite the situation, Devastator spent a moment turning the priceless diamond over in his hand before putting it back in his pocket and returning his attention to Cyborg.
"Is there any sign of Jinx?" asked the half-robotic Titan. The Hive all scattered after the cave-in. BB and Robin are tryin' to track 'em down now, but none of us saw where she got to."
Devastator glanced around again, and Jinx ducked back. "No... I don't see her," he said, and a note of worry entered his voice. "You don't... you don't think she got..."
"No way," said Cyborg with certainty, and Jinx couldn't help but smirk. As if a cave-in was enough to take her down. "She probably snuck off somewhere in the middle of the fight. You just sit tight, okay? Star, Raven and I are gonna get you out of there."
"Right," said Devastator, who didn't sound too overjoyed at the prospect of staying here too long. "Just be careful, okay? I can see stress fractures in this rock. You try to blast your way in here, and the whole complex could collapse..."
"Hey, you're talkin' to Cyborg here," said Cyborg in that ultra-confident tone Jinx remembered with something less than fondness. "I got everything covered. Don't you worry about a thing."
Devastator gave a nervous laugh. "Sure," he said. "Devastator out." The Titan flipped the communicator shut and took a long, deep breath, before drawing his baton once more. As Jinx watched, the flames surrounding the baton sprang back to life at his very touch, and yet she noted that despite the fact that they were licking his hand, he showed no sign of pain or discomfort. With his other hand he took the diamond back out of his pocket, holding it up to the red light emitted from the baton and turning it this way and that to watch the flames dance within the heart of the gem.
As carefully and quietly as a cat, Jinx slowly stepped around the corner. Devastator's back was to her, his attention focused on the priceless jewel in his hands. Carefully, she formed a hex in her hands, taking her time so as to make no noise whatsoever, bringing her arm up to pitch it into Devastator's back like a baseball. One clean, powerful shot would be enough. Carefully she collected the entropic energy, and -
The Hive communicator at her hip chose that moment to speak. "Gizmo to Jinx! Jinx! Jinx, where are you?!"
Both Jinx and Devastator froze.
And then, both Jinx and Devastator acted at once.
Jinx lunged forward with a shout, flinging the stored up energy of her hex at Devastator, but her moment's hesitation had doomed her brilliant plan, and Devastator dove to the side as the energy struck the vault door and tore it to ribbons of steel like construction paper. He hit the ground rolling, and snapped his baton backwards as he did so, a pair of nearby rocks blasting towards her like grapeshot. One missed high, one she disintegrated with a flick of her wrist, and with her other hand she broke off the bases of a series of stalactites looming from the tunnel overhead, which plunged down towards Devastator like missiles.
Devastator's reaction was faster than she had expected. The briefing had claimed that he had trouble with complex compounds like rocks, yet faced with them, he drove his baton-hand up as though trying to impale something above him, and the three nearest stalactites instantly burst like artillery shells. The rest shattered against the floor of the tunnel. Unfortunately for him, Jinx had not been waiting to determine the results of her attack, and a half-second later, a wave of entropic energy that she had sent roiling along the ground slammed into him and unceremoniously swept him through the open vault door and into the vault itself, where the aftereffects of her entropy caused half of the unopened jewel boxes inside the vault to explode, showering Devastator with diamond dust and semi-precious stones.
"Is that all you've got?" she asked with a grin as he scrambled back to his feet.
He replied by snatching a fist-sized chunk of quartz off the ground and spiking it at her as though they were playing dodge ball. Jinx spun like a dancer to avoid the thrown rock, and yet while the quartz missed, it exploded as soon as it was within two feet of her, threw her off her balance, and sent her tumbling to the ground. Or rather it would have, except the floor beneath her feet blew up as she was falling to meet it, the blast catching her right in the sternum and flipping her over twice before dumping her unceremoniously on her back.
... now she was mad.
She did not do anything so undignified as scramble, but instead positively leaped back up, conjuring entropic energy from both hands and hurling it at Devastator, who had emerged from the interior of the vault and taken what cover he could behind fallen rocks and piles of debris. He swung his baton like he was orchestrating some mad symphony and pieces of the wall and ceiling burst at his command, but she contemptuously swatted the projectiles he fired at her aside with waves of entropy and tore his cover apart with repeated bursts of the same. Running out of things to hide behind, he desperately targeted the floor beneath her feet, but she was ready this time, and used the blast to flip backwards like a gymnast and land perfectly on her feet, before conjuring another hex and -
All of a sudden, the fight stopped.
Devastator's baton still flared, the hex still crackled in her hands, and yet both Jinx and Devastator stopped dead in their tracks as the entire tunnel began to shake and quiver. Dust and pebbles fell from the ceiling as a mighty rumble filled the air around them. Having suddenly forgotten both Devastator and diamond, Jinx rapidly looked around the quaking corridor, before her eyes fell upon Devastator again, who was staring at her with a wide-eyed expression that told her he had just come to the same conclusion she did. And then the ceiling caved in with a roar, and both of them ran.
The tunnel collapsed in sections, the most badly damaged ones first, and it was this fact alone which prevented both Jinx and Devastator from being crushed into jelly. Jinx did not look back, nor did she even consider what Devastator might be doing, as she sprinted around the corner and down the tunnel that led into regions unknown, and the full-throated roar of splintering beams and imploding rock behind her told her everything she needed to know about what would happen should she trip. She did not. Rocks thundered in her ears, clapping against one another like enormous castanets, until finally a slab of granite as large as an office building crushed a section of the tunnel several feet behind her, and then suddenly everything was quiet again.
Jinx ground to a halt, one hand on the tunnel wall, listening and feeling for more tremors. For a few seconds, she could hear nothing save for the sound of her own thumping heart and ragged breath, and it took a moment before she even realized that there was still someone else in the tunnel with her.
Devastator was standing on the other side of the tunnel, doubled over and trying to catch his breath, his baton still held in one hand, once more reduced to bare steel. He was more winded than she was, at least from the looks of things, but that didn't stop him from watching her even as he struggled to catch his breath, shifting his baton around to his right hand as though she wouldn't notice. For her part, Jinx had dispelled the entropic energy she was using when she started running, but it was still there, ready to call upon should there be a need for round three.
Another tremor, much more subdued, shook the area, and both of them froze and listened and watched for any sign that it was about to become necessary for them to run again, but it settled down without further collapse, serving only to underline just how bad an idea it would be to resume hostilities when one of the two of them wielded raw entropy, and the other supernatural demolitions
It was an idea that Devastator had apparently gotten as well, for he made no effort to restart the fight. Instead he was watching her like a rat watching a mountain lion, saying nothing, just waiting for her to move or act. Jinx got the sense that Devastator knew himself to be outmatched, and decided to try and play his fear.
"Give up?" she asked.
He didn't reply immediately, but took a few moments to consider it. Still, his answer was not 'Yes' or 'I surrender,' but "How about a truce?" Apparently he wasn't quite that afraid of her.
"Give me the diamond, and I'll think about it."
His free hand automatically slid to his side where the diamond was being held. "No way," he said.
She gave him her best maniacal grin, the one that never failed to unsettle the other Hivers. "You know what happens if we start up again, don't you?"
"Yeah," he said, very nervous but still defiant. "And so do you."
"So what makes you think I won't do it?"
"Because Cyborg says you're not crazy."
That one stopped her short.
She continued to watch him with a defiant look, but while he seemed to be trying to phase through the wall away from her, he gave no indication that he was about to hand the diamond over to her, and she knew that even if she could take him down conventionally, there was no way she could do so before he made use of his own powers and potentially killed them both. Accordingly, all she could do was groan in frustration. "Fine," she said. "Keep it for now." She pulled her own communicator from her belt, the one Gizmo had interrupted her over, and contemptuously turned her back on Devastator, flipping it open. "Gizmo?"
A screenfull of static greeted her, along with a flashing yellow light in the corner of the communicator's screen that indicated no signal. She pointed the communicator in several directions, even hit it a few times, but it stubbornly refused to show her anything other than a black and white haze. However much of the tunnel had imploded, it was blocking the signal.
She looked back over at Devastator, who appeared to be laboring under the same difficulties, his own Titans communicator in-hand, the hiss of static emanating from it. The Titan using it glanced furtively at Jinx, as if not entirely certain she wasn't about to leap for his throat or blast him with a hex, and after a few more moments fiddling with the thing, he clipped it back onto his belt and turned to face her.
"I can't get through," he said, as if she was somehow in doubt. "Can - "
"No," snapped Jinx angrily, frowning as she considered the massive granite slab that had fallen behind them. "And since you decided to fight instead of just handing the diamond over, now we're stuck here."
Cyborg would have protested that he had done no such thing, that she had been the one to fire the first spell, but Devastator did not. "Cyborg said they were tunneling through to get us out. All we need to do is..."
"That was before all this," said Jinx. "Even if we didn't just collapse the entire cavern, what are they gonna do? Drill through a hundred yards of solid rock?"
"If they have to," replied Devastator, who was clearly more scared than he was trying to let on. "They're not gonna give up just because of another cave-in."
"The hallway imploded, you idiot! There's no tunnel left for them to follow. They could dig for three weeks and never find us."
Plainly, Devastator had not considered that possibility, and even in the dim light of what few overhead bulbs were still working, he quite clearly turned paler, his hands starting to quiver visibly. Jinx felt her own stomach starting to tighten at the prospect of being trapped down here to starve to death, and quickly made sure not to let any of it show, certainly not in front of a Titan.
"Well... I mean... what about this tunnel we're in?" asked Devastator. "Do you know where it goes?"
Jinx growled as she took the map out of her pocket and unfolded it once more. After a few moments' study, she shook her head. "This thing doesn't show it. It must be too new..."
"... or too old," ventured Devastator, who was looking up at the ceiling and walls. "This place looks like it's ready to collapse too."
"Well then maybe you shouldn't blow anything else up?" Jinx asked rhetorically.
"Yeah," snapped Devastator back bitterly, "instead you should throw more of those pink things around. They really help."
Jinx nearly blasted him then and there for that, but the threat of imminent death managed to stay her hand. "... all right," she said through clenched teeth. "No more powers until it's not gonna kill us both?"
"Sure..." agreed Devastator with undue haste.
A soft groan, like a tree moaning in a windstorm, emerged from somewhere overhead, and more dust filtered down from the ceiling. Devastator backed several paces down the tunnel, and Jinx had to remind herself not to do the same, at risk of appearing worried.
"I really think we should get out of here," said Devastator, and Jinx had to admit that she agreed, not that she was about to tell the Titan that. Instead she wordlessly turned and started walking down the tunnel, leaving Devastator to catch up or not as he liked. She did not glance back to see that he was following her, acting as if, as far as she was concerned, he was the last thing on her mind. It wasn't true of course, for he still had the diamond, but she had a feeling that he wouldn't fall too far behind.
And besides, it wasn't like he had anywhere else to go...
*------------------------------------------------------------*
For a good hour, Jinx and Devastator walked down the abandoned mining tunnel in stony silence. Jinx refused categorically to so much as glance at Devastator, save for once or twice when she was certain he wasn't looking, giving off as best she could the impression that she had forgotten he was there. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth, but no matter how much she forced herself to think, she could not come up with a way to divest Devastator of the diamond without potentially bringing the entire tunnel down on both their heads. Accordingly, she had decided to simply wait and see what opportunities presented themselves for getting the diamond back.
So far not much had developed. The hallway's uniformity was mind-numbing, no turns, no twists, no change in the dim overhead lighting that was somehow still deriving power despite all the cave-ins. By now they had to have covered at least three miles, but still there was no sign of anything up ahead, though Jinx supposed she should count herself as lucky that they hadn't come to a dead end.
She had taken the lead, if you could call it that. Devastator had stayed a few paces behind her at all times, probably wanted to keep her in sight, and she had been content to simply let him follow her. She wanted to put him off his guard, give him a chance to make a mistake and let her get the drop on him. A single good hex would do the trick, but she wasn't sufficiently confident that she could knock him out with one shot without drawing a reply. Getting the diamond would be of no use if it meant getting crushed to death. Neither of them had said a word since leaving the scene of the last cave-in, which was fine by Jinx, and apparently fine by Devastator as well. It wasn't as though they had a lot to talk about, after all.
The first interruption to their silent walk came suddenly.
One moment, Jinx had been walking under automatic control, concentrating intently on the problem of how to get the diamond away from Devastator, if only so that she wouldn't have to consider the problem of what they were going to do if this tunnel turned out to come to an abrupt end. The next, without any warning whatsoever, the entire ceiling gave way above their heads with a crash, dumping tons of loose dirt and sand down on top of them.
Jinx may not have been concentrating on her surroundings, but her reflexes were honed to a razor's edge, and she reacted automatically, diving forwards and hitting the ground in a tight roll, coming up on her feet and sprinting out of the way. Devastator, further back and with less experience under his belt, managed to avoid the bulk of the collapse, but could not avoid being clipped by it, and was driven to the ground under hundreds of pounds of sand and dirt.
As soon as it became clear that the rest of the tunnel wasn't about to implode, Jinx quickly decelerated to a stop, turning back to see what had befallen the Titan. Devastator was pinned face-down on the ground by an enormous pile of dirt, completely buried save for his head and his right arm, the rest of him held motionless by the weight of the collapsed debris, his baton having rolled out of reach over to the side of the tunnel. As she watched, he struggled to claw his way free with his one available arm, without success, finally looking up at her with an expression halfway between apprehension and expectation.
The look on Devastator's face brought a triumphant smile to hers. "You're not actually gonna ask me for help, are you?"
He tried to reply, but the weight of the debris was squashing the air out of his lungs, and he only managed a soft "please" before collapsing into a coughing fit.
She giggled as she opened her hand and let her entropic energy form into a hex. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't blow your head off and take the diamond."
"You'll... bring the... hallway... down."
She actually might, which she knew of course, that being the reason why she hadn't simply done so instead of asking. Entropy and bad luck were fine weapons, but not the most discriminating in terms of what they destroyed.
She shrugged and let the energy disperse. "Fine then," she said, crossing her arms, "I'll just wait for you to suffocate."
She had expected him to plead with her and beg for his life, which might have been fun. Instead however, he shut his eyes tightly and tried to steady what little breathing he still could do as he extended his one free arm as far as it could go. For a few moments, she wasn't at all certain what he was doing, and then she heard the rocks lining the tunnel near her starting to groan. She looked around, and saw, to her surprise, a layer of... frost... forming all over the walls and ceiling.
"What the - "
"Help me or... or I'll... blow the tunnel in..." choked Devastator between clenched teeth, his eyes still held shut.
Generally speaking, few things surprised Jinx, but this one did. "You're going to kill us both?" she asked, more confused than anything.
"That's up to... to you!" he managed to cough out. "I can't... I can't hold it... forever!"
Despite the warning, Jinx took a few seconds to consider the situation, watching Devastator, who cracked his eyes open and looked up at her expectantly, sweat standing out on his brow, either from the strain of maintaining the explosive energy, or the strain of breathing.
The suspense was apparently getting to Devastator. "Please!" he finally exploded. "I can't... I... help m-"
"Fine," she said, cutting him off, her voice glacially cool, or so she deemed it, and with a very controlled, casual gait, she walked over to the pile of dirt, crouched down, took his hand, braced herself, and pulled. Very slowly, Devastator came loose of the debris that was crushing the air out of his lungs, and he gasped for breath as his chest was released, before finally struggling the rest of the way out and flopping down onto his hands and knees in front of the dirt pile, breathing heavily.
Jinx crouched in front of him, frowning at how easy it would be to blast him or even to simply hit him over the back of the head and knock him cold, and yet he had those damned explosions ready to go in the walls and ceiling, like some kind of twisted version of a dead man's switch.
"I don't suppose you'll give me the diamond out of gratitude?" she ventured. What the hell, it was worth a shot.
Instead of defiantly refusing her, Devastator gulped down more air for a few moments before sitting up and shaking his head in incomprehension. "What do you want with this diamond, anyhow?"
Jinx laughed. "It's worth a hundred million dollars, what do you think I want with it?"
"Yeah," said Devastator, "but you can't sell it! Every newspaper in the world's been talking about this thing ever since they dug it up. What are you gonna do, walk into a jewelry store and say you found it lying in the gutter?"
"I don't have to sell it to a jeweler you know," said Jinx with a frown.
"No, but you have to sell it to somebody. Even a criminal wouldn't buy this, it'd be like putting up a sign saying 'I buy stolen goods, arrest me!'"
"Look who cares why I want it," snapped Jinx, suddenly tired of the questions. "I want it. And I get what I want."
"Is that why you're stuck in a mining tunnel?"
Jinx refused to be baited. "I'm getting out of here," she said, crossing her arms. "You may not be. And when I get out of here, it'll be with the diamond."
"Well since the instant you have the diamond you'll probably blow my head off, I think I'll keep it for now." He had apparently recovered sufficiently to be ready to move on, and stood up. "Let's go."
Jinx rolled her eyes as she stood as well. "Lead the way, fearless... wait a minute... what about those bombs you set?"
Devastator stopped. "Bombs?"
"The rocks you were gonna blow apart if I didn't pull you out."
"What, those?" asked Devastator, sounding genuinely confused. "I let those go once you pulled me out."
Externally, Jinx did her utmost not to appear perturbed. Internally, she was screaming very creative epithets at herself, Devastator, and whatever malicious god had set this situation up.
"Thanks, by the way..." offered Devastator, before turning and walking off down the tunnel.
"... don't mention it," said Jinx through clenched teeth, barely managing to keep the groan out of her voice as she turned and followed Devastator away from the dirt pile.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
two roads converged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference
- Robert Frost, Road Not Taken
*------------------------------------------------------------*
A hundred yards wide and a quarter mile long, the primary cavern of the Los Palmas diamond mining complex was large enough to house a small warship, yet at present it was dark and nearly empty, save for the distant glow of the strung lights hanging above the cavern floor. Mine carts and laser drills lay scattered about the rock enclosure, some on their sides, some with smoking rents torn in them. Figures in black armor, energy rifles still in hand, lay crumpled alongside the mining equipment, soft moans, or the lack thereof, indicating which ones were still semi-conscious, and which ones were out cold.
The three dozen figures striding through the middle of the cavern did not pay the fallen soldiers the slightest attention, and what few sounds the troops made were masked by mechanical whirings, heavy footfalls, and, of course, witty banter.
... well... banter at least.
"See, what'd ah tell y'all?!" remarked the red-suited figure in the lead to an identical red-suited figure walking alongside him. "Nobody ever beats Billy Numerous!"
A chorus of enthusiastic replies from the dozens of exact replicas of the speaker only added to the surreality of the situation, but the four people walking along who weren't clones of the crimson-clad southerner took it all in stride, for while Billy was congratulating himself for having made such a mess of the security guards who had tried to stop them, Gizmo and Mammoth were engaged in what was apparently a much more important pass-time: Whining.
"Are we there yet?"
"Yeah, how much further we goin'?"
"Shut up, both of you," said Jinx, glancing left and right through the forest of Billys as she tried to pick out the appropriate path.
"We've been down here forever!" said Gizmo, "I need to recharge my batteries!"
"I told you to bring extra, didn't I? And what are you complaining about? You're not even walking!"
Gizmo crossed his arms and muttered something under his breath, as the two jets emerging from his backpack harness floated him over fallen guards and debris. Jinx chose to pretend she hadn't heard what he'd said as she consulted the map in her hands.
"Should be around... somewhere..."
A grin crossed her face a moment later as she spotted a small tunnel branching out from the main cavern and running deeper into the mine. Without a word, she walked quickly towards it, leaving the others to follow. The line of electric lights hung overhead led directly into the corridor, as did a rail cart line, marking it out as a location of some importance within the underground maze.
"Yo, Jinx?"
Jinx glanced back absentmindedly as See-More caught up to her, leaving Mammoth and Gizmo to bring up the rear along with Billy Numerous, once more re-united with all of his selves.
"What is it?" Jinx asked, inflecting her voice with fatigue to signal how little she wanted to hear any more complaints.
"Relax," said See-More, "I was just wonderin' what we're doin' down here. You said we were gonna take Billy for a test, but why here?"
"We're in a diamond mine, genius," said Jinx deadpan. "What do you think we're here for?"
"Yeah," replied See-More, still confused, "but I don't see any diamonds. Are we s'possed to be diggin' em out of the wall or somethin'?"
Jinx sighed and growled to herself. "When they dig the diamonds out of the ground, they store them in a secure place inside the mine before they ship them to the jewelcutters. We're gonna raid it."
See-More let a smile cross his face. "Sounds good. So where is it?"
"If this map is worth anything, then it should be right about... there."
Ahead, the tunnel divided into two different shafts, the lights splitting and proceeding in both directions. The rail tracks however led left only, and from the fork in the tunnel, Jinx could see that the leftmost branch came to an abrupt halt ten yards further down, where the way was blocked by a solid steel door. Jinx turned and waved up the other Hivers, and stood back to watch as See-More confirmed that there was a vault of some sort behind the barrier, Gizmo went to work trying to open it, and Mammoth and Billy watched for any further interference from whatever guards might still be poking around.
Gizmo reported that the door was "trivial" to hack, and would be open in a couple minutes, and Jinx allowed herself to think about the real purpose of this heist for a moment. She glanced back at Billy Numerous, who was, she was displeased to note, blabbering with Mammoth over the proper way to deep fry a whole turkey. No genius, that one, but he'd managed to hold his own pretty well with the guards on the way in, and he didn't seem too annoying. Of the six or seven replacements the Hive Five had tested out to replace Private Hive (who had up and left after the disaster with Mother May-Eye), Billy seemed to be the best prospect.
That said more about the others than it did about Billy himself, but Jinx supposed she was lucky not to have attracted another Superhero on deep cover...
"Ha! Got it!"
As usual, all she needed to do was give Gizmo a computer to hack, and all complaints vanished. She adopted a feral grin as Gizmo pushed the door open and flew into the vault. Jinx and the others followed him in, finding themselves inside a metal cube twenty feet to a side, the walls covered in locked metal boxes, like the safety deposit boxes in a bank. On the opposite wall was a special box, three times larger than the others, fitted with a combination lock, clearly holding something important, and she walked straight over to it as the others began to burn, cut, tear, or pry their way into the various smaller boxes to get at the valuables inside. With a wave of her hand, she smashed the lock on the front of the larger box, and opened the door.
Jackpot.
Inside the metal box sat a single diamond the size of a small peach. Oblong and flat, like an enormous beetle, it positively glowed a pale blue in the fluorescent light of the vault. Carefully, she plucked it out of the small safe, and held it up to the light, letting it sparkle as she turned it slowly this way and that. The others all stopped what they were doing as they saw the enormous gemstone, and whistled, chuckled or simply gazed on appreciatively.
"Whoa!"
"Look at that!"
"Hot damn..."
"That's gotta be worth a lot!"
The last comment engendered a smirk from Jinx. "We're not fencing this one," she said, clearly uninterested in hearing objections. "This one's mine."
Puzzled looks were exchanged. "What?" asked Gizmo. "Why? That thing's gotta be worth millions!"
"Yeah," asked See-More, more confused than upset. "What do you want with that?"
"None of your business, okay?" she snapped, clasping the diamond in her fist. "Finish up here and let's get going."
Her orders did not quite carry the note of command she might have hoped for, as all four of the others rolled their eyes (or eye), and chuckled. See-More even nudged Mammoth with his elbow. "I guess diamonds really are a girl's - "
Jinx whirled around, shooting See-More a look of pure venom. "Finish that sentence and watch what happens. I dare you."
See-More took one look at his team leader and elected to refrain from further comment, and Jinx did not stick around to hear the rest, stepping out of the bank vault to wait for the others to finish with their rounds of theft. In no time at all, all five of them (more if you counted Billy's doubles) were walking back the way they had come, all but Jinx loaded down with diamonds of all shapes and colors, bragging to one another about the amazing stuff they were to buy with their shares. Jinx alone remained silent and unburdened, the brilliant gemstone held safely in her pocket as she let Mammoth and Gizmo take the lead, and tried to trace the shortest route back to the surface on her map.
"Yo, Jinx?" asked See-More. "How're we gettin' outta here?"
"In handcuffs."
Jinx had only a bare second to register that someone else had answered before she walked straight into Mammoth, who had come to an abrupt halt in front of her. Bouncing off of him, she stopped as well as she saw the one thing she had hoped most of all not to see tonight.
Or rather the six things.
All six of the Teen Titans were standing in the middle of the enormous cavern the Hivers had been traversing only five minutes before. Robin stood out in front, his staff held like a flagpole, his perpetual smirk of smug superiority written on his face. To his left and right were arrayed the other Titans in a line. Raven, cloaked in shadow like a living nightmare, floating several inches above the ground with dark energy sheathing her hands. Starfire, her eyes and fists blazing a radioactive green, poised on the balls of her feet to launch either into the air or directly into one of the Hivers. Cyborg, looming larger even than Mammoth, arms crossed, feet planted wide, scowling at them as if the Hive were less than dirt beneath his metal feet, a gross inconvenience to his time. Beast Boy, crouched down like a coiled spring, a wicked grin on his face, standing far enough from his teammates that Jinx knew he was already planning on assuming some gargantuan form and ripping into them. Last of all, nearest to Robin, a boy she didn't recognize in person but knew to be Devastator, the newest Titan, decked out in red and orange and holding at his side a baton made of flaming steel like a branding iron hot off the coals, whose gaze was darting from one Hiver to the next too quickly for her to read.
Robin, as always, commanded all the attention, stepping forward with just the slightest swagger and flipping his staff around into a ready position. "Give it up, Jinx," he said in the tough-guy voice he had to have learned from Batman. "You're outmatched this time."
They were, Jinx knew, but Mammoth took a step forward himself and clenched his fists. "You guys can't stop us!" he thundered back at the Boy Wonder. "Go crawl back to your tower before we break your legs!"
"Yeah," chimed in See-More, sliding his visor's adjustment knob over to a combat setting. "This stuff's ours now. You want it, you're gonna have to come and take it from us!"
Despite her best attempts, Jinx couldn't help but smile a bit. No matter that the last five times they had faced the Titans had all turned into disasters, her friends were all ready for round six at the drop of a hat.
Cyborg scoffed at the other Hivers, par for the course for him as his human and robotic eyes both fell on Billy. "Doin' some recruiting?" he asked.
Jinx stepped past Mammoth and See-More as Gizmo and Billy stepped out to form a line on either side of her. "If you can," she said, giving Devastator her most disparaging look, and grinning as she saw him flinch, "so can we."
"Always one step behind," said Robin, and the smug satisfaction written on his face as he said it gave Jinx the urge to cave his it in. "We've got you six on five. Give up the goods and come quietly."
She didn't even have to glance over at Billy, for he took his own cue, stepping forward with a grin. "Now you listen here, stop-light. Nobody outnumbers Billy Numerous..."
Three seconds later, a small army of clones stood all about the cavern, encircling both Titans and Hivers, the former blinking in disbelief, the latter cackling to themselves as they faced down their nemeses. This had not been what Jinx had had in mind when she had decided to take Billy on a field test, but given the circumstances, it would do.
"What was that about us leaving in handcuffs?" asked Jinx, relishing the look of undisguised astonishment on Cyborg's face more than she had imagined humanly possible. She snapped her fingers, more for effect than anything else. That would come later.
"Take 'em down."
Her teammates obliged.
As always in these sorts of fights, complete anarchy ensued. She knew the Titans usually tried to coordinate, but coordinating the Hive was like herding cats... deaf cats. Accordingly, she let the others pick their targets and go to work while she chose one for herself. With no time to sit back and formulate even a personal plan, she simply conjured a hex and flung it into the midst of the Titans to scatter them. The sea of Billy Numerouses (Numeri?) enveloped her a second later, blocking off her view of what was going on, and she lightly flipped up into the air to try and get a better picture. A starbolt nearly took her head off, and she aborted her jump, landing hard atop an overturned forklift, and whirled about to fire back, but Starfire was already gone, flipping through the air like a gnat, trying to avoid See-More's laser beam as it carved random patterns into the cavern wall in pursuit of her.
A blueish glow lit up the immediate area and half a dozen of Billy's doubles went flying about like bowling pins as Cyborg's sonic cannon cut a swathe through the sea of red around him. Cyborg himself, standing out as always ('not as always, actually', she thought with a grimace), had his back to her, a perfect target almost as large as the proverbial broadside of a barn. She summoned another hex and another and another, and hurled them down at Cyborg like a vengeful goddess hurling thunderbolts, pelting the ground around him and upsetting his balance, sending him toppling over. Allowing herself a triumphant cackle, she gathered up the entropic energy she wielded for yet another strike, and was preparing to unleash it when the forklift blew up.
Had something hit the forklift, she could have dealt with it, but instead the entire machine went off like a bomb with no warning whatsoever, and the next thing she knew she was flying through the air before slamming into the rock wall of the cavern and sliding to the ground. The surprise was worse than the impact itself, and she sat up and looked around for the culprit even as she gathered her energy about her. For a second she thought Robin had tossed an explosive birdarang her way, but Robin was on the other side of the cavern dealing with Mammoth and a half dozen Billies. So who could...
... oh right... him.
Devastator was standing a good fifty paces away, keeping near to Cyborg, but while Cyborg was facing away from her, trying to fight off part of Billy's one-man army, Devastator was looking straight at her, his baton still smoldering red and pieces of the detonated forklift laying all around him. She scrambled back to her feet, thankful that the newest Titan hadn't had the presence of mind to follow up his attack, and flipped open her Hive communicator. Devastator was small potatoes.
"Gizmo," she said, "deal with the newbie. I want Cyborg."
For once, Gizmo didn't respond with a smart remark. "Got it," he said, "he's toast," and Jinx saw Gizmo fire a barrage of rockets at Raven to keep her occupied while he disengaged and turned around to actually follow orders. Miracles never ceased.
Then again, it was hardly miraculous for Gizmo to want to show off, and show off he proceeded to do, screaming his own brand of garbled insults and launching another hail of micro-missiles out of his harness at Devastator, who prudently sought shelter behind a massive stalagmite, the front half of which disintegrated beneath Gizmo's assault. Jinx shook the rock fragments off of her shoulders and sprinted towards Cyborg, who spotted her as he was turning to support Devastator, and opened fire with his sonic cannon. Too little, too late. Jinx easily sidestepped the blue beam and flung a hex at the ceiling above Cyborg, which crumbled like stale bread. Cyborg had no choice but to fall back or be crushed, and selected the former option, diving backwards as a piece of rock the size of a car shattered against the spot he had just been standing. Jinx laughed again, and prepared to follow up her attack when she heard a series of blasts from her left, and turned to see something she had not expected.
Gizmo was laying on the ground on his back, screaming nonsensical epithets at Devastator, who, confronted with Gizmo's rocket assault, had apparently targeted the pair of jet boosters the pre-teen gear-head was using to fly with, and blown both of them to bits. A small carpet of debris rained down around Gizmo as he tried to struggle back to his feet, held down by the unaided weight of his own harness. He pressed a button, and four mechanical spider legs emerged from his backpack, hoisting him back into the air with a flourish, but before Gizmo could so much as gloat over this accomplishment, Devastator stepped forward and swung his baton like an orchestra conductor, up, down, left and right, and blew all four limbs off at the roots, dumping Gizmo unceremoniously back onto the ground.
Gizmo, understandably enough, was livid. "You snot-guzzling, crud-munching..."
"Next time, don't use pure titanium," said Devastator as he moved forward, presumably to finish the job. Though smallest of the Titans, Devastator was still much bigger than Gizmo, and had a flaming metal baton to boot, while Gizmo was laying on his back like an overturned turtle. Much as Jinx wanted to to get some payback from Cyborg, this decision was open and shut.
Devastator never knew what hit him as Jinx blindsided him with a wave of entropy, tossing him back away from Gizmo into the mouth of the tunnel that led to the vault they had just ransacked. In retrospect, she realized with a frown, sending Gizmo after Devastator was a mistake. She should have handled him herself before dealing with Cyborg. Fortunately, there was time enough to rectify that little error...
Devastator stood back up with a groan as Jinx moved past Gizmo to face him down. He froze as he saw who was advancing towards him, an understandable reaction maybe, but one that would cost him, as she instantly took the opportunity to blast him again. The pink wave of energy hit him square in the chest and threw him fifteen feet down the tunnel, near to where the tunnel forked into two branches. Rapidly, he scrambled back to his feet, narrowly evading a third energy wave and snapping his baton like a tennis player. Jinx had no idea what he was targeting, but she did not wait around to find out, and rolled forward, narrowly avoiding the chorus of explosions that erupted from the ground behind her, and coming up with yet another entropic blast, which caught Devastator in the stomach and slammed him back into the wall, hard enough to shake dust loose from the light fixtures above.
"Should'a stayed home, newbie," said Jinx with a grin as Devastator moaned softly, holding his stomach with one hand as he lifted his baton and swung it around again. Jinx heard the wall behind Devastator's head creak as a lunchbox-sized chunk of it was blasted towards her like a cannonball. The rock would have clocked her right in the nose, but with a flick of her wrist, her entropic powers shattered it to pebbles. Brushing them out of her face, she raised her other hand and blasted Devastator's baton from his grip, instantly extinguishing its flames as she tossed it down one of the two tunnel branches.
The rest of the fight still raged behind her, and thus there was no time for the customary bragging that normally would have gone on. Shorn of his weapon, Devastator had a bit of a deer-in-headlights look to him as he stared at Jinx, unsure of what he ought to do.
"Who taught you how to fight?" she asked, "your grandmother?" She knew the real answer of course. Devastator's stance, his mannerisms, everything smacked of Robin's tutelage, but this kid was no Robin, and to prove the point, she conjured forth another hex in one hand and casually pitched it right at Devastator, planning to knock him unconscious in a single solid blow.
The plan was working perfectly right up until the point where the floor exploded under her feet.
What with the flames and all, Jinx had rather assumed that the baton was integral to Devastator's powers. It appeared however that this assumption had been in error, for no sooner had she reached forward to blast him than he aimed his hand out at the ground beneath her and the rail car tracks she was standing on blew apart, throwing her into the air like a rag doll. Her hex, already in mid-launch, flew upwards and back as she flipped end over end, slamming not into Devastator, but into the tunnel ceiling behind her, which shattered like a pane of glass, weakened already by the repeated impacts and shocks of the raging battle. With a roar like a raging waterfall, the tunnel supports gave way, and the entire ceiling came crashing down in an avalanche of rock and dirt. Jinx managed to hit the ground rolling, narrowly avoiding being crushed under thirty tons of rubble, and blindly scrambled ahead as the entire tunnel section imploded. Desperately lunging forward to get out of the way of the cascading debris, she hit the ground just as a fist-sized rock smashed into the back of her head, and everything went black.
*------------------------------------------------------------*
Jinx woke up with a splitting headache.
She was laying on the bare ground up against the side of the mining tunnel, completely covered in dirt, the black shawl around her shoulders torn and flecked with bits of crystal. Her hair was matted with what she hoped wasn't blood, and her entire right side was on fire from where she had slid across the uneven rock floor. With one hand to her head, she carefully picked herself up off the dirt. Her sleeve was torn, her arm scraped raw, but nothing seemed to be broken, and though scuffed and bruised, she didn't appear to be bleeding. Still, her arm throbbed mercilessly, and she grimaced as she rubbed it with her other hand, blinking in the dim light cast by what few overhead bulbs were still working as she tried to figure out what the hell had happened.
By the look of things, the broad tunnel between the main cavern and the fork that led to the diamond vault had completely collapsed, a massive wall of dirt and rock blocking the passage from end to end. The fork itself was still clear, the supports having held, but the way back to her teammates was sealed by tons and tons of debris. She was standing on one side of the tunnel fork, staring at what could well have been fifty solid yards of imploded debris, so thick that she could hear nothing of what was happening on the other side of it. Around the corner to her right lay the diamond vault they had just robbed, but already she knew that was a dead end, while behind her, the tunnel stretched on deeper into the dark reaches of the mining complex.
"David, come in! Can you hear me?"
Jinx' eyes shot open, for though the voice that had just spoken was soft and distorted and cross-cut with static, she recognized it instantly as Cyborg's, and she froze as still as a statue and did nothing but listen and try to pinpoint where it was coming from. There was a shuffling sound from around the corner, from the other fork of the tunnel that led to the diamond vault, and Jinx heard someone stand up with a groan and the soft click of a communicator flipping on.
"Cyborg? Hello? Is anyone there?"
The reply from Cyborg's tinned voice was almost instantaneous, and the relief in his tone was obvious even through the static. "Goddamn," he said, "are you all right, man?"
There was a soft groan and a rattling of small pebbles as whoever was speaking shook himself off. "I think so," came the reply, followed by a moment's silence. "The... the tunnel's blocked off."
"Yeah," said Cyborg, "Jinx brought the whole thing down when you blasted her. Where are you?"
"I'm... I'm not sure, lemme look around." Jinx heard the sound of shuffling and footsteps turning in place, and very, very carefully, she made her way towards the corner of the fork in the tunnel. Even had she not recognized the voice from before, Jinx already knew who it was that would be waiting for her around the corner. Her suspicion was confirmed a moment later when she peered around into the tunnel that led to the vault, and saw a red and orange-suited figure standing with her back mostly to her. Quickly she ducked down behind the corner, barely peeking around it so as not to be seen in the low light of the hallway.
Devastator turned around several times, clearly without a clue in the world that he was not the only one who had survived the cave-in. "I'm in front of a... metal door of some kind."
"That's the vault door," said Cyborg. "There should be a fork in the tunnel near you..."
"Yeah... I think I see it," said Devastator as he continued to describe his surroundings to Cyborg. Jinx ducked back entirely to avoid being spotted as she tried to decide what to do with this Titan. Much as she relished the idea of beating his head in while Cyborg watched helplessly over the communicator, Devastator was, as before, small potatoes. She had the diamond after all, and nothing else was...
Jinx froze, her hand held over her unexpectedly empty pocket, as the conversation between Cyborg and Devastator filtered back to the forefront of her mind, and she peered once more around the corner.
"... tip said somethin' about a jewel heist," said Cyborg. "The Hive are idiots, but they wouldn't'a just left a four hundred carat diamond behind. One of 'em musta taken it from the vault."
"Yeah, well, whoever had it, they don't anymore," said Devastator back as he reached down into his own pocket and pulled out the very diamond Jinx had expected to find safe in hers. She realized with a curt groan that it must have fallen loose when she had dove to avoid being crushed by the collapsing tunnel. Just great...
Despite the situation, Devastator spent a moment turning the priceless diamond over in his hand before putting it back in his pocket and returning his attention to Cyborg.
"Is there any sign of Jinx?" asked the half-robotic Titan. The Hive all scattered after the cave-in. BB and Robin are tryin' to track 'em down now, but none of us saw where she got to."
Devastator glanced around again, and Jinx ducked back. "No... I don't see her," he said, and a note of worry entered his voice. "You don't... you don't think she got..."
"No way," said Cyborg with certainty, and Jinx couldn't help but smirk. As if a cave-in was enough to take her down. "She probably snuck off somewhere in the middle of the fight. You just sit tight, okay? Star, Raven and I are gonna get you out of there."
"Right," said Devastator, who didn't sound too overjoyed at the prospect of staying here too long. "Just be careful, okay? I can see stress fractures in this rock. You try to blast your way in here, and the whole complex could collapse..."
"Hey, you're talkin' to Cyborg here," said Cyborg in that ultra-confident tone Jinx remembered with something less than fondness. "I got everything covered. Don't you worry about a thing."
Devastator gave a nervous laugh. "Sure," he said. "Devastator out." The Titan flipped the communicator shut and took a long, deep breath, before drawing his baton once more. As Jinx watched, the flames surrounding the baton sprang back to life at his very touch, and yet she noted that despite the fact that they were licking his hand, he showed no sign of pain or discomfort. With his other hand he took the diamond back out of his pocket, holding it up to the red light emitted from the baton and turning it this way and that to watch the flames dance within the heart of the gem.
As carefully and quietly as a cat, Jinx slowly stepped around the corner. Devastator's back was to her, his attention focused on the priceless jewel in his hands. Carefully, she formed a hex in her hands, taking her time so as to make no noise whatsoever, bringing her arm up to pitch it into Devastator's back like a baseball. One clean, powerful shot would be enough. Carefully she collected the entropic energy, and -
The Hive communicator at her hip chose that moment to speak. "Gizmo to Jinx! Jinx! Jinx, where are you?!"
Both Jinx and Devastator froze.
And then, both Jinx and Devastator acted at once.
Jinx lunged forward with a shout, flinging the stored up energy of her hex at Devastator, but her moment's hesitation had doomed her brilliant plan, and Devastator dove to the side as the energy struck the vault door and tore it to ribbons of steel like construction paper. He hit the ground rolling, and snapped his baton backwards as he did so, a pair of nearby rocks blasting towards her like grapeshot. One missed high, one she disintegrated with a flick of her wrist, and with her other hand she broke off the bases of a series of stalactites looming from the tunnel overhead, which plunged down towards Devastator like missiles.
Devastator's reaction was faster than she had expected. The briefing had claimed that he had trouble with complex compounds like rocks, yet faced with them, he drove his baton-hand up as though trying to impale something above him, and the three nearest stalactites instantly burst like artillery shells. The rest shattered against the floor of the tunnel. Unfortunately for him, Jinx had not been waiting to determine the results of her attack, and a half-second later, a wave of entropic energy that she had sent roiling along the ground slammed into him and unceremoniously swept him through the open vault door and into the vault itself, where the aftereffects of her entropy caused half of the unopened jewel boxes inside the vault to explode, showering Devastator with diamond dust and semi-precious stones.
"Is that all you've got?" she asked with a grin as he scrambled back to his feet.
He replied by snatching a fist-sized chunk of quartz off the ground and spiking it at her as though they were playing dodge ball. Jinx spun like a dancer to avoid the thrown rock, and yet while the quartz missed, it exploded as soon as it was within two feet of her, threw her off her balance, and sent her tumbling to the ground. Or rather it would have, except the floor beneath her feet blew up as she was falling to meet it, the blast catching her right in the sternum and flipping her over twice before dumping her unceremoniously on her back.
... now she was mad.
She did not do anything so undignified as scramble, but instead positively leaped back up, conjuring entropic energy from both hands and hurling it at Devastator, who had emerged from the interior of the vault and taken what cover he could behind fallen rocks and piles of debris. He swung his baton like he was orchestrating some mad symphony and pieces of the wall and ceiling burst at his command, but she contemptuously swatted the projectiles he fired at her aside with waves of entropy and tore his cover apart with repeated bursts of the same. Running out of things to hide behind, he desperately targeted the floor beneath her feet, but she was ready this time, and used the blast to flip backwards like a gymnast and land perfectly on her feet, before conjuring another hex and -
All of a sudden, the fight stopped.
Devastator's baton still flared, the hex still crackled in her hands, and yet both Jinx and Devastator stopped dead in their tracks as the entire tunnel began to shake and quiver. Dust and pebbles fell from the ceiling as a mighty rumble filled the air around them. Having suddenly forgotten both Devastator and diamond, Jinx rapidly looked around the quaking corridor, before her eyes fell upon Devastator again, who was staring at her with a wide-eyed expression that told her he had just come to the same conclusion she did. And then the ceiling caved in with a roar, and both of them ran.
The tunnel collapsed in sections, the most badly damaged ones first, and it was this fact alone which prevented both Jinx and Devastator from being crushed into jelly. Jinx did not look back, nor did she even consider what Devastator might be doing, as she sprinted around the corner and down the tunnel that led into regions unknown, and the full-throated roar of splintering beams and imploding rock behind her told her everything she needed to know about what would happen should she trip. She did not. Rocks thundered in her ears, clapping against one another like enormous castanets, until finally a slab of granite as large as an office building crushed a section of the tunnel several feet behind her, and then suddenly everything was quiet again.
Jinx ground to a halt, one hand on the tunnel wall, listening and feeling for more tremors. For a few seconds, she could hear nothing save for the sound of her own thumping heart and ragged breath, and it took a moment before she even realized that there was still someone else in the tunnel with her.
Devastator was standing on the other side of the tunnel, doubled over and trying to catch his breath, his baton still held in one hand, once more reduced to bare steel. He was more winded than she was, at least from the looks of things, but that didn't stop him from watching her even as he struggled to catch his breath, shifting his baton around to his right hand as though she wouldn't notice. For her part, Jinx had dispelled the entropic energy she was using when she started running, but it was still there, ready to call upon should there be a need for round three.
Another tremor, much more subdued, shook the area, and both of them froze and listened and watched for any sign that it was about to become necessary for them to run again, but it settled down without further collapse, serving only to underline just how bad an idea it would be to resume hostilities when one of the two of them wielded raw entropy, and the other supernatural demolitions
It was an idea that Devastator had apparently gotten as well, for he made no effort to restart the fight. Instead he was watching her like a rat watching a mountain lion, saying nothing, just waiting for her to move or act. Jinx got the sense that Devastator knew himself to be outmatched, and decided to try and play his fear.
"Give up?" she asked.
He didn't reply immediately, but took a few moments to consider it. Still, his answer was not 'Yes' or 'I surrender,' but "How about a truce?" Apparently he wasn't quite that afraid of her.
"Give me the diamond, and I'll think about it."
His free hand automatically slid to his side where the diamond was being held. "No way," he said.
She gave him her best maniacal grin, the one that never failed to unsettle the other Hivers. "You know what happens if we start up again, don't you?"
"Yeah," he said, very nervous but still defiant. "And so do you."
"So what makes you think I won't do it?"
"Because Cyborg says you're not crazy."
That one stopped her short.
She continued to watch him with a defiant look, but while he seemed to be trying to phase through the wall away from her, he gave no indication that he was about to hand the diamond over to her, and she knew that even if she could take him down conventionally, there was no way she could do so before he made use of his own powers and potentially killed them both. Accordingly, all she could do was groan in frustration. "Fine," she said. "Keep it for now." She pulled her own communicator from her belt, the one Gizmo had interrupted her over, and contemptuously turned her back on Devastator, flipping it open. "Gizmo?"
A screenfull of static greeted her, along with a flashing yellow light in the corner of the communicator's screen that indicated no signal. She pointed the communicator in several directions, even hit it a few times, but it stubbornly refused to show her anything other than a black and white haze. However much of the tunnel had imploded, it was blocking the signal.
She looked back over at Devastator, who appeared to be laboring under the same difficulties, his own Titans communicator in-hand, the hiss of static emanating from it. The Titan using it glanced furtively at Jinx, as if not entirely certain she wasn't about to leap for his throat or blast him with a hex, and after a few more moments fiddling with the thing, he clipped it back onto his belt and turned to face her.
"I can't get through," he said, as if she was somehow in doubt. "Can - "
"No," snapped Jinx angrily, frowning as she considered the massive granite slab that had fallen behind them. "And since you decided to fight instead of just handing the diamond over, now we're stuck here."
Cyborg would have protested that he had done no such thing, that she had been the one to fire the first spell, but Devastator did not. "Cyborg said they were tunneling through to get us out. All we need to do is..."
"That was before all this," said Jinx. "Even if we didn't just collapse the entire cavern, what are they gonna do? Drill through a hundred yards of solid rock?"
"If they have to," replied Devastator, who was clearly more scared than he was trying to let on. "They're not gonna give up just because of another cave-in."
"The hallway imploded, you idiot! There's no tunnel left for them to follow. They could dig for three weeks and never find us."
Plainly, Devastator had not considered that possibility, and even in the dim light of what few overhead bulbs were still working, he quite clearly turned paler, his hands starting to quiver visibly. Jinx felt her own stomach starting to tighten at the prospect of being trapped down here to starve to death, and quickly made sure not to let any of it show, certainly not in front of a Titan.
"Well... I mean... what about this tunnel we're in?" asked Devastator. "Do you know where it goes?"
Jinx growled as she took the map out of her pocket and unfolded it once more. After a few moments' study, she shook her head. "This thing doesn't show it. It must be too new..."
"... or too old," ventured Devastator, who was looking up at the ceiling and walls. "This place looks like it's ready to collapse too."
"Well then maybe you shouldn't blow anything else up?" Jinx asked rhetorically.
"Yeah," snapped Devastator back bitterly, "instead you should throw more of those pink things around. They really help."
Jinx nearly blasted him then and there for that, but the threat of imminent death managed to stay her hand. "... all right," she said through clenched teeth. "No more powers until it's not gonna kill us both?"
"Sure..." agreed Devastator with undue haste.
A soft groan, like a tree moaning in a windstorm, emerged from somewhere overhead, and more dust filtered down from the ceiling. Devastator backed several paces down the tunnel, and Jinx had to remind herself not to do the same, at risk of appearing worried.
"I really think we should get out of here," said Devastator, and Jinx had to admit that she agreed, not that she was about to tell the Titan that. Instead she wordlessly turned and started walking down the tunnel, leaving Devastator to catch up or not as he liked. She did not glance back to see that he was following her, acting as if, as far as she was concerned, he was the last thing on her mind. It wasn't true of course, for he still had the diamond, but she had a feeling that he wouldn't fall too far behind.
And besides, it wasn't like he had anywhere else to go...
*------------------------------------------------------------*
For a good hour, Jinx and Devastator walked down the abandoned mining tunnel in stony silence. Jinx refused categorically to so much as glance at Devastator, save for once or twice when she was certain he wasn't looking, giving off as best she could the impression that she had forgotten he was there. In reality, nothing could have been further from the truth, but no matter how much she forced herself to think, she could not come up with a way to divest Devastator of the diamond without potentially bringing the entire tunnel down on both their heads. Accordingly, she had decided to simply wait and see what opportunities presented themselves for getting the diamond back.
So far not much had developed. The hallway's uniformity was mind-numbing, no turns, no twists, no change in the dim overhead lighting that was somehow still deriving power despite all the cave-ins. By now they had to have covered at least three miles, but still there was no sign of anything up ahead, though Jinx supposed she should count herself as lucky that they hadn't come to a dead end.
She had taken the lead, if you could call it that. Devastator had stayed a few paces behind her at all times, probably wanted to keep her in sight, and she had been content to simply let him follow her. She wanted to put him off his guard, give him a chance to make a mistake and let her get the drop on him. A single good hex would do the trick, but she wasn't sufficiently confident that she could knock him out with one shot without drawing a reply. Getting the diamond would be of no use if it meant getting crushed to death. Neither of them had said a word since leaving the scene of the last cave-in, which was fine by Jinx, and apparently fine by Devastator as well. It wasn't as though they had a lot to talk about, after all.
The first interruption to their silent walk came suddenly.
One moment, Jinx had been walking under automatic control, concentrating intently on the problem of how to get the diamond away from Devastator, if only so that she wouldn't have to consider the problem of what they were going to do if this tunnel turned out to come to an abrupt end. The next, without any warning whatsoever, the entire ceiling gave way above their heads with a crash, dumping tons of loose dirt and sand down on top of them.
Jinx may not have been concentrating on her surroundings, but her reflexes were honed to a razor's edge, and she reacted automatically, diving forwards and hitting the ground in a tight roll, coming up on her feet and sprinting out of the way. Devastator, further back and with less experience under his belt, managed to avoid the bulk of the collapse, but could not avoid being clipped by it, and was driven to the ground under hundreds of pounds of sand and dirt.
As soon as it became clear that the rest of the tunnel wasn't about to implode, Jinx quickly decelerated to a stop, turning back to see what had befallen the Titan. Devastator was pinned face-down on the ground by an enormous pile of dirt, completely buried save for his head and his right arm, the rest of him held motionless by the weight of the collapsed debris, his baton having rolled out of reach over to the side of the tunnel. As she watched, he struggled to claw his way free with his one available arm, without success, finally looking up at her with an expression halfway between apprehension and expectation.
The look on Devastator's face brought a triumphant smile to hers. "You're not actually gonna ask me for help, are you?"
He tried to reply, but the weight of the debris was squashing the air out of his lungs, and he only managed a soft "please" before collapsing into a coughing fit.
She giggled as she opened her hand and let her entropic energy form into a hex. "Give me one reason why I shouldn't blow your head off and take the diamond."
"You'll... bring the... hallway... down."
She actually might, which she knew of course, that being the reason why she hadn't simply done so instead of asking. Entropy and bad luck were fine weapons, but not the most discriminating in terms of what they destroyed.
She shrugged and let the energy disperse. "Fine then," she said, crossing her arms, "I'll just wait for you to suffocate."
She had expected him to plead with her and beg for his life, which might have been fun. Instead however, he shut his eyes tightly and tried to steady what little breathing he still could do as he extended his one free arm as far as it could go. For a few moments, she wasn't at all certain what he was doing, and then she heard the rocks lining the tunnel near her starting to groan. She looked around, and saw, to her surprise, a layer of... frost... forming all over the walls and ceiling.
"What the - "
"Help me or... or I'll... blow the tunnel in..." choked Devastator between clenched teeth, his eyes still held shut.
Generally speaking, few things surprised Jinx, but this one did. "You're going to kill us both?" she asked, more confused than anything.
"That's up to... to you!" he managed to cough out. "I can't... I can't hold it... forever!"
Despite the warning, Jinx took a few seconds to consider the situation, watching Devastator, who cracked his eyes open and looked up at her expectantly, sweat standing out on his brow, either from the strain of maintaining the explosive energy, or the strain of breathing.
The suspense was apparently getting to Devastator. "Please!" he finally exploded. "I can't... I... help m-"
"Fine," she said, cutting him off, her voice glacially cool, or so she deemed it, and with a very controlled, casual gait, she walked over to the pile of dirt, crouched down, took his hand, braced herself, and pulled. Very slowly, Devastator came loose of the debris that was crushing the air out of his lungs, and he gasped for breath as his chest was released, before finally struggling the rest of the way out and flopping down onto his hands and knees in front of the dirt pile, breathing heavily.
Jinx crouched in front of him, frowning at how easy it would be to blast him or even to simply hit him over the back of the head and knock him cold, and yet he had those damned explosions ready to go in the walls and ceiling, like some kind of twisted version of a dead man's switch.
"I don't suppose you'll give me the diamond out of gratitude?" she ventured. What the hell, it was worth a shot.
Instead of defiantly refusing her, Devastator gulped down more air for a few moments before sitting up and shaking his head in incomprehension. "What do you want with this diamond, anyhow?"
Jinx laughed. "It's worth a hundred million dollars, what do you think I want with it?"
"Yeah," said Devastator, "but you can't sell it! Every newspaper in the world's been talking about this thing ever since they dug it up. What are you gonna do, walk into a jewelry store and say you found it lying in the gutter?"
"I don't have to sell it to a jeweler you know," said Jinx with a frown.
"No, but you have to sell it to somebody. Even a criminal wouldn't buy this, it'd be like putting up a sign saying 'I buy stolen goods, arrest me!'"
"Look who cares why I want it," snapped Jinx, suddenly tired of the questions. "I want it. And I get what I want."
"Is that why you're stuck in a mining tunnel?"
Jinx refused to be baited. "I'm getting out of here," she said, crossing her arms. "You may not be. And when I get out of here, it'll be with the diamond."
"Well since the instant you have the diamond you'll probably blow my head off, I think I'll keep it for now." He had apparently recovered sufficiently to be ready to move on, and stood up. "Let's go."
Jinx rolled her eyes as she stood as well. "Lead the way, fearless... wait a minute... what about those bombs you set?"
Devastator stopped. "Bombs?"
"The rocks you were gonna blow apart if I didn't pull you out."
"What, those?" asked Devastator, sounding genuinely confused. "I let those go once you pulled me out."
Externally, Jinx did her utmost not to appear perturbed. Internally, she was screaming very creative epithets at herself, Devastator, and whatever malicious god had set this situation up.
"Thanks, by the way..." offered Devastator, before turning and walking off down the tunnel.
"... don't mention it," said Jinx through clenched teeth, barely managing to keep the groan out of her voice as she turned and followed Devastator away from the dirt pile.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 25, cont'd
*------------------------------------------------------------*
One could only keep one's mind focussed for so long before it began to slip. Jinx wasn't quite as bad as Mammoth or Gizmo, but hours of walking down the seemingly endless tunnel with nothing to occupy herself beyond plotting how to steal the diamond back from Devastator exceeded her attention span very quickly, especially since there was clearly no way either of them could take down the other while they remained underground. She neither knew nor cared nor asked what Devastator was thinking, but the mindless trudging seemed to be getting to him too, and given that fighting was out of the question, he appeared to think no harm of complaining.
"How far does this thing go?"
"I didn't build it," snapped Jinx. "I don't know if it goes anywhere."
"A six mile underground tunnel?" replied Devastator. "It goes somewhere."
"Eight," corrected Jinx, kicking a small rock aside and imagining any one of several people's heads stenciled upon it "at least eight so far."
"Whatever. Nobody carves an eight mile tunnel through solid rock for no reason."
"Well what makes you think I know where it's going?"
Devastator didn't respond instantly, and she could see him eying her carefully. "Nothing," he said. "Nevermind."
She rolled her eyes and kept going, and Devastator made no further attempt to make conversation, but the almost oppressive quiet that wrapped around them once more left her with an urge to fill it with something, so fill it she did, as he had.
"Knowing my luck, it leads to a volcano or something."
"What do you mean?"
Jinx had no intention of explaining, but when she noticed suddenly that Devastator's footsteps had stopped, she turned back, only to find that he was staring at her with wide eyes, one hand on the handle of his baton, as though he was expecting her suddenly to attack. If he was trying to look scary, he failed miserably, but she did pause for a second. "What?" she asked.
"What do you mean by 'knowing my luck'?" he said, and there was a very serious edge to his question that had not been there before.
She blinked a few times and then addressed him like she was talking to a four-year old. "I'm bad luck," she said condescendingly, "where do you think I got the name Jinx? Knowing my luck, we're about to walk into a - "
"I know your powers are all about bad luck," said Devastator, cutting her off, "But I thought we agreed not to use them until..."
Jinx rolled her eyes and groaned theatrically before lowering her head in frustration. It was enough to cause Devastator to fall quiet. "I don't just use bad luck you idiot," she said, "I am bad luck. You know, just like Cyborg is a jackass? I can't just switch it off whenever I feel like it."
He seemed to get the point. "... oh," he said, clearly embarrassed. Jinx considered pretending to be outraged and insulted, just for fun, but she decided against it. Right now all she wanted to do was get out of here alive, and with that damned rock.
"Do your homework next time," she said with a smirk, and turned away.
Devastator followed. "... sorry," he said.
She laughed. "Thanks, I really need your apologies. They make everything so much better."
Her sarcasm stung, she could tell, and he frowned. "Fine, I'm not sorry then. And by the way, Cyborg's not a jackass."
Of all the subjects she didn't want to talk about... and yet did she let it pass in silence? "Uh, yeah he is."
"Just because he's a Titan doesn't make him..."
"First of all, yes it does, second of all, you don't know what you're talking about again, and third of all, shut the hell up, okay?"
She hadn't actually meant to say any of that, well... maybe the first part but... well it didn't matter now. Devastator was as surprised as she was, and she read the confusion on his face as plainly as a neon sign before he decided to back down.
"Fine... whatever you want..." he said, and turned, and continued on, shaking his head. And Jinx knew she should have left it at that, and just walked on after him, except that... well goddamnit Cyborg being a Titan had nothing to do with it, and this thing with her and Cyborg wasn't just some damned adolescent snit and...
"He joined the Hive, okay?" she said all of a sudden, and Devastator froze like he'd been suddenly placed into stasis. Only then did Jinx remember that Devastator had only been with the Titans for a few months. She waited for him to recover and to turn around, and before he could ask what the hell she was talking about, she answered his question for him.
"Robin sent him to sneak into the Hive academy and find out what we were up to. He joined us."
"I remember," said Devastator. "I mean... I remember he told me once. So what?"
"So what?" How could he not see this? "He didn't just join the academy, he joined the Hive Five, us! We gave him a communicator, an initiation, everything! I even took him to the stupid school dance! And what does he do? He turns around and stabs us all right in the back."
"You were trying to help Brother Blood build a superweapon!" protested Devastator
"That's not the point!" shouted Jinx. "Robin and the rest of those idiots stopped us from finishing that ion amplifier, but Cyborg actually joined us, promised to help us, tried to be our friend, and then pulled that! And the worst part is, he doesn't even think he did anything wrong! And you all agree with him!" She spat on the floor of the tunnel. "'Jackass' is being charitable..."
"Jinx, I know Cyborg. He didn't go in there just to - "
"I don't care why he went into the Hive," said Jinx, "I care that he did it. You know what it's like to find out one of your teammates has secretly been playing for the other side all along?"
"No," said Devastator, "but the rest of us sure as hell do."
"Oh, right, that thing with Terra? That makes it even worse! He knew what that was like and he did it to all of us. Terra wasn't our plant, we didn't send her in to spy on you guys! You made all this noise about how bad that was, and then turned around and did the same exact thing back to us!"
Devastator had no reply to that, but Jinx wasn't done. "I bet he jokes about it, doesn't he? Laughs about how stupid we all were to believe him? I know all of you guys think we're a bunch of idiots anyway, but - "
"He never mentioned it to me," said Devastator softly.
"Doesn't matter," she said with a wave of her hand. "he did it, and he meant to do it all along, and that's why he's a jackass and always will be. And I know he's your friend and all, and you guys are on the same side and I'm just a Hiver, but since you don't know a goddamn thing about it, shut up."
As was probably inevitable, Devastator didn't let that one pass quietly. "I do know something about it," he said.
Jinx laughed out loud. "Really?" she asked with as much sarcasm as she could muster. "They picked you up a month after the Terra thing, so I guess they weren't so afraid of it happening again, now were they?"
"You don't know what the hell you're talking about," said Devastator in what apparently passed for an intimidating voice. Jinx had been more intimidated by bowls of soup.
"No, really, I'm interested," pressed Jinx, still laying the sarcasm on as thick as butter on bread. "What do you know about this sort of thing? What with all your vast experience and everything in having people do that to - "
"I know that Raven's been expecting me to do the same damn thing ever since I showed up!" yelled Devastator angrily.
Both Jinx and Devastator let the echoes of Devastator's voice fade away, staring at each other in silence, before the essence of what he had just said gelled in Devastator's mind, and he clenched his eyes shut and lowered his head, growling at himself. "Shit..." was all he could say.
"... seriously?"
"God damnit..." whispered Devastator to himself in frustration, and did not raise his eyes.
Jinx laughed, a reaction clearly unanticipated by Devastator, but that was too bad. "Raven thought you were a plant?" she said. "What? Did she think we sent you or something?"
"How should I know what she thought?" he snapped in annoyance as he looked back up at her. "She... suspected me for a while, okay? It's done."
Jinx crossed her arms. "I don't think it is done..." she said with an appraising smile. "She still thinks that, doesn't she?"
"Not that it's any of your business, but no, she doesn't."
"You're lying," said Jinx, not that she was certain, but it seemed a safe bet. Why else would he still be upset by it?
"Whatever," said Devastator, which, Jinx noted, was not a denial. "The point is, I know what it's like to have people think you're a traitor without being one."
"Oh, so... you're not a plant?"
Devastator's reply was almost instantaneous. "Don't even start that."
Jinx laughed and started to walk away. "Well you and Cyborg can go form the 'wrongfully accused' club then if you want, but I know what Cyborg is, and I won't just forget it."
"Whatever you want..." said Devastator, still clearly upset with himself for having let something slip, his mind obviously racing to determine what the implications might be.
"Relax," said Jinx, "I can't use it to kill any of you. All it means is that Raven's a bigger idiot than I thought."
"She's not a... wait... what?"
"Anyone with eyes can see you're not a plant." explained Jinx.
"How do you know that?" asked Devastator.
"Well... for one thing, you're a terrible liar."
Devastator considered that one for a moment. "... really?"
"Oh God yes. You're as bad as - "
But Devastator was never to know who else was as bad a liar as he was, for at that instant, with no prior sign of any instability, the lights failed.
The tunnel shook violently and there was a loud crash, like another landslide, but before Jinx could locate the source of it and react appropriately, she was plunged into what was quite literally the most profound darkness she had ever imagined. The shift was so stark that she nearly fell over, for the darkness was absolute, no light of any sort in any direction whatsoever. Jinx' cat-shaped eyes usually afforded her excellent night vision, but this wasn't like the night, it was like someone had torn her eyes out and cast them on the floor. She could not see her hand in front of her face, could not see the hexes she reflexively conjured, simply, absolutely could not see.
... now they were in trouble.
"Oh shit..." she said, not caring this time who heard the fear in her voice. She groped outwards for the wall of the tunnel, and found it, pressing her hand against it tightly. "What the hell - "
"Jinx," came Devastator's voice from behind her, curt and sharp but surprisingly calm. "Don't move."
It was the last thing she had expected to hear. "What? What are you - "
"There's a big hole in the floor three inches in front of you and I can't remember if you can fly or not."
... well that certainly got her attention.
"How do... can you see?" she asked, suddenly worried that the lights were still working but that she had spontaneously gone blind.
"Er... sort of," said Devastator, clearing nothing up. "Hold on." A moment later, the immediate area was illuminated by a burst of red, and Jinx turned her head to see Devastator holding up his baton, wreathed at his command in red flames. The light it cast was enough to reveal the deep hole that indeed yawned right in front of her, but not much else.
"What the hell happened..."
"I don't know," said Devastator, looking around. "I think there was an shift or something. These holes all opened up, and the lights are dead."
Jinx turned to ask him what he was talking about, but Devastator was staring off into the darkness, not even glancing at the flaming baton-turned-torch he was holding. The light from the baton barely penetrated two feet into the omnipresent gloom, yet Devastator was squinting, as if staring off into the distance.
"I think... I think we're okay," he said carefully. "It looks like we can keep going, for a while at least."
Jinx didn't even try to disguise her confusion. "How the hell can you see anything?"
"I can't," he said. "I can sense it... sort of. I can sense the difference between the rock molecules and the air ones, like... look it's not important. I can see where we need to go..."
Jinx was well prepared to just take his word for it, especially as this little fact didn't help her a damn bit. "Well congratulations," she said. "Meanwhile I've got a little problem, so if you don't mind..."
"Here," said Devastator, turning his baton around to point the end of it at her. "I'll lead the way, just hold on and try not to trip."
Jinx blinked. Was he actually offering to... He certainly sounded serious enough, and as she had just been saying, he was a terrible liar, but...
"What, you think I'm stupid?" she asked. "You'll lead me right off a cliff or something."
"If I wanted to do that, all I'd have to do is walk away and leave you here," said Devastator, a trifle annoyed by the sound of it. "Now come on,"
Jinx wasn't sure what to think. "... it's on fire," she said.
Now it was Devastator's turn to laugh. He touched the business end of the baton, still wreathed in flames, to the back of his free hand with no ill effect whatsoever. "It's not fire," he said. "It's some kind of weird energy field. It won't burn you."
She wasn't entirely sure she believed him, but she touched the end of the baton gingerly. It was warm to the touch, but not hot, and in fact seemed to be... pulsating somehow, from cool to warm and back again. She was not entirely certain she liked this plan... indeed she was entirely certain she didn't like it, but she held onto her end of the baton and looked up at Devastator, who was dimly visible in the red glow of the baton. "Go slowly," she said, trying to sound properly defiant and ignoring the obvious fact that he would go any damn pace he liked without reference to her, for she had run out of trump cards.
Still, rather than doing as she would have and reminding her of that fact, he just nodded. "Follow me," he said, and slowly he picked his way around the hole that had opened in the floor of the tunnel, and over the rubble that had fallen from the ceiling, and on down the tunnel. It was utterly nerve-wracking to be led into the blackness, avoiding chasms that just seemed to appear as if by magic in front of her feet, and yet clearly Devastator could see, for he avoided each and every one of them easily, and soon enough they were clear of the more immediate obstacles, and the tunnel was relatively clear again, though still as dark as pitch.
"So wait a minute," said Devastator's dis-embodied voice from somewhere up ahead, for the baton's 'flames' had faded down to mere embers, and she was once more unable to see him. "You took Cyborg to a school dance?"
"I tell you what," said Jinx with a resigned sigh, "I'll pretend to forget what you said about Raven, and you never mention that again. Deal?"
That one provoked a laugh from up ahead. "Deal."
*------------------------------------------------------------*
If it had been hard to measure time before, now it was impossible. They moved at what could charitably be called "crawl" speed down the tunnel for what seemed like a thousand years. She didn't like the idea that this Titan was the only thing preventing her from being lost in the darkness for all time, but she liked the idea of actually getting lost down here a whole lot less, and so she put up with it. The flames on the baton had soon disappeared altogether, plunging her back into the absolute blackness of before, but that didn't seem to phase Devastator in the slightest, who pressed on with the same assurance she would have if she had only been able to see.
Still, even this lost its novelty after a while, at least once she gained reasonable confidence that he wasn't about to walk her off a cliff either accidentally or on purpose. Once or twice she stumbled and lost her grip on the baton, but he always dutifully waited for her to get back up and pressed the metal stick into her hands before continuing. They didn't speak a whole lot, he appeared to need to concentrate in order to maintain whatever he was doing, and she needed all her wherewithall just to avoid falling. Other than the occasional warning of debris or a turn ahead, they passed the hours in silence.
Finally though, after God-knew how much time had passed, Devastator stopped. For a brief, horrible instant, Jinx worried that they had finally come to a dead end, but he disabused her of that notion immediately.
"I... I gotta stop for a while," he said, and his voice sounded pained, though of course she couldn't see what the problem was.
"What? Why?"
"I get..." he said hoarsely, "I get headaches when I do this for too long. I just... I just need a little bit, okay?"
It wasn't like she was in any position to tell him what he could and couldn't do just now, but if he wanted to ask her permission, she was willing to pretend. "All right," she said. "How long do you need."
"I don't know..." said Devastator. "There's... the wall's about a foot to your left, and there's nothing around here to fall into. Just... wait there or something."
She reached over and found the wall, and slid down it to a seated position. They had been walking for hours upon hours, and she hadn't realized how tired she was.
The sound of someone scuffing against the rock wall opposite her told her that Devastator was doing the same thing, and she heard him sigh with relief, probably when he switched off whatever his 'sensing' powers were. He was quiet for a few moments, then unexpectedly spoke up
"How long have we been down here?" he asked.
"I don't know," said Jinx, shaking her head even though she knew Devastator couldn't see her. "All night, probably."
He considered that for a moment. "If... if this tunnel doesn't go anywhere..."
"I really don't want to even think about that," she replied, not letting him get to wherever he was going.
His train of thought was apparently persistent. "I'm just wondering. I don't... know the rest of the Hive very well. Would any of them find us?"
"What?" barked Jinx back. "Of course they would! What, you think, because we're 'bad guys' we don't care what happens to each other? They're looking for us right now, or at least for me!"
"Calm down," said Devastator. "That's not what I meant. I meant could any of them find us? I don't know what they all can do."
"Oh..." Jinx thought about it for a moment, but the more she thought, the more sure she was that the Hive had no idea where they were right now. For all of Gizmo's equipment or See-More's detection capabilities, neither of them were as good as Raven, Robin, or Cyborg at this sort of thing, and quite obviously they hadn't found them yet.
"They... might," she said, not willing to say 'no' out loud. "I don't intend to leave it to them."
"Me neither," he said, "I was just wondering."
"Why?" she asked. "Afraid the Hive'll find us before your Titans do?"
"Aren't you afraid of the opposite?" he replied.
She honestly hadn't even considered it. "They'd have found us already if they could," she said. "Same with my friends. We're gonna have to get out of here ourselves."
"And what happens then?" he asked.
She could perhaps have spoken platitudes or lied, but that just wasn't her style. "Then I knock you out, take the diamond, and ransom you back to the Titans," she said.
It might have been the wrong thing to say, but Jinx was fairly certain she had this do-gooder's measure by now. Even if the sane thing to do was to leave her here, both of them knew that he wasn't going to do that.
He chuckled then, either because he didn't believe her or just at the absurdity of the situation, she couldn't tell. "We'll see," was all he would say.
"Oh, what?" she asked with a weary laugh. "Did you think you were taking me to jail?"
"I think I'm trying to get out of here," he replied, sounding equally tired. "I'll deal with that part once we're out, if that's okay with you."
"Not like I have a choice," she said, trying to make herself sound nonchalant and uncaring that this kid was the only chance she had of ever getting out of here. Not for the first time, she wondered what in God's name she had been thinking letting Mammoth carry all the flashlights...
Distant echoes rattled down the tunnel from Heaven-knew where, soft groans in the rock from unfathomable pressure being applied to some immovable object deep within the bedrock. She shuddered involuntarily, wishing she could see something, not that that would save her if the tunnel chose to collapse, but being stuck in a lightless tomb that threatened to implode at any time was enough to give anyone a bit of a scare after all. She cursed herself for being so nervous, especially in front of a Titan, and wondered for a second if Devastator was as well, and decided that he had to be, and that even if he wasn't, it was only because he could see if he chose to, and then wondered if he was watching her right now, because how could she even tell if he was or not, and if he was then had he just seen her shivering and if so would he realize that this place was really starting to -
"Jinx?"
"Yeah?" she replied instantaneously, and a moment later she actually cringed at how nervous she had sounded just then, so much so that she didn't bother to reflect on the same stark sound in Devastator's voice.
"I was... just wondering..."
He trailed off, not saying what he was just wondering about. Was he actually wondering something, or just trying to think of something to say to fill the eerie near-silence that predominated. Either way, he didn't finish whatever he was trying to say, leaving it hanging, until Jinx couldn't stand it any more and blurted out "Well? What?" if only to be able to listen to something other than the groan of underground rock.
"This... Hive academy... the one Cyborg infiltrated... you were a student there?"
"Yeah," she said, "what about it?"
"I just... I don't get it," he said. "It was like a high school for bad guys?"
"Pretty much," she said. "Why?"
"Well... I mean how did you even get into that kind of a thing? It's not like they could have an open house..."
She chuckled. "How do you think we got in? We applied."
"We?"
"Me and Gizmo and Mammoth," she said, not sure where this was going, "We had to show 'em our stuff, beat up some goons, rob a jewelery store, Gizmo had to get some kinda age waiver from the Headmistress, but that's all there was to it."
"Who builds a school for villains?"
Jinx had wondered that herself more than once, but she feigned indifference. "Don't know, don't care. It was there, and we all applied as soon as we found out about it."
"Why?"
"What do you mean 'why'?" she replied. "How many villain academies do you think there are?"
"I never even knew there was one," he explained, "but I meant why the hell would you apply to a place to learn how to be a crook?"
"So that you can be a really good one?" suggested Jinx in a tone that was meant to indicate that Devastator was stupid for asking.
"Why would you want to be a crook in the first place?" he asked.
She smiled despite herself. Perhaps he was expecting her to have a epiphany? "Because I like messing with people," she said without even the slightest trace of remorse, "especially people who mess with me."
"Like the Titans?"
"Just like the Titans," she confirmed. "Like you. Like everybody."
"Wait a minute..." said Devastator, skeptically. "What are you talking about? Nobody messes with you guys except us, and we only do it whenever you go looking for it."
"Don't be an idiot," she scoffed at him, or at least at the darkness from whence his voice was emitting. "Nobody messes with us now that we're famous criminals and people know what happens if they piss us off. Try being the only kid in the home who doesn't want to sit around moping about their dead parents, or the only girl in your class who can beat up the boys. Try having pink hair and an attitude problem and having 'accidents' just 'happen' every time you walk over. Tell me how little you get messed with when half the kids are afraid to be in the same room with you, and the other half hate your guts, and the social workers are the same way."
Devastator didn't reply to that immediately, for which she was thankful, as she was in no mood to be accused, again, of being a spoiled brat by yet another sanctimonious asshole, but when he finally did answer, it was with something other than what she had anticipated.
"You were... you were in a foster center?"
The question took her aback a moment. "How did you..." she started to say, before she suddenly realized the extent of what she had just said, and stopped herself short. Now it was her turn to swear. "Shit," she said sharply, and groaned. "It's none of your business. You wouldn't know anything about - "
"Which one?"
She hesitated. "A... lot of them," she said, certain that there was something here she should have been seeing, but not what it was...
"Any... any in this state?" Devastator sounded... weird. Like he was scared or something.
"They were state homes," she said, wiling to play along until she figured out what was...
"Were you ever in that pit up in Redding? Or the one in Bakersfield before the Wayne Foundation replaced it?"
Now how the hell did he...
... no way.
"You can't be serious," she said, her voice now matching his in terms of being weirded out.
"Since I was two," he said in a tone that was still betraying shock. "Until about six months ago."
"State homes?"
"State homes. Almost all of them, actually."
She hadn't been through the full circuit, but then she had left early. "This is... too weird."
"Tell me about it," he replied. In some ways, she supposed she shouldn't be surprised. After all, most metahumans, good or bad, were orphans, or at least most of the ones whose pasts and identities were known. Even so though, there was a far jump from that to...
"Do you think we ever met?" She knew she should be maintaining a facade of not giving a damn about this Titan, but this was just beyond strange, and she wanted to make sure they hadn't secretly known one another for years. That would have been just too much.
"I er... think I'd have remembered you," was Devastator's tactful reply. "'Sides, you're... I mean I think you're a couple years older than me? We probably wouldn't have met."
It made sense. It was a big system after all. Still, there was one way to be sure he wasn't just making it all up to mess with her.
"So, what were you in for?"
Someone faking it would either not have understood or pretended to get angry, but Devastator didn't even hesitate.
"Car wreck," he said. "What about you?"
That was all it took, and Jinx knew he was telling the truth, which meant of course that Devastator knew that the question would have sounded surprising or even rude to anyone but another orphan, as would her freely-given answer.
"I was abandoned."
There was a few seconds' pause. "I'm sorry," said Devastator.
She snorted. "Yeah, well, I'm not. They didn't want me, I didn't want them. Worked out for all of us."
"So then how'd you hook up with the other Hivers?"
"I told you already," she said, "I applied to the Hive."
"Yeah, but you said you already knew Gizmo and Mammoth then. Don't tell me they were in the system too."
"Gizmo was," she said, and she knew in the back of her mind that she probably shouldn't have been talking about all this, but she just didn't care anymore. "I met him inside. We both left the place in Crescent City about four years ago."
"That was you?"
Jinx laughed. Runaways from foster care weren't all that uncommon, but runaways who literally blasted their way out... well that tended to draw attention. She could only imagine the stories that must have circulated after they left.
"So... why'd you guys leave?"
She scoffed at him. "Better question is, why didn't you?"
"Me?" he asked, sounding confused. "Why would I?"
"Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't anybody?"
"Jinx, this isn't a Dickens novel. We weren't in poorhouses eating gruel. I know it wasn't that bad, even in the worst places, so what gives?"
"It wasn't that bad for you maybe. You could hide it."
"Hide what?"
"That you're weird. That you had powers. I'm bad luck, remember? People noticed. That's why I started hanging out with Gizmo."
"What, Gizmo has bad luck too?"
"No," she said irritatedly, and groaned before explaining. "He was like six when I met him. The other kids picked on him a lot because he'd skipped two grades ahead and had glasses and hung out reading science magazines instead of dinosaur books or whatever kids are supposed to do. And because they thought he was really funny whenever he got mad. He'd shout at them all about how much he was going to kick their asses and everybody knew he was full of it. So I'd come in and scare 'em all off with a hex and he'd yell at me that he didn't need my help and he could take care of himself. Said his parents were mad scientists or something who got arrested for whatever reason and that he was gonna figure out how to break them out of prison because he was a genius." Jinx forebore to mention that she had found out years later that Gizmo's parents had simply died of some unspecified illness the year before she'd met him, and that they had been neither criminals nor mad scientists. Gizmo himself didn't know that she knew that...
"So... what happened then?"
What did he want, her life story? "We got sick of people picking on us because we were different than them. Because they were jealous. We were both smarter than any of them, and we both knew it, and that drove them crazy. So we busted out, learned how to steal things, ran into Mammoth and sort of made a team, and then we heard about the Hive academy, so we joined up.” There was more to it than that of course, a lot more to it than that, but she wasn’t about to start telling Devastator every little thing about her.
And perhaps he guessed that, for he didn’t follow up her little story with any other question. The silence reigned for a minute or so, before Jinx finally chanced a question of her own.
“What about you? Did you have a little band of fellow freaks too?”
The reply was somewhat more somber than she expected, and quieter as well.
“… no,” he said. “I never… I never met anyone else like me. Least… not until I met the Titans.”
There was something else going on there, something he wasn’t saying, but oddly enough, she didn’t feel like going after it, given the tone in Devastator’s voice. Normally that was the opposite of what she would have done, but then she supposed he hadn’t actually laughed in her face as she had half-expected him to. Accordingly, rather than messing with him further, she simply changed the subject.
“So, are you ready to go yet?”
“Huh?” Devastator sounded like he’d been woken suddenly from some deep thought. “Oh, um… not yet…” he said. “I just… I’m gonna just wait a little bit more. Just a few minutes. Is that okay?”
Would it have mattered if she said it wasn’t? She didn’t experiment. “Whatever you want,” she said, sitting back against the rock wall of the tunnel. To be perfectly honest, she was pretty damn tired herself, and all the talking and surprises of the last few minutes hadn’t helped her any. Neither one of them seemed inclined to continue the conversation, and the sounds of the rock creaking around them once more filled her ears, though this time she didn’t feel the same chill of fear that she had before. A few more minutes, and they’d be on their way, after all, and she laid her head back and closed her eyes just to rest her eyelids before they got going again. It would just be a few minutes… just a few more minutes…
*------------------------------------------------------------*
Jinx woke up with a start.
For a brief, horrible moment, she had no idea where she was, and the fact that everything was pitch black did not help matters in the slightest. She made a few gasping horrified sounds that she would have far preferred to take back, given the opportunity, before she remembered everything that had happened, and relaxed, chagrinned somewhat at having panicked in the first place. Hopefully Devastator hadn’t heard any of that. Speaking of which…
“Devastator?” she called into the darkness.
There was no answer.
The very instant that she realized that he hadn’t answered, she began to be very worried. Sixteen different scenarios, each more outlandish than the previous, entered her mind immediately, that he’d been crushed by another landslide or abducted by mole people or devoured alive by army ants, and that she was now stuck down here. And after the quarter second it took to run through all of those possibilities in her head, she suddenly realized the most likely one of all was that he had simply waited for her to fall asleep, and snuck off by himself to find his own way out, and left her here to die.
“Devastator?!”
There was no attempt to keep the fear out of her voice this time, and within her mind she was frantically second and third guessing everything that she had remembered either of them saying before she fell asleep. He’d been disturbed by something, something she’d said. Had he made a snap decision to leave her here? Had he been pretending all along, trying to tire her out and let her guard down so she’d fall asleep? Had the other Titans found them, and just decided to leave her here to die? And what the hell was she gonna do now?! She was trapped a mile beneath the earth in a lightless tunnel leading to nowhere with none of her friends within range to help and no way to get out except for a long, slow, lingering…
“Devastator!!”
There was a loud gasp from several feet in front of her, followed by the sound of someone scraping against the opposite wall of the tunnel. Someone coughed several times, and then suddenly there was a flash of red, and Devastator was sitting right in front of her, against the opposite wall, rubbing his eyes with one hand, and holding his flaming baton aloft like a road flare with the other.
“Wh… what… what is it?”
Jinx blinked in the sudden and unexpected light, and found herself completely tongue tied, staring like an idiot at the Titan. “You… fell asleep,” was the best reply she could manage.
“I did?” Devastator was still half-asleep, and he shook his head several times to clear it. “S... Sorry...” he stammered, making no comment about the scream she had emitted a moment ago to wake him. Slowly, he got back up to his feet, and she noticed that the baton was considerably brighter this time, bright enough to cast a reasonable circle of light around them. She brushed what dust and dirt and debris she could off of herself as she stood up as well.
“How long was… was I asleep?”
She had to admit that she didn’t know. “I fell asleep too…”
“Oh…” he said, surprised, she could tell, but not shocked. He seemed to think less of having fallen asleep in the presence of his enemy than she did, though she noted with a smirk that he didn’t think so little of it as to forget to check his pocket for the diamond.
“Let’s… get out of here,” he said.
“Yeah,”
They both turned and began to walk off down the tunnel, Devastator in the lead again. They hadn’t gone more than thirty paces before Devastator asked her a question.
“So… was the Hive hard to get into?”
“Why?” she asked, “thinking of joining up?”
“Of course not,” he said quickly before her laugh clued him in that she was teasing. He shook his head and continued walking. “What, is that your idea of trying to get me to switch sides or something?”
“What makes you think we’d let you in?” she said half-mockingly. “Unlike the Titans, we have standards.”
The joke sounded mean, perhaps it was even meant with mean-spirit, but it set both of them to laughing as they continued on their way, and thus accomplished what it had been spoken for. They might have been laughing for entirely different reasons, but at that moment, who gave a damn?
*------------------------------------------------------------*
The tunnel was sloping upwards, steep enough to be a climb rather than a walk, which was a good sign, as far as Jinx was concerned, though it did make the going slower, as it quickly became obvious that Devastator was much less agile than she was, to the point where she had to actually help him up some of the rougher patches. By now she had stopped remarking on the oddity of her doing this for a Titan, in favor of just getting the hell out of here. Besides, he had the only light.
“You actually know Marcus Beachman?” asked Devastator
“I used to beat him up in sixth grade,” said Jinx, remembering fondly the look of pure terror on Marcus’ face that she had been able to engineer with merely a disapproving glance. She grabbed Devastator’s arm and pulled, and he scrambled up the six-foot wall to join her on top of the ledge above it. “He liked to pick on Gizmo a lot, so I taught him a few lessons. How’d you know him?”
“Gizmo wasn’t the only one he liked to pick on,” said Devastator with a grimace, looking around before finding a way further up the tunnel and trudging on ahead.
“So why not just blow him up?”
“Because I’m not insane.”
It sounded more insane to Jinx to let someone beat you up than it did to fight back, but Heroes were weird… “So you’re saying he’s in Jump?”
“Yeah,” said Devastator, “only he doesn’t call himself Marcus anymore.”
“So what’s he call himself?” she asked.
“Heard of a guy called ‘Adonis’?” he said nonchalantly. Jinx nearly fell over.
“You’re kidding me…”
“Nope,” said Devastator. “Tried to tear me apart, last time we met. Beast Boy beat the stuffing out of him.”
“Wow…” said Jinx, shaking her head. “Wait ‘til I tell Gizmo. We have to screw with him.”
“Be my guest,” said Devastator as he clambered up the last chunk of steep tunnel to a flatter section, and turned to offer Jinx a hand. Jinx snorted and lightly flipped up over his head, landing perfectly on her feet behind him. He rolled his eyes. “Show off…”
“If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” said Jinx with a smirk, turning and walking off down the tunnel, letting him follow as he wished to. She’d gone at least a dozen paces before she remembered that she’d done so despite the fact that he was the only one holding the light, and had to wait for him to catch up.
They’d gone another fifty yards or so before she noticed him staring somewhat intently at the walls. “Looking for more diamonds?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “There’s… something weird here.”
“What?”
“How come the walls are so smooth?”
Jinx glanced at the walls of the tunnel again. They were comprised of some kind of stone of course, a channel dug straight through the bedrock, but they were perfectly smooth, as though someone had taken the time to sand and even polish them. “Maybe that’s how they make them,” she suggested with a shrug. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I guess…” said Devastator, in a tone which meant that he thought it did indeed matter, but wasn’t sure how. See-More used the same tones. “… I just wonder what this tunnel is. It’s way too long just to be a diamond shaft.”
”I don’t care what it is as long as it gets us out of here,” said Jinx.
“Yeah,” said Devastator, but he continued to glance at the walls periodically, as though the rock would give him some idea as to what this place was.
They had moved on for another couple of minutes, and Jinx was already trying to think of something else to say, just to pass the time, when suddenly they rounded a corner, and found themselves at the end of the tunnel.
A massive cavern, easily twice the size of the one that the Hive and Titans had fought in earlier loomed before them, but unlike the previous cavern, this one was clearly not a natural cave, but some kind of underground facility, the walls carved and shaped like blocks, the floor smooth and free of stalactites, the ground covered with extraneous bits of heavy equipment and piles of building materials, and most important of all, the ceiling lined with fluorescent lights, which flickered on one by one, illuminating the entire scene in a dull glow.
Even that dull glow was like the shining lights of Heaven to Jinx, and she stopped in her tracks and just stared for a moment, her eyes accustoming themselves to the sight before her. Devastator’s baton faded out to nothing as he too blinked in the unfamiliar light and chanced a smile. He was clearly thinking the same thing she was, namely that this cavern had to be man-made, and that there had to be an exit from it, for how else could all of this equipment have been transported in here? It did not matter if the exit was locked or barred or welded shut, for either of them could dispense with such fortifications with a literal wave of their hand.
They were home free.
Which… of course… meant that it was time to consider the diamond.
“Let’s find a way out of here,”
Jinx simply nodded, giving no indication of what she was thinking. The terms of their little truce had been until they were no longer in danger of killing themselves by beginning a fight. The cavern was enormous and sturdy-looking, and while it was still possible certainly that a battle between a wielder of entropy and a psychokinetic could destroy the entire cavern, it was extremely unlikely. Perhaps if she got a good opportunity, she could just blast him unconscious right here, take the diamond, and leave. He seemed to have forgotten that they were supposed to be fighting over the diamond, after all, so it shouldn’t be hard to set him up…
… of course… there really was no harm in waiting just a bit longer either. After all, the cavern might lead to another pitch dark hallway or something…
“You all right?”
Jinx started out of her thoughts to find that she had stopped walking while considering her options. “Yeah,” she said, “just fine.” She studied his face to see if he suspected what she was thinking, but he merely nodded and moved on. Over piles of metal casings for God-knew-what and bits of equipment that looked like arc welders they climbed, until several minutes later, they came across something wholly indescribable.
It looked like a sewer pipe, save that it was at least twelve feet tall, and lain right across their path, crossing the cavern from one side to the other. It was metal, segmented, and stamped upon each section were numerical building codes of some sort. Tinted a very dark green, the pipe or whatever it was also had red lights installed along its side every so often, slowly blinking in the underground twilight.
It was… certainly an odd thing to encounter in the middle of nowhere, and it was much too high to see over. Devastator paused to consider what to do now, but Jinx had no such confusion. She broke into a run, and called on her powers at the same time, leaping into the air with a graceful flip, and using the reaction of her powers to push her up and on top of the pipe. She landed properly, steadied herself, and resisted the urge to raise her arms like a gymnast as she took a look around. On the opposite side of the pipe was what she was looking for, a large, paved tunnel, big enough to fit an 18-wheeler truck, that sloped upwards out of sight towards what had to be the surface.
“Got it,” she said, turning back to Devastator, “There’s an exit over here.” He smiled and gave a very visible sigh of relief, and started to walk over to the pipe, and Jinx started to wonder if perhaps she shouldn’t have told him there was no exit so as to put herself in a better position to get rid of him, even as she crouched down to help pull him up and over the pipe (for there was no way in hell he could do what she had just done), and all of these things and more were running through her head when the pipe itself suddenly woke up.
There was a roar, not like a landslide or a collapsing cavern, a roar like that of a dinosaur, and before Jinx could blink, she was thrown off her feet and down onto the cavern floor, as the metal pipe she was standing on bucked and twisted and rose up into the air. Jinx did not need to know what was happening to know that she should not remain laying on the ground, and she sprang up almost as soon as she touched the dirt and ran back half a dozen paces, and turned around, and her jaw dropped.
The pipe was not a pipe at all, it was a gigantic mechanical worm.
A robotic worm the size of an aqueduct was looming overhead, its head, armed with a single red eye that stared down at them, and a huge gaping maw full of razor-sharp steel teeth that was slowly opening and closing, as though the damned thing was smacking its lips in anticipation of a meal. It opened its jaws and let out an ear-splitting roar that shook rocks from the ceiling of the cavern and nearly bowled Jinx over.
“What the hell is – “
It did not give them time to ask.
The red eye glowed brightly, and Jinx realized what was coming with only an instant to spare. She lunged for one side as red laser bored into the ground where she had been standing moments ago, carving a furrow through the ground. Devastator lunged to the side as well, snatching his baton from his side and lighting it on fire as he snapped it around at the worm. A rock near the worm’s coiled body exploded like a bomb, but to no effect whatsoever, other than getting the mechanical nightmare’s attention.
Jinx scrambled back as the thing let loose another roar, and its head retracted into its body to be replaced by a whirling drill bit, with which it dove at Devastator. Devastator was still on his side from his last lunge, and in desperation, turned his baton on the worm itself, targeting one of the metal panels that it used for armor and blasting it to bits. The worm noticed this one, swerving off at the last second and striking the ground next to Devastator, sending a hail of stone chips flying everywhere like bullets. Jinx ducked behind a pile of rebar as the rock pieces pinged off her cover, before the worm, having realized that it had missed its target, roared once again and loomed back up into the air.
The dust kicked up by the worm was such that Jinx could no longer see where Devastator had gotten to, but she could see the worm, and that was all she needed. She stepped around the cover and spun in a circle, gathering up her entropy like momentum before releasing a wave of it in a razor-sharp slash of energy that broke against the machine’s metal hide, barely scratching the paint. The worm whirled about to face her, a laser blast nearly cutting her head off as she ducked, rolled, and came up with another handful of hexes which she tossed at the ceiling above the worm. Multi-ton rocks crumbled from the cavern roof and rained down upon the worm, but they might as well have been styrofoam for all the good they did. The worm fired its laser again, this time hitting close enough that Jinx felt the heat on her face as she jumped back, before ducking behind a cement mixer for cover. A second later, the worm’s laser sliced the cement mixer in half, and Jinx was sent running back down the cavern, desperately dodging left and right to avoid beams of incalculable energy.
“Zap! Zap! BOOM!”
Jinx turned back to see the worm roaring in what appeared to be pain, a smoking rent torn in its face where its laser had been emitting from. Devastator stood between her and it, his baton held high, and he swung it down like he was trying to hammer something into the ground, then lifting it and slamming it down again and again, and with each swing, a small chunk of the thing’s armor blew up, rocking the worm back and forth and back again. Yet no sooner had Devastator stopped to evaluate the effectiveness of his strikes than the worm discarded the shattered laser lens, and another one slid into place from within the body of the beast. It whipped its head back down and fired, and the blast would have disintegrated Devastator had Jinx not reacted instinctively and blasted him out of the way with a hex. Even that didn’t spare him a series of hard shocks as the worm swung its tail around and hit him in mid-air like a thrown baseball, sending him flying back towards Jinx to land in a heap on the ground next to her, where he lay, groaning softly.
This was no time to be laying down. “Get up!” she shouted at him, in the voice she had used many-a-time to force one of her own teammates to do something they very much didn’t want to do. Apparently it wasn’t all that different than Robin’s version, for he winced and staggered, but managed to get back to his feet, and looked back up at the worm which was slowly advancing towards them, its drill once more extended to grind them to paste.
“Can’t you just blow it up?!” cried Jinx as she flung hex after hex into the oncoming worm, scoring the metal and chipping the paint, but unable to stop the drill itself.
“It’s too big,” he replied, “and too complicated! It’s made of an alloy I’ve never seen before!”
”Well you’d better think of something you can do!” yelled Jinx, backing up as the worm advanced on them. “My hexes can’t get through his armor!”
Devastator was backing up as well, though they would soon run out of room against the cavern wall. He was not however watching the worm, but instead looking all around them, perhaps for something else to blow up? Then suddenly, the psychokinetic said something that confirmed every theory she’d ever had about the insanity of heroes.
“Hold him off! I’ve got an idea!”
Hold him off? How exactly was she supposed to do that? Still there was no time to properly throttle him, and all she could do was use her entropic powers to rip a huge section of the ceiling off and drop it on the worm’s head. As the previous sections had done, this one shattered like glass as soon as it struck, but the sheer weight forced the thing’s head down, and it had to rear back up before continuing. And then suddenly, Devastator was next to her, holding a length of steel rebar as tall as he was in one hand, and his baton in the other. With a swipe, he blew a small hole in the ground, and set the rebar in it, facing up and forwards like a pike, but then hesitated. “It’s… it’s not sharp enough…” he said, looking around for a knife perhaps.
Jinx snapped her fingers, and the top six inches of the rebar snapped off at an angle, leaving a razor-sharp point behind. “What are you gonna do?!” she shouted over the roaring worm, “stab him with it?”
“Yep,”
She did not get a chance to do a double take.
The worm roared and lunged forwards towards them, and Jinx dove to the side, but Devastator did not, at least not instantly. As the monstrous robot closed in, he stood his ground, his baton held low, watching the worm as carefully as he had watched Jinx earlier in the evening. And then finally, when the worm was so close that Jinx was about to blast him aside again, Devastator swung his baton upwards, and the sharpened rebar stake was blasted into the air like a cruise missile, straight into the diving worm, driving into its armor like an arrow into a board, where it stuck, quivering.
The impact was not particularly powerful, though the worm did hesitate as it attempted to determine how badly it had been damaged. And Jinx was about to ask what in the name of Hell the point of that had been, when she saw that Devastator still hadn’t moved, and was holding his free hand up, fingers extended towards the embedded rebar, which was now beginning to turn white with frost…
... oh that was clever…
The worm had finished determining that the attack had been nothing more than a minor nuisance, and turned back on Devastator, but it was already too late, and Devastator’s fist suddenly closed. Moments later, the rebar, half-embedded inside the worm’s throat, blew up, a shaped charge blast that tore a jagged rent in its armored hide, not merely peeling off the outer layers like the previous blasts, but ripping all th way through and exposing its 'throat'. The worm shuddered and roared and lunged this way and that, stabbing at Devastator and missing, but driving the Titan back into a corner from whence there was no escape at all, and it reared up again and spun around to crush the metahuman who had damaged it so, just as Devastator turned and screamed as loud as he could over the roaring machine. “Jinx! Now!”
There was a part of her, perhaps her rational brain, which told her that she could just as easily be a bit late, and only shoot the worm after it had crushed Devastator to pulp. But by the time she thought of that, she had already acted.
Jinx fired one of her most powerful hexes with the aim and poise of a marksman, and the hex slammed right into the worm’s unarmored thorax, shredding the circuitry and demolishing the machinery that gave the unholy thing life. It let out an ear-shattering screech, writhing about like it was being murdered, which she supposed was true enough in a way. It jackknifed, twisted, and then spontaneously lashed out, slamming its tail section into her like a bullwhip and throwing her through the air like a rag doll. She hit the cavern wall awkwardly, and felt something pop in her left knee, and screamed as the pain bit through her, but her scream was lost in the sounds of the dying war machine. Desperately she crawled for cover, but the worm’s death throes had begun to destabilize the entire cavern, and rocks were falling from the ceiling all over now. She could see the exit, three dozen yards away, tantalizingly close, but she couldn’t make the difference on her feet, couldn’t even stand up unaided.
But fortunately, she didn’t have to.
Devastator just appeared, though in all practicality she wasn’t watching for him and he might well have just walked over, and grabbed her arm. He shouted something, it might have been “Come on!”, but the noise was too much to hear. She took his hand and managed to stand up, biting her lip until she drew blood from the pain, and with one hand over his shoulders, managed to hobble towards the exit as the cavern began to implode behind them. They were not moving fast enough and she put weight on her injured leg in desperation, and found that it would take it, though doing so made her lightheaded with pain. They reached the exit tunnel bare seconds before a fifty-ton rock landed before it, blocking the way back to the tunnel, and raced as fast as they could up, up, up, until Devastator could drag her no further, and she risked passing out. They waited only a moment or two to catch their breath, before moving on, both armed, her limping, him sore and exhausted, until finally the tunnel straightened out, and they found themselves staring at the surface.
*------------------------------------------------------------*
One could only keep one's mind focussed for so long before it began to slip. Jinx wasn't quite as bad as Mammoth or Gizmo, but hours of walking down the seemingly endless tunnel with nothing to occupy herself beyond plotting how to steal the diamond back from Devastator exceeded her attention span very quickly, especially since there was clearly no way either of them could take down the other while they remained underground. She neither knew nor cared nor asked what Devastator was thinking, but the mindless trudging seemed to be getting to him too, and given that fighting was out of the question, he appeared to think no harm of complaining.
"How far does this thing go?"
"I didn't build it," snapped Jinx. "I don't know if it goes anywhere."
"A six mile underground tunnel?" replied Devastator. "It goes somewhere."
"Eight," corrected Jinx, kicking a small rock aside and imagining any one of several people's heads stenciled upon it "at least eight so far."
"Whatever. Nobody carves an eight mile tunnel through solid rock for no reason."
"Well what makes you think I know where it's going?"
Devastator didn't respond instantly, and she could see him eying her carefully. "Nothing," he said. "Nevermind."
She rolled her eyes and kept going, and Devastator made no further attempt to make conversation, but the almost oppressive quiet that wrapped around them once more left her with an urge to fill it with something, so fill it she did, as he had.
"Knowing my luck, it leads to a volcano or something."
"What do you mean?"
Jinx had no intention of explaining, but when she noticed suddenly that Devastator's footsteps had stopped, she turned back, only to find that he was staring at her with wide eyes, one hand on the handle of his baton, as though he was expecting her suddenly to attack. If he was trying to look scary, he failed miserably, but she did pause for a second. "What?" she asked.
"What do you mean by 'knowing my luck'?" he said, and there was a very serious edge to his question that had not been there before.
She blinked a few times and then addressed him like she was talking to a four-year old. "I'm bad luck," she said condescendingly, "where do you think I got the name Jinx? Knowing my luck, we're about to walk into a - "
"I know your powers are all about bad luck," said Devastator, cutting her off, "But I thought we agreed not to use them until..."
Jinx rolled her eyes and groaned theatrically before lowering her head in frustration. It was enough to cause Devastator to fall quiet. "I don't just use bad luck you idiot," she said, "I am bad luck. You know, just like Cyborg is a jackass? I can't just switch it off whenever I feel like it."
He seemed to get the point. "... oh," he said, clearly embarrassed. Jinx considered pretending to be outraged and insulted, just for fun, but she decided against it. Right now all she wanted to do was get out of here alive, and with that damned rock.
"Do your homework next time," she said with a smirk, and turned away.
Devastator followed. "... sorry," he said.
She laughed. "Thanks, I really need your apologies. They make everything so much better."
Her sarcasm stung, she could tell, and he frowned. "Fine, I'm not sorry then. And by the way, Cyborg's not a jackass."
Of all the subjects she didn't want to talk about... and yet did she let it pass in silence? "Uh, yeah he is."
"Just because he's a Titan doesn't make him..."
"First of all, yes it does, second of all, you don't know what you're talking about again, and third of all, shut the hell up, okay?"
She hadn't actually meant to say any of that, well... maybe the first part but... well it didn't matter now. Devastator was as surprised as she was, and she read the confusion on his face as plainly as a neon sign before he decided to back down.
"Fine... whatever you want..." he said, and turned, and continued on, shaking his head. And Jinx knew she should have left it at that, and just walked on after him, except that... well goddamnit Cyborg being a Titan had nothing to do with it, and this thing with her and Cyborg wasn't just some damned adolescent snit and...
"He joined the Hive, okay?" she said all of a sudden, and Devastator froze like he'd been suddenly placed into stasis. Only then did Jinx remember that Devastator had only been with the Titans for a few months. She waited for him to recover and to turn around, and before he could ask what the hell she was talking about, she answered his question for him.
"Robin sent him to sneak into the Hive academy and find out what we were up to. He joined us."
"I remember," said Devastator. "I mean... I remember he told me once. So what?"
"So what?" How could he not see this? "He didn't just join the academy, he joined the Hive Five, us! We gave him a communicator, an initiation, everything! I even took him to the stupid school dance! And what does he do? He turns around and stabs us all right in the back."
"You were trying to help Brother Blood build a superweapon!" protested Devastator
"That's not the point!" shouted Jinx. "Robin and the rest of those idiots stopped us from finishing that ion amplifier, but Cyborg actually joined us, promised to help us, tried to be our friend, and then pulled that! And the worst part is, he doesn't even think he did anything wrong! And you all agree with him!" She spat on the floor of the tunnel. "'Jackass' is being charitable..."
"Jinx, I know Cyborg. He didn't go in there just to - "
"I don't care why he went into the Hive," said Jinx, "I care that he did it. You know what it's like to find out one of your teammates has secretly been playing for the other side all along?"
"No," said Devastator, "but the rest of us sure as hell do."
"Oh, right, that thing with Terra? That makes it even worse! He knew what that was like and he did it to all of us. Terra wasn't our plant, we didn't send her in to spy on you guys! You made all this noise about how bad that was, and then turned around and did the same exact thing back to us!"
Devastator had no reply to that, but Jinx wasn't done. "I bet he jokes about it, doesn't he? Laughs about how stupid we all were to believe him? I know all of you guys think we're a bunch of idiots anyway, but - "
"He never mentioned it to me," said Devastator softly.
"Doesn't matter," she said with a wave of her hand. "he did it, and he meant to do it all along, and that's why he's a jackass and always will be. And I know he's your friend and all, and you guys are on the same side and I'm just a Hiver, but since you don't know a goddamn thing about it, shut up."
As was probably inevitable, Devastator didn't let that one pass quietly. "I do know something about it," he said.
Jinx laughed out loud. "Really?" she asked with as much sarcasm as she could muster. "They picked you up a month after the Terra thing, so I guess they weren't so afraid of it happening again, now were they?"
"You don't know what the hell you're talking about," said Devastator in what apparently passed for an intimidating voice. Jinx had been more intimidated by bowls of soup.
"No, really, I'm interested," pressed Jinx, still laying the sarcasm on as thick as butter on bread. "What do you know about this sort of thing? What with all your vast experience and everything in having people do that to - "
"I know that Raven's been expecting me to do the same damn thing ever since I showed up!" yelled Devastator angrily.
Both Jinx and Devastator let the echoes of Devastator's voice fade away, staring at each other in silence, before the essence of what he had just said gelled in Devastator's mind, and he clenched his eyes shut and lowered his head, growling at himself. "Shit..." was all he could say.
"... seriously?"
"God damnit..." whispered Devastator to himself in frustration, and did not raise his eyes.
Jinx laughed, a reaction clearly unanticipated by Devastator, but that was too bad. "Raven thought you were a plant?" she said. "What? Did she think we sent you or something?"
"How should I know what she thought?" he snapped in annoyance as he looked back up at her. "She... suspected me for a while, okay? It's done."
Jinx crossed her arms. "I don't think it is done..." she said with an appraising smile. "She still thinks that, doesn't she?"
"Not that it's any of your business, but no, she doesn't."
"You're lying," said Jinx, not that she was certain, but it seemed a safe bet. Why else would he still be upset by it?
"Whatever," said Devastator, which, Jinx noted, was not a denial. "The point is, I know what it's like to have people think you're a traitor without being one."
"Oh, so... you're not a plant?"
Devastator's reply was almost instantaneous. "Don't even start that."
Jinx laughed and started to walk away. "Well you and Cyborg can go form the 'wrongfully accused' club then if you want, but I know what Cyborg is, and I won't just forget it."
"Whatever you want..." said Devastator, still clearly upset with himself for having let something slip, his mind obviously racing to determine what the implications might be.
"Relax," said Jinx, "I can't use it to kill any of you. All it means is that Raven's a bigger idiot than I thought."
"She's not a... wait... what?"
"Anyone with eyes can see you're not a plant." explained Jinx.
"How do you know that?" asked Devastator.
"Well... for one thing, you're a terrible liar."
Devastator considered that one for a moment. "... really?"
"Oh God yes. You're as bad as - "
But Devastator was never to know who else was as bad a liar as he was, for at that instant, with no prior sign of any instability, the lights failed.
The tunnel shook violently and there was a loud crash, like another landslide, but before Jinx could locate the source of it and react appropriately, she was plunged into what was quite literally the most profound darkness she had ever imagined. The shift was so stark that she nearly fell over, for the darkness was absolute, no light of any sort in any direction whatsoever. Jinx' cat-shaped eyes usually afforded her excellent night vision, but this wasn't like the night, it was like someone had torn her eyes out and cast them on the floor. She could not see her hand in front of her face, could not see the hexes she reflexively conjured, simply, absolutely could not see.
... now they were in trouble.
"Oh shit..." she said, not caring this time who heard the fear in her voice. She groped outwards for the wall of the tunnel, and found it, pressing her hand against it tightly. "What the hell - "
"Jinx," came Devastator's voice from behind her, curt and sharp but surprisingly calm. "Don't move."
It was the last thing she had expected to hear. "What? What are you - "
"There's a big hole in the floor three inches in front of you and I can't remember if you can fly or not."
... well that certainly got her attention.
"How do... can you see?" she asked, suddenly worried that the lights were still working but that she had spontaneously gone blind.
"Er... sort of," said Devastator, clearing nothing up. "Hold on." A moment later, the immediate area was illuminated by a burst of red, and Jinx turned her head to see Devastator holding up his baton, wreathed at his command in red flames. The light it cast was enough to reveal the deep hole that indeed yawned right in front of her, but not much else.
"What the hell happened..."
"I don't know," said Devastator, looking around. "I think there was an shift or something. These holes all opened up, and the lights are dead."
Jinx turned to ask him what he was talking about, but Devastator was staring off into the darkness, not even glancing at the flaming baton-turned-torch he was holding. The light from the baton barely penetrated two feet into the omnipresent gloom, yet Devastator was squinting, as if staring off into the distance.
"I think... I think we're okay," he said carefully. "It looks like we can keep going, for a while at least."
Jinx didn't even try to disguise her confusion. "How the hell can you see anything?"
"I can't," he said. "I can sense it... sort of. I can sense the difference between the rock molecules and the air ones, like... look it's not important. I can see where we need to go..."
Jinx was well prepared to just take his word for it, especially as this little fact didn't help her a damn bit. "Well congratulations," she said. "Meanwhile I've got a little problem, so if you don't mind..."
"Here," said Devastator, turning his baton around to point the end of it at her. "I'll lead the way, just hold on and try not to trip."
Jinx blinked. Was he actually offering to... He certainly sounded serious enough, and as she had just been saying, he was a terrible liar, but...
"What, you think I'm stupid?" she asked. "You'll lead me right off a cliff or something."
"If I wanted to do that, all I'd have to do is walk away and leave you here," said Devastator, a trifle annoyed by the sound of it. "Now come on,"
Jinx wasn't sure what to think. "... it's on fire," she said.
Now it was Devastator's turn to laugh. He touched the business end of the baton, still wreathed in flames, to the back of his free hand with no ill effect whatsoever. "It's not fire," he said. "It's some kind of weird energy field. It won't burn you."
She wasn't entirely sure she believed him, but she touched the end of the baton gingerly. It was warm to the touch, but not hot, and in fact seemed to be... pulsating somehow, from cool to warm and back again. She was not entirely certain she liked this plan... indeed she was entirely certain she didn't like it, but she held onto her end of the baton and looked up at Devastator, who was dimly visible in the red glow of the baton. "Go slowly," she said, trying to sound properly defiant and ignoring the obvious fact that he would go any damn pace he liked without reference to her, for she had run out of trump cards.
Still, rather than doing as she would have and reminding her of that fact, he just nodded. "Follow me," he said, and slowly he picked his way around the hole that had opened in the floor of the tunnel, and over the rubble that had fallen from the ceiling, and on down the tunnel. It was utterly nerve-wracking to be led into the blackness, avoiding chasms that just seemed to appear as if by magic in front of her feet, and yet clearly Devastator could see, for he avoided each and every one of them easily, and soon enough they were clear of the more immediate obstacles, and the tunnel was relatively clear again, though still as dark as pitch.
"So wait a minute," said Devastator's dis-embodied voice from somewhere up ahead, for the baton's 'flames' had faded down to mere embers, and she was once more unable to see him. "You took Cyborg to a school dance?"
"I tell you what," said Jinx with a resigned sigh, "I'll pretend to forget what you said about Raven, and you never mention that again. Deal?"
That one provoked a laugh from up ahead. "Deal."
*------------------------------------------------------------*
If it had been hard to measure time before, now it was impossible. They moved at what could charitably be called "crawl" speed down the tunnel for what seemed like a thousand years. She didn't like the idea that this Titan was the only thing preventing her from being lost in the darkness for all time, but she liked the idea of actually getting lost down here a whole lot less, and so she put up with it. The flames on the baton had soon disappeared altogether, plunging her back into the absolute blackness of before, but that didn't seem to phase Devastator in the slightest, who pressed on with the same assurance she would have if she had only been able to see.
Still, even this lost its novelty after a while, at least once she gained reasonable confidence that he wasn't about to walk her off a cliff either accidentally or on purpose. Once or twice she stumbled and lost her grip on the baton, but he always dutifully waited for her to get back up and pressed the metal stick into her hands before continuing. They didn't speak a whole lot, he appeared to need to concentrate in order to maintain whatever he was doing, and she needed all her wherewithall just to avoid falling. Other than the occasional warning of debris or a turn ahead, they passed the hours in silence.
Finally though, after God-knew how much time had passed, Devastator stopped. For a brief, horrible instant, Jinx worried that they had finally come to a dead end, but he disabused her of that notion immediately.
"I... I gotta stop for a while," he said, and his voice sounded pained, though of course she couldn't see what the problem was.
"What? Why?"
"I get..." he said hoarsely, "I get headaches when I do this for too long. I just... I just need a little bit, okay?"
It wasn't like she was in any position to tell him what he could and couldn't do just now, but if he wanted to ask her permission, she was willing to pretend. "All right," she said. "How long do you need."
"I don't know..." said Devastator. "There's... the wall's about a foot to your left, and there's nothing around here to fall into. Just... wait there or something."
She reached over and found the wall, and slid down it to a seated position. They had been walking for hours upon hours, and she hadn't realized how tired she was.
The sound of someone scuffing against the rock wall opposite her told her that Devastator was doing the same thing, and she heard him sigh with relief, probably when he switched off whatever his 'sensing' powers were. He was quiet for a few moments, then unexpectedly spoke up
"How long have we been down here?" he asked.
"I don't know," said Jinx, shaking her head even though she knew Devastator couldn't see her. "All night, probably."
He considered that for a moment. "If... if this tunnel doesn't go anywhere..."
"I really don't want to even think about that," she replied, not letting him get to wherever he was going.
His train of thought was apparently persistent. "I'm just wondering. I don't... know the rest of the Hive very well. Would any of them find us?"
"What?" barked Jinx back. "Of course they would! What, you think, because we're 'bad guys' we don't care what happens to each other? They're looking for us right now, or at least for me!"
"Calm down," said Devastator. "That's not what I meant. I meant could any of them find us? I don't know what they all can do."
"Oh..." Jinx thought about it for a moment, but the more she thought, the more sure she was that the Hive had no idea where they were right now. For all of Gizmo's equipment or See-More's detection capabilities, neither of them were as good as Raven, Robin, or Cyborg at this sort of thing, and quite obviously they hadn't found them yet.
"They... might," she said, not willing to say 'no' out loud. "I don't intend to leave it to them."
"Me neither," he said, "I was just wondering."
"Why?" she asked. "Afraid the Hive'll find us before your Titans do?"
"Aren't you afraid of the opposite?" he replied.
She honestly hadn't even considered it. "They'd have found us already if they could," she said. "Same with my friends. We're gonna have to get out of here ourselves."
"And what happens then?" he asked.
She could perhaps have spoken platitudes or lied, but that just wasn't her style. "Then I knock you out, take the diamond, and ransom you back to the Titans," she said.
It might have been the wrong thing to say, but Jinx was fairly certain she had this do-gooder's measure by now. Even if the sane thing to do was to leave her here, both of them knew that he wasn't going to do that.
He chuckled then, either because he didn't believe her or just at the absurdity of the situation, she couldn't tell. "We'll see," was all he would say.
"Oh, what?" she asked with a weary laugh. "Did you think you were taking me to jail?"
"I think I'm trying to get out of here," he replied, sounding equally tired. "I'll deal with that part once we're out, if that's okay with you."
"Not like I have a choice," she said, trying to make herself sound nonchalant and uncaring that this kid was the only chance she had of ever getting out of here. Not for the first time, she wondered what in God's name she had been thinking letting Mammoth carry all the flashlights...
Distant echoes rattled down the tunnel from Heaven-knew where, soft groans in the rock from unfathomable pressure being applied to some immovable object deep within the bedrock. She shuddered involuntarily, wishing she could see something, not that that would save her if the tunnel chose to collapse, but being stuck in a lightless tomb that threatened to implode at any time was enough to give anyone a bit of a scare after all. She cursed herself for being so nervous, especially in front of a Titan, and wondered for a second if Devastator was as well, and decided that he had to be, and that even if he wasn't, it was only because he could see if he chose to, and then wondered if he was watching her right now, because how could she even tell if he was or not, and if he was then had he just seen her shivering and if so would he realize that this place was really starting to -
"Jinx?"
"Yeah?" she replied instantaneously, and a moment later she actually cringed at how nervous she had sounded just then, so much so that she didn't bother to reflect on the same stark sound in Devastator's voice.
"I was... just wondering..."
He trailed off, not saying what he was just wondering about. Was he actually wondering something, or just trying to think of something to say to fill the eerie near-silence that predominated. Either way, he didn't finish whatever he was trying to say, leaving it hanging, until Jinx couldn't stand it any more and blurted out "Well? What?" if only to be able to listen to something other than the groan of underground rock.
"This... Hive academy... the one Cyborg infiltrated... you were a student there?"
"Yeah," she said, "what about it?"
"I just... I don't get it," he said. "It was like a high school for bad guys?"
"Pretty much," she said. "Why?"
"Well... I mean how did you even get into that kind of a thing? It's not like they could have an open house..."
She chuckled. "How do you think we got in? We applied."
"We?"
"Me and Gizmo and Mammoth," she said, not sure where this was going, "We had to show 'em our stuff, beat up some goons, rob a jewelery store, Gizmo had to get some kinda age waiver from the Headmistress, but that's all there was to it."
"Who builds a school for villains?"
Jinx had wondered that herself more than once, but she feigned indifference. "Don't know, don't care. It was there, and we all applied as soon as we found out about it."
"Why?"
"What do you mean 'why'?" she replied. "How many villain academies do you think there are?"
"I never even knew there was one," he explained, "but I meant why the hell would you apply to a place to learn how to be a crook?"
"So that you can be a really good one?" suggested Jinx in a tone that was meant to indicate that Devastator was stupid for asking.
"Why would you want to be a crook in the first place?" he asked.
She smiled despite herself. Perhaps he was expecting her to have a epiphany? "Because I like messing with people," she said without even the slightest trace of remorse, "especially people who mess with me."
"Like the Titans?"
"Just like the Titans," she confirmed. "Like you. Like everybody."
"Wait a minute..." said Devastator, skeptically. "What are you talking about? Nobody messes with you guys except us, and we only do it whenever you go looking for it."
"Don't be an idiot," she scoffed at him, or at least at the darkness from whence his voice was emitting. "Nobody messes with us now that we're famous criminals and people know what happens if they piss us off. Try being the only kid in the home who doesn't want to sit around moping about their dead parents, or the only girl in your class who can beat up the boys. Try having pink hair and an attitude problem and having 'accidents' just 'happen' every time you walk over. Tell me how little you get messed with when half the kids are afraid to be in the same room with you, and the other half hate your guts, and the social workers are the same way."
Devastator didn't reply to that immediately, for which she was thankful, as she was in no mood to be accused, again, of being a spoiled brat by yet another sanctimonious asshole, but when he finally did answer, it was with something other than what she had anticipated.
"You were... you were in a foster center?"
The question took her aback a moment. "How did you..." she started to say, before she suddenly realized the extent of what she had just said, and stopped herself short. Now it was her turn to swear. "Shit," she said sharply, and groaned. "It's none of your business. You wouldn't know anything about - "
"Which one?"
She hesitated. "A... lot of them," she said, certain that there was something here she should have been seeing, but not what it was...
"Any... any in this state?" Devastator sounded... weird. Like he was scared or something.
"They were state homes," she said, wiling to play along until she figured out what was...
"Were you ever in that pit up in Redding? Or the one in Bakersfield before the Wayne Foundation replaced it?"
Now how the hell did he...
... no way.
"You can't be serious," she said, her voice now matching his in terms of being weirded out.
"Since I was two," he said in a tone that was still betraying shock. "Until about six months ago."
"State homes?"
"State homes. Almost all of them, actually."
She hadn't been through the full circuit, but then she had left early. "This is... too weird."
"Tell me about it," he replied. In some ways, she supposed she shouldn't be surprised. After all, most metahumans, good or bad, were orphans, or at least most of the ones whose pasts and identities were known. Even so though, there was a far jump from that to...
"Do you think we ever met?" She knew she should be maintaining a facade of not giving a damn about this Titan, but this was just beyond strange, and she wanted to make sure they hadn't secretly known one another for years. That would have been just too much.
"I er... think I'd have remembered you," was Devastator's tactful reply. "'Sides, you're... I mean I think you're a couple years older than me? We probably wouldn't have met."
It made sense. It was a big system after all. Still, there was one way to be sure he wasn't just making it all up to mess with her.
"So, what were you in for?"
Someone faking it would either not have understood or pretended to get angry, but Devastator didn't even hesitate.
"Car wreck," he said. "What about you?"
That was all it took, and Jinx knew he was telling the truth, which meant of course that Devastator knew that the question would have sounded surprising or even rude to anyone but another orphan, as would her freely-given answer.
"I was abandoned."
There was a few seconds' pause. "I'm sorry," said Devastator.
She snorted. "Yeah, well, I'm not. They didn't want me, I didn't want them. Worked out for all of us."
"So then how'd you hook up with the other Hivers?"
"I told you already," she said, "I applied to the Hive."
"Yeah, but you said you already knew Gizmo and Mammoth then. Don't tell me they were in the system too."
"Gizmo was," she said, and she knew in the back of her mind that she probably shouldn't have been talking about all this, but she just didn't care anymore. "I met him inside. We both left the place in Crescent City about four years ago."
"That was you?"
Jinx laughed. Runaways from foster care weren't all that uncommon, but runaways who literally blasted their way out... well that tended to draw attention. She could only imagine the stories that must have circulated after they left.
"So... why'd you guys leave?"
She scoffed at him. "Better question is, why didn't you?"
"Me?" he asked, sounding confused. "Why would I?"
"Why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't anybody?"
"Jinx, this isn't a Dickens novel. We weren't in poorhouses eating gruel. I know it wasn't that bad, even in the worst places, so what gives?"
"It wasn't that bad for you maybe. You could hide it."
"Hide what?"
"That you're weird. That you had powers. I'm bad luck, remember? People noticed. That's why I started hanging out with Gizmo."
"What, Gizmo has bad luck too?"
"No," she said irritatedly, and groaned before explaining. "He was like six when I met him. The other kids picked on him a lot because he'd skipped two grades ahead and had glasses and hung out reading science magazines instead of dinosaur books or whatever kids are supposed to do. And because they thought he was really funny whenever he got mad. He'd shout at them all about how much he was going to kick their asses and everybody knew he was full of it. So I'd come in and scare 'em all off with a hex and he'd yell at me that he didn't need my help and he could take care of himself. Said his parents were mad scientists or something who got arrested for whatever reason and that he was gonna figure out how to break them out of prison because he was a genius." Jinx forebore to mention that she had found out years later that Gizmo's parents had simply died of some unspecified illness the year before she'd met him, and that they had been neither criminals nor mad scientists. Gizmo himself didn't know that she knew that...
"So... what happened then?"
What did he want, her life story? "We got sick of people picking on us because we were different than them. Because they were jealous. We were both smarter than any of them, and we both knew it, and that drove them crazy. So we busted out, learned how to steal things, ran into Mammoth and sort of made a team, and then we heard about the Hive academy, so we joined up.” There was more to it than that of course, a lot more to it than that, but she wasn’t about to start telling Devastator every little thing about her.
And perhaps he guessed that, for he didn’t follow up her little story with any other question. The silence reigned for a minute or so, before Jinx finally chanced a question of her own.
“What about you? Did you have a little band of fellow freaks too?”
The reply was somewhat more somber than she expected, and quieter as well.
“… no,” he said. “I never… I never met anyone else like me. Least… not until I met the Titans.”
There was something else going on there, something he wasn’t saying, but oddly enough, she didn’t feel like going after it, given the tone in Devastator’s voice. Normally that was the opposite of what she would have done, but then she supposed he hadn’t actually laughed in her face as she had half-expected him to. Accordingly, rather than messing with him further, she simply changed the subject.
“So, are you ready to go yet?”
“Huh?” Devastator sounded like he’d been woken suddenly from some deep thought. “Oh, um… not yet…” he said. “I just… I’m gonna just wait a little bit more. Just a few minutes. Is that okay?”
Would it have mattered if she said it wasn’t? She didn’t experiment. “Whatever you want,” she said, sitting back against the rock wall of the tunnel. To be perfectly honest, she was pretty damn tired herself, and all the talking and surprises of the last few minutes hadn’t helped her any. Neither one of them seemed inclined to continue the conversation, and the sounds of the rock creaking around them once more filled her ears, though this time she didn’t feel the same chill of fear that she had before. A few more minutes, and they’d be on their way, after all, and she laid her head back and closed her eyes just to rest her eyelids before they got going again. It would just be a few minutes… just a few more minutes…
*------------------------------------------------------------*
Jinx woke up with a start.
For a brief, horrible moment, she had no idea where she was, and the fact that everything was pitch black did not help matters in the slightest. She made a few gasping horrified sounds that she would have far preferred to take back, given the opportunity, before she remembered everything that had happened, and relaxed, chagrinned somewhat at having panicked in the first place. Hopefully Devastator hadn’t heard any of that. Speaking of which…
“Devastator?” she called into the darkness.
There was no answer.
The very instant that she realized that he hadn’t answered, she began to be very worried. Sixteen different scenarios, each more outlandish than the previous, entered her mind immediately, that he’d been crushed by another landslide or abducted by mole people or devoured alive by army ants, and that she was now stuck down here. And after the quarter second it took to run through all of those possibilities in her head, she suddenly realized the most likely one of all was that he had simply waited for her to fall asleep, and snuck off by himself to find his own way out, and left her here to die.
“Devastator?!”
There was no attempt to keep the fear out of her voice this time, and within her mind she was frantically second and third guessing everything that she had remembered either of them saying before she fell asleep. He’d been disturbed by something, something she’d said. Had he made a snap decision to leave her here? Had he been pretending all along, trying to tire her out and let her guard down so she’d fall asleep? Had the other Titans found them, and just decided to leave her here to die? And what the hell was she gonna do now?! She was trapped a mile beneath the earth in a lightless tunnel leading to nowhere with none of her friends within range to help and no way to get out except for a long, slow, lingering…
“Devastator!!”
There was a loud gasp from several feet in front of her, followed by the sound of someone scraping against the opposite wall of the tunnel. Someone coughed several times, and then suddenly there was a flash of red, and Devastator was sitting right in front of her, against the opposite wall, rubbing his eyes with one hand, and holding his flaming baton aloft like a road flare with the other.
“Wh… what… what is it?”
Jinx blinked in the sudden and unexpected light, and found herself completely tongue tied, staring like an idiot at the Titan. “You… fell asleep,” was the best reply she could manage.
“I did?” Devastator was still half-asleep, and he shook his head several times to clear it. “S... Sorry...” he stammered, making no comment about the scream she had emitted a moment ago to wake him. Slowly, he got back up to his feet, and she noticed that the baton was considerably brighter this time, bright enough to cast a reasonable circle of light around them. She brushed what dust and dirt and debris she could off of herself as she stood up as well.
“How long was… was I asleep?”
She had to admit that she didn’t know. “I fell asleep too…”
“Oh…” he said, surprised, she could tell, but not shocked. He seemed to think less of having fallen asleep in the presence of his enemy than she did, though she noted with a smirk that he didn’t think so little of it as to forget to check his pocket for the diamond.
“Let’s… get out of here,” he said.
“Yeah,”
They both turned and began to walk off down the tunnel, Devastator in the lead again. They hadn’t gone more than thirty paces before Devastator asked her a question.
“So… was the Hive hard to get into?”
“Why?” she asked, “thinking of joining up?”
“Of course not,” he said quickly before her laugh clued him in that she was teasing. He shook his head and continued walking. “What, is that your idea of trying to get me to switch sides or something?”
“What makes you think we’d let you in?” she said half-mockingly. “Unlike the Titans, we have standards.”
The joke sounded mean, perhaps it was even meant with mean-spirit, but it set both of them to laughing as they continued on their way, and thus accomplished what it had been spoken for. They might have been laughing for entirely different reasons, but at that moment, who gave a damn?
*------------------------------------------------------------*
The tunnel was sloping upwards, steep enough to be a climb rather than a walk, which was a good sign, as far as Jinx was concerned, though it did make the going slower, as it quickly became obvious that Devastator was much less agile than she was, to the point where she had to actually help him up some of the rougher patches. By now she had stopped remarking on the oddity of her doing this for a Titan, in favor of just getting the hell out of here. Besides, he had the only light.
“You actually know Marcus Beachman?” asked Devastator
“I used to beat him up in sixth grade,” said Jinx, remembering fondly the look of pure terror on Marcus’ face that she had been able to engineer with merely a disapproving glance. She grabbed Devastator’s arm and pulled, and he scrambled up the six-foot wall to join her on top of the ledge above it. “He liked to pick on Gizmo a lot, so I taught him a few lessons. How’d you know him?”
“Gizmo wasn’t the only one he liked to pick on,” said Devastator with a grimace, looking around before finding a way further up the tunnel and trudging on ahead.
“So why not just blow him up?”
“Because I’m not insane.”
It sounded more insane to Jinx to let someone beat you up than it did to fight back, but Heroes were weird… “So you’re saying he’s in Jump?”
“Yeah,” said Devastator, “only he doesn’t call himself Marcus anymore.”
“So what’s he call himself?” she asked.
“Heard of a guy called ‘Adonis’?” he said nonchalantly. Jinx nearly fell over.
“You’re kidding me…”
“Nope,” said Devastator. “Tried to tear me apart, last time we met. Beast Boy beat the stuffing out of him.”
“Wow…” said Jinx, shaking her head. “Wait ‘til I tell Gizmo. We have to screw with him.”
“Be my guest,” said Devastator as he clambered up the last chunk of steep tunnel to a flatter section, and turned to offer Jinx a hand. Jinx snorted and lightly flipped up over his head, landing perfectly on her feet behind him. He rolled his eyes. “Show off…”
“If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” said Jinx with a smirk, turning and walking off down the tunnel, letting him follow as he wished to. She’d gone at least a dozen paces before she remembered that she’d done so despite the fact that he was the only one holding the light, and had to wait for him to catch up.
They’d gone another fifty yards or so before she noticed him staring somewhat intently at the walls. “Looking for more diamonds?” she asked.
“No,” he replied. “There’s… something weird here.”
“What?”
“How come the walls are so smooth?”
Jinx glanced at the walls of the tunnel again. They were comprised of some kind of stone of course, a channel dug straight through the bedrock, but they were perfectly smooth, as though someone had taken the time to sand and even polish them. “Maybe that’s how they make them,” she suggested with a shrug. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I guess…” said Devastator, in a tone which meant that he thought it did indeed matter, but wasn’t sure how. See-More used the same tones. “… I just wonder what this tunnel is. It’s way too long just to be a diamond shaft.”
”I don’t care what it is as long as it gets us out of here,” said Jinx.
“Yeah,” said Devastator, but he continued to glance at the walls periodically, as though the rock would give him some idea as to what this place was.
They had moved on for another couple of minutes, and Jinx was already trying to think of something else to say, just to pass the time, when suddenly they rounded a corner, and found themselves at the end of the tunnel.
A massive cavern, easily twice the size of the one that the Hive and Titans had fought in earlier loomed before them, but unlike the previous cavern, this one was clearly not a natural cave, but some kind of underground facility, the walls carved and shaped like blocks, the floor smooth and free of stalactites, the ground covered with extraneous bits of heavy equipment and piles of building materials, and most important of all, the ceiling lined with fluorescent lights, which flickered on one by one, illuminating the entire scene in a dull glow.
Even that dull glow was like the shining lights of Heaven to Jinx, and she stopped in her tracks and just stared for a moment, her eyes accustoming themselves to the sight before her. Devastator’s baton faded out to nothing as he too blinked in the unfamiliar light and chanced a smile. He was clearly thinking the same thing she was, namely that this cavern had to be man-made, and that there had to be an exit from it, for how else could all of this equipment have been transported in here? It did not matter if the exit was locked or barred or welded shut, for either of them could dispense with such fortifications with a literal wave of their hand.
They were home free.
Which… of course… meant that it was time to consider the diamond.
“Let’s find a way out of here,”
Jinx simply nodded, giving no indication of what she was thinking. The terms of their little truce had been until they were no longer in danger of killing themselves by beginning a fight. The cavern was enormous and sturdy-looking, and while it was still possible certainly that a battle between a wielder of entropy and a psychokinetic could destroy the entire cavern, it was extremely unlikely. Perhaps if she got a good opportunity, she could just blast him unconscious right here, take the diamond, and leave. He seemed to have forgotten that they were supposed to be fighting over the diamond, after all, so it shouldn’t be hard to set him up…
… of course… there really was no harm in waiting just a bit longer either. After all, the cavern might lead to another pitch dark hallway or something…
“You all right?”
Jinx started out of her thoughts to find that she had stopped walking while considering her options. “Yeah,” she said, “just fine.” She studied his face to see if he suspected what she was thinking, but he merely nodded and moved on. Over piles of metal casings for God-knew-what and bits of equipment that looked like arc welders they climbed, until several minutes later, they came across something wholly indescribable.
It looked like a sewer pipe, save that it was at least twelve feet tall, and lain right across their path, crossing the cavern from one side to the other. It was metal, segmented, and stamped upon each section were numerical building codes of some sort. Tinted a very dark green, the pipe or whatever it was also had red lights installed along its side every so often, slowly blinking in the underground twilight.
It was… certainly an odd thing to encounter in the middle of nowhere, and it was much too high to see over. Devastator paused to consider what to do now, but Jinx had no such confusion. She broke into a run, and called on her powers at the same time, leaping into the air with a graceful flip, and using the reaction of her powers to push her up and on top of the pipe. She landed properly, steadied herself, and resisted the urge to raise her arms like a gymnast as she took a look around. On the opposite side of the pipe was what she was looking for, a large, paved tunnel, big enough to fit an 18-wheeler truck, that sloped upwards out of sight towards what had to be the surface.
“Got it,” she said, turning back to Devastator, “There’s an exit over here.” He smiled and gave a very visible sigh of relief, and started to walk over to the pipe, and Jinx started to wonder if perhaps she shouldn’t have told him there was no exit so as to put herself in a better position to get rid of him, even as she crouched down to help pull him up and over the pipe (for there was no way in hell he could do what she had just done), and all of these things and more were running through her head when the pipe itself suddenly woke up.
There was a roar, not like a landslide or a collapsing cavern, a roar like that of a dinosaur, and before Jinx could blink, she was thrown off her feet and down onto the cavern floor, as the metal pipe she was standing on bucked and twisted and rose up into the air. Jinx did not need to know what was happening to know that she should not remain laying on the ground, and she sprang up almost as soon as she touched the dirt and ran back half a dozen paces, and turned around, and her jaw dropped.
The pipe was not a pipe at all, it was a gigantic mechanical worm.
A robotic worm the size of an aqueduct was looming overhead, its head, armed with a single red eye that stared down at them, and a huge gaping maw full of razor-sharp steel teeth that was slowly opening and closing, as though the damned thing was smacking its lips in anticipation of a meal. It opened its jaws and let out an ear-splitting roar that shook rocks from the ceiling of the cavern and nearly bowled Jinx over.
“What the hell is – “
It did not give them time to ask.
The red eye glowed brightly, and Jinx realized what was coming with only an instant to spare. She lunged for one side as red laser bored into the ground where she had been standing moments ago, carving a furrow through the ground. Devastator lunged to the side as well, snatching his baton from his side and lighting it on fire as he snapped it around at the worm. A rock near the worm’s coiled body exploded like a bomb, but to no effect whatsoever, other than getting the mechanical nightmare’s attention.
Jinx scrambled back as the thing let loose another roar, and its head retracted into its body to be replaced by a whirling drill bit, with which it dove at Devastator. Devastator was still on his side from his last lunge, and in desperation, turned his baton on the worm itself, targeting one of the metal panels that it used for armor and blasting it to bits. The worm noticed this one, swerving off at the last second and striking the ground next to Devastator, sending a hail of stone chips flying everywhere like bullets. Jinx ducked behind a pile of rebar as the rock pieces pinged off her cover, before the worm, having realized that it had missed its target, roared once again and loomed back up into the air.
The dust kicked up by the worm was such that Jinx could no longer see where Devastator had gotten to, but she could see the worm, and that was all she needed. She stepped around the cover and spun in a circle, gathering up her entropy like momentum before releasing a wave of it in a razor-sharp slash of energy that broke against the machine’s metal hide, barely scratching the paint. The worm whirled about to face her, a laser blast nearly cutting her head off as she ducked, rolled, and came up with another handful of hexes which she tossed at the ceiling above the worm. Multi-ton rocks crumbled from the cavern roof and rained down upon the worm, but they might as well have been styrofoam for all the good they did. The worm fired its laser again, this time hitting close enough that Jinx felt the heat on her face as she jumped back, before ducking behind a cement mixer for cover. A second later, the worm’s laser sliced the cement mixer in half, and Jinx was sent running back down the cavern, desperately dodging left and right to avoid beams of incalculable energy.
“Zap! Zap! BOOM!”
Jinx turned back to see the worm roaring in what appeared to be pain, a smoking rent torn in its face where its laser had been emitting from. Devastator stood between her and it, his baton held high, and he swung it down like he was trying to hammer something into the ground, then lifting it and slamming it down again and again, and with each swing, a small chunk of the thing’s armor blew up, rocking the worm back and forth and back again. Yet no sooner had Devastator stopped to evaluate the effectiveness of his strikes than the worm discarded the shattered laser lens, and another one slid into place from within the body of the beast. It whipped its head back down and fired, and the blast would have disintegrated Devastator had Jinx not reacted instinctively and blasted him out of the way with a hex. Even that didn’t spare him a series of hard shocks as the worm swung its tail around and hit him in mid-air like a thrown baseball, sending him flying back towards Jinx to land in a heap on the ground next to her, where he lay, groaning softly.
This was no time to be laying down. “Get up!” she shouted at him, in the voice she had used many-a-time to force one of her own teammates to do something they very much didn’t want to do. Apparently it wasn’t all that different than Robin’s version, for he winced and staggered, but managed to get back to his feet, and looked back up at the worm which was slowly advancing towards them, its drill once more extended to grind them to paste.
“Can’t you just blow it up?!” cried Jinx as she flung hex after hex into the oncoming worm, scoring the metal and chipping the paint, but unable to stop the drill itself.
“It’s too big,” he replied, “and too complicated! It’s made of an alloy I’ve never seen before!”
”Well you’d better think of something you can do!” yelled Jinx, backing up as the worm advanced on them. “My hexes can’t get through his armor!”
Devastator was backing up as well, though they would soon run out of room against the cavern wall. He was not however watching the worm, but instead looking all around them, perhaps for something else to blow up? Then suddenly, the psychokinetic said something that confirmed every theory she’d ever had about the insanity of heroes.
“Hold him off! I’ve got an idea!”
Hold him off? How exactly was she supposed to do that? Still there was no time to properly throttle him, and all she could do was use her entropic powers to rip a huge section of the ceiling off and drop it on the worm’s head. As the previous sections had done, this one shattered like glass as soon as it struck, but the sheer weight forced the thing’s head down, and it had to rear back up before continuing. And then suddenly, Devastator was next to her, holding a length of steel rebar as tall as he was in one hand, and his baton in the other. With a swipe, he blew a small hole in the ground, and set the rebar in it, facing up and forwards like a pike, but then hesitated. “It’s… it’s not sharp enough…” he said, looking around for a knife perhaps.
Jinx snapped her fingers, and the top six inches of the rebar snapped off at an angle, leaving a razor-sharp point behind. “What are you gonna do?!” she shouted over the roaring worm, “stab him with it?”
“Yep,”
She did not get a chance to do a double take.
The worm roared and lunged forwards towards them, and Jinx dove to the side, but Devastator did not, at least not instantly. As the monstrous robot closed in, he stood his ground, his baton held low, watching the worm as carefully as he had watched Jinx earlier in the evening. And then finally, when the worm was so close that Jinx was about to blast him aside again, Devastator swung his baton upwards, and the sharpened rebar stake was blasted into the air like a cruise missile, straight into the diving worm, driving into its armor like an arrow into a board, where it stuck, quivering.
The impact was not particularly powerful, though the worm did hesitate as it attempted to determine how badly it had been damaged. And Jinx was about to ask what in the name of Hell the point of that had been, when she saw that Devastator still hadn’t moved, and was holding his free hand up, fingers extended towards the embedded rebar, which was now beginning to turn white with frost…
... oh that was clever…
The worm had finished determining that the attack had been nothing more than a minor nuisance, and turned back on Devastator, but it was already too late, and Devastator’s fist suddenly closed. Moments later, the rebar, half-embedded inside the worm’s throat, blew up, a shaped charge blast that tore a jagged rent in its armored hide, not merely peeling off the outer layers like the previous blasts, but ripping all th way through and exposing its 'throat'. The worm shuddered and roared and lunged this way and that, stabbing at Devastator and missing, but driving the Titan back into a corner from whence there was no escape at all, and it reared up again and spun around to crush the metahuman who had damaged it so, just as Devastator turned and screamed as loud as he could over the roaring machine. “Jinx! Now!”
There was a part of her, perhaps her rational brain, which told her that she could just as easily be a bit late, and only shoot the worm after it had crushed Devastator to pulp. But by the time she thought of that, she had already acted.
Jinx fired one of her most powerful hexes with the aim and poise of a marksman, and the hex slammed right into the worm’s unarmored thorax, shredding the circuitry and demolishing the machinery that gave the unholy thing life. It let out an ear-shattering screech, writhing about like it was being murdered, which she supposed was true enough in a way. It jackknifed, twisted, and then spontaneously lashed out, slamming its tail section into her like a bullwhip and throwing her through the air like a rag doll. She hit the cavern wall awkwardly, and felt something pop in her left knee, and screamed as the pain bit through her, but her scream was lost in the sounds of the dying war machine. Desperately she crawled for cover, but the worm’s death throes had begun to destabilize the entire cavern, and rocks were falling from the ceiling all over now. She could see the exit, three dozen yards away, tantalizingly close, but she couldn’t make the difference on her feet, couldn’t even stand up unaided.
But fortunately, she didn’t have to.
Devastator just appeared, though in all practicality she wasn’t watching for him and he might well have just walked over, and grabbed her arm. He shouted something, it might have been “Come on!”, but the noise was too much to hear. She took his hand and managed to stand up, biting her lip until she drew blood from the pain, and with one hand over his shoulders, managed to hobble towards the exit as the cavern began to implode behind them. They were not moving fast enough and she put weight on her injured leg in desperation, and found that it would take it, though doing so made her lightheaded with pain. They reached the exit tunnel bare seconds before a fifty-ton rock landed before it, blocking the way back to the tunnel, and raced as fast as they could up, up, up, until Devastator could drag her no further, and she risked passing out. They waited only a moment or two to catch their breath, before moving on, both armed, her limping, him sore and exhausted, until finally the tunnel straightened out, and they found themselves staring at the surface.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 25, cont'd more
They were standing in a desert of some sort, facing towards the coast, and in the distance, the skyscrapers of Jump City could just barely be made out in the morning light. The sun was just beginning to wink over the mountains to the east, the mountains they had just emerged from. Jinx had absolutely no idea where they were, save that they were somewhere east of Jump City, and that they had gone much further than she had thought, for the diamond mine itself was not visible from Jump. She did not know if it was the morning after her attempted burglary, or the one after that, and she did not care. The sounds of the collapsing cavern behind them gradually faded to silence, and they stood in the entrance to the cave they had just emerged from, at long last, and listened to the wind blowing through the sagebrush, and the distant sounds of cars on a nearby road. They had made it.
“Nice job,” she said. It seemed the most appropriate thing to say.
Evidently he agreed. “Thanks,” he said. “You too,” and she nodded and even managed a smile.
And then she shot him.
The hex caught him flatfooted, square in the temple, and had it been a rock or something she would probably have killed him outright, but hexes didn’t quite work like physical objects, and this one she had not taken the time to shape into some kind of overt slashing or bludgeoning implement. It did have enough force to drop him like a puppet with his strings cut, but it didn’t knock him out cold. For one thing, in her present condition, she wasn’t sure she could manage a hex like that. For another, she didn’t need to risk it.
Devastator landed on his back, hard, and lay fairly still for a few moments before slowly picking himself up to a seated position, only to find Jinx, still leaning against the wall, with entropic energy crackling over her hands and a triumphant smirk on her face. “Can’t say I didn’t warn you…” she said mockingly.
“Are you crazy?” he demanded, rubbing his head where the hex had hit him, not immediately reaching for his baton, perhaps realizing that it was futile.
“No,” she said lightly, “just pragmatic.”
“You’re hurt,” he said. “You think you’re in any shape to beat me now?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” was her reply, “but I don’t have to beat you.” She pulled her communicator off of her belt, and showed the screen to Devastator. It showed a series of moving blips rapidly closing on a stationary one. “They do.”
It took Devastator less time than she expected to realize how much trouble he was in.
“Well lookee here!” came a voice from behind Devastator, who jumped and scrambled to his feet, snatching up his baton and turning around in time to see four copies of Billy Numerous walking towards him from around the side of the cave. A second later, Gizmo appeared, flying on a new set of rocket boosters, with some kind of enormous device in his hands that could as easily have been a sonic screwdriver as a scanner. Mammoth and See-More were further back, having had the furthest ground to cover, See-More floating with his eye as a hot-air balloon, Mammoth jogging across the desert towards them all.
“As soon as we got into the cavern, we were close enough to the surface for a signal to get through,” said Jinx as Devastator turned from one Hiver to the next in something approaching horror. “I hit a silent alarm, and let them know where we were. I don’t suppose you did the same thing, did you?”
The expression on his face told her the answer.
“Jinx!” shouted Gizmo, relief apparent on his face, to the extent that he even omitted his usual epithets in the face of the Titan. Indeed, he seemed to have momentarily forgotten that the Psychokinetic was even present. “Are you okay?! What happened?!”
“I’m fine,” said Jinx, and she meant it this time. “Brought us all a little present.”
“Those Titans ran us all outta the mine,” said Mammoth. “We lost all the jewels we wuz gonna get.”
Jinx smirked. “Not all of ‘em,” she said, and the other Hivers followed her gaze to Devastator, who looked rather like he was trying to decide a prayer for a bolt of lightning to strike him dead would go over well.
Gizmo and the others, as always, could sense fear. “Cool…” said Gizmo in a very disconcerting voice. “I say we play with this one for a while. Let me cut him open and find out how he works.”
“Nah,” said See-More, “let’s see if there’s someone who wants to buy him.”
“That Cyborg beat the snot outta me!” roared Mammoth, punching his fist into his open hand. “I want some payback!”
With each recited alternative, Devastator looked more and more like he was about to be sick. His baton was still in his hand, but he made no effort to raise it, turning from Hiver to Hiver before finally returning his gaze to Jinx.
“Well,” said Jinx with a controlled smirk, “first things first. Let’s have the diamond.”
Devastator did not react immediately, but even he could see that there was no point in resisting. One of the other Titans might have refused on principle and been beaten to a pulp for it, but he simply slid a shaking hand into his pocket and pulled out the fist-sized gem he had been carrying, and gently tossed it to Jinx. In the natural light of day it seemed even more beautiful, and Jinx permitted herself a second to admire it before she slid it into her own pocket.
“So what’re we gonna do with the snot-guzzler?” asked Gizmo impatiently.
That seemed to be the question Devastator wanted an answer to as well, and he stared at her mutely, fearfully, like a prisoner awaiting judgment. She honestly hadn’t thought this far ahead, and so she took her time, trying to decide what they ought to do with this Titan, this enemy, that had now fallen right into their hands, for not in a million years could Devastator hope to take on the entire Hive by himself.
She pondered the matter while her teammates waited and while Devastator sweated and quivered nervously, and went over the various options in her mind, before finally coming to a decision she was comfortable with.
“Let him go.”
She wasn’t sure who was more surprised: Devastator, or the other Hivers. Devastator choked and clearly thought he had heard Jinx incorrectly, but Gizmo, who had been so happy to see her a moment earlier, nearly fell out of the air, while Mammoth just stood confused, and See-More looked frankly horrified, as though she had suggested vivisecting the Titan.
“Are you out of your stinking mind?!” yelled Gizmo. “Let him go?! Why should we do that?!”
“Yeah, I’m wonderin’ the same thing, Jinx,” asked See-More, albeit without the histrionics that Jinx was still hoping Gizmo was going to grow out of.
“Because I said so,” said Jinx, looking almost bemused. “He’s learned what happens when you mess with the Hive 5. I’m not about to kill the only do-gooder who’s ever figured that out. We’ll send him back to his little friends and let ‘em know that we could’ve killed him if we’d wanted to, and there wasn’t anything they could’ve done about it. It’ll give them all something to think about, next time we show up.”
“So would killing him!” insisted Gizmo.
“Killing him would just get all the other Titans on us harder than ever,” she said. “And I’ve had enough fun for one day. We’ll kill him next time.”
Gizmo wasn’t happy. Mammoth wasn’t happy. See-More wasn’t happy, and Billy seemed to be vaguely confused by the whole thing, but she didn’t much care. She was in charge of the Hive, not them, and she knew they’d do what she ordered, albeit with a lot of griping. One by one, the Hivers turned to go, and Jinx waved them off, telling them she’d catch up in just a minute. Devastator looked like he still expected them to kill him at any moment, and it wasn’t until the other Hivers had vanished that he asked the obvious question.
“What the… what are you doing?”
“I’m letting you go,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I feel like it,” she said nonchalantly, which was not the most accurate reason, but was the one that required the least explanation.
“But…” he said, still not quite able to believe that it wasn’t a trick, “but I don’t… I don’t get it…”
“Relax,” she said, “there’s nothing to get. You… saved my ass back there, with the worm, and when the lights went out, even though I told you I was gonna take that diamond from you when we got out. So I figure you deserve a free pass this time. Besides, you’re not as annoying as the other Titans.”
He plainly had no idea what to say, but decided on the obvious once again. “… thanks,” he said. “What… what happens… next time we…”
“Next time I’m gonna beat the stuffing out of you, just like I would have this time if that cave-in hadn’t happened. You’re an okay kid, and you helped me get out of there, but get in my way again and I’ll mop the floor with you.” Her words were harsh and threatening, but her voice was simply tired, as was his, and so rather than cringing, he simply smiled and nodded.
“What makes you so sure I won’t beat the stuffing out of you?” he asked.
“Because you’re not good enough,” she said, plainly.
“We’ll see, I guess,” he said, and with a nod, he started to walk away from the cave in the opposite direction that the Hivers had gone. Even if he called for the Titans right now, it would take them some time to get here, enough for her to escape, she knew. Before he had gotten more than a few paces away though, he stopped and turned back.
”Hey, um… could you do me a favor?”
“You mean besides not killing you?”
“It’s a small one. When you and Gizmo go and er… see Marcus next, could you tell him I said hi?”
Jinx grinned. “Should I tell him Devastator says hello, or David?”
Devastator’s eyes shot open in surprise. “How did you – “
“Cyborg called you that after the first cave-in,” she said with a laugh. “Is that your real name?”
“Um… sort of…” said Devastator, “it’s a long story. But yeah, tell him David says hi.”
“Sure,” she said.
Devastator turned away, and walked off, and Jinx prepared to follow her teammates, who would be waiting for her nearby, but before she did, she called after him one more time.
“Hey, David?” She wasn’t sure why she wanted to tell him this, but… well… why did she do anything?
“Yeah?” he said, stopping and turning his head back.
“We’d have let you into the Hive.”
He did not say anything to that, simply stood there, and watched her, and then finally nodded slowly, and turned away. Jinx watched him leave, and then did the same, still limping on her injured leg, as she followed her teammates who were waiting on the other side of the entrance. Gizmo was still grumbling, but clearly relieved to see her all right, peppering his questions liberally with the insults and angry threats he used to disguise the fact that he'd been worried sick, and Mammoth offered to carry her back to the vehicle, which she refused of course, but which still made her smile a bit, and See-More wanted to know what had happened in the tunnel and what all that noise was about a mechanical worm, and all of them made snide comments about Billy, who Jinx decided would probably make a fine addition to the Hive, even if he did brag way too much, and she made a mental note that she’d tell him as soon as they all got back and could prepare for the initiation.
It was good to be home.
*------------------------------------------------------------*
Starfire tested the door to the roof, and found it unlocked, not that she could not have torn it from its hinges and flung it across the city with one hand even had it been locked, but she had learned that such things were best reserved for moments of dire need.
As she expected, the roof was in use, so to speak, though there were normally no activities to be done up here, save for the occasional game of volleying the ball or basketing it (the sheer number of things that people on this planet did with a ball never ceased to amaze). At present however, there was neither basketing nor volleying occurring. Instead David was standing upon the roof, staring off over the city in a manner she recognized quite easily, for she had done the same thing more than once from a similar vantage point.
She stepped onto the roof and shut the door behind her, and David must have heard her, for he turned his head to see who it was. She was afraid that she might be disturbing him, in the way that Raven did not wish to be disturbed, but he smiled and turned back to the cityscape beyond, and she walked up towards where he was standing, well back from the edge of the roof, but still staring across the bay at the city.
“You are feeling better, friend?”
David smiled and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It was just some bruises and scrapes. Nothing serious.”
“That is wonderful news,” said Starfire. “We were all most distressed when Cyborg and Raven were unable to determine where you were located. We feared that you might have been crushed by one of the collapses that struck the diamond mine.”
“So was I,” said David, “Got lucky, I guess.”
“Well, whether as a result of chance or another factor, we are all very glad to have you back among us once more.”
That brought a smile to David’s face, which was of course the reason she had said it, though it was not as whole-hearted as she would have hoped for. “Thanks, Star,” he said, and she could tell he meant it, but that his mind was on another subject. She did not press him however, she found that doing such things rarely led to anything positive.
The city shone in the darkening sky like a glistening mountain of diamonds, and Starfire watched it in silence for several minutes, before asking another question.
“Forgive me, friend David, but… is there some reason why you are up here watching the setting of the sun, rather than downstairs with the rest of us?”
David did not answer immediately, but waited a moment or two “I’m… just thinking about some of the things that happened in the mine.”
She nodded. "Robin mentioned that you encountered one of the drilling machines Slade used to try and destroy our Tower back before you were a Titan. We... did not know that there was a fourth."
"Yeah," said David, "that might have been where he built them or something. Robin said he might have drilled that tunnel to be able to sneak into the diamond mines whenever he needed to."
"Those machines were extremely fierce," said Starfire. "Was it... difficult, confronting one?"
David shrugged. "We managed," he said simply. "That's not... I was just… thinking about Jinx, and… some of the stuff we talked about.”
Starfire clenched her fist. “You and Jinx were trapped for many schlorvaks,” she said. “If she caused you undue harm, then we shall – “
“Nono,” said David quickly. “No, it… that wasn’t it. Jinx is… a lot of things, but… she’s also exactly what she pretends to be. No… deceptions or hidden agendas…” he made a sound that Starfire recognized as a sigh (though on her planet it formed part of a traditional challenge for single combat to the death). “I guess… after everything that’s happened… I just sort of miss that.”
Starfire nodded. “If you spoke to Jinx for the length of time you were trapped, then you would know her far better than any of us do,” she said. “Did you… forgive me… ‘make friends’ is the term, yes?”
“Yeah, that’s the term,” said David, “and… no, we didn’t. She promised me that next time she was gonna kick my butt, and I believe her.” He paused, and his voice fell somewhat, a slightly more somber tone. “But… I think that if… if things had been different. Then we could have been friends.”
“Different for her?” asked Starfire.
David shook his head. “Different for me,” he said. “And… that scares the hell out of me.”
Starfire was familiar with the idiom David had used, but she did not get his meaning. “I… do not understand,” said Starfire. “Why should that be cause for fear?”
David took a nervous breath and let it go slowly. “What… what if I hadn’t been in… the Wayne Center in Jump when Cinderblock attacked it?” he asked. “What if there’d been no Cinderblock at all? None of this conspiracy stuff. I’d never have met any of you, right?”
“Most… likely not,” said Starfire now hoping that she didn’t understand. “Are you… thinking perhaps that this would have been preferable?”
“No!” insisted David instantly, to Starfire’s relief. “Nono, Star… no, I… you’ve gotta believe me… meeting you guys has been the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. By a million miles. If it wasn’t for all the other people that got killed, I’d say that it was worth having Cinderblock do all that stuff to me that he did if it meant I got to meet you all. That’s not what I meant.”
Starfire smiled and put a hand on David’s shoulder to indicate that she understood, and he lowered his head to go on.
“But… it was because of Cinderblock that I met you all. If that hadn’t happened, I’d probably still be back in some other Center or something, or… at least that’s what I always thought.”
“But you no longer think this?”
He did not answer the question directly. “What if… I’d met the Hive… instead of you guys?”
“The Hive?”
“Jinx and Gizmo met up inside the system, the same place I was. They were in the same system I was in, and had it a little worse off, and turned into bad guys. I didn’t. If I’d been there with them, if they’d met me and found out that I had these powers, I’d probably be in the Hive Five right now. I’d be fighting you guys every other week, just like they do.”
“I do not believe you would,” said Starfire. “You are a hero, not a villain, and that is not entirely a matter of circumstance.”
“I’m not heroic though, not like you guys. I mean… I go out with you and we do the hero thing, and I… I do it now because it’s… instinct and rote memory or something, and because Robin’s trained it into me, and because I’ve had all this time with you guys, but I just don’t… think like a hero. And… I’m not freaking out about this, I'm really not, because there’s nothing to do about it anyway, but… I always used to assume, back before I joined you all, that… if I ever wound up using my powers, it’d be as a bad guy, not a good guy. That’s one of the reasons I never used them. And if… I’d been in some other facility, and I’d met Jinx instead of you and the others… that’s what I’d be.”
“No it is not.”
David seemed legitimately confused by her certainty. “It’s… not?”
"Jinx has decided to act in the way that she has, as have all of her friends, but you did not. You have made choices that have caused you to be here, now. Whether or not you sought to become a hero, you have done so, with our help or without it. You are a hero, a ‘good guy’. If it were not for chance, I would not have arrived upon this planet, and none of us would have found one another. You should not discount such things just because - "
"I tried to kill Terra."
Starfire stopped dead in mid-sentence. David had spoken calmly and without inflection, as deadpan as anything Raven had ever said, and his eyes had not deviated from the horizon, but his words were precise and uncluttered with evasions and extraneous terms. A simple declaration that made no sense.
"I... I do not understand. You were..."
"We were fighting, and she kept going on and on about how stupid I'd been to trust her in the first place, and how bad it was going to look once the rest of you found out about it. She said I'd led you all right into a trap with Slade and that you were all gonna die knowing that I was the one that had set it all up..." he paused and took a long, slow breath, his voice slightly hollow but calm as the waters below. "... and I just lost it. We'd been fighting, hurt each other, that's how these things work but... that was different. I wanted her blood. I went after her like... like I wanted to rip her throat out and blow her guts all over the street." He paused again. "I still do. And I almost succeeded."
David's voice was calm, but Starfire could tell how disturbed he really was just by how quietly he was standing. "But you did not kill her," she said.
"My powers gave out," he said. "I got too... excited I guess. Overused them maybe, who knows..." he fell quiet again for a second, and Starfire thought he was done and was preparing what she wanted to say, when he dropped another bomb. "... and then I did the same thing to Raven."
"What?" she couldn't help but let some surprise out this time. Neither David nor Raven had said anything of a -
"She shot me," he said simply. "Thought I was part of Slade's plan. She had plenty of reasons to, and I caught her at a bad time, but she just up and shot me," he drummed his fingers against his shirt. "Right here. And her powers failed. I don’t know why, but I was hurting really bad, and wasn’t thinking too clearly, and she’d just tried to shoot me, and I got…” he was having trouble continuing, “…I got so angry, and just lashed out…”
Silence reigned for a few seconds. “And… then what happened?”
“Nothing,” said David. “I was too badly hurt, and too upset. I couldn’t make the powers work. I collapsed, and she helped me, and we got through it.” He took a long, deep breath. “But… what happens on the day I don’t collapse?”
“You should not fear your powers so,” said Starfire.
“I’m not afraid of my powers, Star, I’m afraid of me. My powers do what I want them to, and sometimes I want to just… blow someone like Terra to pieces. And every time I practice with them or use them… they just get easier to use. Used to be if I got upset I couldn’t use them, now I have to be really upset. And I’m more precise, and more powerful, and everything… and one of these days I’m worried that I’m gonna…”
“David,” said Starfire, “forgive me once more, but you have… missed the sharpness?”
David hesitated in confusion, and Starfire knew she had made an error with the idiom. “the… point?”
That made more sense to him, and she continued. “Forgive me if this is surprising to you, but… the King of Tamaran is my Knorfka. If I wished to, I could summon a billion Tamaranean warriors to invade Earth and subjugate it, so that I might rule it as queen for all time. Or perhaps I could have them come and exterminate all of my enemies in one sweep. These things are within my power to do, but I am not afraid that I shall one day do them, for I know that I will not.”
“Well, yeah, Star… you’re a hero.”
“As are you,” said Starfire, “and not because of what Cinderblock’s actions were. He provided the opportunity, but you took it, and made of it what you would with your own character. Robin would not have accepted you for training if you were as Jinx is, even if your powers were thirty times what they are. The ‘point’ which you have missed is not that you wished to kill Terra, but that you did not kill her.”
”I would have if I could,” said David.
“Perhaps,” said Starfire, “but you could not, and so we shall never know. Perhaps you would have thrown her to the ground and then not killed her. We do not know. But we believe it to be thus, and you have not yet shown us any reason to believe otherwise, and so until you do, please do not worry that you are the same as Jinx or as Gizmo or the other members of the Hive, and that you are here simply because of luck. None of us would have accepted you as a Titan or a friend if that were so.”
She knew it had worked before he spoke, for a small smile crossed David’s face, and he lowered his head in a manner Robin would describe as “sheepish”, and when he looked up again, much of the worry that had been inscribed on his face was gone. Not all of it of course, but much of it.
“Thanks, Star,” he said simply, and she knew it was heartfelt. “I hope you’re right.”
“Come friend David,” she said, “this worry is merely because of Jinx’ escape with the precious jewel she sought. The next battle you engage with her in will not result in your butt kicking, but hers.”
David smiled and began to laugh, and Starfire hesitated, for she had not intended to be funny.
“Did I… speak something incorrectly?”
“No,” said David, “well… sort of actually. Jinx got away, but not with the jewel.”
Starfire frowned in puzzlement. “But you said that you returned the gem to her when she – “
David reached into his pocket and pulled out the largest diamond Starfire had ever seen, a flawless gem as large as the egg of a Denubian Slime-worm. Starfire was generally not impressed by most earthly jewels, but this one elicited a small gasp, and she stared at it in disbelief. David simply smiled, and handed her the jewel, and she held it up and squeezed it hard enough that glass or plastic would have shattered, and yet the gem did not.
“But…” she said, “you… you said that you gave it back to Jinx!”
“I said I gave her a gem. Not that one.”
“But then… if you did not give her the diamond… what was it you gave her?”
David chuckled…
*------------------------------------------------------------*
The Man in Gold turned the jewel over in his hands carefully, taking his time, inspecting it, which was only to be expected, but Jinx dearly wished he would hurry the hell up.
“My dear,” said the Man in Gold in a calm tone, “do you believe that I am an idiot?”
Calm though the question was, it stung her like a slap to the face partly because of the surprise.
“What… what are you?”
“This is not the jewel I asked you to retrieve. In fact, this is not even a diamond.”
“What?!”
The Man in Gold lowered the gem and placed it on the table in front of him. “This is a cubic zirconia,” he said. “A fake. A fraudulent gem that I must assume you are giving me because you believe I am an enormous fool who cannot tell the difference.”
“That’s…” Jinx literally did not know what to say. “That’s… that’s impossible!”
“It’s not merely possible,” said the Man in Gold, “it’s the truth, but I have no time to play games with you, so if you have the real diamond, I suggest you produce it, now, and if not, then I suggest you leave, now.”
Jinx’ head was spinning. How could the diamond be fake?! “I took it from the vault just like you said!” she insisted.
“Yes,” said the Man in Gold, “and then you let it fall into the hands of someone who can identify materials by sight and sense, and proceeded to follow him into a place where you could not see what he was doing. Zirconia and Diamonds look identical to you and I perhaps, but to Devastator, it would be as comparing apples to flaming meteors. No doubt he simply picked up an appropriately-sized Zirconia from somewhere in the tunnels while you were busy playing Blind Man’s Bluff.”
Jinx stared at the fake diamond in horror as the Man in Gold turned his back on her.
“Now go away,” he said. “I’ve a lot of work to do preparing the apocalypse, and I cannot be bothered with doomed fools.”
“No!” shouted Jinx. “No, wait… you… you’ve gotta give us another chance! There’s gotta be… gotta be something else we can do.”
“Something worth sparing your lives when my lord returns? I think not. You couldn’t even manage a simple jewel heist. You needed Devastator’s help to get past that damned mining worm. What will you do for an encore? Rob a parking meter?”
“Come on,” said Jinx. “We’re willing to do whatever it takes, okay?” She thought suddenly of a card to play. “Surely since you’re so busy, you can think of something you need done that you just don’t have time to deal with yourself, can’t you?”
The Man in Gold paused, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hrm,” he said, and Jinx’ hopes brightened. “Well… now that you mention it, there is something you can do for me. Something perhaps more up your alley than mere jewel theft.”
“Name it,” said Jinx with relief. “Just name it.”
“It’s not all that complicated,” he said. “All I need you to do, is to destroy Robin…"
They were standing in a desert of some sort, facing towards the coast, and in the distance, the skyscrapers of Jump City could just barely be made out in the morning light. The sun was just beginning to wink over the mountains to the east, the mountains they had just emerged from. Jinx had absolutely no idea where they were, save that they were somewhere east of Jump City, and that they had gone much further than she had thought, for the diamond mine itself was not visible from Jump. She did not know if it was the morning after her attempted burglary, or the one after that, and she did not care. The sounds of the collapsing cavern behind them gradually faded to silence, and they stood in the entrance to the cave they had just emerged from, at long last, and listened to the wind blowing through the sagebrush, and the distant sounds of cars on a nearby road. They had made it.
“Nice job,” she said. It seemed the most appropriate thing to say.
Evidently he agreed. “Thanks,” he said. “You too,” and she nodded and even managed a smile.
And then she shot him.
The hex caught him flatfooted, square in the temple, and had it been a rock or something she would probably have killed him outright, but hexes didn’t quite work like physical objects, and this one she had not taken the time to shape into some kind of overt slashing or bludgeoning implement. It did have enough force to drop him like a puppet with his strings cut, but it didn’t knock him out cold. For one thing, in her present condition, she wasn’t sure she could manage a hex like that. For another, she didn’t need to risk it.
Devastator landed on his back, hard, and lay fairly still for a few moments before slowly picking himself up to a seated position, only to find Jinx, still leaning against the wall, with entropic energy crackling over her hands and a triumphant smirk on her face. “Can’t say I didn’t warn you…” she said mockingly.
“Are you crazy?” he demanded, rubbing his head where the hex had hit him, not immediately reaching for his baton, perhaps realizing that it was futile.
“No,” she said lightly, “just pragmatic.”
“You’re hurt,” he said. “You think you’re in any shape to beat me now?”
“Maybe, maybe not,” was her reply, “but I don’t have to beat you.” She pulled her communicator off of her belt, and showed the screen to Devastator. It showed a series of moving blips rapidly closing on a stationary one. “They do.”
It took Devastator less time than she expected to realize how much trouble he was in.
“Well lookee here!” came a voice from behind Devastator, who jumped and scrambled to his feet, snatching up his baton and turning around in time to see four copies of Billy Numerous walking towards him from around the side of the cave. A second later, Gizmo appeared, flying on a new set of rocket boosters, with some kind of enormous device in his hands that could as easily have been a sonic screwdriver as a scanner. Mammoth and See-More were further back, having had the furthest ground to cover, See-More floating with his eye as a hot-air balloon, Mammoth jogging across the desert towards them all.
“As soon as we got into the cavern, we were close enough to the surface for a signal to get through,” said Jinx as Devastator turned from one Hiver to the next in something approaching horror. “I hit a silent alarm, and let them know where we were. I don’t suppose you did the same thing, did you?”
The expression on his face told her the answer.
“Jinx!” shouted Gizmo, relief apparent on his face, to the extent that he even omitted his usual epithets in the face of the Titan. Indeed, he seemed to have momentarily forgotten that the Psychokinetic was even present. “Are you okay?! What happened?!”
“I’m fine,” said Jinx, and she meant it this time. “Brought us all a little present.”
“Those Titans ran us all outta the mine,” said Mammoth. “We lost all the jewels we wuz gonna get.”
Jinx smirked. “Not all of ‘em,” she said, and the other Hivers followed her gaze to Devastator, who looked rather like he was trying to decide a prayer for a bolt of lightning to strike him dead would go over well.
Gizmo and the others, as always, could sense fear. “Cool…” said Gizmo in a very disconcerting voice. “I say we play with this one for a while. Let me cut him open and find out how he works.”
“Nah,” said See-More, “let’s see if there’s someone who wants to buy him.”
“That Cyborg beat the snot outta me!” roared Mammoth, punching his fist into his open hand. “I want some payback!”
With each recited alternative, Devastator looked more and more like he was about to be sick. His baton was still in his hand, but he made no effort to raise it, turning from Hiver to Hiver before finally returning his gaze to Jinx.
“Well,” said Jinx with a controlled smirk, “first things first. Let’s have the diamond.”
Devastator did not react immediately, but even he could see that there was no point in resisting. One of the other Titans might have refused on principle and been beaten to a pulp for it, but he simply slid a shaking hand into his pocket and pulled out the fist-sized gem he had been carrying, and gently tossed it to Jinx. In the natural light of day it seemed even more beautiful, and Jinx permitted herself a second to admire it before she slid it into her own pocket.
“So what’re we gonna do with the snot-guzzler?” asked Gizmo impatiently.
That seemed to be the question Devastator wanted an answer to as well, and he stared at her mutely, fearfully, like a prisoner awaiting judgment. She honestly hadn’t thought this far ahead, and so she took her time, trying to decide what they ought to do with this Titan, this enemy, that had now fallen right into their hands, for not in a million years could Devastator hope to take on the entire Hive by himself.
She pondered the matter while her teammates waited and while Devastator sweated and quivered nervously, and went over the various options in her mind, before finally coming to a decision she was comfortable with.
“Let him go.”
She wasn’t sure who was more surprised: Devastator, or the other Hivers. Devastator choked and clearly thought he had heard Jinx incorrectly, but Gizmo, who had been so happy to see her a moment earlier, nearly fell out of the air, while Mammoth just stood confused, and See-More looked frankly horrified, as though she had suggested vivisecting the Titan.
“Are you out of your stinking mind?!” yelled Gizmo. “Let him go?! Why should we do that?!”
“Yeah, I’m wonderin’ the same thing, Jinx,” asked See-More, albeit without the histrionics that Jinx was still hoping Gizmo was going to grow out of.
“Because I said so,” said Jinx, looking almost bemused. “He’s learned what happens when you mess with the Hive 5. I’m not about to kill the only do-gooder who’s ever figured that out. We’ll send him back to his little friends and let ‘em know that we could’ve killed him if we’d wanted to, and there wasn’t anything they could’ve done about it. It’ll give them all something to think about, next time we show up.”
“So would killing him!” insisted Gizmo.
“Killing him would just get all the other Titans on us harder than ever,” she said. “And I’ve had enough fun for one day. We’ll kill him next time.”
Gizmo wasn’t happy. Mammoth wasn’t happy. See-More wasn’t happy, and Billy seemed to be vaguely confused by the whole thing, but she didn’t much care. She was in charge of the Hive, not them, and she knew they’d do what she ordered, albeit with a lot of griping. One by one, the Hivers turned to go, and Jinx waved them off, telling them she’d catch up in just a minute. Devastator looked like he still expected them to kill him at any moment, and it wasn’t until the other Hivers had vanished that he asked the obvious question.
“What the… what are you doing?”
“I’m letting you go,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because I feel like it,” she said nonchalantly, which was not the most accurate reason, but was the one that required the least explanation.
“But…” he said, still not quite able to believe that it wasn’t a trick, “but I don’t… I don’t get it…”
“Relax,” she said, “there’s nothing to get. You… saved my ass back there, with the worm, and when the lights went out, even though I told you I was gonna take that diamond from you when we got out. So I figure you deserve a free pass this time. Besides, you’re not as annoying as the other Titans.”
He plainly had no idea what to say, but decided on the obvious once again. “… thanks,” he said. “What… what happens… next time we…”
“Next time I’m gonna beat the stuffing out of you, just like I would have this time if that cave-in hadn’t happened. You’re an okay kid, and you helped me get out of there, but get in my way again and I’ll mop the floor with you.” Her words were harsh and threatening, but her voice was simply tired, as was his, and so rather than cringing, he simply smiled and nodded.
“What makes you so sure I won’t beat the stuffing out of you?” he asked.
“Because you’re not good enough,” she said, plainly.
“We’ll see, I guess,” he said, and with a nod, he started to walk away from the cave in the opposite direction that the Hivers had gone. Even if he called for the Titans right now, it would take them some time to get here, enough for her to escape, she knew. Before he had gotten more than a few paces away though, he stopped and turned back.
”Hey, um… could you do me a favor?”
“You mean besides not killing you?”
“It’s a small one. When you and Gizmo go and er… see Marcus next, could you tell him I said hi?”
Jinx grinned. “Should I tell him Devastator says hello, or David?”
Devastator’s eyes shot open in surprise. “How did you – “
“Cyborg called you that after the first cave-in,” she said with a laugh. “Is that your real name?”
“Um… sort of…” said Devastator, “it’s a long story. But yeah, tell him David says hi.”
“Sure,” she said.
Devastator turned away, and walked off, and Jinx prepared to follow her teammates, who would be waiting for her nearby, but before she did, she called after him one more time.
“Hey, David?” She wasn’t sure why she wanted to tell him this, but… well… why did she do anything?
“Yeah?” he said, stopping and turning his head back.
“We’d have let you into the Hive.”
He did not say anything to that, simply stood there, and watched her, and then finally nodded slowly, and turned away. Jinx watched him leave, and then did the same, still limping on her injured leg, as she followed her teammates who were waiting on the other side of the entrance. Gizmo was still grumbling, but clearly relieved to see her all right, peppering his questions liberally with the insults and angry threats he used to disguise the fact that he'd been worried sick, and Mammoth offered to carry her back to the vehicle, which she refused of course, but which still made her smile a bit, and See-More wanted to know what had happened in the tunnel and what all that noise was about a mechanical worm, and all of them made snide comments about Billy, who Jinx decided would probably make a fine addition to the Hive, even if he did brag way too much, and she made a mental note that she’d tell him as soon as they all got back and could prepare for the initiation.
It was good to be home.
*------------------------------------------------------------*
Starfire tested the door to the roof, and found it unlocked, not that she could not have torn it from its hinges and flung it across the city with one hand even had it been locked, but she had learned that such things were best reserved for moments of dire need.
As she expected, the roof was in use, so to speak, though there were normally no activities to be done up here, save for the occasional game of volleying the ball or basketing it (the sheer number of things that people on this planet did with a ball never ceased to amaze). At present however, there was neither basketing nor volleying occurring. Instead David was standing upon the roof, staring off over the city in a manner she recognized quite easily, for she had done the same thing more than once from a similar vantage point.
She stepped onto the roof and shut the door behind her, and David must have heard her, for he turned his head to see who it was. She was afraid that she might be disturbing him, in the way that Raven did not wish to be disturbed, but he smiled and turned back to the cityscape beyond, and she walked up towards where he was standing, well back from the edge of the roof, but still staring across the bay at the city.
“You are feeling better, friend?”
David smiled and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “It was just some bruises and scrapes. Nothing serious.”
“That is wonderful news,” said Starfire. “We were all most distressed when Cyborg and Raven were unable to determine where you were located. We feared that you might have been crushed by one of the collapses that struck the diamond mine.”
“So was I,” said David, “Got lucky, I guess.”
“Well, whether as a result of chance or another factor, we are all very glad to have you back among us once more.”
That brought a smile to David’s face, which was of course the reason she had said it, though it was not as whole-hearted as she would have hoped for. “Thanks, Star,” he said, and she could tell he meant it, but that his mind was on another subject. She did not press him however, she found that doing such things rarely led to anything positive.
The city shone in the darkening sky like a glistening mountain of diamonds, and Starfire watched it in silence for several minutes, before asking another question.
“Forgive me, friend David, but… is there some reason why you are up here watching the setting of the sun, rather than downstairs with the rest of us?”
David did not answer immediately, but waited a moment or two “I’m… just thinking about some of the things that happened in the mine.”
She nodded. "Robin mentioned that you encountered one of the drilling machines Slade used to try and destroy our Tower back before you were a Titan. We... did not know that there was a fourth."
"Yeah," said David, "that might have been where he built them or something. Robin said he might have drilled that tunnel to be able to sneak into the diamond mines whenever he needed to."
"Those machines were extremely fierce," said Starfire. "Was it... difficult, confronting one?"
David shrugged. "We managed," he said simply. "That's not... I was just… thinking about Jinx, and… some of the stuff we talked about.”
Starfire clenched her fist. “You and Jinx were trapped for many schlorvaks,” she said. “If she caused you undue harm, then we shall – “
“Nono,” said David quickly. “No, it… that wasn’t it. Jinx is… a lot of things, but… she’s also exactly what she pretends to be. No… deceptions or hidden agendas…” he made a sound that Starfire recognized as a sigh (though on her planet it formed part of a traditional challenge for single combat to the death). “I guess… after everything that’s happened… I just sort of miss that.”
Starfire nodded. “If you spoke to Jinx for the length of time you were trapped, then you would know her far better than any of us do,” she said. “Did you… forgive me… ‘make friends’ is the term, yes?”
“Yeah, that’s the term,” said David, “and… no, we didn’t. She promised me that next time she was gonna kick my butt, and I believe her.” He paused, and his voice fell somewhat, a slightly more somber tone. “But… I think that if… if things had been different. Then we could have been friends.”
“Different for her?” asked Starfire.
David shook his head. “Different for me,” he said. “And… that scares the hell out of me.”
Starfire was familiar with the idiom David had used, but she did not get his meaning. “I… do not understand,” said Starfire. “Why should that be cause for fear?”
David took a nervous breath and let it go slowly. “What… what if I hadn’t been in… the Wayne Center in Jump when Cinderblock attacked it?” he asked. “What if there’d been no Cinderblock at all? None of this conspiracy stuff. I’d never have met any of you, right?”
“Most… likely not,” said Starfire now hoping that she didn’t understand. “Are you… thinking perhaps that this would have been preferable?”
“No!” insisted David instantly, to Starfire’s relief. “Nono, Star… no, I… you’ve gotta believe me… meeting you guys has been the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. By a million miles. If it wasn’t for all the other people that got killed, I’d say that it was worth having Cinderblock do all that stuff to me that he did if it meant I got to meet you all. That’s not what I meant.”
Starfire smiled and put a hand on David’s shoulder to indicate that she understood, and he lowered his head to go on.
“But… it was because of Cinderblock that I met you all. If that hadn’t happened, I’d probably still be back in some other Center or something, or… at least that’s what I always thought.”
“But you no longer think this?”
He did not answer the question directly. “What if… I’d met the Hive… instead of you guys?”
“The Hive?”
“Jinx and Gizmo met up inside the system, the same place I was. They were in the same system I was in, and had it a little worse off, and turned into bad guys. I didn’t. If I’d been there with them, if they’d met me and found out that I had these powers, I’d probably be in the Hive Five right now. I’d be fighting you guys every other week, just like they do.”
“I do not believe you would,” said Starfire. “You are a hero, not a villain, and that is not entirely a matter of circumstance.”
“I’m not heroic though, not like you guys. I mean… I go out with you and we do the hero thing, and I… I do it now because it’s… instinct and rote memory or something, and because Robin’s trained it into me, and because I’ve had all this time with you guys, but I just don’t… think like a hero. And… I’m not freaking out about this, I'm really not, because there’s nothing to do about it anyway, but… I always used to assume, back before I joined you all, that… if I ever wound up using my powers, it’d be as a bad guy, not a good guy. That’s one of the reasons I never used them. And if… I’d been in some other facility, and I’d met Jinx instead of you and the others… that’s what I’d be.”
“No it is not.”
David seemed legitimately confused by her certainty. “It’s… not?”
"Jinx has decided to act in the way that she has, as have all of her friends, but you did not. You have made choices that have caused you to be here, now. Whether or not you sought to become a hero, you have done so, with our help or without it. You are a hero, a ‘good guy’. If it were not for chance, I would not have arrived upon this planet, and none of us would have found one another. You should not discount such things just because - "
"I tried to kill Terra."
Starfire stopped dead in mid-sentence. David had spoken calmly and without inflection, as deadpan as anything Raven had ever said, and his eyes had not deviated from the horizon, but his words were precise and uncluttered with evasions and extraneous terms. A simple declaration that made no sense.
"I... I do not understand. You were..."
"We were fighting, and she kept going on and on about how stupid I'd been to trust her in the first place, and how bad it was going to look once the rest of you found out about it. She said I'd led you all right into a trap with Slade and that you were all gonna die knowing that I was the one that had set it all up..." he paused and took a long, slow breath, his voice slightly hollow but calm as the waters below. "... and I just lost it. We'd been fighting, hurt each other, that's how these things work but... that was different. I wanted her blood. I went after her like... like I wanted to rip her throat out and blow her guts all over the street." He paused again. "I still do. And I almost succeeded."
David's voice was calm, but Starfire could tell how disturbed he really was just by how quietly he was standing. "But you did not kill her," she said.
"My powers gave out," he said. "I got too... excited I guess. Overused them maybe, who knows..." he fell quiet again for a second, and Starfire thought he was done and was preparing what she wanted to say, when he dropped another bomb. "... and then I did the same thing to Raven."
"What?" she couldn't help but let some surprise out this time. Neither David nor Raven had said anything of a -
"She shot me," he said simply. "Thought I was part of Slade's plan. She had plenty of reasons to, and I caught her at a bad time, but she just up and shot me," he drummed his fingers against his shirt. "Right here. And her powers failed. I don’t know why, but I was hurting really bad, and wasn’t thinking too clearly, and she’d just tried to shoot me, and I got…” he was having trouble continuing, “…I got so angry, and just lashed out…”
Silence reigned for a few seconds. “And… then what happened?”
“Nothing,” said David. “I was too badly hurt, and too upset. I couldn’t make the powers work. I collapsed, and she helped me, and we got through it.” He took a long, deep breath. “But… what happens on the day I don’t collapse?”
“You should not fear your powers so,” said Starfire.
“I’m not afraid of my powers, Star, I’m afraid of me. My powers do what I want them to, and sometimes I want to just… blow someone like Terra to pieces. And every time I practice with them or use them… they just get easier to use. Used to be if I got upset I couldn’t use them, now I have to be really upset. And I’m more precise, and more powerful, and everything… and one of these days I’m worried that I’m gonna…”
“David,” said Starfire, “forgive me once more, but you have… missed the sharpness?”
David hesitated in confusion, and Starfire knew she had made an error with the idiom. “the… point?”
That made more sense to him, and she continued. “Forgive me if this is surprising to you, but… the King of Tamaran is my Knorfka. If I wished to, I could summon a billion Tamaranean warriors to invade Earth and subjugate it, so that I might rule it as queen for all time. Or perhaps I could have them come and exterminate all of my enemies in one sweep. These things are within my power to do, but I am not afraid that I shall one day do them, for I know that I will not.”
“Well, yeah, Star… you’re a hero.”
“As are you,” said Starfire, “and not because of what Cinderblock’s actions were. He provided the opportunity, but you took it, and made of it what you would with your own character. Robin would not have accepted you for training if you were as Jinx is, even if your powers were thirty times what they are. The ‘point’ which you have missed is not that you wished to kill Terra, but that you did not kill her.”
”I would have if I could,” said David.
“Perhaps,” said Starfire, “but you could not, and so we shall never know. Perhaps you would have thrown her to the ground and then not killed her. We do not know. But we believe it to be thus, and you have not yet shown us any reason to believe otherwise, and so until you do, please do not worry that you are the same as Jinx or as Gizmo or the other members of the Hive, and that you are here simply because of luck. None of us would have accepted you as a Titan or a friend if that were so.”
She knew it had worked before he spoke, for a small smile crossed David’s face, and he lowered his head in a manner Robin would describe as “sheepish”, and when he looked up again, much of the worry that had been inscribed on his face was gone. Not all of it of course, but much of it.
“Thanks, Star,” he said simply, and she knew it was heartfelt. “I hope you’re right.”
“Come friend David,” she said, “this worry is merely because of Jinx’ escape with the precious jewel she sought. The next battle you engage with her in will not result in your butt kicking, but hers.”
David smiled and began to laugh, and Starfire hesitated, for she had not intended to be funny.
“Did I… speak something incorrectly?”
“No,” said David, “well… sort of actually. Jinx got away, but not with the jewel.”
Starfire frowned in puzzlement. “But you said that you returned the gem to her when she – “
David reached into his pocket and pulled out the largest diamond Starfire had ever seen, a flawless gem as large as the egg of a Denubian Slime-worm. Starfire was generally not impressed by most earthly jewels, but this one elicited a small gasp, and she stared at it in disbelief. David simply smiled, and handed her the jewel, and she held it up and squeezed it hard enough that glass or plastic would have shattered, and yet the gem did not.
“But…” she said, “you… you said that you gave it back to Jinx!”
“I said I gave her a gem. Not that one.”
“But then… if you did not give her the diamond… what was it you gave her?”
David chuckled…
*------------------------------------------------------------*
The Man in Gold turned the jewel over in his hands carefully, taking his time, inspecting it, which was only to be expected, but Jinx dearly wished he would hurry the hell up.
“My dear,” said the Man in Gold in a calm tone, “do you believe that I am an idiot?”
Calm though the question was, it stung her like a slap to the face partly because of the surprise.
“What… what are you?”
“This is not the jewel I asked you to retrieve. In fact, this is not even a diamond.”
“What?!”
The Man in Gold lowered the gem and placed it on the table in front of him. “This is a cubic zirconia,” he said. “A fake. A fraudulent gem that I must assume you are giving me because you believe I am an enormous fool who cannot tell the difference.”
“That’s…” Jinx literally did not know what to say. “That’s… that’s impossible!”
“It’s not merely possible,” said the Man in Gold, “it’s the truth, but I have no time to play games with you, so if you have the real diamond, I suggest you produce it, now, and if not, then I suggest you leave, now.”
Jinx’ head was spinning. How could the diamond be fake?! “I took it from the vault just like you said!” she insisted.
“Yes,” said the Man in Gold, “and then you let it fall into the hands of someone who can identify materials by sight and sense, and proceeded to follow him into a place where you could not see what he was doing. Zirconia and Diamonds look identical to you and I perhaps, but to Devastator, it would be as comparing apples to flaming meteors. No doubt he simply picked up an appropriately-sized Zirconia from somewhere in the tunnels while you were busy playing Blind Man’s Bluff.”
Jinx stared at the fake diamond in horror as the Man in Gold turned his back on her.
“Now go away,” he said. “I’ve a lot of work to do preparing the apocalypse, and I cannot be bothered with doomed fools.”
“No!” shouted Jinx. “No, wait… you… you’ve gotta give us another chance! There’s gotta be… gotta be something else we can do.”
“Something worth sparing your lives when my lord returns? I think not. You couldn’t even manage a simple jewel heist. You needed Devastator’s help to get past that damned mining worm. What will you do for an encore? Rob a parking meter?”
“Come on,” said Jinx. “We’re willing to do whatever it takes, okay?” She thought suddenly of a card to play. “Surely since you’re so busy, you can think of something you need done that you just don’t have time to deal with yourself, can’t you?”
The Man in Gold paused, and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hrm,” he said, and Jinx’ hopes brightened. “Well… now that you mention it, there is something you can do for me. Something perhaps more up your alley than mere jewel theft.”
“Name it,” said Jinx with relief. “Just name it.”
“It’s not all that complicated,” he said. “All I need you to do, is to destroy Robin…"
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 26: Manifest Destiny
"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."
- Jean de la Fontaine
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The nightmare was always the same.
Flames and lava and rivers of blood that coursed through the streets of a wrecked city like arteries. Smoldering ruins, charred skeletons, the bitter taste of smoke in the air. None of these things were surprising anymore. Some nights, she had no idea where she was, just some nameless city burning forever in the sunless dark. Some nights she could pinpoint a landmark she recognized, a statue or bridge or monument that identifies the particular city on fire.
Most nights, she was in Jump.
The flames she was used to, the smell of smoke no longer bothered her. Raven was not some delicate flower to blanche and faint at the first sign of unpleasantness. Her dreams were usually filled with these kinds of imagery, and she'd seen enough bloodshed and death over the last couple years to send hardened warriors screaming into the night. Flickering firelight and twisted ruins had been her companion since as early as she could remember. She may not have been immune to fear, but she didn't scare easily. What scared her tonight was not the imagery, it was the company...
"Tick-tock, Raven. Time is running out."
"I'm not afraid of you!" she shouted defiantly, but it was a lie, and he knew it. He knew everything about her, somehow, his one eye boring right through her like a laser drill, laying bare all of her secrets without twitching an eyelid. He vanished and materialized at will. In dreams, you can never evade your enemies, no matter how far you run.
"Silly girl," says Slade. "I'm not the one to be afraid of. You know that."
She was standing on the ruins of the Jump City Community Center, now half-collapsed, its metal roof reduced to slag. She could feel the heat of the ruined building through the soles of her boots, hot enough to set her on fire if this were real. She knew it wasn't. It didn't help.
"What you have concealed, you shall become!"
A swarm of meteors screamed in from nowhere, and reflexively, she conjured up her shield. Explosions pummeled the building to rubble around her, fanning the flames that burned higher and higher, needing no fuel to scorch the very skies.
She threw the shield down like it was a physical object, screaming defiance back at the figments of her own imagination. "It's a lie!" she shouted. "I won't let this happen! I'll find a way!"
"Your optimism is really adorable," came the reply, calm as the sea before a storm, and she turned around as Slade appeared through the crackling fire. She could almost picture the leering smile concealed behind his unchanging mask. "But you're forgetting one thing. This is what you were born to do. You were sent here to destroy the Earth."
The flames loomed up around Slade, consuming her world in fire, and then a moment later they parted again, revealing the Tower. Distinctive even in death, it leaned to one side like a melting wax sculpture, all alone in a sea of magma. The curtains closed and opened once more, and then her friends appeared, turned to statues and swarmed by indescribable foes, dead as stones, their final agonies frozen forever on their lifeless faces.
"Your destiny will be fulfilled! The portal must be opened!"
The voice was not Slade's. It was deeper and ringed with thunder, a voice she had never heard in person but knew better than she did her own, and she took a step back in surprise as the world faded into a purple mist, save for two pairs of blood-red eyes that fixed on her like homing missiles. She couldn't look away from them, she couldn't run or teleport or phase through the walls. She could only stare into them as they swelled and grew and filled her vision, drawing her in deeper and deeper until...
She woke up with a gasp.
Raven was sitting cross-legged in her room, in the center of a meditation and protection circle she drew several hours ago. The circle was one of the most powerful rituals she knew, a barrier against telepathic, empathic, and all magical contact. Ten thousand warrior-monks of Azarath could have beaten their spells and weapons against this circle for a century without so much as disturbing the air within it.
It had kept Slade out for three seconds.
Slowly she calmed down, breathed, remembered where she was, what she was doing here, reached out empathically and found the five other presences within the tower, some of the clumped up in the common room, others scattered throughout the living sectors. Their very presence took the edge off the shock of waking up, and she chanted her mantra to herself once or twice more to calm herself down, but when she closed her eyes, she still saw four eyes like burning coals staring back at her, and her startled cry melded seamlessly with a soft beep from her communicator, indicating that at least one of those five presences wanted to see her.
She knew which one without having to check.
She considered ignoring it, feigning sleep or some such, but before she had made her mind up to do so or not, she was already sliding her books aside and blowing the candles out. Something to do, something other than trying and failing to meditate, might just be what she needed right now, and accordingly she stepped out of her useless protection circle with a sigh, taking a moment to adopt the proper expression of slightly annoyed disconcern before opening the door and proceeding down the hallway and up the stairs towards the common room.
All five of the others were there already, and apparently had been there for some time, to judge by the way Beast Boy was draped over his chair like a melted wax figure, the very personification of boredom. Cyborg and Robin were standing in front of the main screen, their backs to the door, staring at a frozen image of Slade, taken from one of the bottling plant's video-recorders. Starfire was off to one side, paying no mind to the others, looking down at a computer-generated printout of the fiery mark that had been emblazoned on Slade's forehead, while David (he didn't seem to resent them using his 'real' name, even now) sat on the edge of one of the couches, vaguely watching the proceedings with an empty, glazed look that indicated either terminal disinterest or shell shock. Given David, it was a tossup.
She sat down wordlessly on the opposite side of the couch, wishing she had brought a book with her, but true to form, Robin had known she was here without her having to announce herself. "Take a look at this," he said without further ado, "and tell me if you can identify anything."
Beast Boy yawned as he pressed a button on the remote control, rewinding the footage back a few moments, before playing it back. On the video screen, Slade stepped forward confidently, delivering one of his monotone messages, though with the volume muted, it was impossible to determine which one. The camera zoomed in as Slade walked nonchalantly towards it, focusing on his mask, and on the red rune burnt into his forehead like a brand.
"Freeze!" said Robin. Beast Boy obliged with a click of the remote, splaying the mark all over the screen.
"We've been trying to figure out what this mark is," said Robin at his most no-nonsense. "We think its the key to Slade's new abilities. So far, we've got nothing."
"I cross referenced it against every database on the planet," said Cyborg, sounding more than a mite annoyed. "Nothin' came up. Whatever this thing is, it's not from Earth."
"And I have been unable to identify the symbol either," chimed in Starfire. "It is not Tamaranean in origin, nor does it fit with my understanding of other races in the galaxy."
Raven drew her hood up over her head and shut her eyes for a moment as she desperately tried to think of something to say. Merely glancing at that horrible symbol was enough to send icicles stabbing through her heart, and her breath caught involuntarily. "I don't recognize it," she said quickly, trying to keep the hesitation out of her words, as well as keep a lid on that voice in her head that was screaming that she had to tell them all the truth, right here, right now.
The prospect of doing that was horrible enough to make it easy to ignore.
Clearly her discomfiture had not gone unnoticed, as when she opened her eyes again, even Beast Boy was eying her quizzically, and Robin had walked over and put what was no doubt supposed to be a comforting hand on her shoulder. "We will figure out why Slade's targeting you," he said, supremely confident as always. It might have worked, had that very prospect not filled her with almost as much dread as Slade himself.
"Slade doesn't concern me," she said, and it was the truth, after all. She managed to make it sound enough like her usual monotone that Beast Boy relaxed, and Robin nodded and turned back to the recording. He and Cyborg began discussing new avenues of research, as Beast Boy occasionally weighed in with a smart remark that helped very little and Starfire continued to examine the printout, periodically talking to herself in untranslated Tamaranean.
None of this concerned Raven enormously, for she was busy trying to determine what the hell she should do now. She had told the others that she was researching the mysterious mark on Slade's forehead, but her real goal in pouring over her books and tomes was considerably different. Her personal library, part her own, part 'inherited' from Malchior, was one of the most comprehensive in the galaxy, at least in the subjects of sorcery, demonology, and the occult. And yet no matter how many books she tore through, no matter what avenues she researched, she kept running straight into the same dead end. The same foregone conclusion.
On the other side of the couch, David suddenly inhaled sharply and seemed to wake up. Raven had been so occupied in her own thoughts that she hadn't even noticed him dozing. She glanced over at him, and then paused. What she had taken to be shell shock or disinterest, from a closer look, was something else entirely. David's eyes were only half-open, his head hanging, periodically jerking up as he roused himself. He looked beyond exhausted, like he was under the effects of some kind of sedative. None of the others seemed to be paying the slightest mind to him, but Raven raised an eyebrow. "You all right?" she asked.
David blinked several times, having apparently not even noticed Raven sitting down. "Y.. yeah..." he stammered out, coughing lightly. "I'm okay..."
"You don't look it," said Raven. Normally she let things like this go, but this was just weird. Besides, she needed something else to think about.
"I just haven't been sleeping great," he said, mumbling his words a bit. By the looks of things, that was an understatement, but it explained why the others were leaving him be. She was about to turn away when he added an offhand comment. "... nightmares."
She stopped.
"Nightmares?"
He shrugged. "Yeah... just... just a bad dream here and there..."
"Since when?"
There was an edge to her voice, but in his fatigued state, David plainly didn't notice. "Er... not sure," he said. "Since... since all that stuff happened?" He gestured vaguely at the screen, where Robin was playing back footage of Slade laying waste to the bottling plant.
Six different things came to mind at once, none of them pleasant, and Raven felt a apprehension beginning to wrap around her like a cold blanket, even if she couldn't identify the source just yet. "What... kind of nightmares?" she asked.
It was strange enough for her to be asking after such things that this time even David noticed, and raised an eyebrow weakly. "I don't... don't remember really. Just... bits and pieces of it. Why?"
She made up a reason. She even made it sound convincing. "We all get them once in a while. It's part of the job. I can show you ways to get rid of them if you tell me what they're about."
David seemed satisfied with that answer, either that or he was too tired to argue. "I was... in some kind of tower," he said, "with a bunch of people I don't recognize, aliens or something. They looked like big... lizards. And then... there was a man... a big man with a red beard. He was... saying something. Some kinda... I dunno... poem? I don't remember it..."
Raven exhaled slowly, her taut nerves relaxing somewhat. David's nightmare was weird, but despite her fears, it clearly bore no relation to the blood-drenched scenes she saw every time she tried to meditate. Likely it was meaningless, a sub-conscious reaction to stress and confusion, like most nightmares. One thing at least that wasn't related to her impending annihilation of the Earth.
"Do you... think you can help?" he asked.
It was something to do. "Just relax," she said. "I'll try a mind-calming spell. It was a simple cantrip, one she had learned long ago and used on all of the others at one point or another, designed to send the subject into a deep, and usually dreamless, sleep. Focusing on her energies and whispering her mantra to herself wasn't as good as meditating, but under the circumstances, it was the best she could do. David obligingly shut his eyes, and she gently placed a hand about six inches over his head, releasing a small ball of bluish energy into him. Instantly his entire form relaxed, and his head fell sideways onto his shoulder. Maintaining the spell took little concentration, and as she repeated the words to herself over and over, she took a minute to think this through. There had to be a line of research she hadn't considered, something oblique to the subject. All she needed was to find it. After all, it wasn't like there was any shortage of writings on the end of -
"The gem was born of evil's fire..."
Raven's eyes burst open like cannons discharging, her heart froze in her chest, and every muscle locked at once. Her throat seized up, cutting off her windpipe, choking her breath off in a gasp.
"... the gem shall be his portal..."
Slowly, with infinite care, she turned her head towards David, her eyes glistening with fear. It couldn't be. It couldn't be! Nobody on Earth knew that verse except..."
"... he comes to claim, he comes to sire..."
David was fast asleep, his face composed, and yet it was his voice speaking, his lips moving, barely audible even to her, just a whisper. Asleep or not, David was whispering words that no living being save Slade could have known, before her very eyes.
"... the end of all things - "
"NO!!"
Everyone in the room froze.
Before Raven could stop herself, she was on the other side of the room, backed up against the counter like a cornered animal. David, like everyone else, was wide awake, for the spell had ended the instant Raven had moved, phasing through the couch before she could stop herself. Slade's frozen face still leered from the video screen, but nobody was watching it. All eyes were on her, reflecting fear, concern, surprise, and confusion.
For a few seconds, nobody said anything. And then everyone spoke at once.
"Raven?"
"Friend?"
"Dude!"
"Whoa..."
"What?"
She warded off the questions already forming. "Sorry..." she said, mastering her emotions once more. "I thought I..."
"Raven, are you okay?" asked Beast Boy, giving her one of those looks of worried concern that almost hurt to see. "You don't look so good."
"Yeah," chimed in Cyborg. "You look kinda..."
"Pale?" suggested Robin.
"Well... paler," said Cyborg.
"I'm fine," said Raven. "I just... haven't been able to meditate recently."
It was perhaps saying something that they all seemed to accept this explanation, albeit not without some more questions she desperately didn't want to deal with right now.
"Is there... some way in which we might assist you?" asked Starfire. "Perhaps the mind-cleansing properties of the - "
Whatever Starfire had in mind was not something Raven was prepared to entertain. "I'll be fine," she snapped. "Stop worrying."
She had meant to say 'don't worry'.
"Look uh..." said Robin, the way he always did when trying to phrase something delicately, "we're gonna be at this a while. If you need to... get some rest or something?"
Right now, there was nothing she wanted more, and nothing she was less likely to be able to do, not that she could explain that to Robin. "... right," she said, unable to conjure up the words to express anything further. "I'll... do that..."
Robin nodded slowly, though his and the others' concerned expressions became no easier to bear. "David," he said, without even looking at the psychokinetic. "You should probably go too. Try and get some sleep. You're both on patrol tomorrow."
"Sure," said David. He also had not removed eyes from Raven, surprise having shaken off fatigue for the time being. "I'll try." David stood up slowly, and walked towards the door, casting the occasional glance back at Raven. Raven waited only a bit longer before taking her own leave, wanting to get out of here and back to her room before the others could start asking her the questions she could see forming in their minds already. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Beast Boy make a move to follow her, only to be stopped by Cyborg, who set a hand on the changeling's shoulder and shook his head no.
She moved quickly to the door, through it, and down the hallway, taking a different route down than David so as to avoid everyone. The instant she was out of sight of the others, she broke into a flat run, racing back to her room, panic bubbling up in her chest as she did so. She reached the door to her sanctuary, and phased through it without even bothering to open the door. As soon as she was inside, she stopped, falling back against the door and clutching the sides of her head as she slid down it onto the ground, her breath coming in short gasps, eyes clenched shut.
The gem was born of evil's fire...
She screamed.
The walls and door were close to soundproof, and nobody could hear her unless they were right outside her door, so she didn't stop herself, but screamed formlessly in rage and frustration for a good ten seconds. It helped a little bit. Slowly her heart rate dropped, she calmed down, and the frustration and anger she had been feeling were replaced with fear and dread. Her constant companions ever since her birthday.
By all the Gods, what now?
She'd asked herself that on her birthday. She'd asked herself that the day she found that thing inside David's mind. And the closer it got to judgment day, the more and more she demanded answers from the ether, and heard nothing. The people she knew she ought to be turning to for help were the very people she couldn't tell. Some things she could tell them, but not this. If they knew...
Did they know?
The others didn't but... Great Azar, David had been reciting the prophecy! THE prophecy! Did he even know what he was saying? Had he known he was saying anything at all? And what did that mean? If he knew, then he would tell the others. He'd been quick enough to tell Beast Boy about Terra after all and this was way beyond that. If they found out...
She shut her eyes again, tight, and forced herself to calm down. No, he didn't know. They didn't know. Not yet at least. She still had time to find a way out, but all her research had failed, and she had no idea where to turn. She opened her eyes again, and they fell on the piles of books scattered liberally around the room. Ten thousand volumes on every demon, monster, and occult nightmare in existence, and none of them had given her the solution she desperately needed. She needed answers. She needed help. Someone who she could talk to. Someone connected to all this. Someone who might have the answer she sought...
Her eyes opened wide.
No... No that... that was... she couldn't!
She... she couldn't... there had to be another...
One look around her room, at the sum total of the knowledge of ancient Azarath... and the absolute certainty of what she knew she was about to do landed on her like a six-ton weight.
Slowly, without even thinking about it, Raven stood back up. For a second she didn't move, and then mechanically, robotically, she turned around, walked over to her front door, and slid it aside with the touch of a button. She glanced up and down the silent hallway, stepped out into it, and let the door slide closed behind her.
It sounded like prison bars slamming shut.
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
This was wrong.
Raven stood in front of the unadorned metal door, still as a statue, waiting for... well for Azar-knew-what. For divine inspiration, for all she knew. Just waiting. And as she waited, the reminder kept popping back up.
This was wrong.
Raven had a very strong sense of what was right and wrong, partly innate, partly from training. One did not live amongst pacifist monks for all of one's childhood without picking up some sense of ethics. That she herself was a product of pure evil only served to help. Like recognized like.
And this, this thing here, this action she was about to take, was wrong.
It wasn't like there were laws about this sort of thing. Superpowers were rare enough across the galaxy that they didn't come with such things, hence why a good half of those with superpowers used them to commit crimes. Superpowers set one apart, above the limits imposed on normal society. Even the most stalwart of heroes got away with things no normal law enforcement agency in the world could. Superpowers gave one the ability to do things no legal scholar had ever thought of, even on alien worlds where such things were more common. What Raven was about to do was perfectly legal.
It was still wrong. And she knew it.
The stakes were more enormous than anyone but her knew, and she owed it to the others to try and stop what was coming, without burdening them with the weight of the terrible fate she had brought into their lives. She knew it sounded like an excuse, a cop-out, but it was true. And how many small little crimes had they permitted or even committed in order to perform a greater good? When Cyborg threw a car into a supervillain threatening the city, did he stop to ask permission of the owner? When Starfire snatched a pedestrian out of the way of gunfire, did she give them a choice in the matter? This was no different.
Except, of course, that it was completely different, not to mention wrong.
She sighed. In the end, what choice was there? She could not tell them. For better or worse, she couldn't risk it. She simply couldn't face their horrified stares, their angry shouts, their unanswerable demands as to why she had not warned them of the mind-numbing horror that they had let into their midst when she first arrived on Earth. Maybe that made her a coward. She didn't know. All she knew was that she could not tell them. She had to solve this on her own.
And so she phased through the door.
The room was sparsely furnished, in fact it didn't look much different from when it had just been a guest room. Neither the catastrophic mess of Beast Boy's nest, nor the obsessively-ordered neatness of Robin's cave, it, like its resident, was something of a middle ground. The desk on the right wall had several pages written in a shaky hand, weighted down by a stainless steel baton. A poster sat above the desk, a composite of all five of the original Titans, clearly one dating back at least a few months. Despite the anachronism, Raven wasn't surprised that it hadn't been replaced with one of the more modern versions that the souvenir shops around Jump were already selling.
A handful of books lined the shelves along the left wall, not enough to fill them, half of which were her own volumes, lent out for this or that reason. Next to that sat a pair of large, framed pictures, but puzzlingly, they were blank, slate grey like the rest of the wall. It was only upon approaching that Raven realized they weren't pictures at all, but some kind of tactile composite, an invisible mosaic of patterns and materials that looked identical to her, but no doubt stood out quite vividly to someone who could see via means other than light. She wondered for a second where he'd gotten it, then remembered the insane things people often sent her for no reason whatsoever, and only then did she remind herself that time was a factor here, and that putting the deed off made it no easier to stomach.
David lay on the far side of the room, in his bed, asleep, or close enough. She didn't have to approach to see that he was having another vivid dream, possibly another nightmare. His head twitched every so often, and his eyes were moving beneath his eyelids. Any second now, he might suddenly wake, an eventuality she would need to avoid in order to pull this off. As silently as a field mouse, she approached the bed until she was standing next to it, and she extended one hand and gently laid it on the blanket, whispering her mantra as quietly as she physically could.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."
A soft blue glow enveloped the bed and the sleeper within it, as Raven released a spell into him. David went rigid for a moment, then slowly relaxed, his breathing slowing to a steady pace, his head falling over to one side. Raven maintained the spell for a few more moments, then drew her hand back and took a deep breath. The spell was a variant of a healing ritual she had once been taught, one that placed the subject into a deep, rapid, regenerative trance. Even if he only received ten minutes of actual rest, David would wake up feeling completely refreshed and alert.
But more importantly for Raven's purposes here, he would also, baring a massive sensory intrusion, be absolutely comatose for the next eight hours,
The voice of Azar came back to her as she gently slid a chair over to the side of the bed, and sat down in it, calming herself, steadying herself for what she was about to do.
"It is anathema to enter an unwilling mind..."
The words were practically burnt into Raven's head, a lesson repeated over and over by the monks of Azarath. No amount of excuse-making or moral relativism could change it. This thing she was doing was forbidden. It was criminal. It was wrong.
And worst of all, she knew the others would agree if she asked them.
The last time she had entered David's mind, she had done so with an astral projection, entering a psychic trance and leaving her body behind momentarily as she deployed her consciousness into his mindscape. That sufficed for simple investigations, certainly, and carried next-to-no risk, save that of being evicted rudely back into one's own body, but that was not what she intended to do here. She knew that whatever was in there would resent her intrusion, would resist a simple mind connection. She would have to do it... 'properly'.
She reached into her cloak, and drew out a small object...
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos."
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos."
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The mindscape was not as it had been.
Floating above the forest, Raven saw instantly that something drastic had changed here. Anyone could have. The trees still sat quietly in the still air, no sound of bird or beast disturbing them. The golden hemisphere that twinkled in the midst of the forest still shone as brilliantly as she remembered it, but there was something else here too. Five towers as tall as skyscrapers loomed over the canopy, each one massive enough to serve as the centerpiece of the Jump City Skyline. The five towers were scattered randomly across the forest, but they somehow did not look foreign, despite the setting, their bases merging seamlessly into the foliage, as though they had grown naturally out of the ground somehow. Each of the towers was comprised of a different material. One tower was made of polished steel, another of varnished wood, a third of shining crystal. The one nearest to her was made of a black stone that looked like volcanic pumice, and the last one seemed to be comprised of rubber. What these towers were, where they had come from, what they represented, all these were questions she could not answer now. There was one reason, and one reason alone she was here, and it lay within that golden dome.
She floated over the the canopy, giving the towers a wide berth, moving to the border of the hemispherical golden dome, within which lay the answers she sought, for better or worse. She paused at the border, collected herself, readied the small arsenal of spells she had a feeling she was about to need. And with everything ready, she stepped through.
It was as she remembered, a featureless black moonscape of cold ash, like the aftermath of an asteroid strike or a nuclear war, enveloping her the instant she stepped through the golden dome without limit or barrier visible from horizon to horizon. Unlike last time, however, she appeared to be alone. She had half-expected to see whatever-it-was sitting here, in its ash-dusted satin armchair, waiting for her to return, but instead the bleak terrain stretched on without break or pause, revealing nothing but more of the same.
She turned a complete circle, carefully surveying the surroundings for any threat or sign of life. Other than the charred skeletons of what might have once been steel girders, there was nothing nearby. She wasn't sure what she had anticipated coming in here, a discussion, an argument, a fight, but she certainly hadn't planned on being ignored.
... no, strike that. She wasn't being ignored. The area was too still, too quiet, too nondescript even for somewhere like this. She could feel her empathy prickling in the back of her mind. There was something out there, watching her, waiting for her to let her guard down.
"Come out," she said in as calm a voice as she could. "I just want to talk."
A babble of responses greeted her, coming in from all directions, and she snapped her head around back and forth, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was making the noise, but there was nothing visible. Disjointed words, bits of thirty different languages with no uniformity and no single voice, male or female, human or alien, echoed around her as though shouted by an invisible chorus. An angry one. None of the words were English, but there were a few human ones among them, Latin, Sumerian, something she guessed to be Chinese, lost among a hundred other tongues, some too alien for a human to even pronounce.
She kept circling, kept watching, kept her spells ready on the tip of her brain for instant deployment. "I'm not leaving until you answer me!" she shouted over the cacophony of noise, trying to sound resolute and determined. Perhaps it worked, for the voices stopped like someone had thrown a switch, leaving her listening to the soft sounds of her own footsteps, and then there came another voice, one deep and sharpened, its tone as cold as ice.
"I told you to leave this one alone..."
A shimmer in the unlit sky, a trembling of the air, and a figure coalesced out of the darkness. Indistinct, indescribable, it was tall and short and thin and broad and dark and light by turns, humanoid and otherwise in succession. It could not be described with any regularity, it simply was, but whether it had two eyes or fifty or none at all, it was staring straight at her with a savage gaze that could have struck a man dead at a hundred paces. She steeled herself, and stared right back at it.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"He is not for your filth!" screamed the being venomously as it walked, slithered, and floated towards her, its form shifting so frequently and fluidly that it was dizzying to watch. The only constant was the venomous hate pouring from it like a stench, lighting her empathic senses afire, sending a warning screaming through her head a second before the creature lifted its arm/tentacle/appendage, and brought forth fire.
Fire, roiling, nuclear fire, obliterated everything in sight and plunged the world into an undifferentiated riot of red and orange, enclosing her like an ocean, blotting out the very ground she stood upon. As before, the only defense she had was her shield, a barrier of pure will, one that had failed her last time, forcing her to retreat into her own body once again.
But this time was different.
With one hand, she manifested her shield, and whereas last time it had shattered beneath the flaming barrage, this time it held, held strong and firm as the flames of rage battered against it, and with her other hand she conjured forth psychic energies and mystical powers unnameable in human tongues, and clenched her fist like a boxer, and brought it around, and commanded the fire to be gone.
And it went.
Flames potent enough to consume a planet and burn stars to ash were extinguished at her command, swept aside like leaves before a hurricane, and when they were gone, they revealed the same ashen moonscape, the same space-dark sky, the same monstrous figure standing before her, rage and hatred mollified perhaps by what she took to be shock, that it's powerful toys had availed not to drive the intruder back.
"I didn't ask you if he was for my 'filth'!" snapped Raven, darkly, her voice locked in the no-nonsense tone she took with recalcitrant supervillains. "I asked what you are! Answer me!"
The creature did not reply, though its shifting features began to slow, devolving down into a small humanoid, one she knew she was going to recognize before she recognized it. One she had been expecting to see. David.
But it wasn't David. It couldn't be David. As before, the expression was too direct, too out of character, for it to be anything of the sort. Whether expression of some subconscious facet of his personality or something else altogether, it now stood before her looking surprised. Astonished. Even scared.
"What have you done... ?"
There was such apprehension in that voice that Raven nearly hesitated, but caught herself as she stepped forward, her shield falling to be replaced by a swirling network of energy that kicked up dust about her feet.
"I'm not some amateur psychic you can just push around," she said to the thing that wore David's expression. "And I'm not leaving until you answer me!"
"Dear God... you... you've... manifested?"
David, or whatever it was, recoiled a full pace and a half at this realization, and there was no mistaking the fear, the near-panic in his voice as he said it. He brought his hands around again, and tongues of flame and fire burst from them, as raging and potent as before. Yet with a single extended palm, she conjured forth a shield strong enough to repel them, advancing at an even pace, parting the fire before her with an outstretched hand.
"You can't get rid of me with mind-tricks," she insisted, brushing aside further bursts of flame and raw energy, the creature that resembled David retreating as she approached, blasting away at her with what she hoped was everything it had. The ground warped and twisted, the sky burnt and buckled and collapsed inward, the air itself combusted around her, but nothing could David inflict upon her that she could not counter. She had spent the necessary time in preparation, hanging spells on the edge of her brain, preparing her mental disciplines for the contest she knew would result. She was not merely projecting some image of her own mind into this place. She was here, physically and mentally, in a form Euclidian physics was not equipped to describe. In psychic terms, it was called a "manifestation".
No matter how desperate 'David' was, no matter what world-shattering powers he called upon, against Raven, such powers were not enough, and she swatted them aside, willing herself forward, teleporting directly in front of him and grabbing him by the shirt, hoisting the smaller figure up as she did so. "Tell me what you are!" she shouted in his face. And as she did this, she saw a spirit-shriveling fear flash in the thing's eyes, and then all of a sudden it was gone.
For a second, Raven stood there, blinking at her empty hands, alone once again in the dark landscape. She looked left and right, unsure of where he could possibly have gone, until it occurred to her that they were on this thing's home ground, and it was unlikely to have just moved a few virtual feet, not when it exhibited such mortal terror.
She suddenly realized what she needed to do.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she chanted quietly, channeling her energy into a powerful breaching spell, and she extended one finger, which began to spark a pale blue, like a live wire severed and brandished in the air.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she repeated, and the sparks grew in intensity with each word. "Carazon, Rakashas, Endere. Vaserix Endrien Animadus! Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos!"
Reality tore.
Slowly, painfully, she dragged her sparking finger down like a butter knife, ripping open a gash in the very fabric of her present location. Only once a massive rip had been torn, six feet tall and spilling light like a cracked windowshade, only then did she dispel the magic with a sigh of relief, and stepped through.
And as she did so, she swore that just for a second she could hear the sound of bells...
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Before becoming a Titan, he had not thought it was possible to actually hate an alarm.
One second he was blissfully asleep, unconscious, unaware of the world, and the next, the room flashed red, and an klaxon suitable to raise the dead was blaring in his ears. Had someone walked into his room with a cannon and discharged it next to his head, he could not possibly have been more rapidly woken up.
It was not the most pleasant way to greet the morning.
No... strike that, it wasn't the morning yet. In fact it wasn't even close. The clock showed 9:27 PM. He was fairly certain that he'd only gotten to bed somewhere around 9. He'd been asleep for less than half an hour, or at least he thought it had been that. Honestly, he had not stopped to check the clock when he reached his room, collapsing in his bed without bothering to draw back the covers or change out of his uniform. He hadn't even taken off his belt, a fact he now regretted, as the buckle had dug into his stomach as he slept. Yet... weirdly... he no longer felt tired. Indeed he felt miles better than he had before collapsing, like he had slept for twenty hours rather than twenty minutes. Maybe he was finally starting to adjust to the Titans' weird semi-nocturnal schedule, as Robin kept insisting he eventually would. Either way, it was hardly something to complain about...
He reached over and hit the acknowledge button on the far wall, which mercifully cut off the klaxon, and sat up on the bed to try and find his communicator. As he did, he noticed something else odd. His chair, normally sitting way over by his desk, was right next to his bed, sitting upright and empty, facing him. And sitting on top of the chair was a small purple hand mirror.
The sight was so incongruous that David did a double-take. The chair he might have moved while stumbling about his room in a half-comatose stupor, but he was almost certain that he had never seen the mirror here before. Granted, a mirror was hardly the most menacing of objects, but he felt a chill of unease run down his spine as he looked at it, and slowly reached over to pick it up...
"Robin to Devastator."
Jolted out of his musings on household objects, David withdrew his hand and seized the communicator on his dresser.
"Devastator here," he said.
"We've got a situation. Meet us in the common room."
"Got it." David clipped the communicator and baton onto his belt, and got back up, sliding the chair back over to his desk and absentmindedly dropping the mirror on top of the letter he had been writing back to one of the kids from the DCS. And a moment later he was out the door, the mirror already forgotten, as the old, familiar tightness in his stomach that accompanied any alert began to re-assert itself, as it always did. As he realized by now, it probably always would.
This was not the time...
He rode the elevator up to the common room, trying to steady his nerves and quiet the voice in his head that was screaming that this time, surely this time he was going to go out there and get pounded into jelly by whateverthehell they were going after. It was when he stepped through the doors into the room itself that he realized that this time, that voice might not be so wrong this time...
The viewscreen was covered with pictures of Slade, as it had been before, but rather than old recordings, the symbol in the upper right of the screen showed that this was new footage, live footage, filled with the same scenes of fire and destruction that the old ones had been. It did not take a leap of genius to determine what the emergency was. Slade had decided to make a typically 'theatrical' re-appearance.
The knot tightened.
" - still not answerin'," said Cyborg as David entered. "And the sensors are sayin' she's not in the Tower."
"She is not within her room," said Starfire, entering behind David with a look of concern on her face, having apparently taken the stairs up. I can find nothing to indicate where she may have gone."
By process of elimination, they were talking about Raven.
Robin looked singularly unamused, but said nothing immediately, as Beast Boy looked from one Titan to the other. "Well, we gotta go looking for her, don't we?" he asked, clearly deeming it a self-evident fact.
"We can't," said Robin. "Slade's tearing half the city apart. The police have called in a Code 1."
Cyborg whistled and David winced. Code 1 was bad news. It meant that the civic authorities were abandoning the entire area pending the Titans dealing with the issue. Faced with something like the newly re-energized Slade, David supposed he couldn't blame them, but time had not softened his reaction to having been appointed one of the solutions of last resort for an entire city. And the last fight they had had with Slade had... not gone well...
That Raven had gone missing just as Slade had chosen to show up again made things even worse.
Still, the situation was bad enough that even Beast Boy didn't protest, at least not after a quick glance showed him that Cyborg was clearly behind Robin this time. The only remaining question was dealt with quickly.
"Can you go?"
It took David a second to realize that the question was aimed at him. "Er... yeah... yeah, I'm okay," he said.
He was surprised when that didn't suffice immediately. Starfire and Beast Boy exchanged looks and Robin narrowed his eyes. "You sure?" he asked. "You were pretty out of it earlier."
"Got some sleep, I guess," said David. "I feel a lot better." Not that he was eager to go racing off to face Slade, but he physically felt up to it, at least. Scared as he usually was, he wasn't going to lie about it...
Based on the way Robin was looking at him, David guessed that had the situation been any less urgent, he would have ordered him to stay behind. To be frank, David didn't really understand it himself, but there were plainly more important mysteries to pursue right now, and so at Robin's order, they were soon headed for the T-car, David bringing up the rear, whispering a prayer to whoever might be listening that the situation be not quite as bad as had made it out to be.
"A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it."
- Jean de la Fontaine
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The nightmare was always the same.
Flames and lava and rivers of blood that coursed through the streets of a wrecked city like arteries. Smoldering ruins, charred skeletons, the bitter taste of smoke in the air. None of these things were surprising anymore. Some nights, she had no idea where she was, just some nameless city burning forever in the sunless dark. Some nights she could pinpoint a landmark she recognized, a statue or bridge or monument that identifies the particular city on fire.
Most nights, she was in Jump.
The flames she was used to, the smell of smoke no longer bothered her. Raven was not some delicate flower to blanche and faint at the first sign of unpleasantness. Her dreams were usually filled with these kinds of imagery, and she'd seen enough bloodshed and death over the last couple years to send hardened warriors screaming into the night. Flickering firelight and twisted ruins had been her companion since as early as she could remember. She may not have been immune to fear, but she didn't scare easily. What scared her tonight was not the imagery, it was the company...
"Tick-tock, Raven. Time is running out."
"I'm not afraid of you!" she shouted defiantly, but it was a lie, and he knew it. He knew everything about her, somehow, his one eye boring right through her like a laser drill, laying bare all of her secrets without twitching an eyelid. He vanished and materialized at will. In dreams, you can never evade your enemies, no matter how far you run.
"Silly girl," says Slade. "I'm not the one to be afraid of. You know that."
She was standing on the ruins of the Jump City Community Center, now half-collapsed, its metal roof reduced to slag. She could feel the heat of the ruined building through the soles of her boots, hot enough to set her on fire if this were real. She knew it wasn't. It didn't help.
"What you have concealed, you shall become!"
A swarm of meteors screamed in from nowhere, and reflexively, she conjured up her shield. Explosions pummeled the building to rubble around her, fanning the flames that burned higher and higher, needing no fuel to scorch the very skies.
She threw the shield down like it was a physical object, screaming defiance back at the figments of her own imagination. "It's a lie!" she shouted. "I won't let this happen! I'll find a way!"
"Your optimism is really adorable," came the reply, calm as the sea before a storm, and she turned around as Slade appeared through the crackling fire. She could almost picture the leering smile concealed behind his unchanging mask. "But you're forgetting one thing. This is what you were born to do. You were sent here to destroy the Earth."
The flames loomed up around Slade, consuming her world in fire, and then a moment later they parted again, revealing the Tower. Distinctive even in death, it leaned to one side like a melting wax sculpture, all alone in a sea of magma. The curtains closed and opened once more, and then her friends appeared, turned to statues and swarmed by indescribable foes, dead as stones, their final agonies frozen forever on their lifeless faces.
"Your destiny will be fulfilled! The portal must be opened!"
The voice was not Slade's. It was deeper and ringed with thunder, a voice she had never heard in person but knew better than she did her own, and she took a step back in surprise as the world faded into a purple mist, save for two pairs of blood-red eyes that fixed on her like homing missiles. She couldn't look away from them, she couldn't run or teleport or phase through the walls. She could only stare into them as they swelled and grew and filled her vision, drawing her in deeper and deeper until...
She woke up with a gasp.
Raven was sitting cross-legged in her room, in the center of a meditation and protection circle she drew several hours ago. The circle was one of the most powerful rituals she knew, a barrier against telepathic, empathic, and all magical contact. Ten thousand warrior-monks of Azarath could have beaten their spells and weapons against this circle for a century without so much as disturbing the air within it.
It had kept Slade out for three seconds.
Slowly she calmed down, breathed, remembered where she was, what she was doing here, reached out empathically and found the five other presences within the tower, some of the clumped up in the common room, others scattered throughout the living sectors. Their very presence took the edge off the shock of waking up, and she chanted her mantra to herself once or twice more to calm herself down, but when she closed her eyes, she still saw four eyes like burning coals staring back at her, and her startled cry melded seamlessly with a soft beep from her communicator, indicating that at least one of those five presences wanted to see her.
She knew which one without having to check.
She considered ignoring it, feigning sleep or some such, but before she had made her mind up to do so or not, she was already sliding her books aside and blowing the candles out. Something to do, something other than trying and failing to meditate, might just be what she needed right now, and accordingly she stepped out of her useless protection circle with a sigh, taking a moment to adopt the proper expression of slightly annoyed disconcern before opening the door and proceeding down the hallway and up the stairs towards the common room.
All five of the others were there already, and apparently had been there for some time, to judge by the way Beast Boy was draped over his chair like a melted wax figure, the very personification of boredom. Cyborg and Robin were standing in front of the main screen, their backs to the door, staring at a frozen image of Slade, taken from one of the bottling plant's video-recorders. Starfire was off to one side, paying no mind to the others, looking down at a computer-generated printout of the fiery mark that had been emblazoned on Slade's forehead, while David (he didn't seem to resent them using his 'real' name, even now) sat on the edge of one of the couches, vaguely watching the proceedings with an empty, glazed look that indicated either terminal disinterest or shell shock. Given David, it was a tossup.
She sat down wordlessly on the opposite side of the couch, wishing she had brought a book with her, but true to form, Robin had known she was here without her having to announce herself. "Take a look at this," he said without further ado, "and tell me if you can identify anything."
Beast Boy yawned as he pressed a button on the remote control, rewinding the footage back a few moments, before playing it back. On the video screen, Slade stepped forward confidently, delivering one of his monotone messages, though with the volume muted, it was impossible to determine which one. The camera zoomed in as Slade walked nonchalantly towards it, focusing on his mask, and on the red rune burnt into his forehead like a brand.
"Freeze!" said Robin. Beast Boy obliged with a click of the remote, splaying the mark all over the screen.
"We've been trying to figure out what this mark is," said Robin at his most no-nonsense. "We think its the key to Slade's new abilities. So far, we've got nothing."
"I cross referenced it against every database on the planet," said Cyborg, sounding more than a mite annoyed. "Nothin' came up. Whatever this thing is, it's not from Earth."
"And I have been unable to identify the symbol either," chimed in Starfire. "It is not Tamaranean in origin, nor does it fit with my understanding of other races in the galaxy."
Raven drew her hood up over her head and shut her eyes for a moment as she desperately tried to think of something to say. Merely glancing at that horrible symbol was enough to send icicles stabbing through her heart, and her breath caught involuntarily. "I don't recognize it," she said quickly, trying to keep the hesitation out of her words, as well as keep a lid on that voice in her head that was screaming that she had to tell them all the truth, right here, right now.
The prospect of doing that was horrible enough to make it easy to ignore.
Clearly her discomfiture had not gone unnoticed, as when she opened her eyes again, even Beast Boy was eying her quizzically, and Robin had walked over and put what was no doubt supposed to be a comforting hand on her shoulder. "We will figure out why Slade's targeting you," he said, supremely confident as always. It might have worked, had that very prospect not filled her with almost as much dread as Slade himself.
"Slade doesn't concern me," she said, and it was the truth, after all. She managed to make it sound enough like her usual monotone that Beast Boy relaxed, and Robin nodded and turned back to the recording. He and Cyborg began discussing new avenues of research, as Beast Boy occasionally weighed in with a smart remark that helped very little and Starfire continued to examine the printout, periodically talking to herself in untranslated Tamaranean.
None of this concerned Raven enormously, for she was busy trying to determine what the hell she should do now. She had told the others that she was researching the mysterious mark on Slade's forehead, but her real goal in pouring over her books and tomes was considerably different. Her personal library, part her own, part 'inherited' from Malchior, was one of the most comprehensive in the galaxy, at least in the subjects of sorcery, demonology, and the occult. And yet no matter how many books she tore through, no matter what avenues she researched, she kept running straight into the same dead end. The same foregone conclusion.
On the other side of the couch, David suddenly inhaled sharply and seemed to wake up. Raven had been so occupied in her own thoughts that she hadn't even noticed him dozing. She glanced over at him, and then paused. What she had taken to be shell shock or disinterest, from a closer look, was something else entirely. David's eyes were only half-open, his head hanging, periodically jerking up as he roused himself. He looked beyond exhausted, like he was under the effects of some kind of sedative. None of the others seemed to be paying the slightest mind to him, but Raven raised an eyebrow. "You all right?" she asked.
David blinked several times, having apparently not even noticed Raven sitting down. "Y.. yeah..." he stammered out, coughing lightly. "I'm okay..."
"You don't look it," said Raven. Normally she let things like this go, but this was just weird. Besides, she needed something else to think about.
"I just haven't been sleeping great," he said, mumbling his words a bit. By the looks of things, that was an understatement, but it explained why the others were leaving him be. She was about to turn away when he added an offhand comment. "... nightmares."
She stopped.
"Nightmares?"
He shrugged. "Yeah... just... just a bad dream here and there..."
"Since when?"
There was an edge to her voice, but in his fatigued state, David plainly didn't notice. "Er... not sure," he said. "Since... since all that stuff happened?" He gestured vaguely at the screen, where Robin was playing back footage of Slade laying waste to the bottling plant.
Six different things came to mind at once, none of them pleasant, and Raven felt a apprehension beginning to wrap around her like a cold blanket, even if she couldn't identify the source just yet. "What... kind of nightmares?" she asked.
It was strange enough for her to be asking after such things that this time even David noticed, and raised an eyebrow weakly. "I don't... don't remember really. Just... bits and pieces of it. Why?"
She made up a reason. She even made it sound convincing. "We all get them once in a while. It's part of the job. I can show you ways to get rid of them if you tell me what they're about."
David seemed satisfied with that answer, either that or he was too tired to argue. "I was... in some kind of tower," he said, "with a bunch of people I don't recognize, aliens or something. They looked like big... lizards. And then... there was a man... a big man with a red beard. He was... saying something. Some kinda... I dunno... poem? I don't remember it..."
Raven exhaled slowly, her taut nerves relaxing somewhat. David's nightmare was weird, but despite her fears, it clearly bore no relation to the blood-drenched scenes she saw every time she tried to meditate. Likely it was meaningless, a sub-conscious reaction to stress and confusion, like most nightmares. One thing at least that wasn't related to her impending annihilation of the Earth.
"Do you... think you can help?" he asked.
It was something to do. "Just relax," she said. "I'll try a mind-calming spell. It was a simple cantrip, one she had learned long ago and used on all of the others at one point or another, designed to send the subject into a deep, and usually dreamless, sleep. Focusing on her energies and whispering her mantra to herself wasn't as good as meditating, but under the circumstances, it was the best she could do. David obligingly shut his eyes, and she gently placed a hand about six inches over his head, releasing a small ball of bluish energy into him. Instantly his entire form relaxed, and his head fell sideways onto his shoulder. Maintaining the spell took little concentration, and as she repeated the words to herself over and over, she took a minute to think this through. There had to be a line of research she hadn't considered, something oblique to the subject. All she needed was to find it. After all, it wasn't like there was any shortage of writings on the end of -
"The gem was born of evil's fire..."
Raven's eyes burst open like cannons discharging, her heart froze in her chest, and every muscle locked at once. Her throat seized up, cutting off her windpipe, choking her breath off in a gasp.
"... the gem shall be his portal..."
Slowly, with infinite care, she turned her head towards David, her eyes glistening with fear. It couldn't be. It couldn't be! Nobody on Earth knew that verse except..."
"... he comes to claim, he comes to sire..."
David was fast asleep, his face composed, and yet it was his voice speaking, his lips moving, barely audible even to her, just a whisper. Asleep or not, David was whispering words that no living being save Slade could have known, before her very eyes.
"... the end of all things - "
"NO!!"
Everyone in the room froze.
Before Raven could stop herself, she was on the other side of the room, backed up against the counter like a cornered animal. David, like everyone else, was wide awake, for the spell had ended the instant Raven had moved, phasing through the couch before she could stop herself. Slade's frozen face still leered from the video screen, but nobody was watching it. All eyes were on her, reflecting fear, concern, surprise, and confusion.
For a few seconds, nobody said anything. And then everyone spoke at once.
"Raven?"
"Friend?"
"Dude!"
"Whoa..."
"What?"
She warded off the questions already forming. "Sorry..." she said, mastering her emotions once more. "I thought I..."
"Raven, are you okay?" asked Beast Boy, giving her one of those looks of worried concern that almost hurt to see. "You don't look so good."
"Yeah," chimed in Cyborg. "You look kinda..."
"Pale?" suggested Robin.
"Well... paler," said Cyborg.
"I'm fine," said Raven. "I just... haven't been able to meditate recently."
It was perhaps saying something that they all seemed to accept this explanation, albeit not without some more questions she desperately didn't want to deal with right now.
"Is there... some way in which we might assist you?" asked Starfire. "Perhaps the mind-cleansing properties of the - "
Whatever Starfire had in mind was not something Raven was prepared to entertain. "I'll be fine," she snapped. "Stop worrying."
She had meant to say 'don't worry'.
"Look uh..." said Robin, the way he always did when trying to phrase something delicately, "we're gonna be at this a while. If you need to... get some rest or something?"
Right now, there was nothing she wanted more, and nothing she was less likely to be able to do, not that she could explain that to Robin. "... right," she said, unable to conjure up the words to express anything further. "I'll... do that..."
Robin nodded slowly, though his and the others' concerned expressions became no easier to bear. "David," he said, without even looking at the psychokinetic. "You should probably go too. Try and get some sleep. You're both on patrol tomorrow."
"Sure," said David. He also had not removed eyes from Raven, surprise having shaken off fatigue for the time being. "I'll try." David stood up slowly, and walked towards the door, casting the occasional glance back at Raven. Raven waited only a bit longer before taking her own leave, wanting to get out of here and back to her room before the others could start asking her the questions she could see forming in their minds already. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Beast Boy make a move to follow her, only to be stopped by Cyborg, who set a hand on the changeling's shoulder and shook his head no.
She moved quickly to the door, through it, and down the hallway, taking a different route down than David so as to avoid everyone. The instant she was out of sight of the others, she broke into a flat run, racing back to her room, panic bubbling up in her chest as she did so. She reached the door to her sanctuary, and phased through it without even bothering to open the door. As soon as she was inside, she stopped, falling back against the door and clutching the sides of her head as she slid down it onto the ground, her breath coming in short gasps, eyes clenched shut.
The gem was born of evil's fire...
She screamed.
The walls and door were close to soundproof, and nobody could hear her unless they were right outside her door, so she didn't stop herself, but screamed formlessly in rage and frustration for a good ten seconds. It helped a little bit. Slowly her heart rate dropped, she calmed down, and the frustration and anger she had been feeling were replaced with fear and dread. Her constant companions ever since her birthday.
By all the Gods, what now?
She'd asked herself that on her birthday. She'd asked herself that the day she found that thing inside David's mind. And the closer it got to judgment day, the more and more she demanded answers from the ether, and heard nothing. The people she knew she ought to be turning to for help were the very people she couldn't tell. Some things she could tell them, but not this. If they knew...
Did they know?
The others didn't but... Great Azar, David had been reciting the prophecy! THE prophecy! Did he even know what he was saying? Had he known he was saying anything at all? And what did that mean? If he knew, then he would tell the others. He'd been quick enough to tell Beast Boy about Terra after all and this was way beyond that. If they found out...
She shut her eyes again, tight, and forced herself to calm down. No, he didn't know. They didn't know. Not yet at least. She still had time to find a way out, but all her research had failed, and she had no idea where to turn. She opened her eyes again, and they fell on the piles of books scattered liberally around the room. Ten thousand volumes on every demon, monster, and occult nightmare in existence, and none of them had given her the solution she desperately needed. She needed answers. She needed help. Someone who she could talk to. Someone connected to all this. Someone who might have the answer she sought...
Her eyes opened wide.
No... No that... that was... she couldn't!
She... she couldn't... there had to be another...
One look around her room, at the sum total of the knowledge of ancient Azarath... and the absolute certainty of what she knew she was about to do landed on her like a six-ton weight.
Slowly, without even thinking about it, Raven stood back up. For a second she didn't move, and then mechanically, robotically, she turned around, walked over to her front door, and slid it aside with the touch of a button. She glanced up and down the silent hallway, stepped out into it, and let the door slide closed behind her.
It sounded like prison bars slamming shut.
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
This was wrong.
Raven stood in front of the unadorned metal door, still as a statue, waiting for... well for Azar-knew-what. For divine inspiration, for all she knew. Just waiting. And as she waited, the reminder kept popping back up.
This was wrong.
Raven had a very strong sense of what was right and wrong, partly innate, partly from training. One did not live amongst pacifist monks for all of one's childhood without picking up some sense of ethics. That she herself was a product of pure evil only served to help. Like recognized like.
And this, this thing here, this action she was about to take, was wrong.
It wasn't like there were laws about this sort of thing. Superpowers were rare enough across the galaxy that they didn't come with such things, hence why a good half of those with superpowers used them to commit crimes. Superpowers set one apart, above the limits imposed on normal society. Even the most stalwart of heroes got away with things no normal law enforcement agency in the world could. Superpowers gave one the ability to do things no legal scholar had ever thought of, even on alien worlds where such things were more common. What Raven was about to do was perfectly legal.
It was still wrong. And she knew it.
The stakes were more enormous than anyone but her knew, and she owed it to the others to try and stop what was coming, without burdening them with the weight of the terrible fate she had brought into their lives. She knew it sounded like an excuse, a cop-out, but it was true. And how many small little crimes had they permitted or even committed in order to perform a greater good? When Cyborg threw a car into a supervillain threatening the city, did he stop to ask permission of the owner? When Starfire snatched a pedestrian out of the way of gunfire, did she give them a choice in the matter? This was no different.
Except, of course, that it was completely different, not to mention wrong.
She sighed. In the end, what choice was there? She could not tell them. For better or worse, she couldn't risk it. She simply couldn't face their horrified stares, their angry shouts, their unanswerable demands as to why she had not warned them of the mind-numbing horror that they had let into their midst when she first arrived on Earth. Maybe that made her a coward. She didn't know. All she knew was that she could not tell them. She had to solve this on her own.
And so she phased through the door.
The room was sparsely furnished, in fact it didn't look much different from when it had just been a guest room. Neither the catastrophic mess of Beast Boy's nest, nor the obsessively-ordered neatness of Robin's cave, it, like its resident, was something of a middle ground. The desk on the right wall had several pages written in a shaky hand, weighted down by a stainless steel baton. A poster sat above the desk, a composite of all five of the original Titans, clearly one dating back at least a few months. Despite the anachronism, Raven wasn't surprised that it hadn't been replaced with one of the more modern versions that the souvenir shops around Jump were already selling.
A handful of books lined the shelves along the left wall, not enough to fill them, half of which were her own volumes, lent out for this or that reason. Next to that sat a pair of large, framed pictures, but puzzlingly, they were blank, slate grey like the rest of the wall. It was only upon approaching that Raven realized they weren't pictures at all, but some kind of tactile composite, an invisible mosaic of patterns and materials that looked identical to her, but no doubt stood out quite vividly to someone who could see via means other than light. She wondered for a second where he'd gotten it, then remembered the insane things people often sent her for no reason whatsoever, and only then did she remind herself that time was a factor here, and that putting the deed off made it no easier to stomach.
David lay on the far side of the room, in his bed, asleep, or close enough. She didn't have to approach to see that he was having another vivid dream, possibly another nightmare. His head twitched every so often, and his eyes were moving beneath his eyelids. Any second now, he might suddenly wake, an eventuality she would need to avoid in order to pull this off. As silently as a field mouse, she approached the bed until she was standing next to it, and she extended one hand and gently laid it on the blanket, whispering her mantra as quietly as she physically could.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."
A soft blue glow enveloped the bed and the sleeper within it, as Raven released a spell into him. David went rigid for a moment, then slowly relaxed, his breathing slowing to a steady pace, his head falling over to one side. Raven maintained the spell for a few more moments, then drew her hand back and took a deep breath. The spell was a variant of a healing ritual she had once been taught, one that placed the subject into a deep, rapid, regenerative trance. Even if he only received ten minutes of actual rest, David would wake up feeling completely refreshed and alert.
But more importantly for Raven's purposes here, he would also, baring a massive sensory intrusion, be absolutely comatose for the next eight hours,
The voice of Azar came back to her as she gently slid a chair over to the side of the bed, and sat down in it, calming herself, steadying herself for what she was about to do.
"It is anathema to enter an unwilling mind..."
The words were practically burnt into Raven's head, a lesson repeated over and over by the monks of Azarath. No amount of excuse-making or moral relativism could change it. This thing she was doing was forbidden. It was criminal. It was wrong.
And worst of all, she knew the others would agree if she asked them.
The last time she had entered David's mind, she had done so with an astral projection, entering a psychic trance and leaving her body behind momentarily as she deployed her consciousness into his mindscape. That sufficed for simple investigations, certainly, and carried next-to-no risk, save that of being evicted rudely back into one's own body, but that was not what she intended to do here. She knew that whatever was in there would resent her intrusion, would resist a simple mind connection. She would have to do it... 'properly'.
She reached into her cloak, and drew out a small object...
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos."
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos."
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos..."
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The mindscape was not as it had been.
Floating above the forest, Raven saw instantly that something drastic had changed here. Anyone could have. The trees still sat quietly in the still air, no sound of bird or beast disturbing them. The golden hemisphere that twinkled in the midst of the forest still shone as brilliantly as she remembered it, but there was something else here too. Five towers as tall as skyscrapers loomed over the canopy, each one massive enough to serve as the centerpiece of the Jump City Skyline. The five towers were scattered randomly across the forest, but they somehow did not look foreign, despite the setting, their bases merging seamlessly into the foliage, as though they had grown naturally out of the ground somehow. Each of the towers was comprised of a different material. One tower was made of polished steel, another of varnished wood, a third of shining crystal. The one nearest to her was made of a black stone that looked like volcanic pumice, and the last one seemed to be comprised of rubber. What these towers were, where they had come from, what they represented, all these were questions she could not answer now. There was one reason, and one reason alone she was here, and it lay within that golden dome.
She floated over the the canopy, giving the towers a wide berth, moving to the border of the hemispherical golden dome, within which lay the answers she sought, for better or worse. She paused at the border, collected herself, readied the small arsenal of spells she had a feeling she was about to need. And with everything ready, she stepped through.
It was as she remembered, a featureless black moonscape of cold ash, like the aftermath of an asteroid strike or a nuclear war, enveloping her the instant she stepped through the golden dome without limit or barrier visible from horizon to horizon. Unlike last time, however, she appeared to be alone. She had half-expected to see whatever-it-was sitting here, in its ash-dusted satin armchair, waiting for her to return, but instead the bleak terrain stretched on without break or pause, revealing nothing but more of the same.
She turned a complete circle, carefully surveying the surroundings for any threat or sign of life. Other than the charred skeletons of what might have once been steel girders, there was nothing nearby. She wasn't sure what she had anticipated coming in here, a discussion, an argument, a fight, but she certainly hadn't planned on being ignored.
... no, strike that. She wasn't being ignored. The area was too still, too quiet, too nondescript even for somewhere like this. She could feel her empathy prickling in the back of her mind. There was something out there, watching her, waiting for her to let her guard down.
"Come out," she said in as calm a voice as she could. "I just want to talk."
A babble of responses greeted her, coming in from all directions, and she snapped her head around back and forth, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was making the noise, but there was nothing visible. Disjointed words, bits of thirty different languages with no uniformity and no single voice, male or female, human or alien, echoed around her as though shouted by an invisible chorus. An angry one. None of the words were English, but there were a few human ones among them, Latin, Sumerian, something she guessed to be Chinese, lost among a hundred other tongues, some too alien for a human to even pronounce.
She kept circling, kept watching, kept her spells ready on the tip of her brain for instant deployment. "I'm not leaving until you answer me!" she shouted over the cacophony of noise, trying to sound resolute and determined. Perhaps it worked, for the voices stopped like someone had thrown a switch, leaving her listening to the soft sounds of her own footsteps, and then there came another voice, one deep and sharpened, its tone as cold as ice.
"I told you to leave this one alone..."
A shimmer in the unlit sky, a trembling of the air, and a figure coalesced out of the darkness. Indistinct, indescribable, it was tall and short and thin and broad and dark and light by turns, humanoid and otherwise in succession. It could not be described with any regularity, it simply was, but whether it had two eyes or fifty or none at all, it was staring straight at her with a savage gaze that could have struck a man dead at a hundred paces. She steeled herself, and stared right back at it.
"Who are you?" she asked.
"He is not for your filth!" screamed the being venomously as it walked, slithered, and floated towards her, its form shifting so frequently and fluidly that it was dizzying to watch. The only constant was the venomous hate pouring from it like a stench, lighting her empathic senses afire, sending a warning screaming through her head a second before the creature lifted its arm/tentacle/appendage, and brought forth fire.
Fire, roiling, nuclear fire, obliterated everything in sight and plunged the world into an undifferentiated riot of red and orange, enclosing her like an ocean, blotting out the very ground she stood upon. As before, the only defense she had was her shield, a barrier of pure will, one that had failed her last time, forcing her to retreat into her own body once again.
But this time was different.
With one hand, she manifested her shield, and whereas last time it had shattered beneath the flaming barrage, this time it held, held strong and firm as the flames of rage battered against it, and with her other hand she conjured forth psychic energies and mystical powers unnameable in human tongues, and clenched her fist like a boxer, and brought it around, and commanded the fire to be gone.
And it went.
Flames potent enough to consume a planet and burn stars to ash were extinguished at her command, swept aside like leaves before a hurricane, and when they were gone, they revealed the same ashen moonscape, the same space-dark sky, the same monstrous figure standing before her, rage and hatred mollified perhaps by what she took to be shock, that it's powerful toys had availed not to drive the intruder back.
"I didn't ask you if he was for my 'filth'!" snapped Raven, darkly, her voice locked in the no-nonsense tone she took with recalcitrant supervillains. "I asked what you are! Answer me!"
The creature did not reply, though its shifting features began to slow, devolving down into a small humanoid, one she knew she was going to recognize before she recognized it. One she had been expecting to see. David.
But it wasn't David. It couldn't be David. As before, the expression was too direct, too out of character, for it to be anything of the sort. Whether expression of some subconscious facet of his personality or something else altogether, it now stood before her looking surprised. Astonished. Even scared.
"What have you done... ?"
There was such apprehension in that voice that Raven nearly hesitated, but caught herself as she stepped forward, her shield falling to be replaced by a swirling network of energy that kicked up dust about her feet.
"I'm not some amateur psychic you can just push around," she said to the thing that wore David's expression. "And I'm not leaving until you answer me!"
"Dear God... you... you've... manifested?"
David, or whatever it was, recoiled a full pace and a half at this realization, and there was no mistaking the fear, the near-panic in his voice as he said it. He brought his hands around again, and tongues of flame and fire burst from them, as raging and potent as before. Yet with a single extended palm, she conjured forth a shield strong enough to repel them, advancing at an even pace, parting the fire before her with an outstretched hand.
"You can't get rid of me with mind-tricks," she insisted, brushing aside further bursts of flame and raw energy, the creature that resembled David retreating as she approached, blasting away at her with what she hoped was everything it had. The ground warped and twisted, the sky burnt and buckled and collapsed inward, the air itself combusted around her, but nothing could David inflict upon her that she could not counter. She had spent the necessary time in preparation, hanging spells on the edge of her brain, preparing her mental disciplines for the contest she knew would result. She was not merely projecting some image of her own mind into this place. She was here, physically and mentally, in a form Euclidian physics was not equipped to describe. In psychic terms, it was called a "manifestation".
No matter how desperate 'David' was, no matter what world-shattering powers he called upon, against Raven, such powers were not enough, and she swatted them aside, willing herself forward, teleporting directly in front of him and grabbing him by the shirt, hoisting the smaller figure up as she did so. "Tell me what you are!" she shouted in his face. And as she did this, she saw a spirit-shriveling fear flash in the thing's eyes, and then all of a sudden it was gone.
For a second, Raven stood there, blinking at her empty hands, alone once again in the dark landscape. She looked left and right, unsure of where he could possibly have gone, until it occurred to her that they were on this thing's home ground, and it was unlikely to have just moved a few virtual feet, not when it exhibited such mortal terror.
She suddenly realized what she needed to do.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she chanted quietly, channeling her energy into a powerful breaching spell, and she extended one finger, which began to spark a pale blue, like a live wire severed and brandished in the air.
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos," she repeated, and the sparks grew in intensity with each word. "Carazon, Rakashas, Endere. Vaserix Endrien Animadus! Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos!"
Reality tore.
Slowly, painfully, she dragged her sparking finger down like a butter knife, ripping open a gash in the very fabric of her present location. Only once a massive rip had been torn, six feet tall and spilling light like a cracked windowshade, only then did she dispel the magic with a sigh of relief, and stepped through.
And as she did so, she swore that just for a second she could hear the sound of bells...
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Before becoming a Titan, he had not thought it was possible to actually hate an alarm.
One second he was blissfully asleep, unconscious, unaware of the world, and the next, the room flashed red, and an klaxon suitable to raise the dead was blaring in his ears. Had someone walked into his room with a cannon and discharged it next to his head, he could not possibly have been more rapidly woken up.
It was not the most pleasant way to greet the morning.
No... strike that, it wasn't the morning yet. In fact it wasn't even close. The clock showed 9:27 PM. He was fairly certain that he'd only gotten to bed somewhere around 9. He'd been asleep for less than half an hour, or at least he thought it had been that. Honestly, he had not stopped to check the clock when he reached his room, collapsing in his bed without bothering to draw back the covers or change out of his uniform. He hadn't even taken off his belt, a fact he now regretted, as the buckle had dug into his stomach as he slept. Yet... weirdly... he no longer felt tired. Indeed he felt miles better than he had before collapsing, like he had slept for twenty hours rather than twenty minutes. Maybe he was finally starting to adjust to the Titans' weird semi-nocturnal schedule, as Robin kept insisting he eventually would. Either way, it was hardly something to complain about...
He reached over and hit the acknowledge button on the far wall, which mercifully cut off the klaxon, and sat up on the bed to try and find his communicator. As he did, he noticed something else odd. His chair, normally sitting way over by his desk, was right next to his bed, sitting upright and empty, facing him. And sitting on top of the chair was a small purple hand mirror.
The sight was so incongruous that David did a double-take. The chair he might have moved while stumbling about his room in a half-comatose stupor, but he was almost certain that he had never seen the mirror here before. Granted, a mirror was hardly the most menacing of objects, but he felt a chill of unease run down his spine as he looked at it, and slowly reached over to pick it up...
"Robin to Devastator."
Jolted out of his musings on household objects, David withdrew his hand and seized the communicator on his dresser.
"Devastator here," he said.
"We've got a situation. Meet us in the common room."
"Got it." David clipped the communicator and baton onto his belt, and got back up, sliding the chair back over to his desk and absentmindedly dropping the mirror on top of the letter he had been writing back to one of the kids from the DCS. And a moment later he was out the door, the mirror already forgotten, as the old, familiar tightness in his stomach that accompanied any alert began to re-assert itself, as it always did. As he realized by now, it probably always would.
This was not the time...
He rode the elevator up to the common room, trying to steady his nerves and quiet the voice in his head that was screaming that this time, surely this time he was going to go out there and get pounded into jelly by whateverthehell they were going after. It was when he stepped through the doors into the room itself that he realized that this time, that voice might not be so wrong this time...
The viewscreen was covered with pictures of Slade, as it had been before, but rather than old recordings, the symbol in the upper right of the screen showed that this was new footage, live footage, filled with the same scenes of fire and destruction that the old ones had been. It did not take a leap of genius to determine what the emergency was. Slade had decided to make a typically 'theatrical' re-appearance.
The knot tightened.
" - still not answerin'," said Cyborg as David entered. "And the sensors are sayin' she's not in the Tower."
"She is not within her room," said Starfire, entering behind David with a look of concern on her face, having apparently taken the stairs up. I can find nothing to indicate where she may have gone."
By process of elimination, they were talking about Raven.
Robin looked singularly unamused, but said nothing immediately, as Beast Boy looked from one Titan to the other. "Well, we gotta go looking for her, don't we?" he asked, clearly deeming it a self-evident fact.
"We can't," said Robin. "Slade's tearing half the city apart. The police have called in a Code 1."
Cyborg whistled and David winced. Code 1 was bad news. It meant that the civic authorities were abandoning the entire area pending the Titans dealing with the issue. Faced with something like the newly re-energized Slade, David supposed he couldn't blame them, but time had not softened his reaction to having been appointed one of the solutions of last resort for an entire city. And the last fight they had had with Slade had... not gone well...
That Raven had gone missing just as Slade had chosen to show up again made things even worse.
Still, the situation was bad enough that even Beast Boy didn't protest, at least not after a quick glance showed him that Cyborg was clearly behind Robin this time. The only remaining question was dealt with quickly.
"Can you go?"
It took David a second to realize that the question was aimed at him. "Er... yeah... yeah, I'm okay," he said.
He was surprised when that didn't suffice immediately. Starfire and Beast Boy exchanged looks and Robin narrowed his eyes. "You sure?" he asked. "You were pretty out of it earlier."
"Got some sleep, I guess," said David. "I feel a lot better." Not that he was eager to go racing off to face Slade, but he physically felt up to it, at least. Scared as he usually was, he wasn't going to lie about it...
Based on the way Robin was looking at him, David guessed that had the situation been any less urgent, he would have ordered him to stay behind. To be frank, David didn't really understand it himself, but there were plainly more important mysteries to pursue right now, and so at Robin's order, they were soon headed for the T-car, David bringing up the rear, whispering a prayer to whoever might be listening that the situation be not quite as bad as had made it out to be.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 26, cont'd
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Whoever was listening had a perverse sense of humor. It wasn't just as bad as it looked. It was far worse.
David knew that they were in for trouble when they passed the first burning minivan. It was lying on its roof, wheels still spinning as the burning tires cast thick black smoke into the air. Starfire had gone pale at the sight, Robin and Cyborg fallen silent as Cyborg's grip on the steering wheel tightened visibly. Even if Beast Boy hadn't stopped trying to call Raven, there was a subtle shift in his increasingly desperate calls over the communicator, an edge in his voice that augured nothing good. David by now knew how to read the signs of the cold fury that all of them felt when faced with things like this, and had it been anyone but Slade waiting for them, he would have rated the villain's chances slim to none.
As it was, he was sitting in the backseat trying to convince himself that it had there had been nothing inside the driver's seat of the minivan but skeletal-shaped shadows and figments of his imagination...
The area looked like a bomb had been dropped on it. Buildings lay in gutted ruin, vehicles torn to pieces and scattered over the area. Bodies lay ostentatiously in the streets, some burnt down to skeletons, some still adorned in their clothing and uniforms. Two cops lay scorched to death beside their blackened police cruiser, their useless guns still held in their hands. Beyond them were scattered a half dozen other corpses, most burnt beyond recognition, several of whom were on their backs, their hands held up in front of them defensively, as though they had tried to ward off whatever had killed them.
"We split up to find Slade and take him down," said Robin in a voice that was barely controlled, "whatever it takes!" Nobody responded in words, certainly not David, whose finely tuned sense of when he was in over his head was screaming like it never had before, yet in the face of this... this atrocity, what else could be done? Even from a half-civilian? Nobody else said a word, but David didn't have to look at them to know that they were all ready to subject Slade's new invulnerability powers to a very rigorous test.
And then suddenly, Slade was there.
He was standing next to what had once been an abandoned storefront, now a smoldering wreck, his arms crossed, staring down at his handiwork with evident pleasure, watching as the T-car screamed towards the building, screeched to a halt, and disgorged all five Titans at once.
"I do love my job..." said Slade, just within the range of hearing, and he raised his hand to summon more fire just as Cyborg planted a full-power blast of his sonic cannon straight into his back. The shot would have torn a hole through tank armor, but sufficed only to stagger Slade, and extinguish his flames, and he turned around to face the Titans almost resignedly, like this was nothing more than an inconvenience on his time.
"Mass murder?!" said Robin, his voice seething with outraged anger. "Vandalism?! This is low even for you, Slade!"
"The Teen Titans..." said Slade, preternaturally calm, as always. "So nice of you to drop by, but... as you can see, I'm in the middle of something. I'll deal with you in a few minutes."
Slade's cavalier attitude seemed to only antagonize Robin further. "No!" he said. "We'll deal with you now!"
"You can't always have what you want, Robin..." said Slade, and before anyone could so much as blink, he slammed his fist into the ground, shattering the pavement, and throwing David and all the others off their feet. In the time it took to scramble back up, Slade had vanished again, leaping up onto a roof nearby and out of sight.
Robin didn't hesitate. "Titans!" He shouted. "Go!"
They went, Starfire and Beast Boy flung themselves upwards after Slade, Robin pursuing them with piton guns and grappling launchers to propel himself up. Cyborg could not do so, and neither could David, but Cyborg had no intention of being left behind, and to be honest, neither did David, for many different reasons. Both of them took off on foot, over and through the debris that choked the alleys and streets they raced down. Cyborg had enough weight and mass to smash his way straight through most of the blockades in his path, and anything he could not simply shove aside, either he or David blew to pieces without pausing, lest Slade get out of their sight.
Still, they could not catch up with the aerial battle already begining to rage overhead as Robin hurled birdarangs, Starfire's blasts lit the entire area up in green, and Beast Boy slashed at Slade in form of osprey, eagle, or vampire bat. Cyborg bellowed in frustration as he shunted yet another fallen girder aside after David helpfully blew it in half. "It just don't make sense!" he exclaimed, though David wasn't sure he was talking to him. "This whole place is getting demolished in a couple weeks! If he wanted it gone, there just wasn't no call to come in and... and..." Cyborg couldn't even finish his sentence, opting instead to finish off with a roar, and a low percentage shot at Slade with his sonic cannon that missed by a dozen yards. David had to content himself with chasing after Cyborg, and waiting for an opportunity to make himself useful.
A child's scream provided it.
As it was designed to evolutionarily, the sound pierced right through everything that was happening and found Cyborg and David on the ground, though not well enough to pinpoint where it was coming from. Nevertheless, neither David nor Cyborg paused to listen for it to repeat itself, but simultaneously stopped, turned, and raced towards what seemed to be the most likely group of burning buildings, Cyborg rushing towards the one on the right as he signaled for David to take the leftmost one.
The doors were closed and burning, but doors had long-since ceased to be a barrier to David, and he snatched the baton from his waist as he ran, and swung it vaguely at the entrance as he approached it, blowing both doors to bits with scarcely a thought. A moment later he was inside, wordlessly praying that the building wasn't about to collapse on his head. Wordless prayer had become a far larger part of his life in recent months...
For the moment, his luck held, and the building remained standing. He ground to a halt, listening for anything, and heard it soon after, a little girl's shriek, unintelligible, but likely a call for help, given the circumstances. He spotted a stairwell and bounded up it as quickly as he could, a mistake, as the top step collapsed under his footfall, and nearly sent him plunging down two stories into the basement. He managed to catch himself on the edge of the stair, and scrambled back up on top of it, thankful as never before that his uniform was fireproof, and tore down the hallway, shattering anything in his path with swings of his baton and bursts of his powers, until he finally reached the end of the hallway, blasted both hinges off the final door in his way, and entered.
The room was choked with smoke, so much so that he nearly fainted. He could see nothing whatsoever, and so dispensed with light and switched to his molecular vision, but the vaporized carbon made that no better, and he switched back and simply ducked down. Two children, one a baby, one a little girl of barely four or five years lay crouched on the ground next to a younger boy, two at the most, David guessed. The girl was frantically tugging at the toddler's arm, but a falling beam had apparently landed atop him and either killed him or knocked him out. The beam itself had broken... indeed it almost looked as if it was bitten in half, covered in something resembling bite marks, but David had no time to worry about that. The smoke would fill the room completely in a moment, and the building might collapse at any time.
The windows were made of shatterproof glass. David nonetheless shattered them with a thought, sending glass cascading down into the alley below, and crawled over to the three children. The toddler was breathing, coughing in fact, and both of the other children were crying, but David didn't have time to worry about that either. He scooped the fallen toddler up without a word, and thanked what little luck he had when the little girl, instead of screaming her head off or going catatonic, picked the baby up herself and extended one hand tearfully to David. Grabbing her hand with his own, and holding the toddler as best he could with the other, he scrambled out the window onto the fire escape, helped the little girl over the navigate the windowsill by simply blowing it out of the wall, and was trying to figure out how they would all get down the fire ladders when something hit the fire escape and tore it apart.
He fell a full story down onto the ground, landing on his back atop the shattered safety-glass, which might not have been so annoying had the toddler he was holding not landed on top of him an instant later. Once again his uniform saved him, as the titanium polymer threads withstood the sharp fragments far better than his skin would have, and other than a few bruises and a splitting headache, he was by and large all right. A glance around revealed that the girl had hit an awning before falling onto the ground alongside the still-crying baby, and was weakly trying to say something. David caught the name 'Bobby'. Probably one of the boys' names. He got up gingerly, reaching down for his communicator to call someone down to help him get these kids out of the danger zone, but his hand fell to his side as he realized, all of a sudden, that he was not going to get that far...
Slade stood in the alleyway, blocking the exit onto the street, his fists closed and wreathed in flame. His single eye was trained on David like a laser, but he did not move, not immediately, waiting as David's face lost what color remained in it, and while the little girl picked herself and the baby up, and crept up behind David, peering out from behind him at the armored cyclops in their path.
"I have to say," said Slade. "You weren't the one I was expecting to meet here."
David tried to swallow the enormous lump forming in his throat as he glanced around in vain for the other Titans. Slade had somehow given them the slip, and he could not do the same in return without guaranteeing the deaths of all three kids, or worse. The knot in his stomach tightened so much that he could barely breathe, and Slade smirked and slowly walked towards them.
"Wh... what do you want?" asked David.
"What any messenger wants," said Slade simply. "For their message to be heard. Unfortunately, that requires the recipient to be present, and she seems to have declined my invitation."
"You mean Raven?"
Slade laughed. "It's not Raven I'd be worried about right now if I were you, Devastator. And in any case, I've a message for you too..."
Scared or not, David's next actions were essentially automatic. He pressed the panic button on his communicator, and drew his baton once again, all in the same motion, falling back half a step, the most he could while still remaining between the kids and Slade. With a thought, he sheathed the baton in its red aura. The pulsating warmth of the baton was a slight comfort, but only a slight one.
Slade looked amused. "Are you joking, boy?" he asked. "What do you intend to do with that?"
"Take another step and you'll find out," spat back David, trying to mask his apprehension with little success. "They'll be peeling you off the walls with a spatula."
"You're going to blow me up then?" asked Slade, spreading his arms wide. "By all means try." There was the barest hint of a smile as Slade ostentatiously took another step, pausing momentarily to offer the opportunity to detonate him. "But you already know that's not going to work, don't you?"
If anything, molecular vision was even more terrifying than the normal reality. Against the backdrop of gas, liquid, and solid molecules that ringed him, Slade stood out only by his absence. In normal vision, he was a walking, armored figure, but in molecular terms, he was nothing, a black hole in reality, a stable vacuum displacing everything normal. Slade was right. David could neither manipulate nor even detect the elements Slade was comprised of, could not determine what they were, could not determine if they were.
Somehow this made everything several orders of magnitude more terrifying than before.
Slade read the astonished fear on David's face like he was a book printed in block letters. "I thought so..." he said, and resumed walking. "Honestly, child, do you even know who I am?"
Desperately forcing himself not to turn and run, David managed to stammer a reply, all attempts to appear unafraid abandoned. "Y... yes," he said, tightening his grip on his baton. "But..."
"But what?"
David shut his eyes and took a ragged breath. "But I also know something you don't..."
"Really?" asked Slade with an amused laugh. "And what's that?"
David set his teeth, braced himself, and cracked his eyes open. "The exact chemical composition of asphalt."
It took Slade just a moment, a brief hesitation to figure out what David was talking about, and just as he did,the street exploded underneath his feet.
The blast was raw and powerful, as strong as an anti-tank mine, and it blasted Slade up like a rocket, an ascent aborted a second later when he slammed headfirst into an overhanging streetlight built into the side of one of the buildings. The light shattered on impact in a cascade of sparks, and Slade plunged back down to the alley floor, only to be met by another blast, this aimed both up and outwards, which threw him back towards the entrance to the alley.
Maybe the explosions had hurt Slade and maybe they had not, but they bought seconds, and David didn't even try to determine what had happened to Slade before he turned on the brick wall of the building next to the one he had escaped from. A wave of his magic wand, and an eight foot hole was torn through it like lacework struck with a cannonball. Waving the smoke out of his face, he half dragged, half shoved the little girl through the hole, laying the stirring toddler down next to her, and shouted over the echoes of the blasts for her and her siblings to run like hell. He had to hope that the blasts hadn't deafened them, or if they had, that she'd have the sense to run anyway while he tried to hold Slade long enough for the others to...
Something grabbed him from behind and pulled him up, off his feet, and before he knew what was happening, he was dangling forty feet in the air. He squirmed and twisted reflexively, not even considering what would happen if he did break free, but it mattered not in the end, for a second later he was spun around and hauled over a metal railing and onto another fire escape, face to face with Slade.
They had plainly not hurt him.
"Was that supposed to be clever?" asked Slade, looming over him, pressing him up against the railing of the fire escape so hard that he would have pitched over backwards had Slade not been holding him by the shoulders. He tried to bring up his baton, But Slade contemptuously swatted it out of his grasp. "Did you think I came here to watch your little fireworks display? Do you think this is all a game? Are you such a fool as to ignore the message I bore you?"
Even in the midst of panic, there was a kernel of logic left to David that recoiled at this. Something made no sense here. "You... you killed a dozen people to deliver a message?"
Slade laughed. "I already delivered you the message. I killed a dozen people to make you pay attention to it."
"What are... what are you talking about?!" shouted David, making a renewed effort to break free and damn the fall, but Slade's hands were like steel vices, and in a flash, he remembered laying on the pavement of another street somewhere in the city, watching Slade hold Raven in a similar trap.
"I am talking about Armageddon!" snarled Slade, and he spun around, throwing David down onto the floor of the fire escape. "I am talking about the end of the world. Skies burning, oceans boiling, fire from the heavens. It is all coming about."
"You're insane!"
"Oh I'm very much in control of my faculties, David," said Slade, crossing his arms and watching as David picked himself up. "Come now, you always knew it was going to end this way, didn't you?"
"End what way?"
"With you destroying the Titans?"
David froze. "... what?!"
"Oh perhaps you didn't think it was quite that dramatic," said Slade. "But I know you've always suspected that there was something wrong with you... those powers you're so afraid of... even now... the ones any sane superhero would already have turned to instead of standing there staring at me like a gape-mouthed child..."
"I couldn't destroy the others, even if I wanted to!" shouted David back at Slade, not bothering to ask himself when it was he had decided to take this line of discussion seriously.
"Relying on your own weakness as a defense?" asked Slade with an amused tone, and he strolled over towards David as though he was on holiday. "Face it, David, you haven't got the first idea what you are and aren't capable. But you've always known that whatever these powers were augured no good, haven't you? You knew that if you made use of these abilities of yours, you'd one day wind up on the opposite side of propriety... that's why you hid them for so long, never turned to them, never dared even think about them. You knew that if you ever started to use them, it wouldn't be as a hero..."
David blinked. This was... he'd...
"You've been spying on us!"
"We're all being watched," said Slade. "You and I have something in common in that regard. But both your conscience and my message gave you the same warning, one you've chosen to ignore. I brought you all here to bear witness to the consequences."
David's anger was boiling over by this point. "I don't know what the hell you are talking about! I'm not going to destroy anyone except you!"
"Oh, but you are, David," replied Slade. "You are going to destroy someone else. In fact, you're going to destroy all of them. Whether you like it or not, whether you deny it or not, it doesn't matter in the slightest. You are the catalyst for the annihilation of the Teen Titans."
David could barely speak, but as Slade simply stood there, watching him, a voice of defiance welled up in his throat. "No!" he snapped. "No, that's a lie!"
"Oh is it?"
"You told Raven the exact same thing!" said David, pointing a finger at Slade accusingly. "You stood there in the street and told her that she was gonna end the world. Flesh to stone, blood from the skies, I remember all that! And now all of a sudden I'm the one who's supposed to kill everybody? At least keep your lies straight!"
Slade chuckled darkly. "I told Raven she was destined to destroy the world. You on the other hand... are not merely prophesied to annihilate humanity. You're the cancer that will bring your friends down from within."
"That's not true!"
"I assure you - "
"I don't care what you assure me of! It's not happening! Not ever! Not to Raven, not to me, not to anyone!"
Slade laughed, a long, roaring, belly laugh. "David, don't you see? You've already done it."
"... what?"
"It's already happened. It happened long ago in fact. You've already struck the blow that will destroy your friends. You just don't realize it yet." Slade inclined his head almost mockingly. "Raven does though. On some level, she's always known it would come about, hasn't she? And do you want to know the best part?"
Slade stepped over and leaned in. David was in no position or mindset to stop him. "The best part is," whispered Slade almost conspiratorially, "unlike her, you still have a chance to stop it. Even now, you could still undo the damage you've done, reverse it, save your friends. You could do it... but you won't. Even if you knew how, you wouldn't, because you've addicted yourself. Because it's become more important than you dare acknowledge, even to yourself. And so you're going to sit back and watch your world burn, rather than lift a finger to put the fire out..."
Slade stood back up, slowly, taking a step or two back as he flexed his hands and fingers, summoning fresh flames to dance over his unblemished armor, as David stared mutely at him.
"So no matter how much you or your little friends squirm and cry," said Slade. "You are going to be the agent of their annihilation, and there is nothing anyone else can do to stop it..."
"How 'bout this?!"
Both Slade and David turned their heads upward in search of whoever had spoken that last question, an instant before it dissolved into a formless war cry as Cyborg suddenly plunged out of nowhere.
Slade had only enough time to blink as a half-ton of titanium and circuitry landed on his head at a hundred miles an hour, all focussed on Cyborg's fist, which he slammed into Slade's faceplate so hard that the fire escape collapsed under the blow, as did the three beneath it. David found himself falling towards the ground, but suddenly there was Starfire, grabbing him around his chest and pulling up hard for a second, before setting him down gently on the trash-littered alley floor. It was all so fast that David barely had a chance to blink before he was standing on the ground, and Starfire was handing him his baton, which had landed nearby.
"Are you unharmed?"
He had no idea how to answer that question, but one way or another, he was not required to, for a moment after Starfire asked, there was a massive explosion from further down the alley, and both of them turned in time to see Cyborg blasted bodily into the air by a huge gout of flame, which parted to reveal Slade, unperturbed as ever, standing in the center of a shallow crater surrounded by the wreckage of several fire escapes.
Starfire gave a shout and unleashed a beam of green energy from her eyes, but Slade absorbed it like a sponge, and released flames from his fingertips that forced both Starfire and David to dive to the ground to avoid being incinerated. David brought his baton around and fired a half dozen bricks at Slade from the wall behind him, but as they had the last time he tried such a stunt, the bricks merely shattered against his armored hide, doing nothing whatsoever, even when he commanded them to detonate on impact with all the power he could muster. Starfire had no better luck. Her blasts of energy were worse than useless, for Slade caught one of the starbolts and hurled it back, blowing both of them aside and cloaking the entire area in smoke.
And when the smoke cleared, Slade was gone.
David and Starfire both assumed it was a trick, and both immediately scrambled back to their feet, watching to see when Slade would re-appear. But despite their assumptions, Slade did not show himself, and only slowly did it occur to them that this time he might not be returning.
Their communicators crackled to life at once, and David pulled his off his belt to see Cyborg standing on the roof he had been blasted onto. "I can't see anybody," said Cyborg. "Are y'all out there?"
"We're here," said David, as Starfire lifted off the ground to continue searching either for Slade, the others, or other survivors. David glanced over at the hole he'd blown in the wall, but there was no sign of the three children he had told to run. He'd have to go looking as soon as he called it in. "Slade's... gone, I think."
"I doubt that," chimed Robin in over the communicator. "Can anyone else see him?"
"Uh... no..." came the voice of Beast Boy. "But uh... I can see something else..."
"What is it?" asked Robin.
"Um... dude... you know that symbol of Slade's... ?"
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The floor was made of marble.
On Earth, marble was associated with antiquity, with Ancient Rome and temples to forgotten gods. People thought of it as a fancy, polished, civilized-looking stone, and used it to line the floors and walls of office buildings, hotel lobbies, or government buildings. It was associated with culture and respectability.
Alien cultures, on the other hand, understood what marble was really for...
Raven crouched on the side of the round atrium, one hand on the polished marble floor. The stone was white, pure white, no imperfections or 'marbling' to color it, save for in the very center of the room, where a circle of black stone had been inscribed into it, with seven rays extending from it equidistantly. Each ray was a different color, purple, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, set against the white marble surrounding them in a stark and striking pattern. Raven poured her mind into the marble surface, feeling the currents of magic pulsing through them, using the natural conductivity of marble in regards to all things sorcerous to distribute immense power throughout the room.
Or at least the simulation of it.
She had sliced through every misdirection and layer of obfuscation to get here, and stopped. She could not explain why she had stopped in words, but there was a sixth-sense to these things, one she had long ago learned was your best friend in mind-travel. Particularly within your own, but often times even within other people's.
She stood back up, surveying the atrium, a riot of arched alcoves, open to the elements on the sides, the roof carved in mahogany and other exotic woods, save for in the center above the black inlaid circle, where an open oculus admitted the sky. Above shone no sun, and glimmered no moon, but instead sat an alien sky full of planets and stars near enough to resolve. The atrium was perched atop an immense tower of ivory or limestone, and down below it lay a vast city, but the city was on fire, glowing red and orange in the shallow half-light, smoke vaguely shimmering in the distance. The air was still now, but once in a while it would pick up, and carry with it the faintest echo of distant cries.
Painful cries.
Not even in the wildest conspiracy fantasies she had indulged in, did she ever imagine that David had ever laid eyes on a scene like this one, which of course meant only that she wasn't viewing a memory, but a mental construct. Why his mind, or whoever's mind this really was, had decided to erect this scene was a question best left to psychologists. She had work to do.
There was something here, something hidden, and she had to find it, for she suspected she knew what it was. She closed her eyes and floated up into the middle of the atrium, her cloak wrapped around her, repeating her mantra to herself as she reached out with her mind, a recursive scan of this mind-space she had entered laying bare its foundations and feeling for the patterns of thought that formed its skeleton, isolating the most powerful ones, homing in mentally until she could...
"Curse you!" came a shout from right behind her. "Have you not done enough?! Curse you and all that bears your touch!"
Raven opened her eyes and turned, and saw a horror.
A writhing mass of tentacles sat in the middle of the atrium, some capped with fanged mouths, some with octopus suckers, and some with lidless, bloodshot eyes. Agitated and angry, the tentacles snapped their jaws and beat the air and floor, extending and retracting around a pulsating central body quivering with a raw malevolence so thick she could smell it.
"You invade our home!" shouted the monster, though no specific mouth was doing the talking, the voice originating from somewhere inside the core. "You assail our very thoughts! And you demand answers from us?! Curse you! We shall lay your mind bare to be devoured, and spare the universe your tainted filth!"
Raven had been called worse things than this by many a villain, and the threats did not phase her. "You're not in charge here," she said. "Tell me what I want to know."
"We will tell you nothing!" shouted the slithering horror. "You have performed a final sacrilege, and you shall suffer for it!"
Several tentacles snapped at her, but she raised her shield and blocked each assault as it came, gathering energy of her own and encasing the writhing mass in a black sphere, lifting it bodily off the ground and keeping it hovering in mid-air.
"This isn't some memory-scape," she said to the screaming, twisting mass of alien flesh. "David didn't invent this. You did."
"We are one and the same, and you defile us both!"
"No you're not," said Raven, forcing herself to remain in control. "You know things he doesn't. You know what I am. You know about my father."
The tentacles all froze, the unblinking eyes locked on her like lasers. The voice, when it spoke next, was raspy and quiet, but contained a core of shocked revulsion that could not have been fake, not this deep inside the mind...
"Your... father?!"
It didn't know?
Suddenly the tentacle monster disappeared, popped out of existence like a burst balloon, and Raven was once more alone in the atrium, or rather she appeared to be. Carefully, she reached out empathically, looking for something out of the ordinary, and had just begin isolating the patterns of thought around her when the entire scene shifted.
The ground beneath her feet turned from marble to some other kind of stone, and she found herself standing atop a flat-cropped pyramid. Another city was arrayed before her feet, but this one was not on fire, indeed it was gleaming and polished, sparkling in the twin suns overhead. Throngs of people surrounded the enormous structure, all staring up at the platform Raven was standing on, but not at her.
A dozen feet away, there stood a young woman dressed in white. Though the figures filling the courtyards and plazas below were armored and armed with a variety of lethal weapons, the woman herself wore no armor, nor held any weapons save one, a gleaming scepter of gold and brass, atop which was set a crimson ruby the size of a pineapple. Cries and cheers wafted up from the crowd below, cries of victory or acclamation, who could tell, but as Raven watched, the young woman smiled, and raised the scepter high above her head, and before everyone's eyes, the golden instrument caught fire, flames ringing it like a halo, and yet the young woman's hand was unburnt...
The sight of the flames sent the crowd into a delirium of cheers and trumpet-calls, but Raven heard none of them, her eyes fixed on the flaming scepter, as the young woman lowered it slowly to her side, letting the flames lick at her skirt without scorching the fabric or shimmering the air. Fire without heat had many metaphorical or psychological interpretations... but all she could think of was the literal one she knew all too well.
"What are you?"
Raven whirled around and found a facsimile of David staring back at her, a red-sheathed baton in hand, to her eye, infinitely more dangerous than the real thing. Its eyes were blazing like bonfires, and its demeanor unquestionably malevolent, albeit cautious.
She decided on honesty. "You know what I am."
"Daughter of Trigon, why are you here?" asked David, baton held menacingly forward.
"I need to know what you know," said Raven carefully, "about what's happening."
David's eyes narrowed. "Why?" he asked.
"Because I need to know how to stop it."
Her counterpart seemed to consider this for a moment, and then, disconcertingly, began to laugh, the laugh building and building until it was uproarious, and the figure that was either some extreme manifestation of a buried side of David's personality, or something completely different, was shaking with booming, thunderous laughter.
"You pathetic, idiot, demon!" he shouted back at her. "How great of a fool do you think I am?!"
"It's not a trick!" insisted Raven, "and I'm not joking! You know what's going to happen, don't you?!"
"Of course I know," said David, winding his laughter down. "You are the gem. You're going to bring about the end of the world."
"Then you have to tell me how to stop it!" said Raven almost desperately.
"Stop it?" asked David. "Stop the destiny of the gem of Trigon the Terrible? Are you mad? There is no stopping it! You know that!"
"That's not true!" shouted Raven, sending tremors through the pyramid they stood upon. "It can't be true!"
"And why can it not be true?" asked David, unphased by her anger. "You know the prophecy do you not? The promise of the gem, of your birth, if you are his daughter, is absolute."
Even now, she could not bring herself to believe it. "You can't be sure of that! There has to be something I can do to stop it!"
"There. Is. Nothing!" said David, punctuating each word with a finality that felt like a door slamming shut in her face. "There is nothing you or any other living thing can do to prevent Trigon's return. Do you understand me, girl?! NOTHING! Not with all the powers of the universe can you or anyone else stand against Trigon, a fact you yourself would know if you weren't busy deluding yourself into imagining you are anything but a vessel for the annihilation of your entire species!"
"That's not true!" repeated Raven, practically screaming now, her psychic restraints blasted away
"Isn't it?!" shouted back David. "You're the one who slashed your way in here demanding answers from me! Think, demon! How many generations of scholars and mystics have sought what you are seeking? How many civilizations have tried to stand against Trigon the Terrible? How many warriors of virtue and light has he left broken on the ground to feed the carrion birds? Not with every spell ever invented could you prevent this! I know. And whether or not you believe me is no concern of mine."
It was like someone had reached in and torn her guts out. Raven clutched the side of her head and clenched her teeth and tried to force down the urge to scream, which in this place might cause anything to happen. All of her efforts, all of her research, all of her attempts to find an answer, some way out of the fate creeping up on her... all for nothing...
What was she supposed to do now?
"I have given you your answers," said David, his voice darkening once more to an augury of violence. "Now get out."
The command crystalized Raven's attention, and she raised her head sharply.
"No."
David looked almost surprised, and a strong current of fear wafted off of him, quickly masked, but no less indicative for it. "No?"
"Not until you tell me who you are."
"And why should I tell the gem of Trigon anything at all about myself?!" demanded David.
"Because I'm not leaving until you tell me who you are! If you say there's no hope, then I want to know who's saying so! For all I know you're trying to trick me or working for my father! Answer me!"
David shook his head, almost incredulously, as he slowly raised his baton up. Raven could feel the concentrations of power forming within it, feel the very decision being made within the empathically nebulous figure to use it. "Is it somehow not plain enough to you what I am?"
In truth it was, but Raven wanted, needed to hear it from his own mouth. "Who are you?" she repeated quietly for what she already knew would be the last time.
"Demonspawn," said David quietly with a shake of his head. "I am the Devastator."
And then the baton twitched, and everything burned.
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"You sure you're all right?"
David grimaced and massaged his temple. "Cy, I'm fine. Really. I just got knocked around a little." He wished to God they'd shut off those damned sirens. Every howl was like another blow to the snare drum pounding in his head.
"Hey, I'm just checkin' man."
David sighed. "I know," he said. "Sorry. Just got a headache is all..." A glance at Cyborg's surprised expression made him realize what the next question would be, and he headed it off. "Not... like those. Just a normal one."
"Look, if you're not feelin' up to - "
"It's not," David insisted. "It's just a normal headache. Trust me." Honestly he wasn't sure what it was, but it was manifestly not one of the massive pain spikes that had laid him low during his fight with Terra. For one thing it felt entirely different. For another thing, if it had been one of those, he would not have been able to speak.
Knowing that didn't make it any less unpleasant. His head felt like something was beating against the inside of his skull with a pipe wrench, but he gritted his teeth and tried to erase the signs of it, reasonably certain that it would calm down as soon as the police cars shut their sirens off. And besides, he knew that this time he didn't want to just head home, not without any idea what had happened here, not after what Slade had said...
... not that he believed Slade, but...
Cyborg shrugged. "You know best, man," he said. "Just don't try to push it. We don't need you collapsin' on us again."
"I won't," said David. "Just... do me a favor... don't tell Robin."
Cyborg stopped short, and turned his head back with a look of surprise so acute that David instantly thought he'd made some sort of terrible mistake, only to relax again as Cyborg broke into a broad grin.
"My man," said Cyborg, laying a heavy hand on David's shoulder and shaking his head. "I never thought I'd see the day..."
David had no idea what Cyborg was talking about, but as it happened, Starfire landed a moment later, and he didn't get a chance to ask.
"I have searched the entire area," said Starfire. "There is... no sign of any children."
David grimaced, half from another surge of pain that pulsed through his head, half from the Starfire's revelation. Expected or not, it was not what he wanted to hear.
"They were right there," he said, a bit sharper than he meant to, pointing with his baton towards the hole in the brick wall. "I put them there and told them to run."
"Then maybe they did," suggested Cyborg. "You said Slade came after you, right? Could be they got away."
"Yeah, and maybe they got buried by a collapsing building or something," replied David, his head hurting too much, and spinning too much, to realize how uncharacteristically forward he was being. "We've got to look for them at least, don't we?"
"We are lookin' for them," said Cyborg, just a bit more forcefully, enough for David to notice, but probably not enough for Star to. "Robin's got the cops and EMTs on the way. They'll be pourin' all over the place in a couple minutes."
David forced himself to stop and take a deep breath, and the pain in his head lessened a bit as the sirens finally cut off, but only a bit. Footsteps pounding over the rubble testified to the arrival of emergency crews. He glanced sheepishly up at Cyborg, who simply nodded, and gestured for him to follow as all three of them moved off to regroup with Beast Boy and Robin.
They found Robin talking with one of the police officers, and he no sooner saw them than he signaled he would be just a minute. Cyborg closed with him to join in whatever the conversation was, but David neither knew what he would say to a policeman, nor had any illusions that whatever strategy was being plotted was within his capacity to understand. Beast Boy on the other hand was further away, perched on top of a toppled chimney, curled up in the crouched posture that David by now knew was a signal of nothing good. Accordingly, while Robin, Cyborg, and Starfire conferred with the cops, he made his way over.
"Beast Boy?"
Beast Boy half-turned back to see who it was, and David saw that his communicator was in his hand, open and with a screen full of static. Beast Boy's face was so full of worry that David forgot about his headache, and even about Slade for a moment. "You... you all right?" asked David.
Beast Boy glanced down at the communicator for a second, as if the screen might resolve to something any moment. "She's not answering," he said, and there was no need to ask who. What with everything that had just happened, David had completely forgotten about Raven's disappearance, but plainly Beast Boy had not. The green changeling was plainly worried, tapping the signal button on his communicator every few seconds.
"Maybe she's just busy," suggested David, not really sure what else he could say. Raven kept her own council in all things after all. "Meditating or something. She was kinda wound up earlier..."
"Yeah, but there was an alert dude. She never misses those. You think something's happened?"
The thought had not occurred to him. "I'm... I'm sure she's just..." he was not sure of anything of course, and finally gave up trying to come up with a proper platitude. "I don't know... but whatever she's doing, she'll be all right, and if she's not, she'll let us know, won't she?"
Beast Boy didn't sound particularly convinced. To be honest, David wasn't either, but thinking straight with his head aching like this was far harder than it should have been. Beast Boy shook his head. "I really think we oughta be trying to find - "
Robin interrupted him, calling them over from where the others were standing. "Beast Boy? David?"
David glanced at Robin, then turned back to Beast Boy, extending a hand. "She's Raven," he said. "Whatever it is, she can handle it, right?"
Beast Boy considered that for a moment and nodded. "Yeah..." he said, noncommittally, but he took David's hand to get up and even managed a nervous grin. "Yeah, I guess she can."
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Minutes later, they had rejoined Robin in front of a massive stone building, one that the police were giving a wide berth for the simple reason that Robin had asked them to. Why he had done this was obvious, even to David, but as usual, Robin explained his reasoning anyway.
"Everything in a three-block radius has been destroyed," said Robin, facing the imposing stone structure, "except this. Slade left it standing for a reason."
The building was made of granite and shaped concrete, and David was willing to guess that Slade had left it standing because of the fact that it would have taken a lot more firepower than even he had been deploying to bring it down. Robin sounded convinced however, and Robin knew better...
"According to the city's master plan," said Cyborg, "this is the original town library. But it's been abandoned for decades."
"No wonder," commented Beast Boy. "This place is a dump." He proceeded to prove it by lightly kicking one of the columns, the base of which shattered, sending sixteen tons of rock slamming to the ground an inch away from crushing him into a fine green paste. Starfire yelped, Cyborg jumped forward, and Robin was about to berate him for being careless, save that all of their attentions were drawn by a curious mark carved into the now-revealed lintel above where the column had once stood.
"The Mark of Scath."
David glanced at Robin with a raised eyebrow, but his question was answered before he asked it. "Slade told me the name," said Robin without glancing back, and he stepped up to the solid oak doors, glancing at Starfire as he did so. Chained shut and sealed by years of abandon though they were, Starfire threw them open like the doors to a dollhouse, sending a cloud of disturbed dust wafting out and into the air above.
As soon as the dust cleared, Robin entered, followed one by one by the others. Something in the back of David's neck twitched as he entered, and he quietly slid the baton off of his belt and into his hand, and coated it with a soft red aura, letting the warmth pulse through his fingers. By now it was almost normal.
"Dudes," said Beast Boy, "even without the creepy librarians... I'm not digging this place."
It wasn't like one would expect to see something different than this in an abandoned library, but David nonetheless agreed. The stacks were coated with dust and cobwebs, some bare, some with a few moth-eaten books still on the shelves. The power was off, and the only illumination came from their various powers or lights, and from faint moonlight glimmering in through the opaque windows.
They hadn't gone more than fifty feet or so before they reached the end of the room, and were forced to stop. "Dead end..." said Robin, allowing just a hint of frustration to enter his voice, and turned away to give instructions for a search of the room when David stopped him.
"No it's not..." said David, and the others turned to him, but he wasn't watching them. He was staring straight at the wall, not as a wall but as a mass of rock molecules.
"That section there," he said, pointing at it with his baton. "It's hollow."
Cyborg and Beast Boy glanced at one another and walked over to the section of wall that David had indicated. No sooner had Beast Boy touched it than brilliant shafts of white light stabbed through the air in the outline of a door, and the wall crumbled to dust. Beast Boy yelped and jumped back behind. "Uh..." he said. "I mean... secret passage! Cool! You go first."
Cyborg extended a floodlight from his shoulder and illuminated the stairs down, and the Titans descended single-file, all five of them as silent as their surroundings. David couldn't speak for the others, but he was almost glad for the silence. His head was begining to hurt worse, to the point where he had to stop every couple dozen yards to rub his temples, and then quickly catch back up with the others. Cyborg and Starfire gave him a few concerned looks, but he waved them off. All of them had better things to be worrying about. He certainly did...
They marched on in silence, but for footfalls and the soft click of Beast Boy's communicator as he kept trying to reach Raven, before finally the stairs spilled out into a large open room lined with statues. One look was enough to tell David that this was not a place he wanted to be. The statues were of robed, skeletal figures, carved in exquisite detail from pure obsidian.
Robin and Cyborg's lights reflected off the shining figures and the dust-covered ceiling and walls, even as the nearest statues twinkled in green and red from Starfire and David's own powers.
Starfire was the first one to say anything. "I did not realize your libraries housed such unpleasant sculptures."
"They don't," said Cyborg, retracting his flashlight and consulting his forearm computer. "This part of the building is old. I mean old old." He looked back up, panning his head around slowly, as though hardly able to believe what he was seeing. "Like... before the city was built."
"But... the city's two hundred years old..." said David hesitantly. "How's that even possible?"
"Radio-dating says this stuff was carved even before that," said Cyborg, shaking his head. "You tell me man, I just work here..."
Another jolt of pain shot through David's head, strong enough to make him hiss and shudder, holding the side of his head with one hand as his baton extinguished by itself. "David, are you all right?" asked Robin, sounding as all-business as ever.
David waited a second for the pain to fade and nodded, but clearly Robin wasn't as easily convinced as Cyborg was. He quickly approached and looked David over with a practiced eye. "Your head again?" he asked. David was forced to nod, not without a wince first, and that appeared to be all the evidence Robin needed.
"All right," he said. "Go back upstairs and wait with the cops. We'll be back as soon as we've - "
"No..."
The sole indication of Robin's surprise was the mask over his eyes widening ever-so-slightly. "What?"
David shook his head, trying to force himself not to show how much it hurt to do so. "Slade... Slade said that... I was... I was gonna..."
Cyborg stepped in. "Slade was talkin' some of his crap before I jumped him," he said. "Nothin' important. Just some stuff about - "
David cut Cyborg off as well. "He said I was going to kill you all."
That one definitely surprised Robin. "What?" asked the Boy Wonder.
David could only lower his head. "He said... I was gonna destroy the Titans. That I was gonna... decide to destroy you guys, or something..."
Cyborg simply folded his arms, having overheard much of this from the rooftops before he had tackled Slade. Starfire and Beast Boy looked flatly astonished, but at least both of them looked more sympathetic than angry or afraid. In the end, everyone here knew that despite the leaps and bounds he had made, destroying even one of the Titans was well beyond David's capabilities, let alone destroying all of them.
At present, he was very glad of that fact.
"Like I said," said Cyborg. "Buncha crap. Don't pay no attention, man. Slade likes to play mind games."
"Maybe..." said Robin cryptically. "Do you have any idea what he meant."
David shook his head. "No," he said. "But... I'd really like to ask him."
Robin thought it over a moment. "Sorry," he said, "we can't take the risk that this might be another episode. You're gonna have to wait upstairs with the - "
"The Gem was born of evil's fire..."
Everyone froze, as Robin's instructions were cut off by a ghastly, hollow voice that was utterly bonechilling. As all five Titans spun around, they watched in horror as one by one, the eyes of the obsidian statues lining the vault began to glow a milky white, and one by one, ghostly spirits, hooded skeletons like the statues themselves, floated up off the statues into the center of the room, chanting the verses to a poem like a chorus of the damned...
"The Gem shall be his portal..."
Beast Boy took several steps back, jaw hanging open at this spectral sight. Starfire's fists glowed green with energy, and she too closed on the others, as if there was safety in numbers. Cyborg closed and opened his human eye slowly, unable to quite believe what he was seeing, while Robin, as he always did at the first sign of trouble, crouched low and reached for his telescoping staff.
"He comes to claim, he comes to sire..."
David watched the ghosts in abject horror, feeling like his lungs were seizing up. His head continued to throb, but he paid it no mind, as the words of the ghosts seemed to course through him, rattling and rolling about in his ears, like the sound of a car's backfire setting off the flashbacks of a war veteran, and he felt something stir up from within him, something familiar and alien all at once...
"The end of all things mortal."
And then all of a sudden, every eye in the room, ghostly and living alike, was fixed on David, for it had not been the ghosts that had spoken the last line... but David himself.
For a few seconds, nobody said anything. And then, as one, the ghosts vanished into nothingness, leaving behind only the five teens, and a host of questions without answers
"Um... dude?" asked Beast Boy.
"How did you know that?" asked Cyborg, looking at David like he could scarcely believe his eyes (or ears).
Would that he could answer coherently. "I've..." he stammered, "I've heard that poem before. I know it from somewhere."
"Where?" asked Robin. "How?"
But to that question, all David could give in reply was a confused and helpless shake of his head, and weak, almost plaintive words.
"I don't know..."
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Whoever was listening had a perverse sense of humor. It wasn't just as bad as it looked. It was far worse.
David knew that they were in for trouble when they passed the first burning minivan. It was lying on its roof, wheels still spinning as the burning tires cast thick black smoke into the air. Starfire had gone pale at the sight, Robin and Cyborg fallen silent as Cyborg's grip on the steering wheel tightened visibly. Even if Beast Boy hadn't stopped trying to call Raven, there was a subtle shift in his increasingly desperate calls over the communicator, an edge in his voice that augured nothing good. David by now knew how to read the signs of the cold fury that all of them felt when faced with things like this, and had it been anyone but Slade waiting for them, he would have rated the villain's chances slim to none.
As it was, he was sitting in the backseat trying to convince himself that it had there had been nothing inside the driver's seat of the minivan but skeletal-shaped shadows and figments of his imagination...
The area looked like a bomb had been dropped on it. Buildings lay in gutted ruin, vehicles torn to pieces and scattered over the area. Bodies lay ostentatiously in the streets, some burnt down to skeletons, some still adorned in their clothing and uniforms. Two cops lay scorched to death beside their blackened police cruiser, their useless guns still held in their hands. Beyond them were scattered a half dozen other corpses, most burnt beyond recognition, several of whom were on their backs, their hands held up in front of them defensively, as though they had tried to ward off whatever had killed them.
"We split up to find Slade and take him down," said Robin in a voice that was barely controlled, "whatever it takes!" Nobody responded in words, certainly not David, whose finely tuned sense of when he was in over his head was screaming like it never had before, yet in the face of this... this atrocity, what else could be done? Even from a half-civilian? Nobody else said a word, but David didn't have to look at them to know that they were all ready to subject Slade's new invulnerability powers to a very rigorous test.
And then suddenly, Slade was there.
He was standing next to what had once been an abandoned storefront, now a smoldering wreck, his arms crossed, staring down at his handiwork with evident pleasure, watching as the T-car screamed towards the building, screeched to a halt, and disgorged all five Titans at once.
"I do love my job..." said Slade, just within the range of hearing, and he raised his hand to summon more fire just as Cyborg planted a full-power blast of his sonic cannon straight into his back. The shot would have torn a hole through tank armor, but sufficed only to stagger Slade, and extinguish his flames, and he turned around to face the Titans almost resignedly, like this was nothing more than an inconvenience on his time.
"Mass murder?!" said Robin, his voice seething with outraged anger. "Vandalism?! This is low even for you, Slade!"
"The Teen Titans..." said Slade, preternaturally calm, as always. "So nice of you to drop by, but... as you can see, I'm in the middle of something. I'll deal with you in a few minutes."
Slade's cavalier attitude seemed to only antagonize Robin further. "No!" he said. "We'll deal with you now!"
"You can't always have what you want, Robin..." said Slade, and before anyone could so much as blink, he slammed his fist into the ground, shattering the pavement, and throwing David and all the others off their feet. In the time it took to scramble back up, Slade had vanished again, leaping up onto a roof nearby and out of sight.
Robin didn't hesitate. "Titans!" He shouted. "Go!"
They went, Starfire and Beast Boy flung themselves upwards after Slade, Robin pursuing them with piton guns and grappling launchers to propel himself up. Cyborg could not do so, and neither could David, but Cyborg had no intention of being left behind, and to be honest, neither did David, for many different reasons. Both of them took off on foot, over and through the debris that choked the alleys and streets they raced down. Cyborg had enough weight and mass to smash his way straight through most of the blockades in his path, and anything he could not simply shove aside, either he or David blew to pieces without pausing, lest Slade get out of their sight.
Still, they could not catch up with the aerial battle already begining to rage overhead as Robin hurled birdarangs, Starfire's blasts lit the entire area up in green, and Beast Boy slashed at Slade in form of osprey, eagle, or vampire bat. Cyborg bellowed in frustration as he shunted yet another fallen girder aside after David helpfully blew it in half. "It just don't make sense!" he exclaimed, though David wasn't sure he was talking to him. "This whole place is getting demolished in a couple weeks! If he wanted it gone, there just wasn't no call to come in and... and..." Cyborg couldn't even finish his sentence, opting instead to finish off with a roar, and a low percentage shot at Slade with his sonic cannon that missed by a dozen yards. David had to content himself with chasing after Cyborg, and waiting for an opportunity to make himself useful.
A child's scream provided it.
As it was designed to evolutionarily, the sound pierced right through everything that was happening and found Cyborg and David on the ground, though not well enough to pinpoint where it was coming from. Nevertheless, neither David nor Cyborg paused to listen for it to repeat itself, but simultaneously stopped, turned, and raced towards what seemed to be the most likely group of burning buildings, Cyborg rushing towards the one on the right as he signaled for David to take the leftmost one.
The doors were closed and burning, but doors had long-since ceased to be a barrier to David, and he snatched the baton from his waist as he ran, and swung it vaguely at the entrance as he approached it, blowing both doors to bits with scarcely a thought. A moment later he was inside, wordlessly praying that the building wasn't about to collapse on his head. Wordless prayer had become a far larger part of his life in recent months...
For the moment, his luck held, and the building remained standing. He ground to a halt, listening for anything, and heard it soon after, a little girl's shriek, unintelligible, but likely a call for help, given the circumstances. He spotted a stairwell and bounded up it as quickly as he could, a mistake, as the top step collapsed under his footfall, and nearly sent him plunging down two stories into the basement. He managed to catch himself on the edge of the stair, and scrambled back up on top of it, thankful as never before that his uniform was fireproof, and tore down the hallway, shattering anything in his path with swings of his baton and bursts of his powers, until he finally reached the end of the hallway, blasted both hinges off the final door in his way, and entered.
The room was choked with smoke, so much so that he nearly fainted. He could see nothing whatsoever, and so dispensed with light and switched to his molecular vision, but the vaporized carbon made that no better, and he switched back and simply ducked down. Two children, one a baby, one a little girl of barely four or five years lay crouched on the ground next to a younger boy, two at the most, David guessed. The girl was frantically tugging at the toddler's arm, but a falling beam had apparently landed atop him and either killed him or knocked him out. The beam itself had broken... indeed it almost looked as if it was bitten in half, covered in something resembling bite marks, but David had no time to worry about that. The smoke would fill the room completely in a moment, and the building might collapse at any time.
The windows were made of shatterproof glass. David nonetheless shattered them with a thought, sending glass cascading down into the alley below, and crawled over to the three children. The toddler was breathing, coughing in fact, and both of the other children were crying, but David didn't have time to worry about that either. He scooped the fallen toddler up without a word, and thanked what little luck he had when the little girl, instead of screaming her head off or going catatonic, picked the baby up herself and extended one hand tearfully to David. Grabbing her hand with his own, and holding the toddler as best he could with the other, he scrambled out the window onto the fire escape, helped the little girl over the navigate the windowsill by simply blowing it out of the wall, and was trying to figure out how they would all get down the fire ladders when something hit the fire escape and tore it apart.
He fell a full story down onto the ground, landing on his back atop the shattered safety-glass, which might not have been so annoying had the toddler he was holding not landed on top of him an instant later. Once again his uniform saved him, as the titanium polymer threads withstood the sharp fragments far better than his skin would have, and other than a few bruises and a splitting headache, he was by and large all right. A glance around revealed that the girl had hit an awning before falling onto the ground alongside the still-crying baby, and was weakly trying to say something. David caught the name 'Bobby'. Probably one of the boys' names. He got up gingerly, reaching down for his communicator to call someone down to help him get these kids out of the danger zone, but his hand fell to his side as he realized, all of a sudden, that he was not going to get that far...
Slade stood in the alleyway, blocking the exit onto the street, his fists closed and wreathed in flame. His single eye was trained on David like a laser, but he did not move, not immediately, waiting as David's face lost what color remained in it, and while the little girl picked herself and the baby up, and crept up behind David, peering out from behind him at the armored cyclops in their path.
"I have to say," said Slade. "You weren't the one I was expecting to meet here."
David tried to swallow the enormous lump forming in his throat as he glanced around in vain for the other Titans. Slade had somehow given them the slip, and he could not do the same in return without guaranteeing the deaths of all three kids, or worse. The knot in his stomach tightened so much that he could barely breathe, and Slade smirked and slowly walked towards them.
"Wh... what do you want?" asked David.
"What any messenger wants," said Slade simply. "For their message to be heard. Unfortunately, that requires the recipient to be present, and she seems to have declined my invitation."
"You mean Raven?"
Slade laughed. "It's not Raven I'd be worried about right now if I were you, Devastator. And in any case, I've a message for you too..."
Scared or not, David's next actions were essentially automatic. He pressed the panic button on his communicator, and drew his baton once again, all in the same motion, falling back half a step, the most he could while still remaining between the kids and Slade. With a thought, he sheathed the baton in its red aura. The pulsating warmth of the baton was a slight comfort, but only a slight one.
Slade looked amused. "Are you joking, boy?" he asked. "What do you intend to do with that?"
"Take another step and you'll find out," spat back David, trying to mask his apprehension with little success. "They'll be peeling you off the walls with a spatula."
"You're going to blow me up then?" asked Slade, spreading his arms wide. "By all means try." There was the barest hint of a smile as Slade ostentatiously took another step, pausing momentarily to offer the opportunity to detonate him. "But you already know that's not going to work, don't you?"
If anything, molecular vision was even more terrifying than the normal reality. Against the backdrop of gas, liquid, and solid molecules that ringed him, Slade stood out only by his absence. In normal vision, he was a walking, armored figure, but in molecular terms, he was nothing, a black hole in reality, a stable vacuum displacing everything normal. Slade was right. David could neither manipulate nor even detect the elements Slade was comprised of, could not determine what they were, could not determine if they were.
Somehow this made everything several orders of magnitude more terrifying than before.
Slade read the astonished fear on David's face like he was a book printed in block letters. "I thought so..." he said, and resumed walking. "Honestly, child, do you even know who I am?"
Desperately forcing himself not to turn and run, David managed to stammer a reply, all attempts to appear unafraid abandoned. "Y... yes," he said, tightening his grip on his baton. "But..."
"But what?"
David shut his eyes and took a ragged breath. "But I also know something you don't..."
"Really?" asked Slade with an amused laugh. "And what's that?"
David set his teeth, braced himself, and cracked his eyes open. "The exact chemical composition of asphalt."
It took Slade just a moment, a brief hesitation to figure out what David was talking about, and just as he did,the street exploded underneath his feet.
The blast was raw and powerful, as strong as an anti-tank mine, and it blasted Slade up like a rocket, an ascent aborted a second later when he slammed headfirst into an overhanging streetlight built into the side of one of the buildings. The light shattered on impact in a cascade of sparks, and Slade plunged back down to the alley floor, only to be met by another blast, this aimed both up and outwards, which threw him back towards the entrance to the alley.
Maybe the explosions had hurt Slade and maybe they had not, but they bought seconds, and David didn't even try to determine what had happened to Slade before he turned on the brick wall of the building next to the one he had escaped from. A wave of his magic wand, and an eight foot hole was torn through it like lacework struck with a cannonball. Waving the smoke out of his face, he half dragged, half shoved the little girl through the hole, laying the stirring toddler down next to her, and shouted over the echoes of the blasts for her and her siblings to run like hell. He had to hope that the blasts hadn't deafened them, or if they had, that she'd have the sense to run anyway while he tried to hold Slade long enough for the others to...
Something grabbed him from behind and pulled him up, off his feet, and before he knew what was happening, he was dangling forty feet in the air. He squirmed and twisted reflexively, not even considering what would happen if he did break free, but it mattered not in the end, for a second later he was spun around and hauled over a metal railing and onto another fire escape, face to face with Slade.
They had plainly not hurt him.
"Was that supposed to be clever?" asked Slade, looming over him, pressing him up against the railing of the fire escape so hard that he would have pitched over backwards had Slade not been holding him by the shoulders. He tried to bring up his baton, But Slade contemptuously swatted it out of his grasp. "Did you think I came here to watch your little fireworks display? Do you think this is all a game? Are you such a fool as to ignore the message I bore you?"
Even in the midst of panic, there was a kernel of logic left to David that recoiled at this. Something made no sense here. "You... you killed a dozen people to deliver a message?"
Slade laughed. "I already delivered you the message. I killed a dozen people to make you pay attention to it."
"What are... what are you talking about?!" shouted David, making a renewed effort to break free and damn the fall, but Slade's hands were like steel vices, and in a flash, he remembered laying on the pavement of another street somewhere in the city, watching Slade hold Raven in a similar trap.
"I am talking about Armageddon!" snarled Slade, and he spun around, throwing David down onto the floor of the fire escape. "I am talking about the end of the world. Skies burning, oceans boiling, fire from the heavens. It is all coming about."
"You're insane!"
"Oh I'm very much in control of my faculties, David," said Slade, crossing his arms and watching as David picked himself up. "Come now, you always knew it was going to end this way, didn't you?"
"End what way?"
"With you destroying the Titans?"
David froze. "... what?!"
"Oh perhaps you didn't think it was quite that dramatic," said Slade. "But I know you've always suspected that there was something wrong with you... those powers you're so afraid of... even now... the ones any sane superhero would already have turned to instead of standing there staring at me like a gape-mouthed child..."
"I couldn't destroy the others, even if I wanted to!" shouted David back at Slade, not bothering to ask himself when it was he had decided to take this line of discussion seriously.
"Relying on your own weakness as a defense?" asked Slade with an amused tone, and he strolled over towards David as though he was on holiday. "Face it, David, you haven't got the first idea what you are and aren't capable. But you've always known that whatever these powers were augured no good, haven't you? You knew that if you made use of these abilities of yours, you'd one day wind up on the opposite side of propriety... that's why you hid them for so long, never turned to them, never dared even think about them. You knew that if you ever started to use them, it wouldn't be as a hero..."
David blinked. This was... he'd...
"You've been spying on us!"
"We're all being watched," said Slade. "You and I have something in common in that regard. But both your conscience and my message gave you the same warning, one you've chosen to ignore. I brought you all here to bear witness to the consequences."
David's anger was boiling over by this point. "I don't know what the hell you are talking about! I'm not going to destroy anyone except you!"
"Oh, but you are, David," replied Slade. "You are going to destroy someone else. In fact, you're going to destroy all of them. Whether you like it or not, whether you deny it or not, it doesn't matter in the slightest. You are the catalyst for the annihilation of the Teen Titans."
David could barely speak, but as Slade simply stood there, watching him, a voice of defiance welled up in his throat. "No!" he snapped. "No, that's a lie!"
"Oh is it?"
"You told Raven the exact same thing!" said David, pointing a finger at Slade accusingly. "You stood there in the street and told her that she was gonna end the world. Flesh to stone, blood from the skies, I remember all that! And now all of a sudden I'm the one who's supposed to kill everybody? At least keep your lies straight!"
Slade chuckled darkly. "I told Raven she was destined to destroy the world. You on the other hand... are not merely prophesied to annihilate humanity. You're the cancer that will bring your friends down from within."
"That's not true!"
"I assure you - "
"I don't care what you assure me of! It's not happening! Not ever! Not to Raven, not to me, not to anyone!"
Slade laughed, a long, roaring, belly laugh. "David, don't you see? You've already done it."
"... what?"
"It's already happened. It happened long ago in fact. You've already struck the blow that will destroy your friends. You just don't realize it yet." Slade inclined his head almost mockingly. "Raven does though. On some level, she's always known it would come about, hasn't she? And do you want to know the best part?"
Slade stepped over and leaned in. David was in no position or mindset to stop him. "The best part is," whispered Slade almost conspiratorially, "unlike her, you still have a chance to stop it. Even now, you could still undo the damage you've done, reverse it, save your friends. You could do it... but you won't. Even if you knew how, you wouldn't, because you've addicted yourself. Because it's become more important than you dare acknowledge, even to yourself. And so you're going to sit back and watch your world burn, rather than lift a finger to put the fire out..."
Slade stood back up, slowly, taking a step or two back as he flexed his hands and fingers, summoning fresh flames to dance over his unblemished armor, as David stared mutely at him.
"So no matter how much you or your little friends squirm and cry," said Slade. "You are going to be the agent of their annihilation, and there is nothing anyone else can do to stop it..."
"How 'bout this?!"
Both Slade and David turned their heads upward in search of whoever had spoken that last question, an instant before it dissolved into a formless war cry as Cyborg suddenly plunged out of nowhere.
Slade had only enough time to blink as a half-ton of titanium and circuitry landed on his head at a hundred miles an hour, all focussed on Cyborg's fist, which he slammed into Slade's faceplate so hard that the fire escape collapsed under the blow, as did the three beneath it. David found himself falling towards the ground, but suddenly there was Starfire, grabbing him around his chest and pulling up hard for a second, before setting him down gently on the trash-littered alley floor. It was all so fast that David barely had a chance to blink before he was standing on the ground, and Starfire was handing him his baton, which had landed nearby.
"Are you unharmed?"
He had no idea how to answer that question, but one way or another, he was not required to, for a moment after Starfire asked, there was a massive explosion from further down the alley, and both of them turned in time to see Cyborg blasted bodily into the air by a huge gout of flame, which parted to reveal Slade, unperturbed as ever, standing in the center of a shallow crater surrounded by the wreckage of several fire escapes.
Starfire gave a shout and unleashed a beam of green energy from her eyes, but Slade absorbed it like a sponge, and released flames from his fingertips that forced both Starfire and David to dive to the ground to avoid being incinerated. David brought his baton around and fired a half dozen bricks at Slade from the wall behind him, but as they had the last time he tried such a stunt, the bricks merely shattered against his armored hide, doing nothing whatsoever, even when he commanded them to detonate on impact with all the power he could muster. Starfire had no better luck. Her blasts of energy were worse than useless, for Slade caught one of the starbolts and hurled it back, blowing both of them aside and cloaking the entire area in smoke.
And when the smoke cleared, Slade was gone.
David and Starfire both assumed it was a trick, and both immediately scrambled back to their feet, watching to see when Slade would re-appear. But despite their assumptions, Slade did not show himself, and only slowly did it occur to them that this time he might not be returning.
Their communicators crackled to life at once, and David pulled his off his belt to see Cyborg standing on the roof he had been blasted onto. "I can't see anybody," said Cyborg. "Are y'all out there?"
"We're here," said David, as Starfire lifted off the ground to continue searching either for Slade, the others, or other survivors. David glanced over at the hole he'd blown in the wall, but there was no sign of the three children he had told to run. He'd have to go looking as soon as he called it in. "Slade's... gone, I think."
"I doubt that," chimed Robin in over the communicator. "Can anyone else see him?"
"Uh... no..." came the voice of Beast Boy. "But uh... I can see something else..."
"What is it?" asked Robin.
"Um... dude... you know that symbol of Slade's... ?"
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The floor was made of marble.
On Earth, marble was associated with antiquity, with Ancient Rome and temples to forgotten gods. People thought of it as a fancy, polished, civilized-looking stone, and used it to line the floors and walls of office buildings, hotel lobbies, or government buildings. It was associated with culture and respectability.
Alien cultures, on the other hand, understood what marble was really for...
Raven crouched on the side of the round atrium, one hand on the polished marble floor. The stone was white, pure white, no imperfections or 'marbling' to color it, save for in the very center of the room, where a circle of black stone had been inscribed into it, with seven rays extending from it equidistantly. Each ray was a different color, purple, indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red, set against the white marble surrounding them in a stark and striking pattern. Raven poured her mind into the marble surface, feeling the currents of magic pulsing through them, using the natural conductivity of marble in regards to all things sorcerous to distribute immense power throughout the room.
Or at least the simulation of it.
She had sliced through every misdirection and layer of obfuscation to get here, and stopped. She could not explain why she had stopped in words, but there was a sixth-sense to these things, one she had long ago learned was your best friend in mind-travel. Particularly within your own, but often times even within other people's.
She stood back up, surveying the atrium, a riot of arched alcoves, open to the elements on the sides, the roof carved in mahogany and other exotic woods, save for in the center above the black inlaid circle, where an open oculus admitted the sky. Above shone no sun, and glimmered no moon, but instead sat an alien sky full of planets and stars near enough to resolve. The atrium was perched atop an immense tower of ivory or limestone, and down below it lay a vast city, but the city was on fire, glowing red and orange in the shallow half-light, smoke vaguely shimmering in the distance. The air was still now, but once in a while it would pick up, and carry with it the faintest echo of distant cries.
Painful cries.
Not even in the wildest conspiracy fantasies she had indulged in, did she ever imagine that David had ever laid eyes on a scene like this one, which of course meant only that she wasn't viewing a memory, but a mental construct. Why his mind, or whoever's mind this really was, had decided to erect this scene was a question best left to psychologists. She had work to do.
There was something here, something hidden, and she had to find it, for she suspected she knew what it was. She closed her eyes and floated up into the middle of the atrium, her cloak wrapped around her, repeating her mantra to herself as she reached out with her mind, a recursive scan of this mind-space she had entered laying bare its foundations and feeling for the patterns of thought that formed its skeleton, isolating the most powerful ones, homing in mentally until she could...
"Curse you!" came a shout from right behind her. "Have you not done enough?! Curse you and all that bears your touch!"
Raven opened her eyes and turned, and saw a horror.
A writhing mass of tentacles sat in the middle of the atrium, some capped with fanged mouths, some with octopus suckers, and some with lidless, bloodshot eyes. Agitated and angry, the tentacles snapped their jaws and beat the air and floor, extending and retracting around a pulsating central body quivering with a raw malevolence so thick she could smell it.
"You invade our home!" shouted the monster, though no specific mouth was doing the talking, the voice originating from somewhere inside the core. "You assail our very thoughts! And you demand answers from us?! Curse you! We shall lay your mind bare to be devoured, and spare the universe your tainted filth!"
Raven had been called worse things than this by many a villain, and the threats did not phase her. "You're not in charge here," she said. "Tell me what I want to know."
"We will tell you nothing!" shouted the slithering horror. "You have performed a final sacrilege, and you shall suffer for it!"
Several tentacles snapped at her, but she raised her shield and blocked each assault as it came, gathering energy of her own and encasing the writhing mass in a black sphere, lifting it bodily off the ground and keeping it hovering in mid-air.
"This isn't some memory-scape," she said to the screaming, twisting mass of alien flesh. "David didn't invent this. You did."
"We are one and the same, and you defile us both!"
"No you're not," said Raven, forcing herself to remain in control. "You know things he doesn't. You know what I am. You know about my father."
The tentacles all froze, the unblinking eyes locked on her like lasers. The voice, when it spoke next, was raspy and quiet, but contained a core of shocked revulsion that could not have been fake, not this deep inside the mind...
"Your... father?!"
It didn't know?
Suddenly the tentacle monster disappeared, popped out of existence like a burst balloon, and Raven was once more alone in the atrium, or rather she appeared to be. Carefully, she reached out empathically, looking for something out of the ordinary, and had just begin isolating the patterns of thought around her when the entire scene shifted.
The ground beneath her feet turned from marble to some other kind of stone, and she found herself standing atop a flat-cropped pyramid. Another city was arrayed before her feet, but this one was not on fire, indeed it was gleaming and polished, sparkling in the twin suns overhead. Throngs of people surrounded the enormous structure, all staring up at the platform Raven was standing on, but not at her.
A dozen feet away, there stood a young woman dressed in white. Though the figures filling the courtyards and plazas below were armored and armed with a variety of lethal weapons, the woman herself wore no armor, nor held any weapons save one, a gleaming scepter of gold and brass, atop which was set a crimson ruby the size of a pineapple. Cries and cheers wafted up from the crowd below, cries of victory or acclamation, who could tell, but as Raven watched, the young woman smiled, and raised the scepter high above her head, and before everyone's eyes, the golden instrument caught fire, flames ringing it like a halo, and yet the young woman's hand was unburnt...
The sight of the flames sent the crowd into a delirium of cheers and trumpet-calls, but Raven heard none of them, her eyes fixed on the flaming scepter, as the young woman lowered it slowly to her side, letting the flames lick at her skirt without scorching the fabric or shimmering the air. Fire without heat had many metaphorical or psychological interpretations... but all she could think of was the literal one she knew all too well.
"What are you?"
Raven whirled around and found a facsimile of David staring back at her, a red-sheathed baton in hand, to her eye, infinitely more dangerous than the real thing. Its eyes were blazing like bonfires, and its demeanor unquestionably malevolent, albeit cautious.
She decided on honesty. "You know what I am."
"Daughter of Trigon, why are you here?" asked David, baton held menacingly forward.
"I need to know what you know," said Raven carefully, "about what's happening."
David's eyes narrowed. "Why?" he asked.
"Because I need to know how to stop it."
Her counterpart seemed to consider this for a moment, and then, disconcertingly, began to laugh, the laugh building and building until it was uproarious, and the figure that was either some extreme manifestation of a buried side of David's personality, or something completely different, was shaking with booming, thunderous laughter.
"You pathetic, idiot, demon!" he shouted back at her. "How great of a fool do you think I am?!"
"It's not a trick!" insisted Raven, "and I'm not joking! You know what's going to happen, don't you?!"
"Of course I know," said David, winding his laughter down. "You are the gem. You're going to bring about the end of the world."
"Then you have to tell me how to stop it!" said Raven almost desperately.
"Stop it?" asked David. "Stop the destiny of the gem of Trigon the Terrible? Are you mad? There is no stopping it! You know that!"
"That's not true!" shouted Raven, sending tremors through the pyramid they stood upon. "It can't be true!"
"And why can it not be true?" asked David, unphased by her anger. "You know the prophecy do you not? The promise of the gem, of your birth, if you are his daughter, is absolute."
Even now, she could not bring herself to believe it. "You can't be sure of that! There has to be something I can do to stop it!"
"There. Is. Nothing!" said David, punctuating each word with a finality that felt like a door slamming shut in her face. "There is nothing you or any other living thing can do to prevent Trigon's return. Do you understand me, girl?! NOTHING! Not with all the powers of the universe can you or anyone else stand against Trigon, a fact you yourself would know if you weren't busy deluding yourself into imagining you are anything but a vessel for the annihilation of your entire species!"
"That's not true!" repeated Raven, practically screaming now, her psychic restraints blasted away
"Isn't it?!" shouted back David. "You're the one who slashed your way in here demanding answers from me! Think, demon! How many generations of scholars and mystics have sought what you are seeking? How many civilizations have tried to stand against Trigon the Terrible? How many warriors of virtue and light has he left broken on the ground to feed the carrion birds? Not with every spell ever invented could you prevent this! I know. And whether or not you believe me is no concern of mine."
It was like someone had reached in and torn her guts out. Raven clutched the side of her head and clenched her teeth and tried to force down the urge to scream, which in this place might cause anything to happen. All of her efforts, all of her research, all of her attempts to find an answer, some way out of the fate creeping up on her... all for nothing...
What was she supposed to do now?
"I have given you your answers," said David, his voice darkening once more to an augury of violence. "Now get out."
The command crystalized Raven's attention, and she raised her head sharply.
"No."
David looked almost surprised, and a strong current of fear wafted off of him, quickly masked, but no less indicative for it. "No?"
"Not until you tell me who you are."
"And why should I tell the gem of Trigon anything at all about myself?!" demanded David.
"Because I'm not leaving until you tell me who you are! If you say there's no hope, then I want to know who's saying so! For all I know you're trying to trick me or working for my father! Answer me!"
David shook his head, almost incredulously, as he slowly raised his baton up. Raven could feel the concentrations of power forming within it, feel the very decision being made within the empathically nebulous figure to use it. "Is it somehow not plain enough to you what I am?"
In truth it was, but Raven wanted, needed to hear it from his own mouth. "Who are you?" she repeated quietly for what she already knew would be the last time.
"Demonspawn," said David quietly with a shake of his head. "I am the Devastator."
And then the baton twitched, and everything burned.
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"You sure you're all right?"
David grimaced and massaged his temple. "Cy, I'm fine. Really. I just got knocked around a little." He wished to God they'd shut off those damned sirens. Every howl was like another blow to the snare drum pounding in his head.
"Hey, I'm just checkin' man."
David sighed. "I know," he said. "Sorry. Just got a headache is all..." A glance at Cyborg's surprised expression made him realize what the next question would be, and he headed it off. "Not... like those. Just a normal one."
"Look, if you're not feelin' up to - "
"It's not," David insisted. "It's just a normal headache. Trust me." Honestly he wasn't sure what it was, but it was manifestly not one of the massive pain spikes that had laid him low during his fight with Terra. For one thing it felt entirely different. For another thing, if it had been one of those, he would not have been able to speak.
Knowing that didn't make it any less unpleasant. His head felt like something was beating against the inside of his skull with a pipe wrench, but he gritted his teeth and tried to erase the signs of it, reasonably certain that it would calm down as soon as the police cars shut their sirens off. And besides, he knew that this time he didn't want to just head home, not without any idea what had happened here, not after what Slade had said...
... not that he believed Slade, but...
Cyborg shrugged. "You know best, man," he said. "Just don't try to push it. We don't need you collapsin' on us again."
"I won't," said David. "Just... do me a favor... don't tell Robin."
Cyborg stopped short, and turned his head back with a look of surprise so acute that David instantly thought he'd made some sort of terrible mistake, only to relax again as Cyborg broke into a broad grin.
"My man," said Cyborg, laying a heavy hand on David's shoulder and shaking his head. "I never thought I'd see the day..."
David had no idea what Cyborg was talking about, but as it happened, Starfire landed a moment later, and he didn't get a chance to ask.
"I have searched the entire area," said Starfire. "There is... no sign of any children."
David grimaced, half from another surge of pain that pulsed through his head, half from the Starfire's revelation. Expected or not, it was not what he wanted to hear.
"They were right there," he said, a bit sharper than he meant to, pointing with his baton towards the hole in the brick wall. "I put them there and told them to run."
"Then maybe they did," suggested Cyborg. "You said Slade came after you, right? Could be they got away."
"Yeah, and maybe they got buried by a collapsing building or something," replied David, his head hurting too much, and spinning too much, to realize how uncharacteristically forward he was being. "We've got to look for them at least, don't we?"
"We are lookin' for them," said Cyborg, just a bit more forcefully, enough for David to notice, but probably not enough for Star to. "Robin's got the cops and EMTs on the way. They'll be pourin' all over the place in a couple minutes."
David forced himself to stop and take a deep breath, and the pain in his head lessened a bit as the sirens finally cut off, but only a bit. Footsteps pounding over the rubble testified to the arrival of emergency crews. He glanced sheepishly up at Cyborg, who simply nodded, and gestured for him to follow as all three of them moved off to regroup with Beast Boy and Robin.
They found Robin talking with one of the police officers, and he no sooner saw them than he signaled he would be just a minute. Cyborg closed with him to join in whatever the conversation was, but David neither knew what he would say to a policeman, nor had any illusions that whatever strategy was being plotted was within his capacity to understand. Beast Boy on the other hand was further away, perched on top of a toppled chimney, curled up in the crouched posture that David by now knew was a signal of nothing good. Accordingly, while Robin, Cyborg, and Starfire conferred with the cops, he made his way over.
"Beast Boy?"
Beast Boy half-turned back to see who it was, and David saw that his communicator was in his hand, open and with a screen full of static. Beast Boy's face was so full of worry that David forgot about his headache, and even about Slade for a moment. "You... you all right?" asked David.
Beast Boy glanced down at the communicator for a second, as if the screen might resolve to something any moment. "She's not answering," he said, and there was no need to ask who. What with everything that had just happened, David had completely forgotten about Raven's disappearance, but plainly Beast Boy had not. The green changeling was plainly worried, tapping the signal button on his communicator every few seconds.
"Maybe she's just busy," suggested David, not really sure what else he could say. Raven kept her own council in all things after all. "Meditating or something. She was kinda wound up earlier..."
"Yeah, but there was an alert dude. She never misses those. You think something's happened?"
The thought had not occurred to him. "I'm... I'm sure she's just..." he was not sure of anything of course, and finally gave up trying to come up with a proper platitude. "I don't know... but whatever she's doing, she'll be all right, and if she's not, she'll let us know, won't she?"
Beast Boy didn't sound particularly convinced. To be honest, David wasn't either, but thinking straight with his head aching like this was far harder than it should have been. Beast Boy shook his head. "I really think we oughta be trying to find - "
Robin interrupted him, calling them over from where the others were standing. "Beast Boy? David?"
David glanced at Robin, then turned back to Beast Boy, extending a hand. "She's Raven," he said. "Whatever it is, she can handle it, right?"
Beast Boy considered that for a moment and nodded. "Yeah..." he said, noncommittally, but he took David's hand to get up and even managed a nervous grin. "Yeah, I guess she can."
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Minutes later, they had rejoined Robin in front of a massive stone building, one that the police were giving a wide berth for the simple reason that Robin had asked them to. Why he had done this was obvious, even to David, but as usual, Robin explained his reasoning anyway.
"Everything in a three-block radius has been destroyed," said Robin, facing the imposing stone structure, "except this. Slade left it standing for a reason."
The building was made of granite and shaped concrete, and David was willing to guess that Slade had left it standing because of the fact that it would have taken a lot more firepower than even he had been deploying to bring it down. Robin sounded convinced however, and Robin knew better...
"According to the city's master plan," said Cyborg, "this is the original town library. But it's been abandoned for decades."
"No wonder," commented Beast Boy. "This place is a dump." He proceeded to prove it by lightly kicking one of the columns, the base of which shattered, sending sixteen tons of rock slamming to the ground an inch away from crushing him into a fine green paste. Starfire yelped, Cyborg jumped forward, and Robin was about to berate him for being careless, save that all of their attentions were drawn by a curious mark carved into the now-revealed lintel above where the column had once stood.
"The Mark of Scath."
David glanced at Robin with a raised eyebrow, but his question was answered before he asked it. "Slade told me the name," said Robin without glancing back, and he stepped up to the solid oak doors, glancing at Starfire as he did so. Chained shut and sealed by years of abandon though they were, Starfire threw them open like the doors to a dollhouse, sending a cloud of disturbed dust wafting out and into the air above.
As soon as the dust cleared, Robin entered, followed one by one by the others. Something in the back of David's neck twitched as he entered, and he quietly slid the baton off of his belt and into his hand, and coated it with a soft red aura, letting the warmth pulse through his fingers. By now it was almost normal.
"Dudes," said Beast Boy, "even without the creepy librarians... I'm not digging this place."
It wasn't like one would expect to see something different than this in an abandoned library, but David nonetheless agreed. The stacks were coated with dust and cobwebs, some bare, some with a few moth-eaten books still on the shelves. The power was off, and the only illumination came from their various powers or lights, and from faint moonlight glimmering in through the opaque windows.
They hadn't gone more than fifty feet or so before they reached the end of the room, and were forced to stop. "Dead end..." said Robin, allowing just a hint of frustration to enter his voice, and turned away to give instructions for a search of the room when David stopped him.
"No it's not..." said David, and the others turned to him, but he wasn't watching them. He was staring straight at the wall, not as a wall but as a mass of rock molecules.
"That section there," he said, pointing at it with his baton. "It's hollow."
Cyborg and Beast Boy glanced at one another and walked over to the section of wall that David had indicated. No sooner had Beast Boy touched it than brilliant shafts of white light stabbed through the air in the outline of a door, and the wall crumbled to dust. Beast Boy yelped and jumped back behind. "Uh..." he said. "I mean... secret passage! Cool! You go first."
Cyborg extended a floodlight from his shoulder and illuminated the stairs down, and the Titans descended single-file, all five of them as silent as their surroundings. David couldn't speak for the others, but he was almost glad for the silence. His head was begining to hurt worse, to the point where he had to stop every couple dozen yards to rub his temples, and then quickly catch back up with the others. Cyborg and Starfire gave him a few concerned looks, but he waved them off. All of them had better things to be worrying about. He certainly did...
They marched on in silence, but for footfalls and the soft click of Beast Boy's communicator as he kept trying to reach Raven, before finally the stairs spilled out into a large open room lined with statues. One look was enough to tell David that this was not a place he wanted to be. The statues were of robed, skeletal figures, carved in exquisite detail from pure obsidian.
Robin and Cyborg's lights reflected off the shining figures and the dust-covered ceiling and walls, even as the nearest statues twinkled in green and red from Starfire and David's own powers.
Starfire was the first one to say anything. "I did not realize your libraries housed such unpleasant sculptures."
"They don't," said Cyborg, retracting his flashlight and consulting his forearm computer. "This part of the building is old. I mean old old." He looked back up, panning his head around slowly, as though hardly able to believe what he was seeing. "Like... before the city was built."
"But... the city's two hundred years old..." said David hesitantly. "How's that even possible?"
"Radio-dating says this stuff was carved even before that," said Cyborg, shaking his head. "You tell me man, I just work here..."
Another jolt of pain shot through David's head, strong enough to make him hiss and shudder, holding the side of his head with one hand as his baton extinguished by itself. "David, are you all right?" asked Robin, sounding as all-business as ever.
David waited a second for the pain to fade and nodded, but clearly Robin wasn't as easily convinced as Cyborg was. He quickly approached and looked David over with a practiced eye. "Your head again?" he asked. David was forced to nod, not without a wince first, and that appeared to be all the evidence Robin needed.
"All right," he said. "Go back upstairs and wait with the cops. We'll be back as soon as we've - "
"No..."
The sole indication of Robin's surprise was the mask over his eyes widening ever-so-slightly. "What?"
David shook his head, trying to force himself not to show how much it hurt to do so. "Slade... Slade said that... I was... I was gonna..."
Cyborg stepped in. "Slade was talkin' some of his crap before I jumped him," he said. "Nothin' important. Just some stuff about - "
David cut Cyborg off as well. "He said I was going to kill you all."
That one definitely surprised Robin. "What?" asked the Boy Wonder.
David could only lower his head. "He said... I was gonna destroy the Titans. That I was gonna... decide to destroy you guys, or something..."
Cyborg simply folded his arms, having overheard much of this from the rooftops before he had tackled Slade. Starfire and Beast Boy looked flatly astonished, but at least both of them looked more sympathetic than angry or afraid. In the end, everyone here knew that despite the leaps and bounds he had made, destroying even one of the Titans was well beyond David's capabilities, let alone destroying all of them.
At present, he was very glad of that fact.
"Like I said," said Cyborg. "Buncha crap. Don't pay no attention, man. Slade likes to play mind games."
"Maybe..." said Robin cryptically. "Do you have any idea what he meant."
David shook his head. "No," he said. "But... I'd really like to ask him."
Robin thought it over a moment. "Sorry," he said, "we can't take the risk that this might be another episode. You're gonna have to wait upstairs with the - "
"The Gem was born of evil's fire..."
Everyone froze, as Robin's instructions were cut off by a ghastly, hollow voice that was utterly bonechilling. As all five Titans spun around, they watched in horror as one by one, the eyes of the obsidian statues lining the vault began to glow a milky white, and one by one, ghostly spirits, hooded skeletons like the statues themselves, floated up off the statues into the center of the room, chanting the verses to a poem like a chorus of the damned...
"The Gem shall be his portal..."
Beast Boy took several steps back, jaw hanging open at this spectral sight. Starfire's fists glowed green with energy, and she too closed on the others, as if there was safety in numbers. Cyborg closed and opened his human eye slowly, unable to quite believe what he was seeing, while Robin, as he always did at the first sign of trouble, crouched low and reached for his telescoping staff.
"He comes to claim, he comes to sire..."
David watched the ghosts in abject horror, feeling like his lungs were seizing up. His head continued to throb, but he paid it no mind, as the words of the ghosts seemed to course through him, rattling and rolling about in his ears, like the sound of a car's backfire setting off the flashbacks of a war veteran, and he felt something stir up from within him, something familiar and alien all at once...
"The end of all things mortal."
And then all of a sudden, every eye in the room, ghostly and living alike, was fixed on David, for it had not been the ghosts that had spoken the last line... but David himself.
For a few seconds, nobody said anything. And then, as one, the ghosts vanished into nothingness, leaving behind only the five teens, and a host of questions without answers
"Um... dude?" asked Beast Boy.
"How did you know that?" asked Cyborg, looking at David like he could scarcely believe his eyes (or ears).
Would that he could answer coherently. "I've..." he stammered, "I've heard that poem before. I know it from somewhere."
"Where?" asked Robin. "How?"
But to that question, all David could give in reply was a confused and helpless shake of his head, and weak, almost plaintive words.
"I don't know..."
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 26, cont'd more
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"A bunch of people I don't recognize, aliens or something. They looked like big... lizards."
Raven had to admit that the description was clinically accurate, if nothing else
She was back in the atrium again, the marble-floored, open-skied atrium that towered above a burning city, only this time it was not empty, but filled with people.
Lizard people to be precise.
Seven of them there were, standing around the room atop the various multicolored starbursts inlaid into the pure white marble floor. Tall, scaled, green, and adorned in flowing robes and carven symbols of power, they stood rigidly still, eyes shut, hands folded quietly over their chests, while in the center of the room stood an eighth figure. Just as the robes of the first seven lizards matched the colors of the symbols they stood upon, that of the one in the center was black, like the circle he stood on. Rivers of energy flowed about this central figure, as he spoke in tongues so alien that Raven had trouble identifying it as speech. It was clearly some sort of ritual, and judging from the signs, a very powerful one.
She had fended off assault after mental assault, and found her way back here again through the twisted jungle of meaningless symbolism that this thing had tried to lose her in. What she was viewing now was beyond her, but she paused to watch anyway, on the off-chance it would prove useful.
The chanting grew stronger, louder, more intensive, and the magical energies flying about the central figure gained in intensity apace. The marble beneath her feet began to quiver and fracture as powers of enormous potency flowed through them, and above all the oculus that opened up on the heavens began to glow with swirling forces beyond description or measurement. Even though this was only a mindscape, even though nothing here was real, Raven still took several steps back, just an instant before the figure in the center of the room burst into flame.
It wasn't like a normal combustion, it was far quicker. The lizard creature cried out in a terrible voice of mixed pain and ecstasy and went up in flames like a piece of paper in a blowtorch, reduced to ashes in but an instant. And yet the flames did not extinguish but twisted and danced in the center of the room, as all seven figures standing around them chanted louder and louder, crying out in full-throated roars as the magical energy pulsing through the building burst forth and brought down a river of light from the oculus above, a beam of pure whiteness that struck the flames and fractured as though broken by a prism into a kaleidoscope of rainbow colors that twisted and turned and shifted and finally came to settle, one beam of colored light shining directly upon each alien.
And then one by one, they threw back their heads and cried out in agony or joy or some mixture of the two.
And one by one, their cries were answered by a low and terrible roar, echoing up from somewhere below them, amidst the endlessly burning city. It was a nondescript roar, but it was deep and malevolent enough to turn Raven's blood to icewater.
"Do you imagine yourself to be clever?"
Raven spun around and found herself facing an enormous man, six and a half feet tall at least, big and bulky, with red hair and a broad beard. The man's clothes were a riot of colors, a thousand hues tossed together largely at random, but it was the three foot sword, polished and gleaming and burning with shimmering flames in the man's right hand, that really got Raven's attention.
"Waltzing in as though you own this place," said the man, walking slowly towards Raven, "slashing through anything inconvenient, demanding answers imperiously. Does this make you feel superior? Powerful? In control of your own destiny? To toy with others as though we are your anointed playthings? Are you amused?"
Sarcastic or not, there was nothing amused in the red-haired man's gaze. Raven fell back before the advancing swordsman, retreating into the center of the atrium, noting that the lizard-people had all apparently vanished as soon as this man had appeared.
"Tell me what you are," she said. "Tell me how you know who I am, and about the prophecy."
"That you might race off to tell your masters all that I say?" asked the man. "I think not, demon."
"Trigon isn't my master!"
"You lie!" screamed the other, and he swung his sword at Raven. Raven's shield appeared with a thought, but while her shield had sufficed to repel everything the denizens of this mystery realm had thrown at her so far, a single touch of the flaming sword shattered it like glass and threw her across the room, where she slid to a stop up against a column. "Even if I believed you," bellowed the large man, "you are the Gem! The Gem exists to serve the Master! There is no other way."
"And what do you exist for?" replied Raven, as she slowly got back up. Whatever was in that sword was several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything she had so far encountered, more powerful than anything she had ever seen in a mindscape before.
"I exist to repel monstrosities like yourself," said the man. "You have committed a heinous violation in coming here. I exist to ensure you suffer for it."
"Oh, bullshit!" she shouted back at the man. "You're not some subconscious emotion. You're not part of David at all! You're not even human!"
"Coming from one such as you, demon, that is quite a claim." said the man, circling around the room, eyes fixed on her with a blistering intensity.
Raven matched the man's movements as she tried to provoke some kind of confirmation. "What are you?" she repeated. "An alien? A ghost? A possessing spirit? Is that it?"
"Be silent!" snapped the man, spittle flying from his mouth like bullets.
Raven was not silent. "He's not a kinetic at all, is he? That's why his powers don't work the way they should... he gets them from you, from whatever you are, doesn't he?" She frowned at the man, glaring at him from under her cloak. "So where did you come from..."
"SILENCE!!"
The man swung his sword at Raven, and though she was 20 feet away, the distant slash picked her up and slammed her back into the column of marble hard enough to crack it, tearing a fissure in the featureless marble and shaking the entire atrium with the force of his blow. Raven scrambled back to her feet as the red-bearded man, screaming incoherently in thunderous rage, stomped towards her, his sword slashing back and forth through the air, cleaving columns and inlaid symbols apart with each swipe. The telekinetic blows slammed into her, knocking her back against the wall again and again and again. Desperately, she fired back with her own spells, powerful enough to send a subconscious screaming into the night, but the black beams and bolts bounced off of the charging swordsman like foam bullets off a tank.
"Get out!" screamed the swordsman. "Get out get out get out get out!" but Raven could not have gotten out even if she had wished to, not with that level of ease. Manifestations were not a matter of simply throwing a switch, something the man appeared to either be unaware of or past caring. Raven cast up another shield, fortifying it with all her might, the strongest protective barrier she knew how to produce, but with one blow, the swordsman cleaved it in half and threw her to the ground, looming overhead with his sword held high. Such rage poured off of him that he seemed almost framed in red, nightmarish rage, enough to match anything that she had ever conjured up within her own half-demon soul. And as he raised his sword for a final blow, Raven scrambled to find a spell or power that would ward him off, but the beams of black energy she flung into him from her hands were absorbed like water into a sponge.
An effect she remembered well...
And then, with a hell-raising cry, the red-bearded swordsman plunged his sword down towards her, and she opened her mouth to scream.
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"David? David!"
David could not answer immediately, for a jolt of pain three times worse than any of the ones that had preceded it was burning through his skull like lightning. He staggered and stumbled and grabbed at the wall and missed, and would have fallen had Cyborg not caught him. He remained limp for a moment or two, face contorted in pain, until slowly the savage jolt began to fade away, and he was able to open his eyes.
"I'm okay..."
Nobody was convinced by that, not even David himself, but Robin did not once more insist that David return topside to wait with the police, though it clearly took physical effort not to. Shortly after the recital had stopped, Robin had spoken a few words with the others, and had permitted himself to be convinced that since whatever was going on here clearly had something to do with David, and since Slade had apparently chosen to target him in the absence of Raven, that David might well be in more danger if he went back without the others. Robin clearly didn't like it... to be honest neither did David... but there was nothing to be done about it. They would have to simply hope that what was happening was not one of David's crippling migraine-episodes.
So far, the results were not encouraging.
As soon as David could stand again, they continued on. Robin and Starfire were in the lead, trying to decode what the poem could possibly have meant.
"The gem shall be his portal," quoted Robin. "I think they mean this 'Scath' person. And this 'gem' is how he gets here. If we're going to stop him, we need to find it and destroy it."
"I have never heard of someone named 'Scath', said Starfire. "Do you believe the gem is located somewhere in this complex?"
"I don't know," admitted Robin, "but I'll bet Slade does. If we find him, we can make him give us some answers."
At this point, David wasn't sure if he wanted any more 'answers', especially since they all seemed to turn into more cryptic questions whenever they were found. Still, there was nothing for it now. At least his headache had died back down...
"You holdin' up?"
David looked up at Cyborg and nodded solemnly. "I think so," he said. "I... I wish I knew what was going on..."
"We'll figure it out, man, don't worry." said Cyborg, putting a twenty-pound hand on David's shoulder. "Whatever happens down here, we got your back."
The gesture helped. David took a long, deep breath, and let it out. "Thanks," he said.
"No problem," replied Cyborg. "And hey, don't worry 'bout what Slade said, okay?"
David laughed hollowly. "Little easier said than done, Cy..."
"I know, but Slade likes to mess with your head by sayin' things like that. You really didn't even have to tell everybody 'bout it. We all know how Slade is with this stuff."
"Yeah, I did," said David. "Even if it's nothing... I'll feel better if the rest of you all know about it."
Cyborg shrugged. "Your call," he said. "Just don't want you feelin' like you gotta clear everything through us. You're still pretty new to this thing, but you're gettin' the hang of it. You're gonna have to trust yourself one o' these days."
Despite everything, the comment brought a smile to David's face. He glanced back up at Cyborg. "Maybe tomorrow, eh?"
Cyborg laughed. "Whatever you say, bomb squad..."
All further opportunities for discussion were curtailed immediately, as the hallway they were proceeding down came to an abrupt end at a massive vertical shaft, forty feet across and so deep that the bottom could not be discerned, not even with lights or molecular vision. A broad spiral staircase adorned the outer wall of the shaft, spinning down into the darkness.
Cyborg whistled. "How far do you think it goes...?"
"Only one way to find out," said Beast Boy, and before anyone could contradict him he hocked up an enormous loogie and spat it over the edge of the stairwell, letting it plummet down out of sight as he and the others all waited to hear the splat.
The silent drop lasted twelve seconds.
Cyborg stated the obvious. "That's... far..."
"Then we better get started," said Robin, turning to the stairs and beginning to descend them. "I'm willing to bet that gem is down there."
"Yeah," said Cyborg, "but what else is down there with it?"
Nobody cared to answer him, and all five Titans began to descend along with Robin. The stairs were wide enough to take three or four abreast, and they naturally grouped up fairly tightly, none of them confident that there wasn't some eldrich horror lurking in an unseen corner waiting to spring out and ambush them all. Fortunately, David's headache had begun to recede, and was now manageable enough that he could spare some thought for something else. He found himself wishing that he knew what had happened to those three kids... hoping that the cops had found them already. Slade hadn't been out of his sight long enough to target them, but then again who could tell what Slade was capable of now?
And where the hell was Raven?
Beast Boy was still fingering his communicator nervously, though for the moment he had given up on calling her. Every so often, Beast Boy glanced back at him, and he did his best to smile reassuringly back, though he probably wasn't too convincing. Raven missing, in trouble, or otherwise out of sorts made everyone nervous of course, even David (though perhaps for different reasons), but it seemed always to hit Beast Boy the hardest.
No points awarded for guessing why of course, but that was a subject for another day.
"Sounds like we've got company."
Of all the things Robin could possibly have said, that was the one David least wanted to hear, but an instant later he knew that Robin was right as a pale blue light emerged from further down in the shaft, and quickly rose up towards them. Everyone, David included, quickly adopted a combat position, ready for anything, even Slade.
But not for this.
What rose up from the depths of the darkened shaft sent cries of fright from Beast Boy's lips, and would have from David's had his throat been working properly. Starfire swore in Tamaranean, and Cyborg in English, while Robin, characteristically, simply gripped his staff tightly and set himself to receive the charge of the horde of armed ghosts that wafted up through the very stairs.
Not just ghosts. Monsters.
The skeletal spectres were hideous to look at, beaked, bat-winged, and festooned with rotting flesh and decayed skin, all translucent and glowing with an unearthly light. A terrible sound, a moan mixed with an anguished wail, emerged from all of them as they lifted scythes and swords and rusty blades of no description, and advanced on the Titans from all sides.
For once, Robin needed to give no orders.
Instantly, the Titans were submerged in a horde of the undead monsters, but rote training paid off, and all of them sprung away, dodging clumsy slashes and snatching claws to strike back as they could. Beast Boy became a kangaroo and leapt over one, kicking at another, while Robin simply dodged through five slashes and lashed out with his fist to catch one of the ghosts in the face. In both cases however, their feet and hands passed through the ethereal creatures with no effect whatsoever.
"I can't hit them!" shouted Robin, an instant before Starfire tried to vaporize two of the ghosts with her Starbolts, and succeeded only in disrupting them for a bare second. Cyborg punched at one, with the same result, and for his trouble was belted in the chest by the offended spirit hard enough to throw him back into the wall.
"Yeah, well they can hit us!" cried Cyborg, opening fire with his sonic cannon at point blank range. The disruption lasted longer this time, but no permanent effect was scored, and he quickly had to retreat to avoid getting sliced to pieces.
David had no idea what to do.
His baton was unlikely to have any better effect than Robin's fists had, and the ghosts were already swarming towards him. Desperately he fell back, switching into his molecular vision to try and gain some purchase on the spirit's physical bodies. To his horror, he found that in molecular vision the spirits were completely invisible. They had no physical bodies. Ergo there was nothing to destroy.
Desperately, he targeted a piece of the stairs themselves, hoping to catch the ghosts in the explosion, but the blast barely shook the spirits, even when set off inside their ethereal forms. One of the ghosts charged at him, and he stumbled backwards, narrowly avoiding the slash but winding up backed against the wall with a sea of ghosts all around him and nobody else in sight. The nearest ghost stepped towards him, and he swung at it with his baton, unsheathed and silent, to no effect at all, as the ghost casually pivoted around with an enormous sickle.
And then, before his very eyes, the spirit rammed all two feet of the blade straight through his chest.
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The scream never came.
The sound of marble being rent, of metal screaming as it sliced through rock, sundered her ears and resonated inside her head, but Raven remained laying on the ground, and no corresponding spike of pain indicated where the red-haired swordsman had impaled her. And then slowly, she cracked her eyes open, and saw something she did not expect.
The swordsman was crouched over her, the sword driven straight down into the ground like a railroad spike, buried up to the hilt in the white marble floor. But rather than stabbing right through her, the sword had been driven into the ground an inch away from her head, close enough that its flames licked the side of her face, though like all flames here, they did not burn. And even more strangely, rather than drawing the sword back once more and striking home this time, the swordsman was sitting there motionless, watching her with a mixture of anger and fear in his eyes.
What the hell?
Raven blinked a few times to ensure that she was not hallucinating, and then quickly phased through the floor, re-appearing on the other side of the atrium with her powers crackling over her hands. The swordsman remained crouched where he was, following her with his eyes, and only after she had taken up her new position did he slowly stand back up, though he made no move to pursue her.
She should be dead. She knew that much. There was enough power in that metaphysical sword to kill her twenty times over, and she could not have mis-read the murderous rage flying off the swordsman empathically like a machine gun spraying bullets all over the room. He had wished to kill her. He had possessed the means to kill her. He had availed himself of the opportunity to kill her.
He had failed to kill her.
There was nothing she had done to prevent it, so what the hell was this?
The swordsman watched her like a mouse watching a snake. There was still anger there, but more fear now, more and more every second, though why he should suddenly become afraid was beyond her. Her powers, her most devastating mental combat abilities, had not served even to scratch his clothing.
"Why won't you just leave?" demanded the swordsman. His massive bulk shook and then suddenly shrank, resolving a moment later back into the form of David, his sword transforming back into David's baton. All this was strange, but stranger still was the tone in which the question had been asked. It was utterly bereft of command and confidence, a pleading tone that sounded thin and fearful.
What was she missing?
She left her defenses at the ready, but called upon another slew of powers entirely, and reached out empathically towards the figure standing there in the guise of David. He tried to resist her, tried to establish a mental block of some sort, but his skill at mental scan-blocking did not exceed her own, and she brushed aside his attempt. Of course he could always counterattack, reform his sword and lash out again, or blast her with some kind of mental feedback, but he did no such thing.
"Why didn't you kill me..." she asked him, vocally and psychically both, and on both counts she received no answer save more bursts of anger. Accordingly she searched. She was not trying to read his thoughts. Alien thoughts were almost impossible to read in any event. All she was looking for was something odd, anything out of the ordinary that might explain what she was dealing with. She felt the creature's emotions, felt its, confusion, anger, surprise, but above all its terrible fear, fear of her. The only conclusion she could come to was that he wanted to kill her. Badly.
But he had not.
... perhaps... he could not.
Why? Why could he not? He had means, motive, and opportunity. What was stopping him? What was going on here? Why wasn't he leaping at her throat this very instant to tear her apart. After all, as long as she was manifested inside him, then to slay her here would kill her entirely. If he wanted this 'demon' dead, why not take the opportunity to simply do away with...
By Azar...
"Leave," pleaded the thing resembling David. "In the name of all the Gods, please leave!" it sounded almost pathetic now, begging her to leave it be.
"You weren't trying to kill me," she said slowly, working it out herself at the same pace as she spoke it. "You were... trying to scare me into leaving, weren't you?"
"You have got to leave! Please!"
"You want to kill me. I can feel it from you even now. But you can't do it yourself... why not?"
"You don't understand!"
"Oh, I think I do..." said Raven, as a hollow pit opened up inside her stomach at that very prospect. "You've got the power to kill me outright, but something's stopping you. Something won't let you. It's can't be David stopping you, he doesn't even know I'm here. It's you."
"Damn you!" shrieked David, by now nearly in tears. "Damn you, get out!"
She built to her crescendo, her powers searching for the key, the missing part to the puzzle that was staring her in the face now that she knew what to look for. "You can't kill me! You can't hurt me at all, even though you have the power and you want to! In fact, you can't kill anybody, can you? You're not permitted to! You're not posessing David at all! David's possessing you!"
A hideous, baleful scream was all that the creature could reply with as the entire tower shook and twisted on its foundations, and the sky clouded over grey. A moment later, great fractures were torn in the firmament, and sinister-looking blades jutted in from them, bony and sharp and enormous, like the prows of gigantic ships. One emerged near to her, and she threw herself to the ground to avoid it, and landed hard, rolling over just in time to see the figure standing on the opposite side of the Atrium scream an anguished cry to the heavens.
"LEAVE THIS ONE ALONE!!"
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
He felt nothing.
For a second or two he was frozen in shock, aware only of the fact that there was an enormous ethereal sword sticking right through him, his brain telling him that any moment now he would feel the unfathomable pain of having been pinned to the wall like a beetle by this thing, and that shortly thereafter he would feel nothing at all, as a wound like this was certainly mortal.
A moment passed, and he still felt nothing.
Dimly he heard shouts, screams even, people shouting his name, and blue and green beams of energy flaying the air around him, but he could not piece together what that meant. All he could do was stare the ghost in its skeletal face, and wonder when he would feel it. A full second passed, another, another. Only then was he beginning to realize that no blood was streaming down his shirt, that no nerves were tingling with the pain of being severed, that no force was pinning him to the wall, that in short, the ghost's magical blade, one which had proven capable of physically striking every one of the other Titans, had passed through him like it was made of smoke, and done nothing at all.
And just as he was trying to figure out how that could possibly be, every single ghost assailing the five Titans blew up.
Like a bomb had gone off within it the ghost in front of him flew apart, its form destabilizing like a cloud scattered by wind. Nor was the explosion merely ethereal. The wall behind David cracked, the stairs below the ghost crumbled, and debris was blown off them into the deep well behind the ghost. And yet despite this, not a single bit of pressure did David feel, the blast wave that should have shattered his ribs and pulped his organs, warping around him as though it was he who was without physical form. And no sooner did this happen than the entire stairwell was filled with smoke and fire as every ghost without exception was instantly obliterated. All four of the other Titans were knocked sprawling, battered and thrown about by a mass of concordant pressure waves. Beast Boy was slammed into the wall, Starfire blown up into the air, Cyborg knocked face down onto the stairs, and Robin nearly pitched off the stairwell itself into the shaft.
But in the center of it all stood David, motionless, baton still held in his frozen hand, staring out like a shell-shock victim at the now-empty stairwell shaft, and at the four other Titans who stared wordlessly back at the architect of this impossible act. By no understanding of the ways that the world worked was this thing that had just occurred even possible, and yet here it was. And as Beast Boy and Cyborg and Starfire and Robin all simply stared, David stood like a statue, unable to move or act or even think beyond the fact that the mother of all inexplicable events had just occurred, far far beyond the relatively minor mysteries of before.
But that like before he had no goddamned idea what had just happened.
And before he or anyone else could consider what in God's name to do or say or ask now, the entire stairwell, weakened by the cumulative effects of two hundred simultaneous explosions, gave way all at once and collapsed, spilling all five Titans down into the impenetrable darkness of the underground shaft.
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"A bunch of people I don't recognize, aliens or something. They looked like big... lizards."
Raven had to admit that the description was clinically accurate, if nothing else
She was back in the atrium again, the marble-floored, open-skied atrium that towered above a burning city, only this time it was not empty, but filled with people.
Lizard people to be precise.
Seven of them there were, standing around the room atop the various multicolored starbursts inlaid into the pure white marble floor. Tall, scaled, green, and adorned in flowing robes and carven symbols of power, they stood rigidly still, eyes shut, hands folded quietly over their chests, while in the center of the room stood an eighth figure. Just as the robes of the first seven lizards matched the colors of the symbols they stood upon, that of the one in the center was black, like the circle he stood on. Rivers of energy flowed about this central figure, as he spoke in tongues so alien that Raven had trouble identifying it as speech. It was clearly some sort of ritual, and judging from the signs, a very powerful one.
She had fended off assault after mental assault, and found her way back here again through the twisted jungle of meaningless symbolism that this thing had tried to lose her in. What she was viewing now was beyond her, but she paused to watch anyway, on the off-chance it would prove useful.
The chanting grew stronger, louder, more intensive, and the magical energies flying about the central figure gained in intensity apace. The marble beneath her feet began to quiver and fracture as powers of enormous potency flowed through them, and above all the oculus that opened up on the heavens began to glow with swirling forces beyond description or measurement. Even though this was only a mindscape, even though nothing here was real, Raven still took several steps back, just an instant before the figure in the center of the room burst into flame.
It wasn't like a normal combustion, it was far quicker. The lizard creature cried out in a terrible voice of mixed pain and ecstasy and went up in flames like a piece of paper in a blowtorch, reduced to ashes in but an instant. And yet the flames did not extinguish but twisted and danced in the center of the room, as all seven figures standing around them chanted louder and louder, crying out in full-throated roars as the magical energy pulsing through the building burst forth and brought down a river of light from the oculus above, a beam of pure whiteness that struck the flames and fractured as though broken by a prism into a kaleidoscope of rainbow colors that twisted and turned and shifted and finally came to settle, one beam of colored light shining directly upon each alien.
And then one by one, they threw back their heads and cried out in agony or joy or some mixture of the two.
And one by one, their cries were answered by a low and terrible roar, echoing up from somewhere below them, amidst the endlessly burning city. It was a nondescript roar, but it was deep and malevolent enough to turn Raven's blood to icewater.
"Do you imagine yourself to be clever?"
Raven spun around and found herself facing an enormous man, six and a half feet tall at least, big and bulky, with red hair and a broad beard. The man's clothes were a riot of colors, a thousand hues tossed together largely at random, but it was the three foot sword, polished and gleaming and burning with shimmering flames in the man's right hand, that really got Raven's attention.
"Waltzing in as though you own this place," said the man, walking slowly towards Raven, "slashing through anything inconvenient, demanding answers imperiously. Does this make you feel superior? Powerful? In control of your own destiny? To toy with others as though we are your anointed playthings? Are you amused?"
Sarcastic or not, there was nothing amused in the red-haired man's gaze. Raven fell back before the advancing swordsman, retreating into the center of the atrium, noting that the lizard-people had all apparently vanished as soon as this man had appeared.
"Tell me what you are," she said. "Tell me how you know who I am, and about the prophecy."
"That you might race off to tell your masters all that I say?" asked the man. "I think not, demon."
"Trigon isn't my master!"
"You lie!" screamed the other, and he swung his sword at Raven. Raven's shield appeared with a thought, but while her shield had sufficed to repel everything the denizens of this mystery realm had thrown at her so far, a single touch of the flaming sword shattered it like glass and threw her across the room, where she slid to a stop up against a column. "Even if I believed you," bellowed the large man, "you are the Gem! The Gem exists to serve the Master! There is no other way."
"And what do you exist for?" replied Raven, as she slowly got back up. Whatever was in that sword was several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything she had so far encountered, more powerful than anything she had ever seen in a mindscape before.
"I exist to repel monstrosities like yourself," said the man. "You have committed a heinous violation in coming here. I exist to ensure you suffer for it."
"Oh, bullshit!" she shouted back at the man. "You're not some subconscious emotion. You're not part of David at all! You're not even human!"
"Coming from one such as you, demon, that is quite a claim." said the man, circling around the room, eyes fixed on her with a blistering intensity.
Raven matched the man's movements as she tried to provoke some kind of confirmation. "What are you?" she repeated. "An alien? A ghost? A possessing spirit? Is that it?"
"Be silent!" snapped the man, spittle flying from his mouth like bullets.
Raven was not silent. "He's not a kinetic at all, is he? That's why his powers don't work the way they should... he gets them from you, from whatever you are, doesn't he?" She frowned at the man, glaring at him from under her cloak. "So where did you come from..."
"SILENCE!!"
The man swung his sword at Raven, and though she was 20 feet away, the distant slash picked her up and slammed her back into the column of marble hard enough to crack it, tearing a fissure in the featureless marble and shaking the entire atrium with the force of his blow. Raven scrambled back to her feet as the red-bearded man, screaming incoherently in thunderous rage, stomped towards her, his sword slashing back and forth through the air, cleaving columns and inlaid symbols apart with each swipe. The telekinetic blows slammed into her, knocking her back against the wall again and again and again. Desperately, she fired back with her own spells, powerful enough to send a subconscious screaming into the night, but the black beams and bolts bounced off of the charging swordsman like foam bullets off a tank.
"Get out!" screamed the swordsman. "Get out get out get out get out!" but Raven could not have gotten out even if she had wished to, not with that level of ease. Manifestations were not a matter of simply throwing a switch, something the man appeared to either be unaware of or past caring. Raven cast up another shield, fortifying it with all her might, the strongest protective barrier she knew how to produce, but with one blow, the swordsman cleaved it in half and threw her to the ground, looming overhead with his sword held high. Such rage poured off of him that he seemed almost framed in red, nightmarish rage, enough to match anything that she had ever conjured up within her own half-demon soul. And as he raised his sword for a final blow, Raven scrambled to find a spell or power that would ward him off, but the beams of black energy she flung into him from her hands were absorbed like water into a sponge.
An effect she remembered well...
And then, with a hell-raising cry, the red-bearded swordsman plunged his sword down towards her, and she opened her mouth to scream.
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
"David? David!"
David could not answer immediately, for a jolt of pain three times worse than any of the ones that had preceded it was burning through his skull like lightning. He staggered and stumbled and grabbed at the wall and missed, and would have fallen had Cyborg not caught him. He remained limp for a moment or two, face contorted in pain, until slowly the savage jolt began to fade away, and he was able to open his eyes.
"I'm okay..."
Nobody was convinced by that, not even David himself, but Robin did not once more insist that David return topside to wait with the police, though it clearly took physical effort not to. Shortly after the recital had stopped, Robin had spoken a few words with the others, and had permitted himself to be convinced that since whatever was going on here clearly had something to do with David, and since Slade had apparently chosen to target him in the absence of Raven, that David might well be in more danger if he went back without the others. Robin clearly didn't like it... to be honest neither did David... but there was nothing to be done about it. They would have to simply hope that what was happening was not one of David's crippling migraine-episodes.
So far, the results were not encouraging.
As soon as David could stand again, they continued on. Robin and Starfire were in the lead, trying to decode what the poem could possibly have meant.
"The gem shall be his portal," quoted Robin. "I think they mean this 'Scath' person. And this 'gem' is how he gets here. If we're going to stop him, we need to find it and destroy it."
"I have never heard of someone named 'Scath', said Starfire. "Do you believe the gem is located somewhere in this complex?"
"I don't know," admitted Robin, "but I'll bet Slade does. If we find him, we can make him give us some answers."
At this point, David wasn't sure if he wanted any more 'answers', especially since they all seemed to turn into more cryptic questions whenever they were found. Still, there was nothing for it now. At least his headache had died back down...
"You holdin' up?"
David looked up at Cyborg and nodded solemnly. "I think so," he said. "I... I wish I knew what was going on..."
"We'll figure it out, man, don't worry." said Cyborg, putting a twenty-pound hand on David's shoulder. "Whatever happens down here, we got your back."
The gesture helped. David took a long, deep breath, and let it out. "Thanks," he said.
"No problem," replied Cyborg. "And hey, don't worry 'bout what Slade said, okay?"
David laughed hollowly. "Little easier said than done, Cy..."
"I know, but Slade likes to mess with your head by sayin' things like that. You really didn't even have to tell everybody 'bout it. We all know how Slade is with this stuff."
"Yeah, I did," said David. "Even if it's nothing... I'll feel better if the rest of you all know about it."
Cyborg shrugged. "Your call," he said. "Just don't want you feelin' like you gotta clear everything through us. You're still pretty new to this thing, but you're gettin' the hang of it. You're gonna have to trust yourself one o' these days."
Despite everything, the comment brought a smile to David's face. He glanced back up at Cyborg. "Maybe tomorrow, eh?"
Cyborg laughed. "Whatever you say, bomb squad..."
All further opportunities for discussion were curtailed immediately, as the hallway they were proceeding down came to an abrupt end at a massive vertical shaft, forty feet across and so deep that the bottom could not be discerned, not even with lights or molecular vision. A broad spiral staircase adorned the outer wall of the shaft, spinning down into the darkness.
Cyborg whistled. "How far do you think it goes...?"
"Only one way to find out," said Beast Boy, and before anyone could contradict him he hocked up an enormous loogie and spat it over the edge of the stairwell, letting it plummet down out of sight as he and the others all waited to hear the splat.
The silent drop lasted twelve seconds.
Cyborg stated the obvious. "That's... far..."
"Then we better get started," said Robin, turning to the stairs and beginning to descend them. "I'm willing to bet that gem is down there."
"Yeah," said Cyborg, "but what else is down there with it?"
Nobody cared to answer him, and all five Titans began to descend along with Robin. The stairs were wide enough to take three or four abreast, and they naturally grouped up fairly tightly, none of them confident that there wasn't some eldrich horror lurking in an unseen corner waiting to spring out and ambush them all. Fortunately, David's headache had begun to recede, and was now manageable enough that he could spare some thought for something else. He found himself wishing that he knew what had happened to those three kids... hoping that the cops had found them already. Slade hadn't been out of his sight long enough to target them, but then again who could tell what Slade was capable of now?
And where the hell was Raven?
Beast Boy was still fingering his communicator nervously, though for the moment he had given up on calling her. Every so often, Beast Boy glanced back at him, and he did his best to smile reassuringly back, though he probably wasn't too convincing. Raven missing, in trouble, or otherwise out of sorts made everyone nervous of course, even David (though perhaps for different reasons), but it seemed always to hit Beast Boy the hardest.
No points awarded for guessing why of course, but that was a subject for another day.
"Sounds like we've got company."
Of all the things Robin could possibly have said, that was the one David least wanted to hear, but an instant later he knew that Robin was right as a pale blue light emerged from further down in the shaft, and quickly rose up towards them. Everyone, David included, quickly adopted a combat position, ready for anything, even Slade.
But not for this.
What rose up from the depths of the darkened shaft sent cries of fright from Beast Boy's lips, and would have from David's had his throat been working properly. Starfire swore in Tamaranean, and Cyborg in English, while Robin, characteristically, simply gripped his staff tightly and set himself to receive the charge of the horde of armed ghosts that wafted up through the very stairs.
Not just ghosts. Monsters.
The skeletal spectres were hideous to look at, beaked, bat-winged, and festooned with rotting flesh and decayed skin, all translucent and glowing with an unearthly light. A terrible sound, a moan mixed with an anguished wail, emerged from all of them as they lifted scythes and swords and rusty blades of no description, and advanced on the Titans from all sides.
For once, Robin needed to give no orders.
Instantly, the Titans were submerged in a horde of the undead monsters, but rote training paid off, and all of them sprung away, dodging clumsy slashes and snatching claws to strike back as they could. Beast Boy became a kangaroo and leapt over one, kicking at another, while Robin simply dodged through five slashes and lashed out with his fist to catch one of the ghosts in the face. In both cases however, their feet and hands passed through the ethereal creatures with no effect whatsoever.
"I can't hit them!" shouted Robin, an instant before Starfire tried to vaporize two of the ghosts with her Starbolts, and succeeded only in disrupting them for a bare second. Cyborg punched at one, with the same result, and for his trouble was belted in the chest by the offended spirit hard enough to throw him back into the wall.
"Yeah, well they can hit us!" cried Cyborg, opening fire with his sonic cannon at point blank range. The disruption lasted longer this time, but no permanent effect was scored, and he quickly had to retreat to avoid getting sliced to pieces.
David had no idea what to do.
His baton was unlikely to have any better effect than Robin's fists had, and the ghosts were already swarming towards him. Desperately he fell back, switching into his molecular vision to try and gain some purchase on the spirit's physical bodies. To his horror, he found that in molecular vision the spirits were completely invisible. They had no physical bodies. Ergo there was nothing to destroy.
Desperately, he targeted a piece of the stairs themselves, hoping to catch the ghosts in the explosion, but the blast barely shook the spirits, even when set off inside their ethereal forms. One of the ghosts charged at him, and he stumbled backwards, narrowly avoiding the slash but winding up backed against the wall with a sea of ghosts all around him and nobody else in sight. The nearest ghost stepped towards him, and he swung at it with his baton, unsheathed and silent, to no effect at all, as the ghost casually pivoted around with an enormous sickle.
And then, before his very eyes, the spirit rammed all two feet of the blade straight through his chest.
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
The scream never came.
The sound of marble being rent, of metal screaming as it sliced through rock, sundered her ears and resonated inside her head, but Raven remained laying on the ground, and no corresponding spike of pain indicated where the red-haired swordsman had impaled her. And then slowly, she cracked her eyes open, and saw something she did not expect.
The swordsman was crouched over her, the sword driven straight down into the ground like a railroad spike, buried up to the hilt in the white marble floor. But rather than stabbing right through her, the sword had been driven into the ground an inch away from her head, close enough that its flames licked the side of her face, though like all flames here, they did not burn. And even more strangely, rather than drawing the sword back once more and striking home this time, the swordsman was sitting there motionless, watching her with a mixture of anger and fear in his eyes.
What the hell?
Raven blinked a few times to ensure that she was not hallucinating, and then quickly phased through the floor, re-appearing on the other side of the atrium with her powers crackling over her hands. The swordsman remained crouched where he was, following her with his eyes, and only after she had taken up her new position did he slowly stand back up, though he made no move to pursue her.
She should be dead. She knew that much. There was enough power in that metaphysical sword to kill her twenty times over, and she could not have mis-read the murderous rage flying off the swordsman empathically like a machine gun spraying bullets all over the room. He had wished to kill her. He had possessed the means to kill her. He had availed himself of the opportunity to kill her.
He had failed to kill her.
There was nothing she had done to prevent it, so what the hell was this?
The swordsman watched her like a mouse watching a snake. There was still anger there, but more fear now, more and more every second, though why he should suddenly become afraid was beyond her. Her powers, her most devastating mental combat abilities, had not served even to scratch his clothing.
"Why won't you just leave?" demanded the swordsman. His massive bulk shook and then suddenly shrank, resolving a moment later back into the form of David, his sword transforming back into David's baton. All this was strange, but stranger still was the tone in which the question had been asked. It was utterly bereft of command and confidence, a pleading tone that sounded thin and fearful.
What was she missing?
She left her defenses at the ready, but called upon another slew of powers entirely, and reached out empathically towards the figure standing there in the guise of David. He tried to resist her, tried to establish a mental block of some sort, but his skill at mental scan-blocking did not exceed her own, and she brushed aside his attempt. Of course he could always counterattack, reform his sword and lash out again, or blast her with some kind of mental feedback, but he did no such thing.
"Why didn't you kill me..." she asked him, vocally and psychically both, and on both counts she received no answer save more bursts of anger. Accordingly she searched. She was not trying to read his thoughts. Alien thoughts were almost impossible to read in any event. All she was looking for was something odd, anything out of the ordinary that might explain what she was dealing with. She felt the creature's emotions, felt its, confusion, anger, surprise, but above all its terrible fear, fear of her. The only conclusion she could come to was that he wanted to kill her. Badly.
But he had not.
... perhaps... he could not.
Why? Why could he not? He had means, motive, and opportunity. What was stopping him? What was going on here? Why wasn't he leaping at her throat this very instant to tear her apart. After all, as long as she was manifested inside him, then to slay her here would kill her entirely. If he wanted this 'demon' dead, why not take the opportunity to simply do away with...
By Azar...
"Leave," pleaded the thing resembling David. "In the name of all the Gods, please leave!" it sounded almost pathetic now, begging her to leave it be.
"You weren't trying to kill me," she said slowly, working it out herself at the same pace as she spoke it. "You were... trying to scare me into leaving, weren't you?"
"You have got to leave! Please!"
"You want to kill me. I can feel it from you even now. But you can't do it yourself... why not?"
"You don't understand!"
"Oh, I think I do..." said Raven, as a hollow pit opened up inside her stomach at that very prospect. "You've got the power to kill me outright, but something's stopping you. Something won't let you. It's can't be David stopping you, he doesn't even know I'm here. It's you."
"Damn you!" shrieked David, by now nearly in tears. "Damn you, get out!"
She built to her crescendo, her powers searching for the key, the missing part to the puzzle that was staring her in the face now that she knew what to look for. "You can't kill me! You can't hurt me at all, even though you have the power and you want to! In fact, you can't kill anybody, can you? You're not permitted to! You're not posessing David at all! David's possessing you!"
A hideous, baleful scream was all that the creature could reply with as the entire tower shook and twisted on its foundations, and the sky clouded over grey. A moment later, great fractures were torn in the firmament, and sinister-looking blades jutted in from them, bony and sharp and enormous, like the prows of gigantic ships. One emerged near to her, and she threw herself to the ground to avoid it, and landed hard, rolling over just in time to see the figure standing on the opposite side of the Atrium scream an anguished cry to the heavens.
"LEAVE THIS ONE ALONE!!"
*------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
He felt nothing.
For a second or two he was frozen in shock, aware only of the fact that there was an enormous ethereal sword sticking right through him, his brain telling him that any moment now he would feel the unfathomable pain of having been pinned to the wall like a beetle by this thing, and that shortly thereafter he would feel nothing at all, as a wound like this was certainly mortal.
A moment passed, and he still felt nothing.
Dimly he heard shouts, screams even, people shouting his name, and blue and green beams of energy flaying the air around him, but he could not piece together what that meant. All he could do was stare the ghost in its skeletal face, and wonder when he would feel it. A full second passed, another, another. Only then was he beginning to realize that no blood was streaming down his shirt, that no nerves were tingling with the pain of being severed, that no force was pinning him to the wall, that in short, the ghost's magical blade, one which had proven capable of physically striking every one of the other Titans, had passed through him like it was made of smoke, and done nothing at all.
And just as he was trying to figure out how that could possibly be, every single ghost assailing the five Titans blew up.
Like a bomb had gone off within it the ghost in front of him flew apart, its form destabilizing like a cloud scattered by wind. Nor was the explosion merely ethereal. The wall behind David cracked, the stairs below the ghost crumbled, and debris was blown off them into the deep well behind the ghost. And yet despite this, not a single bit of pressure did David feel, the blast wave that should have shattered his ribs and pulped his organs, warping around him as though it was he who was without physical form. And no sooner did this happen than the entire stairwell was filled with smoke and fire as every ghost without exception was instantly obliterated. All four of the other Titans were knocked sprawling, battered and thrown about by a mass of concordant pressure waves. Beast Boy was slammed into the wall, Starfire blown up into the air, Cyborg knocked face down onto the stairs, and Robin nearly pitched off the stairwell itself into the shaft.
But in the center of it all stood David, motionless, baton still held in his frozen hand, staring out like a shell-shock victim at the now-empty stairwell shaft, and at the four other Titans who stared wordlessly back at the architect of this impossible act. By no understanding of the ways that the world worked was this thing that had just occurred even possible, and yet here it was. And as Beast Boy and Cyborg and Starfire and Robin all simply stared, David stood like a statue, unable to move or act or even think beyond the fact that the mother of all inexplicable events had just occurred, far far beyond the relatively minor mysteries of before.
But that like before he had no goddamned idea what had just happened.
And before he or anyone else could consider what in God's name to do or say or ask now, the entire stairwell, weakened by the cumulative effects of two hundred simultaneous explosions, gave way all at once and collapsed, spilling all five Titans down into the impenetrable darkness of the underground shaft.
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 27: Devastator
"Run your fingers through my soul. For once, just once, feel exactly what I feel, believe what I believe, perceive as I perceive. Look, experience, examine, and for once, just once, understand."
- Anonymous
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
Twelve seconds.
Eleven.
The experience of falling from an immense height was usually so rapid that you scarcely had time to blink, let alone take in your surroundings. The acceleration of gravity was such that it felt more like being fired downwards out of a cannon, wind whipping past your face, spinning and twisting you around like a toy. The few occasions David had had to fall any great distance, his overwhelming impression had simply been how fast it was. Normally, one instant you were miles above the ground, and the next you struck.
But now it seemed he'd been falling for a hundred years.
Ten seconds.
Nine.
Perhaps the world had slowed. Perhaps time itself was warping again. Perhaps his brain had finally snapped, and he was perceiving the world as some kind of decelerated, surreal nightmare. Perhaps it really was one. Everything was free falling, above, below, to the sides. He spun on all three axes, catching only brief glimpses of the others, themselves spinning and calling to one another, or warding of the falling debris which flew about them in pieces ranging from the size of a pebble to the size of the T-car.
Eight seconds.
Seven.
His brain was working so sluggishly, he could no longer remember how far there was to fall, or why he was falling. All his available bandwidth was spoken for, and his memory was dominated by the image of a ghost shrieking like a train whistle before bursting into spectral fragments that flayed the air and shattered the walls and ground...
... but not him.
In the back of his mind, warning bells were ringing. The ground was not an infinite distance away, and at the speeds he was falling, he would dash himself to pieces on the rock below if he did not act now. But the rules of reality had melted away, and he could not remember what to do, or if there was something for him to do. Explosions and blades of force had melted away before him, and while he managed, barely, to convince his conscious mind that what was happening merited action, when the moment came to decide what sort of action was required, he could draw nothing but a blank
Six.
Five.
Below loomed a white glow, not bright but glistening and ethereal, a cold and unwelcoming light from whence issued a low moan, like a distant cry for succor and deliverance. David heard the others shout to one another as they recognized the sound and light for what it was. More ghosts, hundreds more, waiting down at the base of the pit for the Titans to fall within reach.
Four seconds.
The baton was still in his hand, unlit at this point, as the sea of spirits below resolved to individual figures and loomed closer and closer, rusted spectral blades brandished in anticipation of blood. David had destroyed their fellows just seconds ago, blotted them out of existence by the dozen and the hundred, but the base fact that he had done this somehow was still seeping into his conscious mind, and even if he had possessed the wherewithal to try and determine how, he had no conception of how he was to avoid splattering himself into paste on the ground below.
Like a deer in headlights, he stared, motionless, thoughtless, unable to act, only able to watch as his own doom approached. As he fell, one of the spirits flew up to meet him and lashed out with a ghostly sword, as though to cut him in half. He had no means of pivoting or moving to avoid the blow, and he closed his eyes as it struck. He felt something tighten sharply around his waist, roughly where the sword had hit, and instantly knew it was all over, that he'd been torn apart, and that in any event there was nothing left but the few seconds remaining before he slammed into the ground at a hundred and twenty miles per hour.
Three seconds.
Two.
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
The floor was made of stone.
Raven could feel it beneath her hands and knees before she saw it, for she had closed her eyes tightly when the world seemed to disintegrate around her, and only once she felt something solid beneath her did she open them again. Porous stone lay there, volcanic pumice perhaps, illuminated dimly by light from far above, and she raised her head and saw a soaring, Gothic hall laid out before her, arches piled upon arches, studded with windows of violet glass and cloaked with velvet draperies dyed a rich indigo. Light suffused the room, partly from some invisible source lost in the riot of buttresses and vaults far above, partly from the soft glow through the stained glass windows, casting everything into a solemn blue.
Slowly she stood up, looking and feeling around for any sign of life in this strange new setting. Her surroundings had shifted many times already in this investigation, but something in the undercurrents felt different this time. The other locations had felt like facades, matte paintings erected to present a subconscious illusion, but the mental architecture of this location felt solid, physical, real. Or at least as real as one got in a mindscape.
"Hey there!"
Instinct took over, and Raven whirled around with shield raised and powers charged and ready, but instead of a monster, she found herself staring at a person made of water.
A small, slight figure was standing a dozen feet away, arms held behind his back, smiling and rocking back and forth slowly in a relaxed and casual pose, but the figure's demeanor could not have been further from Raven's mind at present. The being was comprised entirely of a clear liquid, sparkling in the dim light, its surface eddying as its motion sent minuscule hydraulic waves rippling through its body. Made either of water or some water-like substance, it nevertheless was an exact facsimile of a person, the water conforming exactly to the shape of a teenaged boy, down to the folds of his clothing, the short-cropped cut of his hair, and the gently smiling features on his face. Nevertheless, a mass of translucent water was not the easiest thing to identify, and it took Raven an embarrassingly-long three seconds to realize who she was looking at.
"David?"
"Expecting someone else?" asked the water-mass with a grin, speaking with David's voice despite possessing neither throat nor tongue, its 'mouth' moving like a computer-generated graphical effect. The simulacrum smiled, or at least appeared to, and laughed, sending ripples all over its surface. "It's his head, after all."
"You're not - "
"Devastator? Nah. He's busy. He'll be along though." The water-figure grinned and ambled over to one of the purple windows, whistling pleasantly as it walked, though how it did that with neither lips nor lungs was anybody's guess. Raven watched it quietly, as it stared out the window for a few moments, hands clasped loosely behind its back, just watching whatever was going on outside.
"How come you keep going in there?"
It took Raven a second to realize the question was meant for her, and she walked to the window to see what the animate water-sculpture was talking about. The window looked down on a forest far below them, verdant and green. And directly opposite them, glistening in the perpetual sunlight, sat an enormous, translucent gold dome, the same one she had entered an eternity ago. Around the dome were arrayed four other towers, of gold and crystal, rubber and wood, and only then did Raven realize she was standing inside the fifth tower, the one of volcanic rock. Back when she had first entered David's mind, she had not had time to consider the new construction here, but plainly it served some purpose...
"Who are you?" she asked, not so much to find out the answer (she already had theories), but to see how the water-David would answer it. As it happened the hydraulic figure just shrugged, his body gurgling like water sloshed about in a bucket.
"You're the mind expert," he said, smiling and resuming his tune, a light and airy one, as he turned away from the window and strolled, not walked but strolled, as though free of any worry or care, a dozen steps away before turning his head back and gesturing to her to follow. "C'mon," he said. "I wanna show you something."
Raven was still trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but there didn't seem to be any undercurrents of malice here, and so she followed the water-figure down the hall, past rows of stained glass and intricately-carved statuary. They reached the end of the hall, coming to a wide staircase upholstered in a carpet of imperial purple, which led down into a massive open atrium, carved directly out of pumice-stone and hung with tapestries on which were sewn gold and silver and crimson symbols, none of which she immediately recognized.
"What is this place?" she asked, assuming that the water-being would not give her a straight answer, but wanting to hear its reply regardless.
"What, this?" asked water-David with a hint of amusement, as though the answer ought to have been obvious. He gestured up at the ceiling. "Take a look."
Raven lifted her head and drew breath sharply. The entire ceiling was made of colored glass, a mosaic of infinite complexity and incredible detail. But it was what the glasswork displayed that surprised her, for the image on the ceiling was a stylized glass portrait of Raven herself, cloaked in writhing shadow, hands raised in an attack position, hood thrown back to reveal her violet eyes staring daggers at some immutable foe.
"You like it?" asked the water-David pleasantly. "
Raven took the time to stare up at the ceiling for a few seconds. "I don't get it," she said. "What is... what is that doing here?"
"Well you do sorta leave an impression..." said water-David with a chuckle and a grin as though this answered all possible questions. He gestured for her to follow, leading the way down the stairs towards the ground floor of the atrium. "I thought we should use a different shot, but I got overruled as usual." He rolled his eyes, an impressive feat for someone who possessed none, but he seemed to bear no ill-will despite. "Still, it's kinda... you know... striking? I mean purple's not my thing really, but - "
"This is... David's head," insisted Raven, who was still trying to figure out the basics of what was going on here.
The watery figure stopped and turned back to Raven, bemused. "So?"
"So... why would - "
It laughed, shaking like a puddle in a windstorm as it grinned and shook its head and even put a hand on her shoulder, cold, but surprisingly dry considering what it was made of. "Raven, do you seriously not get how this works yet? This is your place. That's why we built it."
Raven scarcely knew where to begin with that. And settled for the most immediately obvious question.
"We?"
This question, like all the others before it, was greeted with another laugh. "Well," said the water-statue. "Most of us at least..."
A shuffling noise from her right attracted her attention, and Raven turned her head and saw another figure standing five paces away where none had stood before, shaped as the water-sculpture was, with the same face, the same features, and the same level of detail. But this one was made, not of water, but of soft, gray smoke, swirling and twisting within itself, and yet clearly forced by some means or another into the proper shape. Surprised as Raven was to see this new simulacrum, it appeared even more so, blinking and looking around at its surroundings in wonder and astonishment, until it fixed false eyes on Raven and let out a Hell-raising shriek. An instant later it had vaulted the railing and landed on the floor of the tower lobby, backing up towards the wall, its mouth moving but no coherent sound emerging, arms held out in front of it as though trying to ward off a dangerous predator.
"I... I told you!" shouted the figure of smoke, and the voice was David's once again, but terrified beyond anything Raven had ever heard from him before. 'Tears' of white smoke leeched from the thing's false eyes and dissolved into nothingness as it backed up against the wall, sliding back into a corner and babbling almost incoherently. "I said this would happen! Please! It wasn't me! I told them to listen to you! I tried!"
Raven turned back to the water-David, but it was not moving, silently watching both her and the smoke figure, and so she turned back and took a tentative step down the stairs towards the cowering simulacrum, only for it to scream like a banshee and collapse into a tight, quivering ball, blubbering half-formed apologies for Azar-knew-what transgression.
This was rapidly becoming one of those days she wished she had stayed in bed.
The water-David continued to simply watch the proceedings with its arms crossed, neither venturing a comment nor offering assistance, and so with a sigh, she slowly approached the smoke-David instead, descending to the atrium floor and crossing it. Traces of gray ash were smeared over the floor and walls near where the thing was sitting, and as she approached, she could hear its terrified sobs, intercut with desperate-sounding pleas for mercy.
"We told them..." he said. "We told them not to tell him, but they wouldn't listen to us! They vetoed us! Please! Please don't..."
"Oh, relax," said the water-David, descending the stairs behind her and stopping at the foot of them. "I told you, it'll all work out. She's not here to - "
"We shouldn't have told him!" screamed the smoke-David almost desperately, before collapsing back into a huddling ball.
The water-David merely sighed and shook its head, leaving Raven to try and make heads or tails of what this thing was talking about. "Told him what?" she asked, and the smoke figure nervously turned its head to Raven and stammered a brief reply.
"About T... Terra..."
She paused. "... what?"
"They wouldn't listen!" sobbed the smoke-David. "They won't... they don't listen to me anymore! Not when it's important! I told them to do whatever you wanted! I told them you knew best! But they... they... don't..." the smoke-figure suddenly burst into tears, and before Raven could even register a protest, it was sobbing into her shoulder, its touch light as a feather, wafting the smell of burnt wood across her nostrils and covering the front of her uniform with fine ash.
Normally she would have objected in the strongest possible terms to something like that, but apart from the fact that everything happening here was only a mental construction, the smoke-David's tearful admission and pleas for mercy brought an uncomfortable chill to Raven's mind, and so instead of flinging the thing across the room, as every cell in her body begged to be allowed to do, she simply edged back away from it.
"It's... all right," she said awkwardly. "It'll... all work out." She had no idea of course if it would or wouldn't, but there was something more than slightly embarrassing about this whole situation, and she found herself wishing she were still dealing with Devastator instead of... this...
The smoke figure lifted its head. "P... please..." it begged almost pathetically. "Don't... don't... kill us! We won't do it again! I'll make them see! Please!"
"Hey!" shouted Raven suddenly, silencing the smoke-David instantly. "Will you quit that? Nobody's gonna kill you."
"Speak for yourself."
The last statement was a cross between a hiss and a growl, and Raven whirled around to see who had spoken. Up on the opposite staircase, staring down at her with clenched fists and a gaze like a basilisk, was yet another David. Only this one was made of solid ice.
White and glistening, like an ice sculpture brought to life, this David's demeanor could not have been more different from that of the other two. The light shimmered around it with condensation, yet it did not melt, but filled the air around it with a wintry chill that was actually visible as a blueish haze. Its blank eyes bored into Raven and the smoke-sculpture like lasers, and it strode down the stairs like a juggernaut, with purpose and intent, white frost spreading over the carpets wherever it placed its feet. Its hands were packed into balled fists, and the right-most had the outlines of a baton in it, also made of ice, but brandished like a truncheon or cudgel.
"Who the hell do you think you are?!" snarled the ice-David, the voice still David's but harsher, echoing with reverberated malice. Raven felt the temperature of the air drop as it approached, and the smoke-David gave a yelp and retreated behind her. The water-David remained quiet, turning back to watch as the ice sculpture descended the stairs like a vengeful shade, coating everything in his wake with an expanding sheet of frost.
"What gives you the right to come in here?" it snapped at Raven, brandishing the false-baton in its hand like the magic wand Cyborg had humorously called it when she had first introduced the concept to David. Its words dissolved into near-incoherent screaming as it raged at Raven like an arctic storm. "You have no call to be here! None!"
"Oh good lord, who cares if she has a right or not?" asked the water-David, sounding almost bored by the display. "We're just - "
The ice-David did not reply or even slow down, but extended its left hand towards the water-simulacrum and flash-froze it solid, an instant before it glanced contemptuously at the frozen water-statue, shattering it like a pane of glass struck by a tank shell, and scattering sundered bits of ice all across the room. The smoke-David behind Raven gave a whimper and cowered against the wall as the ice-David turned its gaze back on Raven, a cold, merciless glare that seemed to sap the very warmth from her blood.
"What are you doing here?" raved the ice-David, tracing patterns of white ice on the floor as it rushed towards her.
"I..." stammered Raven, and to her surprise she found herself hesitating before this thing's obvious hostility. It wasn't that she feared it, she knew how to handle hostile mental presences after all, but its outrage was so genuine, so clear and unadulterated and pure, that she paused despite herself as she considered what this portended, given who she believed these sculptures were.
"You what?!" shouted the ice-David. "Answer me!"
"I needed answers!" she finally insisted, already preparing her shield.
The ice-David physically recoiled, like it had been slapped across the face, the appalled, disgusted horror on its face apparent despite its ice-chiseled features. "You needed... answers?" it asked, incredulous, as though this was the crowning horror atop the pyramid of atrocities being committed before his eyes. "Answers?!" it screamed, loud enough to damage its throat had it possessed one. "Fuck you!"
And then it took a swing at her.
Careful though Raven was trying to be around here, her efforts at not disturbing David's mind did not extend to permitting herself to be assaulted. The ice-David's blow was thrown with supernatural force, hard enough to hammer a hole through a cinderblock wall, but Raven was an accomplished master at mental combat, and caught the frozen fist with one simulated hand lightly, as though catching a thrown baseball. A second later she shoved forward with the open palm of her other hand, gathering up energy as she did so and releasing it all at once. Her hand stopped a millimeter from the ice-David's chest, but the energy hit him like a brickbat, and he staggered back ten feet before recovering his footing. Raven did not follow up, a full-fledged battle in here could cause brain damage if not contained properly, but she wasn't sure if the ice-David knew that.
As it turned out, the point was rendered moot a moment later.
Ice-David recovered its footing, instinctively clutching at its chest where the energy had struck it, and took a second or two to recover, before raising its head once again, its snow-white eyes staring flaming daggers at her, and frost flowed along the floor from the shimmering haze around it, riding up the walls and draperies and condensing on Raven's cloak. It said nothing, likely it was beyond speech, and took two menacing, determined steps towards her before there was a blur of motion, and it suddenly shattered into a million pieces which flew in every direction like bomb fragments, mingling with those of the frozen water-simulacrum from a moment ago.
In its place stood yet another version of David, crouched on the ground where it had just landed upon the ice-sculpture fist-first. It remained motionless initially, then slowly stood up, with infinite care and poise, staring at Raven with a look that she could not immediately read, for this version was comprised entirely of metal, sculpted in exquisite detail like the others, but its face and body the unvarying gunmetal-gray of wrought iron.
"He's right, you know."
It was David's voice again, calmer now, controlled and confident, and the iron-David lightly kicked the fragments of the ice-David aside, walking towards her without any apparent hostility, but equally without hesitation. As it did so, the smoke-David behind her slowly crept out, slipping to the side silently as the iron-David's heavy footfalls sent tremors through the floor.
"You really don't have any right to be here," said the iron-David, but the words were not angry. They simply were. "And you know it too, don't you?"
Behind the iron figure, the ice fragments were melting and re-coalescing, and moments later, both water and ice copies of David were reformed again, the ice one staring daggers at her, the water one merely shaking its head slowly, as if in disappointment, with her or with the other Davids.
"Yes," said Raven. "I know."
The iron-David did not seem at all perturbed by her admission. "So then what are you doing here here?" it asked, folding its arms and staring up at her (like David, the simulacra were shorter than she was), like a headmaster lecturing a recalcitrant student.
"I already answered that," replied Raven evenly, using the voice she adopted whenever she was trying to get one of the others to drop a line of inquiry. It usually worked.
"Well..." chimed in the water-David, "you did and you didn't. You said you needed answers, but... why come here for them?"
"Isn't that obvious?"
The last question was instantly distinguishable, if only because it, unlike the others, was not in some permutation of David's voice. Instead it was deep, rich, tonal, like thunder from a distant storm, and one and all, the various Davids present here turned about to follow it, and raised their water or iron or smoke-filled eyes to the top of the stairs leading into the grand chamber they all stood in. Raven did the same, and at the top of the stairs, there stood a large man with a fiery red beard, draped in rich clothes of a thousand different colors, a polished, gleaming scabbard hung at his side, in which was sheathed an enormous jeweled sword. At the sight of the red-bearded man, the water-David smiled, the smoke-David shuddered, the ice-David sneered, and the iron-David smirked, but the bearded man paid them no mind, moving down the stairs with surprising agility, before arriving on the landing below.
"She is here to find me," said the bearded man as though pronouncing a eulogy. "And she has done so." He looked around at the various Davids arrayed here, spending several moments on each one, before slowly drawing the flame-shrouded sword at his side, and the ringing of the steel on the scabbard was like a fine bell.
"So now," said the bearded man, "the only question left, is what do we do with her?"
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
The floors flew past, one after the next in dizzying succession, but Robin was no stranger to freefalls, and he kept his head. With one hand he reached for a grappling launcher, and with the other hand... well... with the other hand he reached for another grappling launcher. At this point, he was fairly sure he was going to need both.
Beast Boy could fly. Starfire could fly. That left Cyborg and David who could not. None of Robin's tools could hold Cyborg's weight, but he knew that Starfire could, and he knew that she would have the presence of mind to go after him. They'd practiced this very drill a hundred times after all, and she knew what to do without stopping to think.
Which left him free to do the following:
He twisted his shoulders, his titanium-polymer cape acting as a rudder, causing him to spin around in mid-air. As he moved, he caught a brief glimpse of a red mark on the wall flying past, and instantly raised his first grappling launcher and blindfired without bothering to confirm what it was. A moment later, and the mark was gone, but so confident was he in his aim that without even taking the time to determine if the shot had struck home or not, he whirled back and fired the other launcher down, towards David. It was an impossible shot, a heavy, non-aerodynamic slug fired by a shooter in free-fall, aimed at a target also freefalling.
Fortunately, Robin made a habit of doing the impossible on a daily basis.
The first grapple pulled tight just as the second one wrapped itself around David's waist. Out of the corner of his eye, Robin spotted Starfire catching Cyborg, mere moments before he would have landed in a sea of angry, armed ghosts. Cyborg fired his sonic cannon downwards, disintegrating the spirits by the dozen and score, but always they snapped back into existence the second his cannon had finished firing. He could not afford to spend any more time paying attention to that though, and an instant later he triggered the retraction winch on both grappling hooks, reeling himself and David up out of reach of the spirits.
Of course the spirits were not going to give up without a fight. Several of them leaped into the air, screaming in fury, lashing out with their weapons. Robin himself was too high for them to reach, but David was not, and without anything to push off of, he could not avoid the dozens of blows that rained down from all directions, twist and squirm though he might. There was simply nothing Robin could do but hurl a handful of useless birdarangs down, which sailed right through the ethereal attackers swarming David, and hope that whatever had prevented them from impaling him before would hold true now.
It did.
The spirits did not detonate or vaporize as they had before, but their weapons again carried no bite when deployed against David alone. This only seemed to enrage them further and they roiled like a pond full of man-eating piranha, slashing and rending and ripping with scythe, sword, and claw. Yet the enraged ghosts might as well have all been figments of Robin's imagination, for all the good it did them, for their scythes melted into vapor, and their swords disintegrated by magic, and their claws passed through David like radio waves through a sheet of paper, emerging on the other side, leaving no trace of their passing. And then a moment later the winch kicked in, and David was wrenched upwards, out of reach of the screaming phantasms. Robin landed on the stair ledge and turned back, grabbing the cable still attached to the grappling launcher on his arm and slowly began to reel it in. A second later, Starfire landed next to him, depositing Cyborg, and lightly tugged on the cable herself, hoisting David up like a line-caught fish and pulling him over onto the stairwell, where he collapsed onto his hands and knees, shaking like a leaf in the wind, one hand clutched to his stomach as though still unable to believe he was in one piece.
The wailing of damned souls was growing louder by the second. It was plain that they were not going to get any time to process the insanity that had just transpired. Behind them sat the red mark Robin had fired at blindly, an enormous Mark of Scath carved into the rock and glowing in the dark stairwell like hot coals. Robin glanced at Cyborg, who ripped the stone from the wall and threw it down the stairwell shaft, where it was instantly torn to bits by the ravening spirits. Behind where it had sat was a wind-swept hallway, disappearing downwards into the gloom.
"Come on!" shouted Robin over the wailing ghosts. "This way!"
The others raced down the exposed hallway, save for Beast Boy who stopped long enough to help David back to his feet. David looked like he was in deep shell shock, like a survivor from some kind of unheralded catastrophe, but he managed, with help, to scramble to his feet and move all the same. No doubt he had no better idea what was going on here than Robin did, but there simply wasn't time for any of them to stop and think this through. Between everything that was happening, Robin simply had to hope that he wasn't about to fold up and collapse on them. They had to run.
So they ran.
Starfire flew above their heads, tossing starbolts backwards up the tunnel at the pursuing ghosts, and Cyborg occasionally spun around to blanket the area behind them in blue energy, but nothing would keep back the tide of spirits who ignored every assault, every blast, and boiled down the shaft after them like avenging demons. Robin snatched a bomb from his belt and hurled it back towards the ghosts, following it up with a barrage of birdarangs, explosive and otherwise, trying to buy himself the time he needed to figure out what they should -
A huge explosion rippled down the tunnel, nearly blowing Robin off his feet, as every single birdarang and shaped charge he had just thrown, explosive and non-explosive alike, blew up at once. The nearest dozen spirits were ripped to shreds, their ghostly filaments flung all over the walls. And as he turned back towards the others, he saw David standing with his back to the others and his face to the horde of ghosts, his baton held outwards like a fencing sword, sheathed in flickering flames of red light. The baton was shaking in his hand, his eyes were open wide and his expression was halfway between mortal terror and thunderstruck awe. But as the ghosts started to reconstitute themselves once more, he shut his eyes and swung the metal stick sharply back and forth, and sent a wave of cascading blasts flying off the walls and ceiling of the tunnel beyond Robin, which sufficed to slow the spirits down for about three seconds.
It was something. And moreover, it was considerably more than Robin had expected David to be able to do at this point.
Robin turned and ran, and grabbed David's arm as he ran past to encourage him to do the same. David proved to require little encouragement, and the two of them soon had caught the others, moments before they all entered a small stone chamber with half a dozen undifferentiated exits leading out.
"Which way do we go?" yelled Beast Boy, as the sounds of the pursuing ghosts thundered towards them.
A ghost lunged into the room and would probably have taken Robin's head off if Starfire hadn't obliterated it with a starbolt first, a temporary measure to be sure, but appreciated nonetheless. "Follow the Mark!" Robin shouted, ducking and rolling as a dozen more appeared where the first had come from, their ethereal weapons clashing against the rock behind him. Starfire and Cyborg both opened fire, point black, scattering the ghosts and sending clouds of debris flying in every direction, but it was all a stopgap. They could not hurt their enemies. They could only flee.
Fortunately, the Mark as a guideline held true. It was prominently displayed above one of the doorways out of the chamber, and an instant after Robin had told him to look for it, Beast Boy spotted it. "This way!" yelled Beast Boy, morphing into a fly to evade a ghost that had moved around to cut him off. The ghost slashed at Beast Boy and missed, and then dissolved violently as Cyborg charged right into and through it, opening a way for the others to escape. Still the ghosts pressed them, hot on their heels, slashing and slicing at every opportunity. Robin took up the rear, ducking under and leaping over slashes with every other step, his staff striking empty air as he tried to swat back the attacking spirits.
Then suddenly, disaster struck.
Robin could tell that David was moving largely on autopilot, his mind dulled no doubt by the shock of everything that had just happened. Even Robin was prepared to forgive that at this point. Between Slade, the migraines, and now whatever miraculous salvation he had experienced after being impaled by the ghosts, more seasoned minds than David's would have seized up by now or succumbed to panic or catatonia. The purpose of training, in part, was to ensure that even when you were distracted, shocked, or otherwise outside the focus you normally needed to fight and act, you could still operate by rote muscle memory if necessary. But muscle memory and gut reaction were treacherous things to rely on, and so it was that when the hallway suddenly dipped, the others all managed to negotiate it without thinking, but David, whose battered mind was simply elsewhere, tripped over an uneven stone, fell flat on his face, and was instantly submerged.
Two hundred ghosts swarmed over David before he had even slid to a stop, screaming soul-rending cries of bloodlust and rage, slashing and hacking with their weapons to tear him to ribbons. His own scream of surprise and fear alerted the others, and despite the imminent danger they stopped, and turned, and tried to blast their way back to him, but it was utterly impossible. Cyborg roared and flayed the air with his sonic cannon, Beast Boy morphed into shape after shape, large and small by turns, and Starfire cried aloud in Tamaranean and sent a fusillade of white-hot blasts to desperately try and clear a path, but more and more ghosts lunged past David towards the others, howling like devils unchained. If they did not resume running now, they would all die, as surely as the rising of the sun, for the ghosts could not be stopped in these numbers, not by ten times the firepower of all of the Titans combined. Yet even if David appeared somehow to be proof against these things' attacks, even if the alternative was certain death, Robin could not give the order to abandon their efforts and flee for their lives. Not like this. Despite everything, he hesitated.
But to his utter astonishment, the one person who he would never have imagined able to keep his head in such a situation, did not hesitate at all.
For a moment, a single moment, the ghosts seemed to part before a full-power blast from Cyborg's cannon, and in that instant Robin saw David laying on his stomach, pinned down by a hundred ghosts, with two dozen ethereal blades actually sticking right through him and into the floor. His expression was that of terror and confusion and panic all mixed into one, but in the instant that he was visible, something... else... a realization perhaps, or a crystalization of thought came over David's face, and the fear and confusion vanished like vapor. And before Robin even realized what David was doing, the psychokinetic had reached down and grabbed his baton, lighting it afire with a thought, and raising it up towards the ceiling...
Robin understood an instant later. "Wait, no!"
A peal of thunder ripped through the hallway, loud enough even to drown out the shrieking ghosts, and a twelve-foot section of the ceiling between David and the other Titans shattered like glass. An instant later, three hundred tons of dirt, rock, and debris plunged through the broken ceiling, like water spilling from a pent-up dam. Several ghosts were caught beneath the surging tide and were dispersed like fog in a windstorm. The remainder howled and screamed for only an instant before their cries were cut off as the impenetrable earthen barrier slammed shut like a security gate, leaving all four remaining Titans standing alone in the suddenly silent hallway.
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
The four Davids of various compositions just stood there, quietly watching the red-bearded man descend the stairs at an even pace, his eyes almost downcast as he rested one hand on the banister while the other held his enormous, burning sword. He reached the foot of the stairs without a word, stopping there, and only then did he look up at Raven and wait, as the eyes of the the four David-figures turned back to her as well.
There were a few moments of silence.
"Kill her," snarled the ice-David through clenched teeth.
"No!" yelped the smoke-David, causing the ice one to whip his head around to face him. Before his gaze, the smoke-David literally withered, but he managed to stammer out a reason. "We... we can't..."
"Yeah..." said the water-David with a smirk. "I'm gonna go with 'no' on that too."
"Tear her guts out!" shrieked the ice-David at the bearded man, with such force that flakes of ice actually flew out of his mouth. "Rip her mind to pieces and let her rot in - "
"Absolutely not," said the iron-David. "And that's final."
"Oh of course," yelled the ice-David. "Wouldn't want to stop you all from sucking up some more! Maybe she'll threaten to kill us again! That's fun, isn't it?"
"Honestly, will you go take a pill or something?" asked the water-David, in what sounded like mock-exasperation. "Are you gonna act like this every time we meet someone new?"
"If the last few times are any indication, somebody has to around here!"
The iron-David groaned and shook his head. "Give it a rest already. She's not going to start anything here. And if she does, we'll take her apart. Now shut up."
"I'll talk whenever I feel like it you preening piece of - !" insisted the ice-David.
"Oh you don't say?" said water-David, laying the sarcasm on thick. Iron-David chuckled, and even smoke-David chanced a small laugh, which ended the instant ice-David turned his eyes on him again.
"May I please get a decision?" asked the bearded man in a long-suffering tone.
"No," said the water-David.
"N... no..." stammered the smoke-David a moment later.
"Yes," snarled the ice-David.
"Hell no," said the iron-David chuckling as he said it, as though the very idea were laughable.
The bearded man sighed almost resignedly, and nodded, as though this was a result he had been long-expecting, and slowly he slid his sword back into its sheath. Only after he had done this, and taken several deep breaths, did he slowly walk forward towards Raven. He closed to within half a dozen paces, folding his arms as he did so, and shaking his head. Raven did not move as he approached, but simply watched, as did the four Davids, and when finally the bearded man had stopped, he stared down at the floor for a few seconds, as if preparing himself for the ordeal of speaking, and then finally raised his head.
"Well," he said. "Here we are."
Raven scarcely knew where to begin. Experienced though she was in dealing with mindscapes, everything she had found in here had generated far more questions than it answered. And yet right now, the red-bearded man appeared to be waiting for her to say something, so she opted to start with the basics.
"And where are we?" she asked, guardedly.
"Oh, I imagine that much is obvious," said the enormous man. "We're inside David's mind, of course. And as you no doubt have surmised," he gestured back at the four Davids behind him, "some of the locals have decided to pay you a visit."
"Ice and smoke?" she asked. "Is that supposed to be a metaphor?"
"This is a mindscape, Raven," replied the large man. "Everything is a metaphor. Not everyone color-codes their emotions, after all."
The iron-David stepped forward, walking around to the right side of the the bearded man and Raven, even as the water and smoke-Davids did the same on the left, the ice-David remaining where he was. "Some people see the world through other lenses," said the iron-David.
"Thanks to him at least," added the water-David, smirking and gesturing at the bearded man.
"It's... it's about... what things are made of... and... why..." said the smoke-David hesitantly, pointedly keeping the water-David between him and the ice-David at all times.
Raven considered this, indeed she'd already determined most of it. "So then what am I supposed to draw from a tower with my picture in a window?"
"Well I imagine you'd have to ask him," replied the man with a hint of frustration in his voice, "but if I had to guess, I'd say you occupy a fairly major role in his life right now, wouldn't you? As do the others."
"Besides," said the iron-David, "I think volcanic rock applies pretty well for you"
"Should've been nerve gas," muttered the ice-David.
"You see, this is why we can't have nice people over..." said the water-David, and he met the ice-David's withering glare with a laugh.
"None of this is real," continued the bearded man, "it's just how you choose to perceive what's going on in here. Your mind is an alien landscape full of disjointed fragments because you arrange it as one. His is a forest with towers because he presents it as such, and you choose to perceive it that way. He's no more schizophrenic than you are. In fact, a great deal less."
Raven's gaze narrowed. "And how would David know any of that?"
"He doesn't."
"But you do?"
The man said nothing, and his silence was answer enough.
"Who are you?"
"I told you already," he said.
"You said you were 'Devastator'," said Raven. "What does that mean?"
"An enormous number of things," replied 'Devastator', crossing his arms, "none of which I am about to explain to the Gem of Trigon. But in the most basic sense, it means I am your enemy."
He said it evenly, with no particular emphasis or even malice to the words, but while no deception or trickery could she sense, and given his previous demeanor, she would normally have believed him, there was something she was wondering about...
"If you're my enemy, how come I'm not dead?"
That one seemed to catch Devastator off-guard. He considered his answer carefully for a few moments, but finally seemed to decide that there was no point in obfuscating.
"Because I can't kill you."
"Can't?"
"If I had the means, Raven, I assure you, you would be dead," said Devastator evenly, "and the world spared much pain in the process. But I can't kill you. I tried to scare you off, and I failed. So here we are."
"Why can't you kill me?"
But instead of answering, the large man shook his head. "No," he said sharply, "no, I am done with your questions. Especially since you're simply going to run off and report every answer to your father."
A burst of anger at the mere mention of her father boiled through Raven unbidden. "I am not working for him," she hissed back at Devastator.
"'I'm not working for him'" mimicked the ice-David, before turning to the others. "Does that sound... familiar to anyone else?"
"It does," said the iron-David, crossing his arms and looking singularly unamused. The smoke-David seemed to shrink a bit and recoil behind the water-David, who was simply shaking his head, but Devastator himself ignored them all.
"Raven," said the bearded man, "right now, the most important things I know about you are that you are the daughter of Trigon the Terrible, and that despite the fact that David has been far more patient with you than I would in his place, you suspected his loyalties to the point where after claiming to be his friend, you broke into his room, sedated him with magic, and then forced your way into his mind."
"I didn't come in here because I thought David was a traitor!" insisted Raven, just a second before she could catch herself.
"Firstly, you're lying, and secondly you say that as though it matters why you came in here," said Devastator. "I doubt seriously that any of the others would ask as to your motives. Or were you planning on leaving as secretly as you entered, and hoping none would be the wiser?"
"I don't have a plan for how I was going to leave," admitted Raven freely. It didn't matter at this point. "Besides, aren't you gonna tell him I was here?"
Devastator laughed. "I would have thought it was apparent by now, Raven, that David and I cannot communicate directly. Otherwise I would not only tell him that you were here, I would suggest to him certain 'actions' he might consider taking. But that is neither here nor there."
Devastator stepped towards her, his gait unhurried, as he spoke in simple, declarative statements, that bore all the force of falling artillery shells. "I'd accuse you of bad faith and criminality if I thought it had the slightest chance in Hell of making an impact, Raven, and I'd claim to be shocked that you would do this to a so-called friend, save that I know how you treat all of your other so-called friends. You know, the ones you're going to be complicit in murdering in a few weeks' time?"
"Stop it," she said curtly, a warning anyone who knew her well would have heeded.
"I think you should go on," said the ice-David who seemed almost to be enjoying this.
"Come on," said the water-David, "we don't need to start - "
"No, I agree with him," interrupted the iron-David, gesturing at the ice figure. "This is our house, we set the rules, not her."
Whether he was heeding the advice of the Davids, or whether he was continuing on his own volition, Devastator persisted.
"The apocalypse is coming, and you're at the very eye of the storm, and yet when the others ask you what's happening, do you tell them? Do you warn them? Or do you let them blindly walk into the darkness behind you. Even Trigon has the decency to leave portents and warnings of what he's about to do, but you conceal it even from your supposed friends."
"Stop it!" yelled Raven, but her words had no threat to back them up, and Devastator knew it.
"I mean, hiding your true nature is one thing, but hiding someone else's? I can't speak to David directly, but you've known about me since before Slade returned. So how is it that it required Slade and Terra to make him realize that something was amiss? And even if you can justify lying to him, how you can possibly justify lying to the others, particularly Beast Boy - "
"Stop it!" screamed Raven with the force of a loudspeaker, and she lashed out almost subconsciously, slashing at Devastator with a blade of pure will manifested from nowhere. A black swatch of energy struck Devastator and broke against him like water on rock, drawing nothing more than a small smirk, even as the Davids behind him shook their heads or cringed or clenched their fists or merely frowned. She paid them no mind. "I'm not gonna kill them! I'll find a way to stop it!"
"Find a way?" asked Devastator, sounding halfway between contemptuous and confused. "Girl, you are fated to destroy the - "
"I know what I'm fated to do!" yelled Raven back at Devastator. "But I won't let it happen, with or without your help, I'll find something, do something. There has to be some way to stop it from happening."
She turned away from Devastator, largely to avoid screaming in frustration, and clenched her eyes shut, balling up her fists and trying to suppress the urge to shatter everything in this mindscape to splinters and volcanic dust. It might have been a full minute before Devastator said anything, and when he did, it was, oddly enough, a question.
"Is that... is that actually why you came here?"
"Of course it is!" snapped Raven as she turned around, but from the expression on Devastator's face, that much was not as obvious as she had perhaps assumed it to be. "I know what I'm supposed to do."
"And you want to stop it?"
"Yes!"
"Why?"
Raven actually blinked, so unexpected was the question. "What do you mean why? Trigon's going to destroy the entire world if I can't stop him."
"You're his daughter," said Devastator, who was looking more confused by the second. "You're his right hand. You're the Gem of Trigon himself. 'The Gem was born of Evil's fire.' Those words are not merely hyperbole..."
"You think I don't know that?"
"So then - "
"I hate my father!" shouted Raven, and the sound of her own words surprised her, for despite everything, she had never before actually vocalized this sentiment in words, indeed never spoken of her feelings in this regard at all. "I hate him and everything he made me! I hate everything about him, everything! I don't want to be part of his prophecy! I won't be part of it!"
Raven's voice echoed around the stone atrium, as silence descended once more, and she found to her surprise that she was actually shaking, not from fear, but from raw emotion. Too many days and nights balanced on the razor's edge of disaster had strung her nerves out to the breaking point, and all of the insanity of this excursion into David's head was simply too much. She had been doing nothing but confronting the blasphemy that was her own parentage for weeks on end, and the loathing and disgust kept simmering beneath the surface simply needed an outlet. She closed her eyes again, and the image of the fire-scorched cities she saw every time she slept or meditated appeared once more.
She fought the tears that threatened to form.
"... why should I believe you?"
The vision vanished, and Raven opened her eyes to see that Devastator had reverted to the form of David, identical with the four others lined up behind him save that he appeared to be made of flesh and blood.
"If you don't help me, then the world ends, whether or not I'm lying." said Raven.
"The world is going to end," replied Devastator. There is no stopping the prophecy. I already told you that."
"Then why do you care if I'm telling the truth or not?" asked Raven. "If the world's going to end anyway, what does it matter what I do?"
"Because if you are telling the truth," said Devastator, "then the stakes in this are considerably higher than even you realize,"
That one made no sense. "What do you mean? If Trigon comes, it's the end of the world. I know that already."
Devastator shook his head. "If you enact your role, and you will, and Trigon is made manifest on this world, then the Earth will die, yes..."
Slowly, he turned away from Raven, looking back at the other assembled Davids, and only after a few moments did he seem to dredge up the courage to finish his statement.
"... but if I misjudge you, and reveal to you what is actually occurring here... and I am wrong... then the entire universe will die."
Raven could not say anything for quite some time, staring at Devastator's back as she tried, and failed, to work out what possible permutation of the prophecy could even theoretically lead to something like that. Was he making things up? Exaggerating? Was he trying to trick her?
Or... was the link she had assumed between Devastator and the Prophecy perhaps a deeper one than she realized?
"What are you?" she asked, not for the first time, but for the last.
For several minutes, Devastator said nothing, and neither did the other Davids, all of them watching Devastator and Raven in silence. Devastator's head was bowed, almost like he was seeking spiritual guidance, and when finally he raised his head once more, he did not turn around.
"I am a weapon," said Devastator quietly, as though to raise his voice a single decibel would be to invite ruin and destruction on them all. "Perhaps the most terrible weapon ever forged. I exist... solely, to lay waste to the world of matter and energy, to fight fire with nuclear holocausts, and dye the world red with flames and destruction. And while I do not understand all of the particulars of what is going on here, I believe that I am the reason that all of this is coming to pass."
Slowly, Raven stepped forward, reaching out and placing a hand on Devastator's shoulder, so as to turn him around. He permitted himself to be turned, until he was facing her, apprehension as clearly visible on his face as paint would have been.
"Is there some way I can stop my father?"
Devastator's breath caught an instant before he finally answered.
"Yes."
"Tell me what it is."
"You won't..." stammered Devastator, "you don't understand..."
"Then tell me everything," said Raven. "Make me understand."
Devastator raised his eyes to look into Raven's, and froze there as he did so for ten long seconds. And then softly, weakly, as if he could scarcely believe that he was doing so, he began to speak.
"It began with fire..."
"Run your fingers through my soul. For once, just once, feel exactly what I feel, believe what I believe, perceive as I perceive. Look, experience, examine, and for once, just once, understand."
- Anonymous
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
Twelve seconds.
Eleven.
The experience of falling from an immense height was usually so rapid that you scarcely had time to blink, let alone take in your surroundings. The acceleration of gravity was such that it felt more like being fired downwards out of a cannon, wind whipping past your face, spinning and twisting you around like a toy. The few occasions David had had to fall any great distance, his overwhelming impression had simply been how fast it was. Normally, one instant you were miles above the ground, and the next you struck.
But now it seemed he'd been falling for a hundred years.
Ten seconds.
Nine.
Perhaps the world had slowed. Perhaps time itself was warping again. Perhaps his brain had finally snapped, and he was perceiving the world as some kind of decelerated, surreal nightmare. Perhaps it really was one. Everything was free falling, above, below, to the sides. He spun on all three axes, catching only brief glimpses of the others, themselves spinning and calling to one another, or warding of the falling debris which flew about them in pieces ranging from the size of a pebble to the size of the T-car.
Eight seconds.
Seven.
His brain was working so sluggishly, he could no longer remember how far there was to fall, or why he was falling. All his available bandwidth was spoken for, and his memory was dominated by the image of a ghost shrieking like a train whistle before bursting into spectral fragments that flayed the air and shattered the walls and ground...
... but not him.
In the back of his mind, warning bells were ringing. The ground was not an infinite distance away, and at the speeds he was falling, he would dash himself to pieces on the rock below if he did not act now. But the rules of reality had melted away, and he could not remember what to do, or if there was something for him to do. Explosions and blades of force had melted away before him, and while he managed, barely, to convince his conscious mind that what was happening merited action, when the moment came to decide what sort of action was required, he could draw nothing but a blank
Six.
Five.
Below loomed a white glow, not bright but glistening and ethereal, a cold and unwelcoming light from whence issued a low moan, like a distant cry for succor and deliverance. David heard the others shout to one another as they recognized the sound and light for what it was. More ghosts, hundreds more, waiting down at the base of the pit for the Titans to fall within reach.
Four seconds.
The baton was still in his hand, unlit at this point, as the sea of spirits below resolved to individual figures and loomed closer and closer, rusted spectral blades brandished in anticipation of blood. David had destroyed their fellows just seconds ago, blotted them out of existence by the dozen and the hundred, but the base fact that he had done this somehow was still seeping into his conscious mind, and even if he had possessed the wherewithal to try and determine how, he had no conception of how he was to avoid splattering himself into paste on the ground below.
Like a deer in headlights, he stared, motionless, thoughtless, unable to act, only able to watch as his own doom approached. As he fell, one of the spirits flew up to meet him and lashed out with a ghostly sword, as though to cut him in half. He had no means of pivoting or moving to avoid the blow, and he closed his eyes as it struck. He felt something tighten sharply around his waist, roughly where the sword had hit, and instantly knew it was all over, that he'd been torn apart, and that in any event there was nothing left but the few seconds remaining before he slammed into the ground at a hundred and twenty miles per hour.
Three seconds.
Two.
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
The floor was made of stone.
Raven could feel it beneath her hands and knees before she saw it, for she had closed her eyes tightly when the world seemed to disintegrate around her, and only once she felt something solid beneath her did she open them again. Porous stone lay there, volcanic pumice perhaps, illuminated dimly by light from far above, and she raised her head and saw a soaring, Gothic hall laid out before her, arches piled upon arches, studded with windows of violet glass and cloaked with velvet draperies dyed a rich indigo. Light suffused the room, partly from some invisible source lost in the riot of buttresses and vaults far above, partly from the soft glow through the stained glass windows, casting everything into a solemn blue.
Slowly she stood up, looking and feeling around for any sign of life in this strange new setting. Her surroundings had shifted many times already in this investigation, but something in the undercurrents felt different this time. The other locations had felt like facades, matte paintings erected to present a subconscious illusion, but the mental architecture of this location felt solid, physical, real. Or at least as real as one got in a mindscape.
"Hey there!"
Instinct took over, and Raven whirled around with shield raised and powers charged and ready, but instead of a monster, she found herself staring at a person made of water.
A small, slight figure was standing a dozen feet away, arms held behind his back, smiling and rocking back and forth slowly in a relaxed and casual pose, but the figure's demeanor could not have been further from Raven's mind at present. The being was comprised entirely of a clear liquid, sparkling in the dim light, its surface eddying as its motion sent minuscule hydraulic waves rippling through its body. Made either of water or some water-like substance, it nevertheless was an exact facsimile of a person, the water conforming exactly to the shape of a teenaged boy, down to the folds of his clothing, the short-cropped cut of his hair, and the gently smiling features on his face. Nevertheless, a mass of translucent water was not the easiest thing to identify, and it took Raven an embarrassingly-long three seconds to realize who she was looking at.
"David?"
"Expecting someone else?" asked the water-mass with a grin, speaking with David's voice despite possessing neither throat nor tongue, its 'mouth' moving like a computer-generated graphical effect. The simulacrum smiled, or at least appeared to, and laughed, sending ripples all over its surface. "It's his head, after all."
"You're not - "
"Devastator? Nah. He's busy. He'll be along though." The water-figure grinned and ambled over to one of the purple windows, whistling pleasantly as it walked, though how it did that with neither lips nor lungs was anybody's guess. Raven watched it quietly, as it stared out the window for a few moments, hands clasped loosely behind its back, just watching whatever was going on outside.
"How come you keep going in there?"
It took Raven a second to realize the question was meant for her, and she walked to the window to see what the animate water-sculpture was talking about. The window looked down on a forest far below them, verdant and green. And directly opposite them, glistening in the perpetual sunlight, sat an enormous, translucent gold dome, the same one she had entered an eternity ago. Around the dome were arrayed four other towers, of gold and crystal, rubber and wood, and only then did Raven realize she was standing inside the fifth tower, the one of volcanic rock. Back when she had first entered David's mind, she had not had time to consider the new construction here, but plainly it served some purpose...
"Who are you?" she asked, not so much to find out the answer (she already had theories), but to see how the water-David would answer it. As it happened the hydraulic figure just shrugged, his body gurgling like water sloshed about in a bucket.
"You're the mind expert," he said, smiling and resuming his tune, a light and airy one, as he turned away from the window and strolled, not walked but strolled, as though free of any worry or care, a dozen steps away before turning his head back and gesturing to her to follow. "C'mon," he said. "I wanna show you something."
Raven was still trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but there didn't seem to be any undercurrents of malice here, and so she followed the water-figure down the hall, past rows of stained glass and intricately-carved statuary. They reached the end of the hall, coming to a wide staircase upholstered in a carpet of imperial purple, which led down into a massive open atrium, carved directly out of pumice-stone and hung with tapestries on which were sewn gold and silver and crimson symbols, none of which she immediately recognized.
"What is this place?" she asked, assuming that the water-being would not give her a straight answer, but wanting to hear its reply regardless.
"What, this?" asked water-David with a hint of amusement, as though the answer ought to have been obvious. He gestured up at the ceiling. "Take a look."
Raven lifted her head and drew breath sharply. The entire ceiling was made of colored glass, a mosaic of infinite complexity and incredible detail. But it was what the glasswork displayed that surprised her, for the image on the ceiling was a stylized glass portrait of Raven herself, cloaked in writhing shadow, hands raised in an attack position, hood thrown back to reveal her violet eyes staring daggers at some immutable foe.
"You like it?" asked the water-David pleasantly. "
Raven took the time to stare up at the ceiling for a few seconds. "I don't get it," she said. "What is... what is that doing here?"
"Well you do sorta leave an impression..." said water-David with a chuckle and a grin as though this answered all possible questions. He gestured for her to follow, leading the way down the stairs towards the ground floor of the atrium. "I thought we should use a different shot, but I got overruled as usual." He rolled his eyes, an impressive feat for someone who possessed none, but he seemed to bear no ill-will despite. "Still, it's kinda... you know... striking? I mean purple's not my thing really, but - "
"This is... David's head," insisted Raven, who was still trying to figure out the basics of what was going on here.
The watery figure stopped and turned back to Raven, bemused. "So?"
"So... why would - "
It laughed, shaking like a puddle in a windstorm as it grinned and shook its head and even put a hand on her shoulder, cold, but surprisingly dry considering what it was made of. "Raven, do you seriously not get how this works yet? This is your place. That's why we built it."
Raven scarcely knew where to begin with that. And settled for the most immediately obvious question.
"We?"
This question, like all the others before it, was greeted with another laugh. "Well," said the water-statue. "Most of us at least..."
A shuffling noise from her right attracted her attention, and Raven turned her head and saw another figure standing five paces away where none had stood before, shaped as the water-sculpture was, with the same face, the same features, and the same level of detail. But this one was made, not of water, but of soft, gray smoke, swirling and twisting within itself, and yet clearly forced by some means or another into the proper shape. Surprised as Raven was to see this new simulacrum, it appeared even more so, blinking and looking around at its surroundings in wonder and astonishment, until it fixed false eyes on Raven and let out a Hell-raising shriek. An instant later it had vaulted the railing and landed on the floor of the tower lobby, backing up towards the wall, its mouth moving but no coherent sound emerging, arms held out in front of it as though trying to ward off a dangerous predator.
"I... I told you!" shouted the figure of smoke, and the voice was David's once again, but terrified beyond anything Raven had ever heard from him before. 'Tears' of white smoke leeched from the thing's false eyes and dissolved into nothingness as it backed up against the wall, sliding back into a corner and babbling almost incoherently. "I said this would happen! Please! It wasn't me! I told them to listen to you! I tried!"
Raven turned back to the water-David, but it was not moving, silently watching both her and the smoke figure, and so she turned back and took a tentative step down the stairs towards the cowering simulacrum, only for it to scream like a banshee and collapse into a tight, quivering ball, blubbering half-formed apologies for Azar-knew-what transgression.
This was rapidly becoming one of those days she wished she had stayed in bed.
The water-David continued to simply watch the proceedings with its arms crossed, neither venturing a comment nor offering assistance, and so with a sigh, she slowly approached the smoke-David instead, descending to the atrium floor and crossing it. Traces of gray ash were smeared over the floor and walls near where the thing was sitting, and as she approached, she could hear its terrified sobs, intercut with desperate-sounding pleas for mercy.
"We told them..." he said. "We told them not to tell him, but they wouldn't listen to us! They vetoed us! Please! Please don't..."
"Oh, relax," said the water-David, descending the stairs behind her and stopping at the foot of them. "I told you, it'll all work out. She's not here to - "
"We shouldn't have told him!" screamed the smoke-David almost desperately, before collapsing back into a huddling ball.
The water-David merely sighed and shook its head, leaving Raven to try and make heads or tails of what this thing was talking about. "Told him what?" she asked, and the smoke figure nervously turned its head to Raven and stammered a brief reply.
"About T... Terra..."
She paused. "... what?"
"They wouldn't listen!" sobbed the smoke-David. "They won't... they don't listen to me anymore! Not when it's important! I told them to do whatever you wanted! I told them you knew best! But they... they... don't..." the smoke-figure suddenly burst into tears, and before Raven could even register a protest, it was sobbing into her shoulder, its touch light as a feather, wafting the smell of burnt wood across her nostrils and covering the front of her uniform with fine ash.
Normally she would have objected in the strongest possible terms to something like that, but apart from the fact that everything happening here was only a mental construction, the smoke-David's tearful admission and pleas for mercy brought an uncomfortable chill to Raven's mind, and so instead of flinging the thing across the room, as every cell in her body begged to be allowed to do, she simply edged back away from it.
"It's... all right," she said awkwardly. "It'll... all work out." She had no idea of course if it would or wouldn't, but there was something more than slightly embarrassing about this whole situation, and she found herself wishing she were still dealing with Devastator instead of... this...
The smoke figure lifted its head. "P... please..." it begged almost pathetically. "Don't... don't... kill us! We won't do it again! I'll make them see! Please!"
"Hey!" shouted Raven suddenly, silencing the smoke-David instantly. "Will you quit that? Nobody's gonna kill you."
"Speak for yourself."
The last statement was a cross between a hiss and a growl, and Raven whirled around to see who had spoken. Up on the opposite staircase, staring down at her with clenched fists and a gaze like a basilisk, was yet another David. Only this one was made of solid ice.
White and glistening, like an ice sculpture brought to life, this David's demeanor could not have been more different from that of the other two. The light shimmered around it with condensation, yet it did not melt, but filled the air around it with a wintry chill that was actually visible as a blueish haze. Its blank eyes bored into Raven and the smoke-sculpture like lasers, and it strode down the stairs like a juggernaut, with purpose and intent, white frost spreading over the carpets wherever it placed its feet. Its hands were packed into balled fists, and the right-most had the outlines of a baton in it, also made of ice, but brandished like a truncheon or cudgel.
"Who the hell do you think you are?!" snarled the ice-David, the voice still David's but harsher, echoing with reverberated malice. Raven felt the temperature of the air drop as it approached, and the smoke-David gave a yelp and retreated behind her. The water-David remained quiet, turning back to watch as the ice sculpture descended the stairs like a vengeful shade, coating everything in his wake with an expanding sheet of frost.
"What gives you the right to come in here?" it snapped at Raven, brandishing the false-baton in its hand like the magic wand Cyborg had humorously called it when she had first introduced the concept to David. Its words dissolved into near-incoherent screaming as it raged at Raven like an arctic storm. "You have no call to be here! None!"
"Oh good lord, who cares if she has a right or not?" asked the water-David, sounding almost bored by the display. "We're just - "
The ice-David did not reply or even slow down, but extended its left hand towards the water-simulacrum and flash-froze it solid, an instant before it glanced contemptuously at the frozen water-statue, shattering it like a pane of glass struck by a tank shell, and scattering sundered bits of ice all across the room. The smoke-David behind Raven gave a whimper and cowered against the wall as the ice-David turned its gaze back on Raven, a cold, merciless glare that seemed to sap the very warmth from her blood.
"What are you doing here?" raved the ice-David, tracing patterns of white ice on the floor as it rushed towards her.
"I..." stammered Raven, and to her surprise she found herself hesitating before this thing's obvious hostility. It wasn't that she feared it, she knew how to handle hostile mental presences after all, but its outrage was so genuine, so clear and unadulterated and pure, that she paused despite herself as she considered what this portended, given who she believed these sculptures were.
"You what?!" shouted the ice-David. "Answer me!"
"I needed answers!" she finally insisted, already preparing her shield.
The ice-David physically recoiled, like it had been slapped across the face, the appalled, disgusted horror on its face apparent despite its ice-chiseled features. "You needed... answers?" it asked, incredulous, as though this was the crowning horror atop the pyramid of atrocities being committed before his eyes. "Answers?!" it screamed, loud enough to damage its throat had it possessed one. "Fuck you!"
And then it took a swing at her.
Careful though Raven was trying to be around here, her efforts at not disturbing David's mind did not extend to permitting herself to be assaulted. The ice-David's blow was thrown with supernatural force, hard enough to hammer a hole through a cinderblock wall, but Raven was an accomplished master at mental combat, and caught the frozen fist with one simulated hand lightly, as though catching a thrown baseball. A second later she shoved forward with the open palm of her other hand, gathering up energy as she did so and releasing it all at once. Her hand stopped a millimeter from the ice-David's chest, but the energy hit him like a brickbat, and he staggered back ten feet before recovering his footing. Raven did not follow up, a full-fledged battle in here could cause brain damage if not contained properly, but she wasn't sure if the ice-David knew that.
As it turned out, the point was rendered moot a moment later.
Ice-David recovered its footing, instinctively clutching at its chest where the energy had struck it, and took a second or two to recover, before raising its head once again, its snow-white eyes staring flaming daggers at her, and frost flowed along the floor from the shimmering haze around it, riding up the walls and draperies and condensing on Raven's cloak. It said nothing, likely it was beyond speech, and took two menacing, determined steps towards her before there was a blur of motion, and it suddenly shattered into a million pieces which flew in every direction like bomb fragments, mingling with those of the frozen water-simulacrum from a moment ago.
In its place stood yet another version of David, crouched on the ground where it had just landed upon the ice-sculpture fist-first. It remained motionless initially, then slowly stood up, with infinite care and poise, staring at Raven with a look that she could not immediately read, for this version was comprised entirely of metal, sculpted in exquisite detail like the others, but its face and body the unvarying gunmetal-gray of wrought iron.
"He's right, you know."
It was David's voice again, calmer now, controlled and confident, and the iron-David lightly kicked the fragments of the ice-David aside, walking towards her without any apparent hostility, but equally without hesitation. As it did so, the smoke-David behind her slowly crept out, slipping to the side silently as the iron-David's heavy footfalls sent tremors through the floor.
"You really don't have any right to be here," said the iron-David, but the words were not angry. They simply were. "And you know it too, don't you?"
Behind the iron figure, the ice fragments were melting and re-coalescing, and moments later, both water and ice copies of David were reformed again, the ice one staring daggers at her, the water one merely shaking its head slowly, as if in disappointment, with her or with the other Davids.
"Yes," said Raven. "I know."
The iron-David did not seem at all perturbed by her admission. "So then what are you doing here here?" it asked, folding its arms and staring up at her (like David, the simulacra were shorter than she was), like a headmaster lecturing a recalcitrant student.
"I already answered that," replied Raven evenly, using the voice she adopted whenever she was trying to get one of the others to drop a line of inquiry. It usually worked.
"Well..." chimed in the water-David, "you did and you didn't. You said you needed answers, but... why come here for them?"
"Isn't that obvious?"
The last question was instantly distinguishable, if only because it, unlike the others, was not in some permutation of David's voice. Instead it was deep, rich, tonal, like thunder from a distant storm, and one and all, the various Davids present here turned about to follow it, and raised their water or iron or smoke-filled eyes to the top of the stairs leading into the grand chamber they all stood in. Raven did the same, and at the top of the stairs, there stood a large man with a fiery red beard, draped in rich clothes of a thousand different colors, a polished, gleaming scabbard hung at his side, in which was sheathed an enormous jeweled sword. At the sight of the red-bearded man, the water-David smiled, the smoke-David shuddered, the ice-David sneered, and the iron-David smirked, but the bearded man paid them no mind, moving down the stairs with surprising agility, before arriving on the landing below.
"She is here to find me," said the bearded man as though pronouncing a eulogy. "And she has done so." He looked around at the various Davids arrayed here, spending several moments on each one, before slowly drawing the flame-shrouded sword at his side, and the ringing of the steel on the scabbard was like a fine bell.
"So now," said the bearded man, "the only question left, is what do we do with her?"
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
The floors flew past, one after the next in dizzying succession, but Robin was no stranger to freefalls, and he kept his head. With one hand he reached for a grappling launcher, and with the other hand... well... with the other hand he reached for another grappling launcher. At this point, he was fairly sure he was going to need both.
Beast Boy could fly. Starfire could fly. That left Cyborg and David who could not. None of Robin's tools could hold Cyborg's weight, but he knew that Starfire could, and he knew that she would have the presence of mind to go after him. They'd practiced this very drill a hundred times after all, and she knew what to do without stopping to think.
Which left him free to do the following:
He twisted his shoulders, his titanium-polymer cape acting as a rudder, causing him to spin around in mid-air. As he moved, he caught a brief glimpse of a red mark on the wall flying past, and instantly raised his first grappling launcher and blindfired without bothering to confirm what it was. A moment later, and the mark was gone, but so confident was he in his aim that without even taking the time to determine if the shot had struck home or not, he whirled back and fired the other launcher down, towards David. It was an impossible shot, a heavy, non-aerodynamic slug fired by a shooter in free-fall, aimed at a target also freefalling.
Fortunately, Robin made a habit of doing the impossible on a daily basis.
The first grapple pulled tight just as the second one wrapped itself around David's waist. Out of the corner of his eye, Robin spotted Starfire catching Cyborg, mere moments before he would have landed in a sea of angry, armed ghosts. Cyborg fired his sonic cannon downwards, disintegrating the spirits by the dozen and score, but always they snapped back into existence the second his cannon had finished firing. He could not afford to spend any more time paying attention to that though, and an instant later he triggered the retraction winch on both grappling hooks, reeling himself and David up out of reach of the spirits.
Of course the spirits were not going to give up without a fight. Several of them leaped into the air, screaming in fury, lashing out with their weapons. Robin himself was too high for them to reach, but David was not, and without anything to push off of, he could not avoid the dozens of blows that rained down from all directions, twist and squirm though he might. There was simply nothing Robin could do but hurl a handful of useless birdarangs down, which sailed right through the ethereal attackers swarming David, and hope that whatever had prevented them from impaling him before would hold true now.
It did.
The spirits did not detonate or vaporize as they had before, but their weapons again carried no bite when deployed against David alone. This only seemed to enrage them further and they roiled like a pond full of man-eating piranha, slashing and rending and ripping with scythe, sword, and claw. Yet the enraged ghosts might as well have all been figments of Robin's imagination, for all the good it did them, for their scythes melted into vapor, and their swords disintegrated by magic, and their claws passed through David like radio waves through a sheet of paper, emerging on the other side, leaving no trace of their passing. And then a moment later the winch kicked in, and David was wrenched upwards, out of reach of the screaming phantasms. Robin landed on the stair ledge and turned back, grabbing the cable still attached to the grappling launcher on his arm and slowly began to reel it in. A second later, Starfire landed next to him, depositing Cyborg, and lightly tugged on the cable herself, hoisting David up like a line-caught fish and pulling him over onto the stairwell, where he collapsed onto his hands and knees, shaking like a leaf in the wind, one hand clutched to his stomach as though still unable to believe he was in one piece.
The wailing of damned souls was growing louder by the second. It was plain that they were not going to get any time to process the insanity that had just transpired. Behind them sat the red mark Robin had fired at blindly, an enormous Mark of Scath carved into the rock and glowing in the dark stairwell like hot coals. Robin glanced at Cyborg, who ripped the stone from the wall and threw it down the stairwell shaft, where it was instantly torn to bits by the ravening spirits. Behind where it had sat was a wind-swept hallway, disappearing downwards into the gloom.
"Come on!" shouted Robin over the wailing ghosts. "This way!"
The others raced down the exposed hallway, save for Beast Boy who stopped long enough to help David back to his feet. David looked like he was in deep shell shock, like a survivor from some kind of unheralded catastrophe, but he managed, with help, to scramble to his feet and move all the same. No doubt he had no better idea what was going on here than Robin did, but there simply wasn't time for any of them to stop and think this through. Between everything that was happening, Robin simply had to hope that he wasn't about to fold up and collapse on them. They had to run.
So they ran.
Starfire flew above their heads, tossing starbolts backwards up the tunnel at the pursuing ghosts, and Cyborg occasionally spun around to blanket the area behind them in blue energy, but nothing would keep back the tide of spirits who ignored every assault, every blast, and boiled down the shaft after them like avenging demons. Robin snatched a bomb from his belt and hurled it back towards the ghosts, following it up with a barrage of birdarangs, explosive and otherwise, trying to buy himself the time he needed to figure out what they should -
A huge explosion rippled down the tunnel, nearly blowing Robin off his feet, as every single birdarang and shaped charge he had just thrown, explosive and non-explosive alike, blew up at once. The nearest dozen spirits were ripped to shreds, their ghostly filaments flung all over the walls. And as he turned back towards the others, he saw David standing with his back to the others and his face to the horde of ghosts, his baton held outwards like a fencing sword, sheathed in flickering flames of red light. The baton was shaking in his hand, his eyes were open wide and his expression was halfway between mortal terror and thunderstruck awe. But as the ghosts started to reconstitute themselves once more, he shut his eyes and swung the metal stick sharply back and forth, and sent a wave of cascading blasts flying off the walls and ceiling of the tunnel beyond Robin, which sufficed to slow the spirits down for about three seconds.
It was something. And moreover, it was considerably more than Robin had expected David to be able to do at this point.
Robin turned and ran, and grabbed David's arm as he ran past to encourage him to do the same. David proved to require little encouragement, and the two of them soon had caught the others, moments before they all entered a small stone chamber with half a dozen undifferentiated exits leading out.
"Which way do we go?" yelled Beast Boy, as the sounds of the pursuing ghosts thundered towards them.
A ghost lunged into the room and would probably have taken Robin's head off if Starfire hadn't obliterated it with a starbolt first, a temporary measure to be sure, but appreciated nonetheless. "Follow the Mark!" Robin shouted, ducking and rolling as a dozen more appeared where the first had come from, their ethereal weapons clashing against the rock behind him. Starfire and Cyborg both opened fire, point black, scattering the ghosts and sending clouds of debris flying in every direction, but it was all a stopgap. They could not hurt their enemies. They could only flee.
Fortunately, the Mark as a guideline held true. It was prominently displayed above one of the doorways out of the chamber, and an instant after Robin had told him to look for it, Beast Boy spotted it. "This way!" yelled Beast Boy, morphing into a fly to evade a ghost that had moved around to cut him off. The ghost slashed at Beast Boy and missed, and then dissolved violently as Cyborg charged right into and through it, opening a way for the others to escape. Still the ghosts pressed them, hot on their heels, slashing and slicing at every opportunity. Robin took up the rear, ducking under and leaping over slashes with every other step, his staff striking empty air as he tried to swat back the attacking spirits.
Then suddenly, disaster struck.
Robin could tell that David was moving largely on autopilot, his mind dulled no doubt by the shock of everything that had just happened. Even Robin was prepared to forgive that at this point. Between Slade, the migraines, and now whatever miraculous salvation he had experienced after being impaled by the ghosts, more seasoned minds than David's would have seized up by now or succumbed to panic or catatonia. The purpose of training, in part, was to ensure that even when you were distracted, shocked, or otherwise outside the focus you normally needed to fight and act, you could still operate by rote muscle memory if necessary. But muscle memory and gut reaction were treacherous things to rely on, and so it was that when the hallway suddenly dipped, the others all managed to negotiate it without thinking, but David, whose battered mind was simply elsewhere, tripped over an uneven stone, fell flat on his face, and was instantly submerged.
Two hundred ghosts swarmed over David before he had even slid to a stop, screaming soul-rending cries of bloodlust and rage, slashing and hacking with their weapons to tear him to ribbons. His own scream of surprise and fear alerted the others, and despite the imminent danger they stopped, and turned, and tried to blast their way back to him, but it was utterly impossible. Cyborg roared and flayed the air with his sonic cannon, Beast Boy morphed into shape after shape, large and small by turns, and Starfire cried aloud in Tamaranean and sent a fusillade of white-hot blasts to desperately try and clear a path, but more and more ghosts lunged past David towards the others, howling like devils unchained. If they did not resume running now, they would all die, as surely as the rising of the sun, for the ghosts could not be stopped in these numbers, not by ten times the firepower of all of the Titans combined. Yet even if David appeared somehow to be proof against these things' attacks, even if the alternative was certain death, Robin could not give the order to abandon their efforts and flee for their lives. Not like this. Despite everything, he hesitated.
But to his utter astonishment, the one person who he would never have imagined able to keep his head in such a situation, did not hesitate at all.
For a moment, a single moment, the ghosts seemed to part before a full-power blast from Cyborg's cannon, and in that instant Robin saw David laying on his stomach, pinned down by a hundred ghosts, with two dozen ethereal blades actually sticking right through him and into the floor. His expression was that of terror and confusion and panic all mixed into one, but in the instant that he was visible, something... else... a realization perhaps, or a crystalization of thought came over David's face, and the fear and confusion vanished like vapor. And before Robin even realized what David was doing, the psychokinetic had reached down and grabbed his baton, lighting it afire with a thought, and raising it up towards the ceiling...
Robin understood an instant later. "Wait, no!"
A peal of thunder ripped through the hallway, loud enough even to drown out the shrieking ghosts, and a twelve-foot section of the ceiling between David and the other Titans shattered like glass. An instant later, three hundred tons of dirt, rock, and debris plunged through the broken ceiling, like water spilling from a pent-up dam. Several ghosts were caught beneath the surging tide and were dispersed like fog in a windstorm. The remainder howled and screamed for only an instant before their cries were cut off as the impenetrable earthen barrier slammed shut like a security gate, leaving all four remaining Titans standing alone in the suddenly silent hallway.
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
The four Davids of various compositions just stood there, quietly watching the red-bearded man descend the stairs at an even pace, his eyes almost downcast as he rested one hand on the banister while the other held his enormous, burning sword. He reached the foot of the stairs without a word, stopping there, and only then did he look up at Raven and wait, as the eyes of the the four David-figures turned back to her as well.
There were a few moments of silence.
"Kill her," snarled the ice-David through clenched teeth.
"No!" yelped the smoke-David, causing the ice one to whip his head around to face him. Before his gaze, the smoke-David literally withered, but he managed to stammer out a reason. "We... we can't..."
"Yeah..." said the water-David with a smirk. "I'm gonna go with 'no' on that too."
"Tear her guts out!" shrieked the ice-David at the bearded man, with such force that flakes of ice actually flew out of his mouth. "Rip her mind to pieces and let her rot in - "
"Absolutely not," said the iron-David. "And that's final."
"Oh of course," yelled the ice-David. "Wouldn't want to stop you all from sucking up some more! Maybe she'll threaten to kill us again! That's fun, isn't it?"
"Honestly, will you go take a pill or something?" asked the water-David, in what sounded like mock-exasperation. "Are you gonna act like this every time we meet someone new?"
"If the last few times are any indication, somebody has to around here!"
The iron-David groaned and shook his head. "Give it a rest already. She's not going to start anything here. And if she does, we'll take her apart. Now shut up."
"I'll talk whenever I feel like it you preening piece of - !" insisted the ice-David.
"Oh you don't say?" said water-David, laying the sarcasm on thick. Iron-David chuckled, and even smoke-David chanced a small laugh, which ended the instant ice-David turned his eyes on him again.
"May I please get a decision?" asked the bearded man in a long-suffering tone.
"No," said the water-David.
"N... no..." stammered the smoke-David a moment later.
"Yes," snarled the ice-David.
"Hell no," said the iron-David chuckling as he said it, as though the very idea were laughable.
The bearded man sighed almost resignedly, and nodded, as though this was a result he had been long-expecting, and slowly he slid his sword back into its sheath. Only after he had done this, and taken several deep breaths, did he slowly walk forward towards Raven. He closed to within half a dozen paces, folding his arms as he did so, and shaking his head. Raven did not move as he approached, but simply watched, as did the four Davids, and when finally the bearded man had stopped, he stared down at the floor for a few seconds, as if preparing himself for the ordeal of speaking, and then finally raised his head.
"Well," he said. "Here we are."
Raven scarcely knew where to begin. Experienced though she was in dealing with mindscapes, everything she had found in here had generated far more questions than it answered. And yet right now, the red-bearded man appeared to be waiting for her to say something, so she opted to start with the basics.
"And where are we?" she asked, guardedly.
"Oh, I imagine that much is obvious," said the enormous man. "We're inside David's mind, of course. And as you no doubt have surmised," he gestured back at the four Davids behind him, "some of the locals have decided to pay you a visit."
"Ice and smoke?" she asked. "Is that supposed to be a metaphor?"
"This is a mindscape, Raven," replied the large man. "Everything is a metaphor. Not everyone color-codes their emotions, after all."
The iron-David stepped forward, walking around to the right side of the the bearded man and Raven, even as the water and smoke-Davids did the same on the left, the ice-David remaining where he was. "Some people see the world through other lenses," said the iron-David.
"Thanks to him at least," added the water-David, smirking and gesturing at the bearded man.
"It's... it's about... what things are made of... and... why..." said the smoke-David hesitantly, pointedly keeping the water-David between him and the ice-David at all times.
Raven considered this, indeed she'd already determined most of it. "So then what am I supposed to draw from a tower with my picture in a window?"
"Well I imagine you'd have to ask him," replied the man with a hint of frustration in his voice, "but if I had to guess, I'd say you occupy a fairly major role in his life right now, wouldn't you? As do the others."
"Besides," said the iron-David, "I think volcanic rock applies pretty well for you"
"Should've been nerve gas," muttered the ice-David.
"You see, this is why we can't have nice people over..." said the water-David, and he met the ice-David's withering glare with a laugh.
"None of this is real," continued the bearded man, "it's just how you choose to perceive what's going on in here. Your mind is an alien landscape full of disjointed fragments because you arrange it as one. His is a forest with towers because he presents it as such, and you choose to perceive it that way. He's no more schizophrenic than you are. In fact, a great deal less."
Raven's gaze narrowed. "And how would David know any of that?"
"He doesn't."
"But you do?"
The man said nothing, and his silence was answer enough.
"Who are you?"
"I told you already," he said.
"You said you were 'Devastator'," said Raven. "What does that mean?"
"An enormous number of things," replied 'Devastator', crossing his arms, "none of which I am about to explain to the Gem of Trigon. But in the most basic sense, it means I am your enemy."
He said it evenly, with no particular emphasis or even malice to the words, but while no deception or trickery could she sense, and given his previous demeanor, she would normally have believed him, there was something she was wondering about...
"If you're my enemy, how come I'm not dead?"
That one seemed to catch Devastator off-guard. He considered his answer carefully for a few moments, but finally seemed to decide that there was no point in obfuscating.
"Because I can't kill you."
"Can't?"
"If I had the means, Raven, I assure you, you would be dead," said Devastator evenly, "and the world spared much pain in the process. But I can't kill you. I tried to scare you off, and I failed. So here we are."
"Why can't you kill me?"
But instead of answering, the large man shook his head. "No," he said sharply, "no, I am done with your questions. Especially since you're simply going to run off and report every answer to your father."
A burst of anger at the mere mention of her father boiled through Raven unbidden. "I am not working for him," she hissed back at Devastator.
"'I'm not working for him'" mimicked the ice-David, before turning to the others. "Does that sound... familiar to anyone else?"
"It does," said the iron-David, crossing his arms and looking singularly unamused. The smoke-David seemed to shrink a bit and recoil behind the water-David, who was simply shaking his head, but Devastator himself ignored them all.
"Raven," said the bearded man, "right now, the most important things I know about you are that you are the daughter of Trigon the Terrible, and that despite the fact that David has been far more patient with you than I would in his place, you suspected his loyalties to the point where after claiming to be his friend, you broke into his room, sedated him with magic, and then forced your way into his mind."
"I didn't come in here because I thought David was a traitor!" insisted Raven, just a second before she could catch herself.
"Firstly, you're lying, and secondly you say that as though it matters why you came in here," said Devastator. "I doubt seriously that any of the others would ask as to your motives. Or were you planning on leaving as secretly as you entered, and hoping none would be the wiser?"
"I don't have a plan for how I was going to leave," admitted Raven freely. It didn't matter at this point. "Besides, aren't you gonna tell him I was here?"
Devastator laughed. "I would have thought it was apparent by now, Raven, that David and I cannot communicate directly. Otherwise I would not only tell him that you were here, I would suggest to him certain 'actions' he might consider taking. But that is neither here nor there."
Devastator stepped towards her, his gait unhurried, as he spoke in simple, declarative statements, that bore all the force of falling artillery shells. "I'd accuse you of bad faith and criminality if I thought it had the slightest chance in Hell of making an impact, Raven, and I'd claim to be shocked that you would do this to a so-called friend, save that I know how you treat all of your other so-called friends. You know, the ones you're going to be complicit in murdering in a few weeks' time?"
"Stop it," she said curtly, a warning anyone who knew her well would have heeded.
"I think you should go on," said the ice-David who seemed almost to be enjoying this.
"Come on," said the water-David, "we don't need to start - "
"No, I agree with him," interrupted the iron-David, gesturing at the ice figure. "This is our house, we set the rules, not her."
Whether he was heeding the advice of the Davids, or whether he was continuing on his own volition, Devastator persisted.
"The apocalypse is coming, and you're at the very eye of the storm, and yet when the others ask you what's happening, do you tell them? Do you warn them? Or do you let them blindly walk into the darkness behind you. Even Trigon has the decency to leave portents and warnings of what he's about to do, but you conceal it even from your supposed friends."
"Stop it!" yelled Raven, but her words had no threat to back them up, and Devastator knew it.
"I mean, hiding your true nature is one thing, but hiding someone else's? I can't speak to David directly, but you've known about me since before Slade returned. So how is it that it required Slade and Terra to make him realize that something was amiss? And even if you can justify lying to him, how you can possibly justify lying to the others, particularly Beast Boy - "
"Stop it!" screamed Raven with the force of a loudspeaker, and she lashed out almost subconsciously, slashing at Devastator with a blade of pure will manifested from nowhere. A black swatch of energy struck Devastator and broke against him like water on rock, drawing nothing more than a small smirk, even as the Davids behind him shook their heads or cringed or clenched their fists or merely frowned. She paid them no mind. "I'm not gonna kill them! I'll find a way to stop it!"
"Find a way?" asked Devastator, sounding halfway between contemptuous and confused. "Girl, you are fated to destroy the - "
"I know what I'm fated to do!" yelled Raven back at Devastator. "But I won't let it happen, with or without your help, I'll find something, do something. There has to be some way to stop it from happening."
She turned away from Devastator, largely to avoid screaming in frustration, and clenched her eyes shut, balling up her fists and trying to suppress the urge to shatter everything in this mindscape to splinters and volcanic dust. It might have been a full minute before Devastator said anything, and when he did, it was, oddly enough, a question.
"Is that... is that actually why you came here?"
"Of course it is!" snapped Raven as she turned around, but from the expression on Devastator's face, that much was not as obvious as she had perhaps assumed it to be. "I know what I'm supposed to do."
"And you want to stop it?"
"Yes!"
"Why?"
Raven actually blinked, so unexpected was the question. "What do you mean why? Trigon's going to destroy the entire world if I can't stop him."
"You're his daughter," said Devastator, who was looking more confused by the second. "You're his right hand. You're the Gem of Trigon himself. 'The Gem was born of Evil's fire.' Those words are not merely hyperbole..."
"You think I don't know that?"
"So then - "
"I hate my father!" shouted Raven, and the sound of her own words surprised her, for despite everything, she had never before actually vocalized this sentiment in words, indeed never spoken of her feelings in this regard at all. "I hate him and everything he made me! I hate everything about him, everything! I don't want to be part of his prophecy! I won't be part of it!"
Raven's voice echoed around the stone atrium, as silence descended once more, and she found to her surprise that she was actually shaking, not from fear, but from raw emotion. Too many days and nights balanced on the razor's edge of disaster had strung her nerves out to the breaking point, and all of the insanity of this excursion into David's head was simply too much. She had been doing nothing but confronting the blasphemy that was her own parentage for weeks on end, and the loathing and disgust kept simmering beneath the surface simply needed an outlet. She closed her eyes again, and the image of the fire-scorched cities she saw every time she slept or meditated appeared once more.
She fought the tears that threatened to form.
"... why should I believe you?"
The vision vanished, and Raven opened her eyes to see that Devastator had reverted to the form of David, identical with the four others lined up behind him save that he appeared to be made of flesh and blood.
"If you don't help me, then the world ends, whether or not I'm lying." said Raven.
"The world is going to end," replied Devastator. There is no stopping the prophecy. I already told you that."
"Then why do you care if I'm telling the truth or not?" asked Raven. "If the world's going to end anyway, what does it matter what I do?"
"Because if you are telling the truth," said Devastator, "then the stakes in this are considerably higher than even you realize,"
That one made no sense. "What do you mean? If Trigon comes, it's the end of the world. I know that already."
Devastator shook his head. "If you enact your role, and you will, and Trigon is made manifest on this world, then the Earth will die, yes..."
Slowly, he turned away from Raven, looking back at the other assembled Davids, and only after a few moments did he seem to dredge up the courage to finish his statement.
"... but if I misjudge you, and reveal to you what is actually occurring here... and I am wrong... then the entire universe will die."
Raven could not say anything for quite some time, staring at Devastator's back as she tried, and failed, to work out what possible permutation of the prophecy could even theoretically lead to something like that. Was he making things up? Exaggerating? Was he trying to trick her?
Or... was the link she had assumed between Devastator and the Prophecy perhaps a deeper one than she realized?
"What are you?" she asked, not for the first time, but for the last.
For several minutes, Devastator said nothing, and neither did the other Davids, all of them watching Devastator and Raven in silence. Devastator's head was bowed, almost like he was seeking spiritual guidance, and when finally he raised his head once more, he did not turn around.
"I am a weapon," said Devastator quietly, as though to raise his voice a single decibel would be to invite ruin and destruction on them all. "Perhaps the most terrible weapon ever forged. I exist... solely, to lay waste to the world of matter and energy, to fight fire with nuclear holocausts, and dye the world red with flames and destruction. And while I do not understand all of the particulars of what is going on here, I believe that I am the reason that all of this is coming to pass."
Slowly, Raven stepped forward, reaching out and placing a hand on Devastator's shoulder, so as to turn him around. He permitted himself to be turned, until he was facing her, apprehension as clearly visible on his face as paint would have been.
"Is there some way I can stop my father?"
Devastator's breath caught an instant before he finally answered.
"Yes."
"Tell me what it is."
"You won't..." stammered Devastator, "you don't understand..."
"Then tell me everything," said Raven. "Make me understand."
Devastator raised his eyes to look into Raven's, and froze there as he did so for ten long seconds. And then softly, weakly, as if he could scarcely believe that he was doing so, he began to speak.
"It began with fire..."
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 27, Cont'd
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
"Know your own limits, know what scares you, what damages your concentration, and consciously suppress it. Anyone can make their body obey their mind. The trick is making your mind obey you."
At the time that Robin had told him that, David had remarked (to himself of course, and later to Cyborg and Beast Boy) that it sounded like fortune cookie wisdom, a bad joke used to make the art of punching someone's teeth in sound deep and mystical. The others had agreed.
Well it was still a bad joke, but David was no longer laughing.
He lay on the ground up against the wall, eyes tightly shut, one hand clutching the baton to his chest like a religious icon, the other holding the side of his head in a vice-grip, both to try and suppress the headache that was still thundering inside his skull, and to try and keep out the wails and shrieks of the mad demons that swarmed all around him. Robin's advice had been to intentionally block out anything that got in the way of doing your job, but while Robin was the expert in this, as he was in everything, David would have liked to see him "block out" hundreds of screaming ghosts that were even now trying to rip him apart.
Focusing his frustrations on Robin helped a little.
He steadfastly refused to think. If he thought, he would have to consider the fact that he had just immured himself inside yet another lightless tunnel buried somewhere underground, with only the company of an army of enraged ghosts trying to re-enact Night of the Living Dead. That they had thus far failed was due to no act of his, they'd certainly been able to hit all the others, and David knew that, if he were to look right now, he would no doubt find that dozens of ethereal weapons were sticking through him, while other ghosts were trying to tear his head off with razor-sharp claws.
Which was why he didn't look.
Whatever Robin might have thought, to David, it had been no sudden epiphany that led him to seal the tunnel. It was merely a matter of the first thing that came to mind. He had been running full tilt, right alongside the others, when his headache had suddenly reared up again, and in the instant's distraction that provided, he had tripped on a rock and fallen. His scream had been largely automatic, and had he taken the time to think, he would have realized what a disastrous position he was in, but instead of thinking, all he had done was open his eyes, and see the other four Titans being overwhelmed by the tide of ghosts. It had not occurred to him that they were trying to force their way back to help him, nor that the ghosts were already engaged in trying to tear him to shreds, he had been able only to focus on what was happening to the others, and in just a split-second, he had reacted by instinct, and brought the roof down to block the ghosts' passage.
And it was only after the rock had fallen, sealing the way ahead, that he realized just what he had done.
The roars and screams grew ever more frantic, and David kept his eyes squeezed shut as he tried to concentrate on something other than the nightmare around him, and clear his head enough to think of what the hell he should do now. It took longer than it should have for him to realize that, whatever his plans were now, the first step probably involved getting up, and to that end, he cracked his eyes open tentatively.
It was a mistake. The ghosts were all over him, screaming in his face, slashing at him with everything on hand like frenzied sharks. Though their weapons and claws passed right through him like they weren't even there, their shrieks and hideous appearances were real enough, and as David's nerve was not exactly steady right now, he yelped and cringed and shut his eyes again. It took the better part of a minute before he could work up the courage to try again, but this time, he took refuge in his own private sanctuary. Raven had her mantra, Robin his rote training... and David had his molecules.
Much better.
The ghosts were still screaming, but in molecular vision, they simply did not exist. He could see the air whipped into a lather of flying currents as the ghosts continued their attacks, but the ghosts themselves had no physical forms, and thus did not directly intrude on his world here. Without pausing to let himself grow afraid again, he quickly got up and took stock of his surroundings. The rockslide behind him was utterly impenetrable, but the hallway they had been fleeing down was still open. He could retrace his steps if need be and select another passageway, or if all else failed, return to the massive well they had fallen down and ascend to the surface there. Part of the stairs had broken away, but he could blast new stairs out of the rock if he needed to.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Just having some kind of plan was a relief, and he slowly turned the baton over in his hand until he was holding it normally, and looked down at it, a solid, familiar mass of iron, carbon, and chromium molecules in a solid lattice, each little point humming with its own energy. He extended a grip on it with his mind, taking control of the energy points and feeling them react to him as the baton began to pulse warm and cold in his hands in tune with his own heartbeat.
And then all of a sudden there was the sound of a deafening blast. The floor shifted under him, nearly knocking him off his feet, and then, most ominously of all, there was utter silence.
Without thinking, he switched back to his normal vision, only to find that something like a bomb had just gone off in front of him. The walls and ceiling and floors were scorched black and run through with fissures, none of which had been present a moment ago. Bits of rock shrapnel were scattered all over the hallway around him. But strangest of all, the ghosts who had just moments ago been trying to tear him apart were now... just... gone. Gone as though blotted out of existence. And far up the tunnel, fifty paces or so at least, there sat another horde of ghosts, but rather than scream and charge and attack him, these held back, still clutching their weapons and watching him in silence.
Or rather, he suddenly realized, watching his baton in silence.
He looked down at the baton, sheathed in red as it always was when he was making use of it. Beyond that, there seemed to be nothing abnormal about it in the slightest, and yet every ghost's spectral eyes were fixed to it. Tentatively he raised the baton, and their eyes followed. He shook it side to side, and their gaze did not falter. He took a small step forward...
... and the entire army of ghosts fell back.
And suddenly, David realized what the thunderous sound from a moment ago had been.
The communicator on his belt suddenly began to vibrate and hiss with static. He reached down and pulled it off, opening it up slowly as his mind's gears turned as if soaked with molasses. At first he could make out no words, for the static was too thick, but slowly it cleared, revealing Cyborg.
"David? David, can you hear me? Goddamnit, can any o' y'all hear me?"
The chorus of voices in the background revealed that the others were with Cyborg, no doubt just on the other side of the rockslide, and David coughed and pressed the com button. "D... Devastator here..." he said.
Instantly the voices quieted as Cyborg waved a hand at them. "I got him!" he said to the others. "Hey man, can you hear me? Are you okay?"
"Y... yeah I can... I can hear you," stammered David, still staring at the ghosts. He left the second question unanswered, for he had no idea how to answer it.
There was relief apparent in Cyborg's voice. "Goddamn man, you scared the hell out of us. What is it with you and cave-ins?"
Cyborg's sarcasm was precisely what David needed to hear right now, and as he laughed nervously, the tension in his stomach loosened a bit, as did the headache he still had. "Seemed... seemed like the thing to do..." he said sheepishly. Honestly, right now he'd have taken any punishment Robin wanted to give him for 'recklessness' to just be out of this insane place.
"Take heart, friend," said Starfire, calling out from behind Cyborg somewhere. "We shall soon break through the barrier and retrieve you."
That snapped David back into reality. "No!" he said, startled. "No, the... the ghosts are still here."
"We'll deal with them, man, you just keep tight and stay low."
While thinking was not David's strong suit right now, he objected immediately. "Guys, the ghosts can't hurt me," he said, wishing that there were some wood around to knock on, and glancing back at the huddled phantasms just to make sure. "I don't know how but... but they just can't. If you break down the barricade, they'll be able to get at the rest of you."
"We're not just gonna leave you down here," said Cyborg. "We know how to handle a coupla - "
"No, look..." David fished for what he wanted to say. "I can... I can get out of here myself if I have to. You guys still have to find that... 'gem' thing, right? You guys can't hit the ghosts, and... I guess I can but I don't know how. If you let 'em through, even if you fight them off, how are you gonna find the gem?"
All this logic seemed to be coming out of nowhere, indeed it was all an excuse, and David knew it. Even if he hadn't been thinking when he collapsed the ceiling, he knew for a fact that he did not want the barrier he had made undone. Not with the spirits still running around, and himself the only one proof against their assaults. It wasn't courage, it was just elementary concern for his friends.
Whether or not the other Titans picked up on that was moot though, and Cyborg reluctantly turned away from his wrist-mounted communicator to ask the others what they thought. David caught only whispers of the heated argument that was no doubt ensuing, but a minute or so later, when Cyborg turned back, he knew that Robin's sense of duty to the mission had won out, as it always did.
"Anything happens, man," said Cyborg, "anything happens, and you hit the panic button, got it? I don't care if what we have to take on to do it, we'll be there in no-time, all right?"
Having won the point, David was already regretting his objection, but it was too late for that now. "Yeah," he said. "I got it."
"Hey," said Cyborg sharply, focusing David's attention. "We'll see you topside man."
David slowly nodded. "Right," he said. "See you."
Cyborg signed off, and the screen went dark, and David turned back up towards the assembled ghosts.
"All right," he said to them. "So... now what?"
He hadn't expected an answer, but before his eyes, the ghosts seemed to shimmer, and slowly began to withdraw down the hallway away from him, finally vanishing in the gloom ahead. David couldn't say why, but this seemed almost more ominous than if they had remained behind, and yet there was nothing for it. He allowed the flames on his baton to grow enough for him to see by, at least out a dozen yards or so, and slowly began to make his way back up the hall. He could of course have shifted to his molecular vision, and thereby cared nothing for the absence of light, but then he'd be unable to see the ghosts if they returned.
For several minutes he made his way back, down hallways and around corners, and through rooms where he relied on his memory to guide him back to the master stairwell. Perhaps his memory was faulty, he'd not exactly been in the best of mindsets while fleeing after all, or perhaps there was some dark work being done here and the hallways had shifted around, but no matter how much he backtracked or searched, he couldn't seem to find his way back to the stairs. Either the ghosts or something else had disturbed the dust, eradicating all of the footprints, and every turn and door led him only to yet another chamber with cruel, monstrous statues leering down at him from cornices and wall sconces.
It reminded him of what Beast Boy had told him was in Raven's room.
His headache had subsided for the moment, but stubbornly refused to go away, and so he kept one hand on his temple and the other holding his baton out like a torch. The only sounds were of his own footsteps and breathing, and occasionally a distant echo from somewhere else. Gradually, he worked his way towards areas that appeared familiar, but every time he found his path suddenly blocked by a rock barrier that he was almost certain had not been there when first he arrived. He might have chanced blasting through one, but he felt disinclined to disturb this place more than he had to, and so he followed what passages were open to him, unable to shake the feeling that there was something out there guiding him towards wherever he was going.
And he doubted it was friendly.
Finally, the hallway he was following emerged into a huge open chamber, round and faced with bricks of limestone. It was shaped almost like an arena, with a low wall running around the base of the chamber, topped by staggered terraces that might have been giant-sized stairs, or perhaps benches to sit upon. The air was musty and cold, and the light of his baton was not enough to reach across the floor of the chamber, and see what awaited him on the other side. Still, it was either go in or go back. He didn't even think much about the answer. Whether or not he wanted to go into the chamber (and he absolutely did not), it was becoming more and more clear to him that this was the only way. The purpose pervading this place was almost oppressive, and going back would lead to more dead ends, convenient rockfalls, and eventually, right back here. He knew it without having to ask himself how.
He stepped into the chamber, half-expecting a gate to slam shut behind him, though none did, and walked towards the center of it. It was a good hundred feet across, and when he got near to the center, he stopped, looking around at the silent architecture, the granite-hewn gargoyles perched in silent vigil on the wall around the chamber floor, the huge limestone blocks that formed the floor itself, and waited just a few moments for what he knew instinctively was coming.
Sure enough, he heard footsteps.
The footsteps were light, even but slow, the person emitting them taking their time walking over the cobbled ground. They were coming from up ahead, but instead of switching to molecular vision, instead of commanding his baton to put out more light, he actually lowered the baton and dropped his gaze to the floor, falling silent himself as the lone figure approached. The shadows cast by the flickering flames danced over the floor and walls as the person slowly moved into view, stopping just short of being fully visible, a half-hidden presence on the edge of his circle of vision.
But it didn't matter. He already knew who it was.
"Hello, David," came a voice, quiet and guarded, almost a whisper, but loud enough in the circumstances to be easily heard.
He took one more breath, long and slow, inhaling, pausing, and exhaling, like a sprinter preparing for a race, or a soldier for war. And only then did he raise his eyes, letting the baton's light spill out just far enough so that he could make out his counterpart's features, and perceive the dim golden glow that surrounded them.
"Hello, Terra," he said.
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
"It was an act of desperation,"
Raven stood, leaning against the banister, as Devastator, once again in the form of David, sat on the stairs and spoke at the rich velvet carpets that covered the floor of the volcanic tower, paying neither her nor the other Davids any mind as they stood or sat, scattered around the vast atrium, listening with various expressions, as though they possessed a memory to recall what he was telling them.
"This is not the first time Trigon has sought to lay claim to a world," said Devastator. "Nor even the fiftieth. He is... evil incarnate, perhaps literally, I don't know. Since before I came into being, he has tormented the universe ceaselessly, and for all I know he will still be doing so when the universe ends."
"But... for all his timelessness, Trigon has learned a few things over the millennia. He has become more cunning, more... subtle. He uses pawns such as Slade, or... tools such as you." He glanced up at Raven who steadfastly refused to show any reaction to being called Trigon's tool. She knew he was looking for an excuse not to continue, and would not afford him one.
"Long ago though, he was far more... direct... than he is today. When he sought to destroy a world, he made open assault upon it, and nothing, not the strongest weapons nor the most powerful magics, could force him back. He laid waste to everything he touched, for the sport of it as far as I know. He did so directly, manifesting in a world and consuming it to ash, drinking up the suffering of its inhabitants like a fine wine."
"I know all this," said Raven. "He's my father, remember?"
"... of course," said Devastator. "In any event, every world Trigon assaulted was... afforded some time to prepare. He would announce his intent, and then wait, attacking only after a stated time had passed. It was no nobility that led him to do this, he wanted the inhabitants to feel fear, to watch as doom crept up on them inexorably, to see their societies dissolve into panic and chaos, before he finally consumed their souls with fire. This is why he permitted the prophecies concerning him to spread, including the prophecy of the Gem... of you. Such was his contempt for any resistance that might be offered."
Now they were getting to it. "So then some people did resist him?"
Devastator nodded. "Usually to no effect at all, for Trigon is and was a being of cosmic power. You cannot slay him with a singularity or defeat him with a battlefleet. But... there was one group, on one of the worlds he assaulted, who believed that he could be defeated, if only they found the right weapons to use against him."
Raven raised an eyebrow. "You mean you."
Devastator shook his head. "Not just me..."
The world flashed white for an instant, and suddenly Devastator and Raven were back atop the enormous tower that stretch high above the burning city below, the seven-pointed star inscribed in the marble floor as immaculate as ever.
"They have no name in any of your tongues, and though no doubt humans would call them walking lizards, they were anything but. They were a proud, cultured civilization, with a rich history and heritage, revered in their day across the galaxy for the depth and breadth of their learning. No doubt that is why Trigon elected to destroy them. He gave them warning in the form of portents and heralds, as was his custom, and watched as their society collapsed into anarchy and fear."
Raven chanced a look off the edge of the tower at the burning city below, which stretched as far as the eye could see. "But not all of them panicked, did they?"
"No," confirmed Devastator. "Their most revered scholars and magicians devised a plan. No mortal weapon could harm Trigon, no matter how strong, so they sought instead for a cosmic weapon."
Devastator gestured at the starburst pattern in the floor. "The universe is governed by fundamental forces, forces that govern the workings of all life, all matter, all energy, everything. Some are physical: gravity, magnetism, the laws of nuclear physics... but the most powerful of all these forces are more philosophical in nature than physical. Gravity controls how a planet forms... but why does it form? What purpose does it serve? They are the underpinnings of everything in the universe, every physical law, every being, every spell cast or machine built, the prime movers of all that is. They control not just the behavior of objects, but the reasons that those objects exist. They are so pervasive in the universe that nobody even considers them. They simply are. Some systems of thought group them all together under the heading of 'God'. Others divide them into a pantheon of hundreds of individual forces."
Devastator sighed. "These people believed there were seven."
Raven nodded. Seven was a very powerful number insofar as magic was concerned, but then so were about half the numbers between 1 and 20, for a variety of reasons.
"They gathered together their strongest sorcerers and sages, and with the assistance of untold sacrifice and toil, they bypassed all of the so-called 'fundamental' forces of the universe, and managed to forge seven... entities, empowered by what they believed were the root forces, not just of the physical universe, but of everything. They believed that by employing weapons that drew their power from existence itself, they actually stood a chance of defeating Trigon."
Raven took a second to absorb all this before speaking up. "So... you're one of these weapons?"
"Yes," said Devastator. "I am the weaponized embodiment of Destruction itself."
"Then... that means David is - "
"A normal, human child," said Devastator. "Or at least as normal as humans ever get. That's why his powers do not work the way you assumed they ought. His powers may resemble a kineticist's, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with real kinetics. He has no supernatural powers of his own. He has only me."
Raven closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. "Okay," she finally said. "I don't even know where to begin here. You're telling me that you're a cosmic-level superweapon built to kill my father?"
"That is... a simplification," said Devastator, "but accurate on the face."
"You expect me to believe that?" she asked
"Not really," he replied with perfect aplomb. "In fact right now, I would imagine you are pondering certain questions, such as why this is the first time you have ever heard of me, why I have not communicated with you earlier, how I came to be here in the first place, or perhaps how it is that David is scarcely capable of detonating an automobile, when I claim to be able to tear the stars from the heavens with but a glance.
Raven had significantly more questions than that, but they would do for a start. "I'm listening," she said.
A chair materialized behind Devastator, and he sat.
"You have to understand," said Devastator, "you and I can sit here and converse, and I can speak, reason, and express opinion, just as you can... but when I say that I am a weapon, I am not speaking in metaphor. I am not alive, not in the strict sense of the word."
"You look alive enough to me," commented Raven.
"Yes, I do," said Devastator, "but I lack something."
"What?"
"Will."
Raven frowned. "Will?"
Devastator leaned forward. "When the seven of us were created, we were not envisioned as being wholly independent champions, that our makers would send out to fight Trigon directly. Even if they had been capable of creating such things, they feared that to create new life and imbue it with the very forces of the universe would just be to create more Trigons, who might turn against them or others, and lay waste to the galaxy. Instead, we were tools, conduits to be precise, mental gateways that granted control over the physical underpinnings of reality. They wished us to be of as much value as we could, so they gave us intelligence, reason, even the ability to desire things, but they intentionally gave us no will of our own. For that, we needed another."
"What do you mean they gave you 'no will'?"
"We cannot act on our own, of our own desire. Not at all. I have within me the power to destroy you so completely that your very existence would be forgotten by the universe, but I cannot do it myself. I lack the will to act against you. That is why I couldn't kill you before. All I could do was hope you might become frightened enough to leave on your own volition." Devastator smirked. "You don't frighten easily."
Raven ignored the remark. "So then if you can't act, how were you supposed to fight Trigon?"
"We weren't," replied Devastator. "Our hosts were."
Raven's eyes widened. "You're a parasite?"
Devastator sighed and shook his head. "No. A parasite drains life from its host. We empower ours with gifts they never could attain themselves. I prefer the term 'symbiont'. However... if you wish to be literal, I am indeed an energy parasite, though I assure you, David has come to no harm from me."
"That's very debatable," said Raven darkly, but she left it at that. "So who were these hosts?"
"Warriors," said Devastator. "The most expertly-trained warriors that their civilization possessed. You would have called them heroes, perhaps even superheroes, given the powers we granted them. They were the elite, the mightiest soldiers of their entire planet. And we were each joined with them, in preparation for Trigon's arrival. We provided the raw power, and they provided the wills to shape it. Through practice and training, they learned to deploy staggering power, many many times that of all of you put together. For a time, all of us, host and parasite alike, believed it might be enough."
"But it wasn't?"
Devastator shook his head. "No," he said. "It wasn't." He stood up, and slowly walked over to the edge of the atrium, peering down at the burning city below. "Trigon came... and we fought him with all the powers of the universe. We scoured cities and boiled oceans and lit the skies with flame. I was in the forefront, 'destruction' lacks the... subtleties of some of the other forces in the universe, and I watched as everything we did, and everything we tried, turned to ashes around us. Trigon was simply unstoppable, and one by one, all seven of the chosen warriors fell before him. And one by one, all seven weapons simply vanished into the ether."
"So what happened to you?"
Devastator sighed. "I don't know,"
Raven said nothing, waiting for him to elaborate, and a few minutes later, he did.
"When the others died, their... parasites, simply dissolved back into the cosmos, I presume from whence they came. We had been bonded to our hosts by incalculably strong magics, and without those bonds, we could not maintain our existence. But when my host died... I found that I remained, invisible, unable to act or fight or do anything but watch as Trigon devoured all life on the planet, and left it a sterile, burnt wasteland. I do not know why I remained, while all of the others simply vanished, but finally I simply left the planet."
"How?"
Devastator shrugged. "I have no physical form," he said. "Not even an energy form. I exist on a level different than that of the reality you are accustomed to. I simply moved elsewhere. I wandered the cosmos for ages, with no real purpose in mind, until one day I came across a planet full of other beings, and descended onto it. There, I encountered a young girl, playing in a river. She could not sense that I was present, but... largely to see if I could, I entered her mind, and she became my new host."
Devastator turned back to Raven and smirked. "They called her 'The Queen of Fire'," he said. "She raised an army, as soon as she was old enough, and overthrew the empire that had been oppressing her people. She founded a new dynasty on her world, that may well reign to this day for all I know. And when she died, of old age, in her palace, I left that planet, and journeyed to another world, and chose a new host," he shook his head, "... who was burnt at the stake as a witch."
"Since then, I have traveled from planet to planet, world to world. I select a host, I bond with them, and they command me. Some hosts never know I'm there. Some use me to become warlords and tyrants. Some are noble and heroic, founding empires or protecting their people. Some simply employ me for their own personal gain, and some refuse ever to employ me at all. They each wield raw destruction, though every host's personality tailors the style in which my powers are made manifest. David, for example, has something of a... methodical, observational bent, and so his powers are manifest in molecular composition and temperature transference. Some are pyrogenic, some warp gravity or other physical forces, and some simply seize the physical structures their enemies are comprised of, and divide them. It all depends on my host. They command me, utterly and fully, by will alone."
Raven listened carefully. Of all the things she had expected Devastator to tell her, this story was not one of them. But then she had long-since stopped expecting to be able to guess where this insane quest of hers would lead.
"How do you choose your hosts?" she asked.
Devastator shrugged. "Sometimes I select randomly. Sometimes I watch a person carefully to find the 'trait' I have in mind at the moment. Sometimes I choose an adult, and see how they cope with their newfound abilities. Sometimes it is a child, who then grows up endowed with great powers. My preferences change with the centuries, and besides that, I have no say over how my hosts employ me. I am a weapon. I do as I am commanded by the will who commands."
"So then if you're so powerful, how come David doesn't have 'cosmic power'? He can barely destroy a car."
"Well, to begin with, he's still quite young," said Devastator, "but... essentially, because he is a human. Humans are frail creatures, as I'm sure you already know. Channeling the raw forces of the universe is not a stress-free act. There is a physical limit to the energies his body can manifest, as there was for all my hosts. And should he exceed that limit - "
"His headaches," said Raven, suddenly putting the pieces together.
Devastator nodded grimly. "The stresses manifest themselves in his circulatory system. If he managed somehow to harness even a fraction of my full power, his heart would simply explode. The lower scale effects resemble migraines."
Raven nodded and changed tacks for a moment. "So let me get this straight," she said, "you chose David, right?"
"Yes," nodded Devastator.
"Why?"
Devastator smiled. "I'm afraid that, if not the rest, is none of your business," he said. "Suffice to say I chose him. Even if you are Trigon's enemy, and David's friend, why I chose him is something I will reveal to him alone, should somehow he come to ask me."
"Fine," said Raven. Even she had to admit that was fair enough. "So then how about something that is my business?"
"Such as?"
"Why did you attack me when I came inside his head?"
Devastator sighed. "Consider my perspective for a moment," he said. "I chose David many many years ago, when he was very young. I had my reasons. I watched him grow up, largely alone, in these... institutions your people use for caring for orphans. I watched him discover his powers, and choose not to use them. I was with him when he was attacked by surprise, and when you five took him into your tower. And I was happy to see it too. He's... always been very limited in his friendships, and I thought what better friends could he find than the five of you..."
The cosmic weapon raised its head, and its voice sharpened considerably as it addressed Raven.
"And then what do I find, but to my surprise, one of his brand new friends turns out to be the daughter of Trigon the Terrible himself. And not just his daughter, but the Gem, the one prophesied to bring him back into the world, and to destroy it. There are nine hundred million trillion sentient beings in this galaxy alone. The odds that I should happen to choose as my host, one who happens to make the acquaintance of the Gem of Trigon, are simply not credible. You are a follower of Azar's, I believe, yes? If so, then you are no doubt familiar with the phrase 'there is no such thing as coincidence'? I don't know if I believe that or not, but you and David meeting is either the greatest coincidence in the history of the universe, or it is something else."
Raven narrowed her eyes. "You think someone's setting us up?"
"Yes," said Devastator. "And I'm not yet certain it isn't you."
"Well assume for a second that it isn't. Why would they do that?"
"Someone has endeavored to arrange things such that David will be present with or near you when you fulfill your destiny and summon your father to destroy the Earth," said Devastator. "If I had to take a guess, I would say that that person was either Trigon himself, or one of his agents, and while I did have reasons for choosing David as my host, I suspect whoever it is has no direct interest in David. More likely, they have some business with me."
"Cinderblock called him 'Devastator'..." said Raven suddenly. "He couldn't have known that name unless..."
"Unless someone told him the name," said the living weapon, "someone who knew I existed, and that I was incarnated within David. Perhaps that someone was Slade, but perhaps not. Either way, it's... worrisome."
"You think Trigon's out to get you?"
"I think Trigon is, as always, out to cause suffering and pain on as wide a scale as he can manage," said Devastator. "But I cannot believe that my presence here, as the prophecy is about to be fulfilled, is all a matter of chance. I don't know if he chose Earth because of me, or if I am merely a side-objective of his, but I do believe Trigon has a reason for wanting my host present when he manifests."
"And what reason is that?"
Devastator shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "But any reason Trigon has will be to the detriment of the universe at large, not to mention your immediate friends."
Raven nodded, and walked over towards Devastator, who watched her approach in silence.
"Then we have to stop my father before he manifests."
Devastator groaned and laid his head in one hand. "I told you already, you cannot stop Trigon from manifesting. His prophecy is absolute. He will manifest, and there is nothing you can do to stop him. I tried once, remember?"
"But you said there was a way I could stop my father!" insisted Raven. "Is there or isn't there? Make up your mind!"
"There..." said Devastator, and his voice sounded pained. "There's... a way you can upset his plans, yes."
"Well? What is it?"
"Trigon clearly intends for me to be present when he returns. Since you cannot stop him from returning, you have to ensure I am not there when he does."
Raven paused, confused. "How do I do that?" she asked. "Take David to another planet?"
"No," said Devastator. "Trigon knows the identity of my host. Physical distance is no barrier to him. He would track David down the instant he appeared. The only option is for me to be joined with a different host, one he doesn't know the identity of."
Raven sensed that she was missing something. "So then... go for it," she said. "If you can just pick one, go ahead and pick."
Once again, Devastator shook his head. "I cannot leave my host voluntarily," he said. "Once I have selected one, I am bound to him for the rest of his life, whether he uses me or not. I cannot leave. Not without your help."
"What are you saying...?" asked Raven hesitantly, "is there some ritual you need me to perform?"
"I'm afraid," said Devastator, "it's much... simpler than that."
"What do you mean?" she asked, though in the back of her mind, she feared she already knew what Devastator was going to say.
"Raven," said Devastator quietly, "if you want to save the universe from your father, then you have to kill David."
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
"Know your own limits, know what scares you, what damages your concentration, and consciously suppress it. Anyone can make their body obey their mind. The trick is making your mind obey you."
At the time that Robin had told him that, David had remarked (to himself of course, and later to Cyborg and Beast Boy) that it sounded like fortune cookie wisdom, a bad joke used to make the art of punching someone's teeth in sound deep and mystical. The others had agreed.
Well it was still a bad joke, but David was no longer laughing.
He lay on the ground up against the wall, eyes tightly shut, one hand clutching the baton to his chest like a religious icon, the other holding the side of his head in a vice-grip, both to try and suppress the headache that was still thundering inside his skull, and to try and keep out the wails and shrieks of the mad demons that swarmed all around him. Robin's advice had been to intentionally block out anything that got in the way of doing your job, but while Robin was the expert in this, as he was in everything, David would have liked to see him "block out" hundreds of screaming ghosts that were even now trying to rip him apart.
Focusing his frustrations on Robin helped a little.
He steadfastly refused to think. If he thought, he would have to consider the fact that he had just immured himself inside yet another lightless tunnel buried somewhere underground, with only the company of an army of enraged ghosts trying to re-enact Night of the Living Dead. That they had thus far failed was due to no act of his, they'd certainly been able to hit all the others, and David knew that, if he were to look right now, he would no doubt find that dozens of ethereal weapons were sticking through him, while other ghosts were trying to tear his head off with razor-sharp claws.
Which was why he didn't look.
Whatever Robin might have thought, to David, it had been no sudden epiphany that led him to seal the tunnel. It was merely a matter of the first thing that came to mind. He had been running full tilt, right alongside the others, when his headache had suddenly reared up again, and in the instant's distraction that provided, he had tripped on a rock and fallen. His scream had been largely automatic, and had he taken the time to think, he would have realized what a disastrous position he was in, but instead of thinking, all he had done was open his eyes, and see the other four Titans being overwhelmed by the tide of ghosts. It had not occurred to him that they were trying to force their way back to help him, nor that the ghosts were already engaged in trying to tear him to shreds, he had been able only to focus on what was happening to the others, and in just a split-second, he had reacted by instinct, and brought the roof down to block the ghosts' passage.
And it was only after the rock had fallen, sealing the way ahead, that he realized just what he had done.
The roars and screams grew ever more frantic, and David kept his eyes squeezed shut as he tried to concentrate on something other than the nightmare around him, and clear his head enough to think of what the hell he should do now. It took longer than it should have for him to realize that, whatever his plans were now, the first step probably involved getting up, and to that end, he cracked his eyes open tentatively.
It was a mistake. The ghosts were all over him, screaming in his face, slashing at him with everything on hand like frenzied sharks. Though their weapons and claws passed right through him like they weren't even there, their shrieks and hideous appearances were real enough, and as David's nerve was not exactly steady right now, he yelped and cringed and shut his eyes again. It took the better part of a minute before he could work up the courage to try again, but this time, he took refuge in his own private sanctuary. Raven had her mantra, Robin his rote training... and David had his molecules.
Much better.
The ghosts were still screaming, but in molecular vision, they simply did not exist. He could see the air whipped into a lather of flying currents as the ghosts continued their attacks, but the ghosts themselves had no physical forms, and thus did not directly intrude on his world here. Without pausing to let himself grow afraid again, he quickly got up and took stock of his surroundings. The rockslide behind him was utterly impenetrable, but the hallway they had been fleeing down was still open. He could retrace his steps if need be and select another passageway, or if all else failed, return to the massive well they had fallen down and ascend to the surface there. Part of the stairs had broken away, but he could blast new stairs out of the rock if he needed to.
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Just having some kind of plan was a relief, and he slowly turned the baton over in his hand until he was holding it normally, and looked down at it, a solid, familiar mass of iron, carbon, and chromium molecules in a solid lattice, each little point humming with its own energy. He extended a grip on it with his mind, taking control of the energy points and feeling them react to him as the baton began to pulse warm and cold in his hands in tune with his own heartbeat.
And then all of a sudden there was the sound of a deafening blast. The floor shifted under him, nearly knocking him off his feet, and then, most ominously of all, there was utter silence.
Without thinking, he switched back to his normal vision, only to find that something like a bomb had just gone off in front of him. The walls and ceiling and floors were scorched black and run through with fissures, none of which had been present a moment ago. Bits of rock shrapnel were scattered all over the hallway around him. But strangest of all, the ghosts who had just moments ago been trying to tear him apart were now... just... gone. Gone as though blotted out of existence. And far up the tunnel, fifty paces or so at least, there sat another horde of ghosts, but rather than scream and charge and attack him, these held back, still clutching their weapons and watching him in silence.
Or rather, he suddenly realized, watching his baton in silence.
He looked down at the baton, sheathed in red as it always was when he was making use of it. Beyond that, there seemed to be nothing abnormal about it in the slightest, and yet every ghost's spectral eyes were fixed to it. Tentatively he raised the baton, and their eyes followed. He shook it side to side, and their gaze did not falter. He took a small step forward...
... and the entire army of ghosts fell back.
And suddenly, David realized what the thunderous sound from a moment ago had been.
The communicator on his belt suddenly began to vibrate and hiss with static. He reached down and pulled it off, opening it up slowly as his mind's gears turned as if soaked with molasses. At first he could make out no words, for the static was too thick, but slowly it cleared, revealing Cyborg.
"David? David, can you hear me? Goddamnit, can any o' y'all hear me?"
The chorus of voices in the background revealed that the others were with Cyborg, no doubt just on the other side of the rockslide, and David coughed and pressed the com button. "D... Devastator here..." he said.
Instantly the voices quieted as Cyborg waved a hand at them. "I got him!" he said to the others. "Hey man, can you hear me? Are you okay?"
"Y... yeah I can... I can hear you," stammered David, still staring at the ghosts. He left the second question unanswered, for he had no idea how to answer it.
There was relief apparent in Cyborg's voice. "Goddamn man, you scared the hell out of us. What is it with you and cave-ins?"
Cyborg's sarcasm was precisely what David needed to hear right now, and as he laughed nervously, the tension in his stomach loosened a bit, as did the headache he still had. "Seemed... seemed like the thing to do..." he said sheepishly. Honestly, right now he'd have taken any punishment Robin wanted to give him for 'recklessness' to just be out of this insane place.
"Take heart, friend," said Starfire, calling out from behind Cyborg somewhere. "We shall soon break through the barrier and retrieve you."
That snapped David back into reality. "No!" he said, startled. "No, the... the ghosts are still here."
"We'll deal with them, man, you just keep tight and stay low."
While thinking was not David's strong suit right now, he objected immediately. "Guys, the ghosts can't hurt me," he said, wishing that there were some wood around to knock on, and glancing back at the huddled phantasms just to make sure. "I don't know how but... but they just can't. If you break down the barricade, they'll be able to get at the rest of you."
"We're not just gonna leave you down here," said Cyborg. "We know how to handle a coupla - "
"No, look..." David fished for what he wanted to say. "I can... I can get out of here myself if I have to. You guys still have to find that... 'gem' thing, right? You guys can't hit the ghosts, and... I guess I can but I don't know how. If you let 'em through, even if you fight them off, how are you gonna find the gem?"
All this logic seemed to be coming out of nowhere, indeed it was all an excuse, and David knew it. Even if he hadn't been thinking when he collapsed the ceiling, he knew for a fact that he did not want the barrier he had made undone. Not with the spirits still running around, and himself the only one proof against their assaults. It wasn't courage, it was just elementary concern for his friends.
Whether or not the other Titans picked up on that was moot though, and Cyborg reluctantly turned away from his wrist-mounted communicator to ask the others what they thought. David caught only whispers of the heated argument that was no doubt ensuing, but a minute or so later, when Cyborg turned back, he knew that Robin's sense of duty to the mission had won out, as it always did.
"Anything happens, man," said Cyborg, "anything happens, and you hit the panic button, got it? I don't care if what we have to take on to do it, we'll be there in no-time, all right?"
Having won the point, David was already regretting his objection, but it was too late for that now. "Yeah," he said. "I got it."
"Hey," said Cyborg sharply, focusing David's attention. "We'll see you topside man."
David slowly nodded. "Right," he said. "See you."
Cyborg signed off, and the screen went dark, and David turned back up towards the assembled ghosts.
"All right," he said to them. "So... now what?"
He hadn't expected an answer, but before his eyes, the ghosts seemed to shimmer, and slowly began to withdraw down the hallway away from him, finally vanishing in the gloom ahead. David couldn't say why, but this seemed almost more ominous than if they had remained behind, and yet there was nothing for it. He allowed the flames on his baton to grow enough for him to see by, at least out a dozen yards or so, and slowly began to make his way back up the hall. He could of course have shifted to his molecular vision, and thereby cared nothing for the absence of light, but then he'd be unable to see the ghosts if they returned.
For several minutes he made his way back, down hallways and around corners, and through rooms where he relied on his memory to guide him back to the master stairwell. Perhaps his memory was faulty, he'd not exactly been in the best of mindsets while fleeing after all, or perhaps there was some dark work being done here and the hallways had shifted around, but no matter how much he backtracked or searched, he couldn't seem to find his way back to the stairs. Either the ghosts or something else had disturbed the dust, eradicating all of the footprints, and every turn and door led him only to yet another chamber with cruel, monstrous statues leering down at him from cornices and wall sconces.
It reminded him of what Beast Boy had told him was in Raven's room.
His headache had subsided for the moment, but stubbornly refused to go away, and so he kept one hand on his temple and the other holding his baton out like a torch. The only sounds were of his own footsteps and breathing, and occasionally a distant echo from somewhere else. Gradually, he worked his way towards areas that appeared familiar, but every time he found his path suddenly blocked by a rock barrier that he was almost certain had not been there when first he arrived. He might have chanced blasting through one, but he felt disinclined to disturb this place more than he had to, and so he followed what passages were open to him, unable to shake the feeling that there was something out there guiding him towards wherever he was going.
And he doubted it was friendly.
Finally, the hallway he was following emerged into a huge open chamber, round and faced with bricks of limestone. It was shaped almost like an arena, with a low wall running around the base of the chamber, topped by staggered terraces that might have been giant-sized stairs, or perhaps benches to sit upon. The air was musty and cold, and the light of his baton was not enough to reach across the floor of the chamber, and see what awaited him on the other side. Still, it was either go in or go back. He didn't even think much about the answer. Whether or not he wanted to go into the chamber (and he absolutely did not), it was becoming more and more clear to him that this was the only way. The purpose pervading this place was almost oppressive, and going back would lead to more dead ends, convenient rockfalls, and eventually, right back here. He knew it without having to ask himself how.
He stepped into the chamber, half-expecting a gate to slam shut behind him, though none did, and walked towards the center of it. It was a good hundred feet across, and when he got near to the center, he stopped, looking around at the silent architecture, the granite-hewn gargoyles perched in silent vigil on the wall around the chamber floor, the huge limestone blocks that formed the floor itself, and waited just a few moments for what he knew instinctively was coming.
Sure enough, he heard footsteps.
The footsteps were light, even but slow, the person emitting them taking their time walking over the cobbled ground. They were coming from up ahead, but instead of switching to molecular vision, instead of commanding his baton to put out more light, he actually lowered the baton and dropped his gaze to the floor, falling silent himself as the lone figure approached. The shadows cast by the flickering flames danced over the floor and walls as the person slowly moved into view, stopping just short of being fully visible, a half-hidden presence on the edge of his circle of vision.
But it didn't matter. He already knew who it was.
"Hello, David," came a voice, quiet and guarded, almost a whisper, but loud enough in the circumstances to be easily heard.
He took one more breath, long and slow, inhaling, pausing, and exhaling, like a sprinter preparing for a race, or a soldier for war. And only then did he raise his eyes, letting the baton's light spill out just far enough so that he could make out his counterpart's features, and perceive the dim golden glow that surrounded them.
"Hello, Terra," he said.
*-----------------------------------------------------------*
"It was an act of desperation,"
Raven stood, leaning against the banister, as Devastator, once again in the form of David, sat on the stairs and spoke at the rich velvet carpets that covered the floor of the volcanic tower, paying neither her nor the other Davids any mind as they stood or sat, scattered around the vast atrium, listening with various expressions, as though they possessed a memory to recall what he was telling them.
"This is not the first time Trigon has sought to lay claim to a world," said Devastator. "Nor even the fiftieth. He is... evil incarnate, perhaps literally, I don't know. Since before I came into being, he has tormented the universe ceaselessly, and for all I know he will still be doing so when the universe ends."
"But... for all his timelessness, Trigon has learned a few things over the millennia. He has become more cunning, more... subtle. He uses pawns such as Slade, or... tools such as you." He glanced up at Raven who steadfastly refused to show any reaction to being called Trigon's tool. She knew he was looking for an excuse not to continue, and would not afford him one.
"Long ago though, he was far more... direct... than he is today. When he sought to destroy a world, he made open assault upon it, and nothing, not the strongest weapons nor the most powerful magics, could force him back. He laid waste to everything he touched, for the sport of it as far as I know. He did so directly, manifesting in a world and consuming it to ash, drinking up the suffering of its inhabitants like a fine wine."
"I know all this," said Raven. "He's my father, remember?"
"... of course," said Devastator. "In any event, every world Trigon assaulted was... afforded some time to prepare. He would announce his intent, and then wait, attacking only after a stated time had passed. It was no nobility that led him to do this, he wanted the inhabitants to feel fear, to watch as doom crept up on them inexorably, to see their societies dissolve into panic and chaos, before he finally consumed their souls with fire. This is why he permitted the prophecies concerning him to spread, including the prophecy of the Gem... of you. Such was his contempt for any resistance that might be offered."
Now they were getting to it. "So then some people did resist him?"
Devastator nodded. "Usually to no effect at all, for Trigon is and was a being of cosmic power. You cannot slay him with a singularity or defeat him with a battlefleet. But... there was one group, on one of the worlds he assaulted, who believed that he could be defeated, if only they found the right weapons to use against him."
Raven raised an eyebrow. "You mean you."
Devastator shook his head. "Not just me..."
The world flashed white for an instant, and suddenly Devastator and Raven were back atop the enormous tower that stretch high above the burning city below, the seven-pointed star inscribed in the marble floor as immaculate as ever.
"They have no name in any of your tongues, and though no doubt humans would call them walking lizards, they were anything but. They were a proud, cultured civilization, with a rich history and heritage, revered in their day across the galaxy for the depth and breadth of their learning. No doubt that is why Trigon elected to destroy them. He gave them warning in the form of portents and heralds, as was his custom, and watched as their society collapsed into anarchy and fear."
Raven chanced a look off the edge of the tower at the burning city below, which stretched as far as the eye could see. "But not all of them panicked, did they?"
"No," confirmed Devastator. "Their most revered scholars and magicians devised a plan. No mortal weapon could harm Trigon, no matter how strong, so they sought instead for a cosmic weapon."
Devastator gestured at the starburst pattern in the floor. "The universe is governed by fundamental forces, forces that govern the workings of all life, all matter, all energy, everything. Some are physical: gravity, magnetism, the laws of nuclear physics... but the most powerful of all these forces are more philosophical in nature than physical. Gravity controls how a planet forms... but why does it form? What purpose does it serve? They are the underpinnings of everything in the universe, every physical law, every being, every spell cast or machine built, the prime movers of all that is. They control not just the behavior of objects, but the reasons that those objects exist. They are so pervasive in the universe that nobody even considers them. They simply are. Some systems of thought group them all together under the heading of 'God'. Others divide them into a pantheon of hundreds of individual forces."
Devastator sighed. "These people believed there were seven."
Raven nodded. Seven was a very powerful number insofar as magic was concerned, but then so were about half the numbers between 1 and 20, for a variety of reasons.
"They gathered together their strongest sorcerers and sages, and with the assistance of untold sacrifice and toil, they bypassed all of the so-called 'fundamental' forces of the universe, and managed to forge seven... entities, empowered by what they believed were the root forces, not just of the physical universe, but of everything. They believed that by employing weapons that drew their power from existence itself, they actually stood a chance of defeating Trigon."
Raven took a second to absorb all this before speaking up. "So... you're one of these weapons?"
"Yes," said Devastator. "I am the weaponized embodiment of Destruction itself."
"Then... that means David is - "
"A normal, human child," said Devastator. "Or at least as normal as humans ever get. That's why his powers do not work the way you assumed they ought. His powers may resemble a kineticist's, but they have nothing whatsoever to do with real kinetics. He has no supernatural powers of his own. He has only me."
Raven closed her eyes and clenched her teeth. "Okay," she finally said. "I don't even know where to begin here. You're telling me that you're a cosmic-level superweapon built to kill my father?"
"That is... a simplification," said Devastator, "but accurate on the face."
"You expect me to believe that?" she asked
"Not really," he replied with perfect aplomb. "In fact right now, I would imagine you are pondering certain questions, such as why this is the first time you have ever heard of me, why I have not communicated with you earlier, how I came to be here in the first place, or perhaps how it is that David is scarcely capable of detonating an automobile, when I claim to be able to tear the stars from the heavens with but a glance.
Raven had significantly more questions than that, but they would do for a start. "I'm listening," she said.
A chair materialized behind Devastator, and he sat.
"You have to understand," said Devastator, "you and I can sit here and converse, and I can speak, reason, and express opinion, just as you can... but when I say that I am a weapon, I am not speaking in metaphor. I am not alive, not in the strict sense of the word."
"You look alive enough to me," commented Raven.
"Yes, I do," said Devastator, "but I lack something."
"What?"
"Will."
Raven frowned. "Will?"
Devastator leaned forward. "When the seven of us were created, we were not envisioned as being wholly independent champions, that our makers would send out to fight Trigon directly. Even if they had been capable of creating such things, they feared that to create new life and imbue it with the very forces of the universe would just be to create more Trigons, who might turn against them or others, and lay waste to the galaxy. Instead, we were tools, conduits to be precise, mental gateways that granted control over the physical underpinnings of reality. They wished us to be of as much value as we could, so they gave us intelligence, reason, even the ability to desire things, but they intentionally gave us no will of our own. For that, we needed another."
"What do you mean they gave you 'no will'?"
"We cannot act on our own, of our own desire. Not at all. I have within me the power to destroy you so completely that your very existence would be forgotten by the universe, but I cannot do it myself. I lack the will to act against you. That is why I couldn't kill you before. All I could do was hope you might become frightened enough to leave on your own volition." Devastator smirked. "You don't frighten easily."
Raven ignored the remark. "So then if you can't act, how were you supposed to fight Trigon?"
"We weren't," replied Devastator. "Our hosts were."
Raven's eyes widened. "You're a parasite?"
Devastator sighed and shook his head. "No. A parasite drains life from its host. We empower ours with gifts they never could attain themselves. I prefer the term 'symbiont'. However... if you wish to be literal, I am indeed an energy parasite, though I assure you, David has come to no harm from me."
"That's very debatable," said Raven darkly, but she left it at that. "So who were these hosts?"
"Warriors," said Devastator. "The most expertly-trained warriors that their civilization possessed. You would have called them heroes, perhaps even superheroes, given the powers we granted them. They were the elite, the mightiest soldiers of their entire planet. And we were each joined with them, in preparation for Trigon's arrival. We provided the raw power, and they provided the wills to shape it. Through practice and training, they learned to deploy staggering power, many many times that of all of you put together. For a time, all of us, host and parasite alike, believed it might be enough."
"But it wasn't?"
Devastator shook his head. "No," he said. "It wasn't." He stood up, and slowly walked over to the edge of the atrium, peering down at the burning city below. "Trigon came... and we fought him with all the powers of the universe. We scoured cities and boiled oceans and lit the skies with flame. I was in the forefront, 'destruction' lacks the... subtleties of some of the other forces in the universe, and I watched as everything we did, and everything we tried, turned to ashes around us. Trigon was simply unstoppable, and one by one, all seven of the chosen warriors fell before him. And one by one, all seven weapons simply vanished into the ether."
"So what happened to you?"
Devastator sighed. "I don't know,"
Raven said nothing, waiting for him to elaborate, and a few minutes later, he did.
"When the others died, their... parasites, simply dissolved back into the cosmos, I presume from whence they came. We had been bonded to our hosts by incalculably strong magics, and without those bonds, we could not maintain our existence. But when my host died... I found that I remained, invisible, unable to act or fight or do anything but watch as Trigon devoured all life on the planet, and left it a sterile, burnt wasteland. I do not know why I remained, while all of the others simply vanished, but finally I simply left the planet."
"How?"
Devastator shrugged. "I have no physical form," he said. "Not even an energy form. I exist on a level different than that of the reality you are accustomed to. I simply moved elsewhere. I wandered the cosmos for ages, with no real purpose in mind, until one day I came across a planet full of other beings, and descended onto it. There, I encountered a young girl, playing in a river. She could not sense that I was present, but... largely to see if I could, I entered her mind, and she became my new host."
Devastator turned back to Raven and smirked. "They called her 'The Queen of Fire'," he said. "She raised an army, as soon as she was old enough, and overthrew the empire that had been oppressing her people. She founded a new dynasty on her world, that may well reign to this day for all I know. And when she died, of old age, in her palace, I left that planet, and journeyed to another world, and chose a new host," he shook his head, "... who was burnt at the stake as a witch."
"Since then, I have traveled from planet to planet, world to world. I select a host, I bond with them, and they command me. Some hosts never know I'm there. Some use me to become warlords and tyrants. Some are noble and heroic, founding empires or protecting their people. Some simply employ me for their own personal gain, and some refuse ever to employ me at all. They each wield raw destruction, though every host's personality tailors the style in which my powers are made manifest. David, for example, has something of a... methodical, observational bent, and so his powers are manifest in molecular composition and temperature transference. Some are pyrogenic, some warp gravity or other physical forces, and some simply seize the physical structures their enemies are comprised of, and divide them. It all depends on my host. They command me, utterly and fully, by will alone."
Raven listened carefully. Of all the things she had expected Devastator to tell her, this story was not one of them. But then she had long-since stopped expecting to be able to guess where this insane quest of hers would lead.
"How do you choose your hosts?" she asked.
Devastator shrugged. "Sometimes I select randomly. Sometimes I watch a person carefully to find the 'trait' I have in mind at the moment. Sometimes I choose an adult, and see how they cope with their newfound abilities. Sometimes it is a child, who then grows up endowed with great powers. My preferences change with the centuries, and besides that, I have no say over how my hosts employ me. I am a weapon. I do as I am commanded by the will who commands."
"So then if you're so powerful, how come David doesn't have 'cosmic power'? He can barely destroy a car."
"Well, to begin with, he's still quite young," said Devastator, "but... essentially, because he is a human. Humans are frail creatures, as I'm sure you already know. Channeling the raw forces of the universe is not a stress-free act. There is a physical limit to the energies his body can manifest, as there was for all my hosts. And should he exceed that limit - "
"His headaches," said Raven, suddenly putting the pieces together.
Devastator nodded grimly. "The stresses manifest themselves in his circulatory system. If he managed somehow to harness even a fraction of my full power, his heart would simply explode. The lower scale effects resemble migraines."
Raven nodded and changed tacks for a moment. "So let me get this straight," she said, "you chose David, right?"
"Yes," nodded Devastator.
"Why?"
Devastator smiled. "I'm afraid that, if not the rest, is none of your business," he said. "Suffice to say I chose him. Even if you are Trigon's enemy, and David's friend, why I chose him is something I will reveal to him alone, should somehow he come to ask me."
"Fine," said Raven. Even she had to admit that was fair enough. "So then how about something that is my business?"
"Such as?"
"Why did you attack me when I came inside his head?"
Devastator sighed. "Consider my perspective for a moment," he said. "I chose David many many years ago, when he was very young. I had my reasons. I watched him grow up, largely alone, in these... institutions your people use for caring for orphans. I watched him discover his powers, and choose not to use them. I was with him when he was attacked by surprise, and when you five took him into your tower. And I was happy to see it too. He's... always been very limited in his friendships, and I thought what better friends could he find than the five of you..."
The cosmic weapon raised its head, and its voice sharpened considerably as it addressed Raven.
"And then what do I find, but to my surprise, one of his brand new friends turns out to be the daughter of Trigon the Terrible himself. And not just his daughter, but the Gem, the one prophesied to bring him back into the world, and to destroy it. There are nine hundred million trillion sentient beings in this galaxy alone. The odds that I should happen to choose as my host, one who happens to make the acquaintance of the Gem of Trigon, are simply not credible. You are a follower of Azar's, I believe, yes? If so, then you are no doubt familiar with the phrase 'there is no such thing as coincidence'? I don't know if I believe that or not, but you and David meeting is either the greatest coincidence in the history of the universe, or it is something else."
Raven narrowed her eyes. "You think someone's setting us up?"
"Yes," said Devastator. "And I'm not yet certain it isn't you."
"Well assume for a second that it isn't. Why would they do that?"
"Someone has endeavored to arrange things such that David will be present with or near you when you fulfill your destiny and summon your father to destroy the Earth," said Devastator. "If I had to take a guess, I would say that that person was either Trigon himself, or one of his agents, and while I did have reasons for choosing David as my host, I suspect whoever it is has no direct interest in David. More likely, they have some business with me."
"Cinderblock called him 'Devastator'..." said Raven suddenly. "He couldn't have known that name unless..."
"Unless someone told him the name," said the living weapon, "someone who knew I existed, and that I was incarnated within David. Perhaps that someone was Slade, but perhaps not. Either way, it's... worrisome."
"You think Trigon's out to get you?"
"I think Trigon is, as always, out to cause suffering and pain on as wide a scale as he can manage," said Devastator. "But I cannot believe that my presence here, as the prophecy is about to be fulfilled, is all a matter of chance. I don't know if he chose Earth because of me, or if I am merely a side-objective of his, but I do believe Trigon has a reason for wanting my host present when he manifests."
"And what reason is that?"
Devastator shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "But any reason Trigon has will be to the detriment of the universe at large, not to mention your immediate friends."
Raven nodded, and walked over towards Devastator, who watched her approach in silence.
"Then we have to stop my father before he manifests."
Devastator groaned and laid his head in one hand. "I told you already, you cannot stop Trigon from manifesting. His prophecy is absolute. He will manifest, and there is nothing you can do to stop him. I tried once, remember?"
"But you said there was a way I could stop my father!" insisted Raven. "Is there or isn't there? Make up your mind!"
"There..." said Devastator, and his voice sounded pained. "There's... a way you can upset his plans, yes."
"Well? What is it?"
"Trigon clearly intends for me to be present when he returns. Since you cannot stop him from returning, you have to ensure I am not there when he does."
Raven paused, confused. "How do I do that?" she asked. "Take David to another planet?"
"No," said Devastator. "Trigon knows the identity of my host. Physical distance is no barrier to him. He would track David down the instant he appeared. The only option is for me to be joined with a different host, one he doesn't know the identity of."
Raven sensed that she was missing something. "So then... go for it," she said. "If you can just pick one, go ahead and pick."
Once again, Devastator shook his head. "I cannot leave my host voluntarily," he said. "Once I have selected one, I am bound to him for the rest of his life, whether he uses me or not. I cannot leave. Not without your help."
"What are you saying...?" asked Raven hesitantly, "is there some ritual you need me to perform?"
"I'm afraid," said Devastator, "it's much... simpler than that."
"What do you mean?" she asked, though in the back of her mind, she feared she already knew what Devastator was going to say.
"Raven," said Devastator quietly, "if you want to save the universe from your father, then you have to kill David."
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet
Re: The Measure of a Titan (ch.17 added)
Chapter 28: The Children of Fire and Gold
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."
- Ambrose Redmoon
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Chilled silence reigned within the pumice tower as Raven stared wide-eyed at the trans-dimensional weaponized embodiment of pure destruction, manifested in the form of David, and tried to process what it had just said to her.
"... what?"
The statement was concise enough to have been Raven's, but Raven had not yet spoken. Indeed, only when she heard the question asked did Raven remember that she and Devastator were not alone in this mindspace. But once she had, it took no empathy to determine what the reaction of the others present was going to be.
"You backstabbing son of a bitch! I'll kill you!"
Devastator merely closed his eyes and sighed as the Ice-David lunged at him with a frozen fist encrusted with icicles like a spiked pair of brass knuckles, making no move to evade or defend himself. Raven knew why, and the Ice-David discovered why soon enough, for fist and arm shattered like glass against Devastator's head, sending fragments of ice flying in every direction. Hail pelted Raven's cloak and scattered about the room, sending the Smoke-David scurrying back a half-dozen paces, perforating the Water-David, who was standing motionless in horrified shock, and pinging off of the Iron-David, whose fists were clenched tightly as he stared living daggers at Devastator. But Devastator himself took no notice of the others, or of the Ice-David's assault, and simply opened his eyes once again to look at Raven.
Raven too had no attention to spare for the others though, for she was still trying to decide if this was some kind of bad metaphor, or if Devastator could possibly have meant -
"I take no pleasure in the suggestion," said Devastator, as though reading her mind, "but I make it genuinely, I assure you."
"You want me to... kill David?" asked Raven hoarsely. She found to her surprise that she was shocked, genuinely shocked, not so much at the suggestion, but at who had just suggested it.
"What I want, and for that matter what you want, have no bearing on the matter," said Devastator, stepping forward. "You claim that you do not want to be the Gem of Trigon. I do not want to be the catalyst for David's death, but whether or not either of us like that we are these things, we are them."
"Stop it," said Raven, and she backed up a pace. "This is... some kind of trick or something. You're trying to get me to -"
"I am trying to get you to see reason!" shouted Devastator, loud enough that the walls rang with his voice and even the Ice-David drew back. "I am trying to save the entire universe from Trigon the Terrible! It is he that is coming, not some criminal in a spandex costume! Do you not see? The end of all things is imminent."
Devastator walked towards Raven, eyes unwavering, hands at his sides, and all four Davids followed him with their eyes. "You claimed a moment ago that you loathed your father. That you would be his enemy. That you would fight him in any way you could. Was that a lie? Or were you telling the truth?"
Raven felt her back hit a wall, though she had not noticed herself backing up. Her mind refused to focus, and she stared mutely back at Devastator.
"Answer me!" demanded Devastator. "Are you Trigon's enemy or - "
"Yes!" yelped Raven reflexively.
Devastator folded his arms. "Then tell me, Gem, what are you prepared to do to stop him?"
"This is insane," said the Iron-David suddenly, and Raven looked over and saw all four Davids watching them, the Smoke hiding behind the Water, while the Iron held the remaining hand of the Ice, restraining it from leaping at either Devastator or Raven and tearing them to pieces.
"She can't stop Trigon," said Smoke-David hesitantly, "even by... doing this! You... you said... said so yourself!"
"You're a traitor," snarled Ice-David, in a broken, pained voice, like the ones she imagined her friends using whenever she had nightmares of them finding out the truth about her.
"No, he's a coward," said Iron-David, his voice much more calm, but all the more disturbing for it. "He knows this enemy of his is coming, so he wants to cut and run, even if he has to kill us all to do it."
"You do not know the first thing of which you are speaking," replied Devastator dismissively without turning his head. "But I believe you do, don't you, Raven?" He gestured back with one arm to the assembled Davids. "Do you want to tell them? Can you describe it better than I?"
"We know what's coming!" insisted Iron-David, for the Ice was too livid for words, and the other two not speaking. "Fire, brimstone, the end of the world, you told us already!"
"No," said Devastator, but he made no effort to direct his words towards David's alter-egos, instead stepping up in front of Raven, looking up at her in perfect calm. "You do not."
It was as though his words were some kind of curse, for Raven's nightmarish memories all came back to her in a rush. The lakes of fire, the ash-dusted statues, the endless forest of ruins that had once been Jump City, her city, still distinctive despite the smoke and flames, all of it flashed before her eyes like a repressed memory coming to the surface, and without thinking, she clutched the sides of her head and squeezed her eyes shut, clenching her teeth and trying to force down the vision, but the vision would not be forced. And through it all, she heard Devastator's voice, preternaturally calm, floating through the thick air.
"None of them understand it," said Devastator, "do they? The Titans, I mean. They hear words like 'fire' and 'demon' and 'evil', but they do not feel them. No-one can feel them who has not experienced them firsthand. The depths of Trigon's cruelty... the pain he embodies... to them it's all just another enemy to face. To you... it is different."
"They... they can stop him..." she said, and found her voice shaking and quiet, unconvincing, even to her own ears.
"No," said Devastator. "They cannot. You know this. Slade knows this. I know it. Nothing can stop him. He is evil made manifest. There is no stopping that. Not by any living means."
His words were soft and almost comforting in their certainty, no hysteria, no anger or denunciation, no cackled laughter mocking her presumption in railing against the inevitable. Just fact. Cold, simple, emotionless fact. No blame. No fault. Things simply were.
And yet...
"You... can't know that!" she insisted as she opened her eyes. "There's... gotta be something else that I can do! Some way to stop him or... anything!"
She'd argued this before, and she half-expected, half-wanted him to become angry or frustrated again, but he did not. Instead he sighed, and shook his head, slowly. "Has there?" he asked, and let the question stand a moment. "You are his daughter, Raven. You know him better than I ever could. Likely better than anyone. What I think of Trigon is not important. It is what you believe that matters. And I can see right now in your very eyes, that what I am telling you is not a surprise, is it?"
What else could she say?
"... no."
Devastator nodded. "Then you know what has to be done."
"No!!!" screamed Ice-David, and he wrenched himself free of Iron-David's grasp, his severed arm regrowing in a matter of seconds as he charged and lashed out with all the fury of an enraged berserker. Water-David merely lowered his head, and placed a hand on Smoke-David's shoulder as he looked away and cringed, while Iron-David watched impassively, as though torn over whether or not to join in. In the end it did not matter. No blow could the Ice-David inflict that so much as registered on Devastator's person, an ant beating its antennae against the Great Pyramids. Devastator himself made no move to stop Ice-David, waiting until his fury was spent, and the Ice sculpture stood doubled over, frozen tears of anger clinking to the ground from his face, his impotent rage drained away like water off the back of a duck. And when Devastator spoke, it was again to Raven.
"For what it's worth, Raven," said Devastator. "I am sorry. Trigon's cruelty is unsurpassed, but it did not even cross my mind that he would make an enemy of his own daughter, and then use her as his portal into the world. I... expected that you would be a partisan of his. Though I suppose that would have made it easier."
Maybe it would have. Raven didn't know and refused to ask. It didn't matter now.
"I don't want to do this..."
"As I understand it," said Devastator, "you did not wish to be the Gem of Trigon either. It gives me no pleasure to admit it, but by one means or another I have doomed David by my presence here. Whether you kill him, or Trigon does, one way or another, his days are coming to an end. None could blame you for taking what steps you deemed - "
"This isn't about blame!" shouted Raven, silencing Devastator, and giving several of the various David's a visible start, and she might have continued, but she silenced herself, looking away again, before she could go on to explain what it was about. It didn't matter what Devastator thought of her. All that mattered was...
Was what... exactly, if not the others?
Devastator remained silent for a few moments, and when he did speak, he did not yell or try and repeat himself, but merely shook his head. "I cannot force you to act," he said, gesturing at the other Davids, "and neither can they. They don't have the power, and I don't have the will." He took a long breath, probably for effect more than need, before raising his eyes to meet hers. "But I can tell you this: Trigon seeks only to inflict torment and death upon all life, by any means that he is able. If you do not kill David, if you leave me trapped within him to await the day of judgment, then I give you my absolute guarantee that every one of your friends will die, and they will likely be joined by the rest of the universe."
And Raven knew that he was right.
It wasn't a matter of being "convinced", it was realizing she had always known. Since before he had begun to talk. Since before she had come to this place. Since David had first arrived in the Tower. She knew that her objections were emotional, not rational. She knew that his logic was flawless, that Trigon was the things Devastator claimed he was, and that his analysis of the situation was probably accurate. She could see the fear and the hesitation in Devastator, feel it, drink it up practically, the fear that her decision might be other than what he hoped, the hesitation that perhaps he was wrong to confide this in her, that he was taking a terrible risk that she would turn out to be a servant of her father's, but there was no obfuscation, no lie. The energy being that was the source of David's powers, that had chosen him to be endowed with the energies of the cosmos, believed without question, that there was no solution but David's death.
The certainty in Devastator's eyes was terrible to behold.
"We all must make hard choices," said Devastator, as the other Davids looked on helplessly, their faces in various permutations of disbelief, horror, and dull shock. "I... regret that my decisions have placed you in this position. But you are the only one who can stop Trigon's plan." He thought about his words for a moment, and ended with a simple, final appeal. "I leave it in your hands..."
"That's it..." hissed the Ice-David, slowly standing back up, his voice as sharp as a stiletto. "I've heard enough out of this bastard! I want him silenced, and her evicted! NOW!"
Devastator merely lowered his eyes, but did not turn around as the other three Davids looked to one another and back to the Ice-David, who took their hesitation as a mortal insult. "What the hell are you all waiting for?!" he screamed back at them, and this time there were real tears in his eyes, half-frozen slush, his entire frame shaking as he shouted at the others in a quivering voice, one that plainly could simply not take any more. "He wants to kill us! And she's gonna do it! I say we throw her out and let her try! Her powers don't work on us!"
"The Devastator is commanded by will alone," said Devastator, eyes downcast, and his voice sounded like he was quoting some forgotten scripture. "She cannot harm David through malice or hate. It was a protection laid against Trigon's minions. But there are other means, as she well knows," he raised his eyes to meet hers, "Her healing and sensory magic works well enough in general, but in this place, the protections are bypassed. Strike to kill from within here, and it will suffice."
Ice-David could not reply in words, indeed his pained shriek of impotent rage was enough to shake the walls, and he collapsed to the ground, beating his fist against the floor hard enough to gouge divots in it and freeze the rock solid within ten feet. As Raven watched, Water-David walked to him and knelt at his side, placing a hand on his shoulder as though in some attempt at succor, while Iron-David stepped around them both, planting his feet and folding his arms, and staring at her and Devastator with an unwavering gaze, as though wordlessly demanding to know how they could countenance reducing his icy counterpart to such a state.
"Get them... out of here..." snarled Ice-David, barely able to speak.
"H... how...?" asked the Smoke-David. "I mean... him, sure, but... what about..."
"Have him kill her!" screamed Ice-David. "Don't you see? She's trying to help him kill us! Get rid of her!"
"We... I mean... we can't just..." stammered Smoke-David, looking to the others one at a time. "She's... she's a - "
"I agree with him," said Iron-David, ruthlessly quiet. "I change my vote. Kill her."
The Smoke-David hesitated, and in that moment's hesitation, Raven knew she should act, that if they did order Devastator to kill her, she would likely not be able to fight it off. But she had no idea what she could do here, unless...
Devastator was staring her in the face, but said nothing, his face a blank mask.
Smoke-David shuddered, visibly shuddered, and could not seem to force words out of his mouth, until Iron-David turned to him. No words were exchanged, but Raven saw the hesitation in Smoke's eyes, and caught the ever-so-slight nod that Iron gave him, a nod clearly filled with wordless meaning. Smoke closed his own eyes and breathed out a puff of haze which danced into the air above him. "D.. do it.." he said, and turned away. "Do it... quick..."
She could not leave, not quickly enough at least, but that wasn't what crossed her mind, for there was another option for her to forestall Devastator's attack, and looking at him, she knew that Devastator himself knew it. She was in David's mind, past his subconscious defenses, past whatever physical barriers he might erect or throw into her path. The rules of what one could and could not do inside the mind of another were many and ironclad, for good reason. Deviating from them seriously endangered the mind in question.
And yet until now, it had simply never occurred to Raven that one might... intentionally deviate.
Water remained crouched next to Ice, who was staring at him half-expectantly, half-desperately. Unlike Smoke, he did face Raven, and his expression was almost mournful. Slowly he lowered his head, took yet another deep breath, and speaking in a voice that was tinged with regret, simply nodded his assent.
"All right..." he said, and she saw his grip on Ice's shoulder tighten.
David's entire mind was here. Defenseless, unprotected by any mechanism or power, save for Devastator, and Devastator had just told her how to circumvent his protections. She turned back to him, and saw the expectation in his eyes, the flashes of urgency. He could not delay for much longer.
"I require unanimity," said Devastator without turning his head. "A decision, please."
He already had it, but he was going through the formalities, such as they were, delaying until the last possible minute. She knew it, and so did Iron and Ice, at least. Without even thinking about it, she felt her own fingers tracing the appropriate designs in the air, felt herself marshaling the energy necessary. The spell was so simple it had no name, a simple burst of psychic power, a fraction of what she could unleash, would suffice. From here, she could liquefy David's consciousness and leave him dead on the spot without so much as a whimper. He would feel nothing, no pain, no surprise, it would be over in an instant...
"Do it," snarled Ice, "Do it, goddamn you! I vote kill her!"
"Agreed," said Iron. "I vote kill her as well,"
"S... so do I..." said Smoke.
"I'm... sorry," said Water, and he sounded it, but he did not hesitate further. "Me too."
Devastator said nothing, but opened his hand, and the flaming sword re-appeared within it, downsized to match David's smaller form. Raven could sense the power in that sword, and it pushed her along, mentally, half of her horrified at what she was preparing to do, and the other half cognizant that there was literally no choice. She was caught between Trigon and Devastator, and if one did not kill her, then the other would, and without making any conscious choice, she prepared the spell for launch. Again and again the images of her friends' burnt and frozen corpses, the ones that haunted her dreams and now even her waking hours, flashed through her head. Even now she could see them, fallen in various poses, their faces contorted with pain, their hands outstretched as if in supplication for aid. One by one they appeared to her. Robin. Cyborg. Starfire.
Beast Boy.
Her throat caught as the image of Beast Boy merged with that of Devastator, striding towards her with sword upraised. And yet her eyes could focus on nothing but the sight of Beast Boy dying, screaming, his emerald eyes torn out, his green skin scorched black, blood that was all too red coursing from half a dozen hideous wounds. And all she could make out of whatever words he was screaming to the darkness was his demand to know why, when she had the chance, she had chosen not to save him.
And then Raven took a breath with which to scream the word of power that would tear David's mind apart.
"No!"
The image shattered, and the spell died in her throat as Devastator stopped short, sword still held high above her head, ready to be brought down like a meteor. Both Raven and Devastator stared at one another, and then slowly turned their heads towards the entrance to the tower, from whence the shout had come.
In the doorway stood a fifth David, though what he was made of, Raven could not tell. He seemed to be solid, though small and slightly misshapen, if his silhouette was accurate, and yet at the very sight of him, Devastator seemed to stiffen, and lowered his sword, and Ice stood back up along with Water, and Smoke blinked and turned back to the others, and Iron folded his arms once again, as though curious to see what this might bring. And as the others watched, the fifth David, smaller than the other four, walked slowly into the atrium itself, and from where she stood, Raven could see that he was made entirely of a yellow metal that warped and shifted like clay as he walked.
It took her a moment to realize that it was gold.
"I veto the motion," said the Gold-David, in what was unquestionably David's voice, more similar to his own than the others were, save only that it lacked the hesitation always lurking behind the real thing.
"You can't..." said Ice in disbelief, even as smoke drew nearer to him. "You can't! You heard her, didn't you!"
"This is hardly the time," added Iron, "for a bunch of sentimental - "
"I said no," said Gold. "Not now, not ever. Step back, Devastator." And at his words, Devastator turned back to Raven, and slowly lowered the sword, stepping back several paces.
"NO!" screamed Ice, and before anyone could stop him he lunged for Gold, charging him and diving atop him, sending both of them crashing to the floor. A moment later and he was sitting atop Gold, beating him savagely with both fists, screaming incoherent cries of rage and frustration. Smoke yelped and flew back, and Iron groaned and shook his head, but Water rushed forward and dragged Ice off of Gold, even as Ice shoved Water away and attacked again and again, beating huge dents and divots into the statue's face and body. And yet when Ice was finally spent, and Water had managed to drag him away, and Gold slowly and painfully picked himself up off the ground. His features damaged, his body twisted and bent backwards, he sat up and spoke clearly enough to be understood.
"I forbid it," he said. "No matter what happens. I forbid it." And at that pronouncement Ice screamed anew and tried to push past Water, and Smoke shivered and withdrew to the side of the atrium, and Iron simply hung his head as though in defeat, and at that instant, Raven knew that it no longer mattered what the other Davids thought.
"Besides," coughed Gold. "We've actually got bigger problems right now."
A hush fell over the atrium as he said that, even Ice instantly calming down, and it seemed as though the light in the tower dimmed slightly. All four elements besides Gold raised their heads, as though sniffing the wind, and Ice and Iron looked at one another with wholly changed expressions. Iron was frowning now, upset about something, though she could not tell what, and Ice looked... almost happy.
"I don't believe it..." said Ice, as Iron walked over to him. "I don't fucking believe it!"
"I do," said Iron, and his voice was a low growl. "Come on..." And without a flash or any evidence of any magic at work, suddenly Iron and Ice were both gone, vanished without a trace.
"Wh... what's happening?" asked Smoke, though who he was asking was unclear. Raven was wondering the same thing, but had not asked. It did not seem prudent.
Fortunately, Water remained behind, shaking his head slowly with a smile of disbelief on his face. "I think we're about to have a fight," he said.
"What?!" asked Smoke, genuinely horrified, by the sound of it. "With... why?"
Water did not answer directly, glancing back at Gold and at Devastator. When he did finally speak, he simply laughed a mirthless laugh, at the state of the universe for all Raven could tell.
"She's baaaaaack..."
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
What little light there was, was mingled gold and red.
The stone amphitheater was dark and cold, ringed by lifeless gargoyles watching over the two teenagers standing in the center of it, their eyes locked on one another. Hundreds of feet underground, far from electric lights and the warmth of the sun, the only light to be seen was being emitted by both metahumans. Terra's hands were sheathed in an energy field of shining gold, whose light was cast dimly around her side of the chamber. David himself emitted nothing, but the baton in his right hand flickered and danced with a heatless red flame, which rose and fell in intensity rhythmically, sometimes mere smoldering embers, sometimes flaming high enough to encase his entire hand.
They stood there for one of the longest seconds in recorded history, neither one saying anything, betraying anything with their expressions or actions. Terra's hands were relaxed at her sides, and David's baton did not so much as twitch. They just stared at one another, each apparently waiting for the other to break the silence, or so it might have appeared. As it was, Terra was the one to speak first.
"I know you're... probably guessing why I'm here."
If David was surprised by the casual expression, he gave utterly no sign of it. And when he replied, his voice was utterly devoid of emotion of any sort.
"Not really."
Terra blinked once or twice. "David," she said, "I - "
"I know you're here to kill me," said David. He might have been reciting a lesson in school for all the emphasis he gave the words. "I don't know why. Honestly, I don't see how it matters."
"I'm not here to kill you."
The words produced no reaction whatsoever, and the chamber fell back into silence. Terra seemed to wait for David to say something, and when he did not, she ventured a comment herself.
"You don't believe me?"
"There are very few things you could say right now that I'd believe, Terra," replied David.
She swallowed. There was no point trying to beat around it. "Look," she said, "there's a lot going on here you don't understand. I'm here to talk, not to fight."
"Well that's really too bad, isn't it?" replied David, "because I'm really not here to do either. But if I have to pick, I'll take fighting over talking right now."
"You told me once that you didn't like fighting."
"I don't," he replied, "but this has been a really strange day. And if you think I'm gonna stand here and listen to you tell me another bunch of lies, then you're crazier than I thought you were."
She shut her eyes and took a deep breath, preparing to start over, but he forestalled her.
"Besides," he said, "you're wrong."
Terra paused and opened her eyes. "What?"
David balled his hands into fists. "You are here to kill me," he repeated, again in the same dangerously calm tone. "Whether or not you want to talk first, that's what you're here to do. And I'd really appreciate it if we could just stop lying about everything right now."
"What are you talking about?"
"One of us is going to kill the other before we leave this room. I know that and so do you."
David's stare was unwavering, a unique enough trait from him to give Terra pause. She visibly hesitated, and then carefully moved towards David, one hand held up in a gesture of peace.
"David, please, you've got to listen to - "
"I swear to God, Terra," said David without moving a muscle, his voice now barely controlled, even as the baton in his hand brightened like a road flare. "If you take one more step, I will implode your skull, and splatter your guts all over the walls." He very slowly raised his baton to shoulder-height. "And if you don't think I can do that, then step forward and find out."
Terra had heard many a threat before, including some she had not expected to hear, but this one was delivered with such... absolute certainty to the words, such a depth of anger welling up behind them, that before she could even consider what to do, she had stopped. From this distance, she could see him literally quivering, and not with fear. She had not known David for too long of course, but she had certainly never seen him like this.
She wondered for a moment if the other Titans ever had.
She wondered if he ever had.
"You seem to have this idea, Terra," said David, "that I care what you think, or have to say, or why you came here." He opened his eyes again, and his stare was as direct as a mining laser. "Let me make this really clear, okay? I am through being played by you, for answers or any other reason!"
"David, I'm not trying to play you!" insisted Terra urgently. "We don't - "
"Bullshit!" shouted David, and the walls echoed with his voice. "Bullshit! That's what you do! That's all you do! You play people! You lie to their faces and then turn around and stab them in the back! That's all you do!"
Terra fell quiet again before David's outburst, and could only watch as a torrent of words spilled out of him like a burst dam.
"You think I'm stupid?" he asked, actually stepping towards her, and despite the fact that he was the smaller of the two of them and that she had beaten him once before, she had the unmistakable urge to back up. She suppressed it, but he scarcely seemed to notice. "You think I don't know what you did back there in the park? That little pep talk you gave me about what the Titans would think if they knew I'd been hanging out with you? You read me like a book, I guess it's what you're good at. Got me all scared and angry until I had one of those stroke things, right? You think I'm gonna sit here and let you talk me into another one?"
"David - "
"How did you find out about those?" he asked, refusing to permit her a word. "Those little 'episodes' I get whenever I overdo it? For that matter, how did you find out that I was leaving the Tower that day Adonis attacked us? Did Slade tell you, or Cinderblock? Or maybe you did some research by yourself, huh?"
"David, please!" shouted Terra, the only way she could get a sentence in. "I understand you're angry with me, I really do, but we've got bigger things to deal with here, okay? This isn't about you and me."
To her surprise, David seemed to pause, and then, of all things, started to laugh, lowering his head until his forehead was resting in one hand and laughing uncontrollably, an ironic, bitter laugh that, if anything, was even more unsettling than having him scream at her.
"... what?" she asked, unsure of what else to say.
Slowly David lifted his head. "You think I'm mad at you because you tried to kill me?" he asked, and let her stew in silence for a few seconds before continuing. "You think that's what this is about?" He shook his head slowly. "No, Terra. Slade tried to kill me. "Adonis tried to kill me. Cinderblock tried to kill me. A lot of people try to kill me, Terra. I've almost gotten used to it. You were half-right before. This isn't about me. But it is about you. And them."
By now, Terra wasn't sure what sort of a conversation she was having here. "What about them?"
David waited just for a beat, and then said something she had not expected to hear.
"'I wanted to annihilate you and your pathetic friends.'"
Terra froze solid, the aura around her hands flickering on and off at those words, but David did not even seem to notice, staring at her with a gaze like a basilisk. The words had been deadpan, calm, emotionless, and yet they had struck with the power of a wrecking ball.
"Where the hell did you hear that?"
"You're not the only one who did some research."
"Did... Robin told - ?"
"Told me what you said?" asked David as if the question was some kind of absurdity. Perhaps it was. "Are you kidding? Robin didn't tell me anything about you. None of them did! I didn't even know you existed until that night in the park. I had to look it up myself. I had a lot of time on my hands after you nearly beat me to death. There was a surveillance camera on you when you told him that. No sound of course, but Robin had an audio recorder on him. I got to hear everything."
"What do you mean 'everything'?"
"'We had to find some way to coax you cowards out of hiding?'" said David. "'Hope you're not expecting a goodbye kiss?' Do any of those sound familiar to you?"
"How did you even find all that?" asked Terra, incredulous.
"This city is full of cameras," explained David, "especially when you start a fight in a government research lab or on a major street. Robin had it all cataloged under your name. All I had to do was watch. I had a feeling you and I might run into each other again, so I thought it might be a good idea to see what I could find." He narrowed his eyes. "Guess what I found?"
"Look, you weren't there," said Terra, more curtly than she intended. "You don't... you don't understand what happened."
"Oh, this ought to be good," said David, rolling his eyes. "Let me guess? They were mean to you? They didn't understand you? They were so cruel that you just had no choice but to go make a deal for ultimate power with a guy who might actually be the devil himself? Remember, I have been living with these people for the last six months. At least try to make the lies sound good, okay?"
This was just too much. "Oh, fuck you!" exploded Terra, paying no attention to the flair of yellow light and the tremors that shot through the room as she shouted back. "I don't have to explain myself to you!"
David didn't skip a beat either. With his free hand he reached down to his belt and pulled off the yellow and black communicator held there. "Do you know what this means?" he asked her, holding it up like a magic talisman. "I hope so, you had one once. It means I'm a Titan. It means you do have to explain yourself to me, whether I was there or not. And right now, I really need an explanation, because you're right, Terra. I don't understand. I really don't understand how anybody could take everything they had, everything the Titans gave them, and just throw it all away like that. Because that's exactly what you did. I was mad at you, after you tried to murder me. I was upset that you'd been lying to me the entire time. But then I found out about all this, Terra." He shook his head. "And this goes way, way beyond just trying to kill me."
"It wasn't that simple!"
"Wasn't it?" he demanded, relentlessly, "You had everything I have now. Everything! And you threw it away like it was nothing! They gave you a home, friends, a life, and you threw it all back in their faces and then stabbed them in the back while they were wiping it out of their eyes! And you think you don't have to answer for that just because I wasn't there? I owe the Titans everything, Terra. Do you understand me? Everything I have! More than I will ever be able to repay. You think I'm not gonna care that you did that to them? You think everyone just uses their friends like you do?"
"I wasn't using them!" protested Terra, and her voice caught as she said so. Scrambling for something to say, some actual justification to give, she hit upon the mother lode. "I... I saved the Titans. The whole city! I died saving them!"
"Yeah, except, here you are," said David. "Alive. And working for Slade again, by the way. How convenient..."
Despite everything, despite knowing that the reason she had come here was far more important than this dredging up of old wounds and crimes, despite the fact that David had his baton in-hand, and now, if not before, the will to use it, Terra could not stop herself from shutting her eyes tightly and turning her head away, her teeth clenched shut as she fought to control herself, fought to push back the memories of the Titans' faces staring up at her, and the cold grip of Slade's all-embracing control clouding her thoughts and urging her on to finish the 'jobs', one after the next.
"What you did to me," came David's voice, filtering through her memories like an alarm clock, "is nothing compared to that." She opened her eyes again to find him still staring at her. "And you're right, Terra. I don't understand. I don't understand how anyone could do what you did." He shook his head slowly. "I hope I never understand."
"You don't know what it's like!" blurted out Terra. "Having powers that just... just go off whenever! Yours just do whatever you want! You have no idea what that's like, what you'd do just to make it stop! You don't have any right to judge me!"
"Maybe not," said David, "but I bet Raven does. And besides that, Terra, it doesn't matter what it's like, or how bad your powers got. There are some things you just don't do." He paused for a second. "Even the Hive knows that. And here you are, still doing it."
Her eyes opened wide. "I went after you, not the others!"
"Right, you just left them to get killed by Slade, because that's so much better. Just like you left Beast Boy to go running around the entire state searching for you."
"I couldn't let him know where I was!" insisted Terra. "It would have ruined everything!"
"Oh well we can't let that happen, now can we?" asked David. "What is this brilliant plan of yours that requires you to betray the others and kill me?"
"I'm trying to stop the world from ending!"
That at least was so outlandish that it gave David pause. "What?"
"You heard me," she said. Having finally found an opening, she was not going to relinquish it. "I don't know all the details, David, but... there's something inside you."
"I know that."
"No, you don't. You don't understand what it is."
"Oh, and you do?"
"No," said Terra. "But Slade does."
David's eyes widened. "You cannot be serious. You don't actually think I'm gonna believe - "
"Just listen to me!" shouted Terra. "Slade's... he's not what you think he is."
A flash of anger, punctuated by David's baton which flared up like a bonfire for a second before returning to normal, keyed Terra to the fact that this might have been the wrong way to put it. "Slade just killed two dozen people!" snapped David, "I watched him do it, Terra!"
"I... I know!" she said. "Just... please..."
David opened his mouth to shout again, but appeared to think better of it, and stopped. They stared at one another for a second, before David slowly lowered his baton half an inch or so. Not enough to represent any kind of reduction in his defenses, but enough to signal an opening.
"You want to talk?" he asked. "Talk. No lies, no crap, okay? You tell me what's going on here. Right now."
"I don't... I don't know all the details."
"Then what do you know?"
Terra took a deep breath. "There's something inside you," she repeated. "Something very dangerous."
"I know that already!"
"It's worse than you think," she said. "A lot worse."
He didn't respond, and she elaborated. "This thing in you, I don't know if it's like a parasite or a ghost or something else, but it's... living inside you. Right now. It's what gives you your powers. And it's really, really powerful."
"How powerful?" asked David, and his voice was quieted. That something was inside him was not a surprise, she could tell. But clearly he didn't know much beyond that.
She did not let up. "More powerful than me. More powerful than Slade even. Way more powerful than you. You just get to use a little fraction of its power. The rest of it just sits there. Waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"I don't know," said Terra. "Maybe for nothing. But Trigon is after it."
The word elicited no flash of recognition from David, Terra could tell, but he lowered his baton some more, and asked the obvious question.
"Who's Trigon?"
Terra shook her head and shuddered. "I don't know who he is exactly," she said. "I've never met him in person. But I think... I think he might be the Devil."
She knew that she had overdone it the instant the word left her lips. "Oh, for God's sake, Terra!" shouted David angrily. "You think I'm gonna believe that? From you?!"
There was no course now but to lay it all out. "David, he brought me back to life!"
That shut David up.
"I was a statue, David, dead, but Slade asked him to bring me back, and he turned me into a human again. That's how I'm here. He brought Slade back too, and gave him all those fire powers. I've never met him in person, I don't know who he is or what he is, but he talks to you out of the darkness and you feel like you want to just die or something. Maybe he's not the devil, but he's the closest thing I've ever run into, okay?"
The desperation, the sincerity in Terra's words clearly had an effect, and rather than scream or accuse her of further deceptions, David remained quiet. His baton fell back to his side, and she saw real fear starting to creep over his face. Fear that she might actually be telling some approximation of the truth this time. And she knew that he would never ever have believed such a thing, not from her, unless what she was saying hadn't coincided with some of the deeper fears he had been harboring about this very issue.
"And... this Trigon wants to kill me?"
Terra shook her head. "No," she said. "Trigon doesn't want to kill you, David. He wants to keep you alive, and with the other Titans."
"Why?"
"He's coming. To Earth. I don't know how, or when, but it's happening very soon. And when he comes, he wants you here. With the others. And then..." she trailed off for a moment before jumping back on track. "... I don't know what happens then," she admitted. "But he wants to destroy the world. And you're part of how he does it. Or that thing inside you is."
David looked rather like someone was explaining to him that black was white. "Wait a minute," he said. "If... this Trigon guy wants me to be here when he shows up, why does he keep sending people to kill me?"
"He's not," said Terra, and she lowered her eyes. "Slade is."
"But... Slade's working for Trigon, right? He brought him back and gave him all those powers?"
"That's what Trigon thinks," said Terra. "Slade's trying to stop him."
Plainly, this was making less and less sense to David. "Why would Slade want to stop Trigon?"
"Look, you don't know Slade, okay?"
"And what, you do?"
"Better than you do. Better than the others too. Maybe even better than Robin. Slade's a bad guy, I'm not saying he isn't. But if Trigon destroys the world, then he'll die too, and he knows it. Trigon had Slade send Cinderblock to destroy that orphanage you were in, to make the Titans take you, and he sent him in again to scare you into staying there. But after Slade figured out what was going on, he had me lure you out of the Tower, and sent Cinderblock to kill you."
"Then..." said David, his head almost visibly spinning from all of this. "Then Slade killed Cinderblock after I beat him? Then he was the one who broke into the jail?"
Terra could only shake her head. "No, David," she said. "Slade didn't kill Cinderblock. I did."
David recoiled a step, as though struck. "What?! Why?"
"Because if I hadn't, Trigon would have found out what Slade was up to, and would have stopped him. And then there'd be no stopping the end of the world."
"Then... then you..."
"After Cinderblock failed, Slade told me I had to kill you instead. There was nobody else he could trust to do it." She sighed. "Do you remember what I told you right at the end of the fight?"
It took him a second, but the memory returned. "You said you were sorry..."
"I was sorry. I'm still sorry, David, but I had to do it. But... something stopped me. I think something Raven did, I still don't know what it was. And now it's nearly too late."
"Hang on a minute," said David, raising one hand. "If Slade wanted to kill me, why didn't he do it himself? He's indestructible, he's got demon powers or whatever, right? And he could have done it in that church after you beat me half to death! Why didn't he just kill me then?"
"Because Trigon's watching him, David," said Terra. "Trigon brought Slade back to be his servant, he's keeping a close eye on him. Trigon has this whole ritual he needs to do before he can show up, it takes weeks. That's what Slade's doing now, it's why he destroyed all those buildings and why he attacked Raven and you guys in that church. He has to, I don't know, announce Trigon's coming or something. I don't understand how it works. But if Trigon ever figured out that Slade's actually trying to kill you, he'd take all of Slade's powers away, and probably kill him."
"So he just doesn't mind you doing it?"
"He doesn't know I'm doing it," said Terra. "That's why Slade used me. Trigon's not on Earth yet, he can only watch what Slade is doing, so Slade convinced him to bring me back to 'help' him get everything ready. Trigon doesn't know why I'm really here, but even so I have to be careful."
"Why?" asked David.
"Because Trigon's got other servants besides Slade. Ones who do want him to succeed. And if they find out what Slade and I are doing, they'll tell Trigon."
"Well you can't be too worried about them if you were willing to start a fight in public like that!"
"That was a last resort, David!" insisted Terra. "You were supposed to die when Cinderblock attacked us! I was just supposed to make sure you were in the right place for it, I wasn't ever supposed to get involved myself."
"So then why did you?" he demanded. "Why is it so important that I get killed?!"
"I told you already, Trigon's going to - "
" - end the world, I heard you the first time," said David. "But is killing me supposed to stop him from showing up or something?"
"No," said Terra. "He's coming anyway. Something to do with Raven, I don't really understand how it works. But Slade says that if you're not there, if Trigon can't get what he wants from inside you, then the other Titans have a chance of stopping him."
"A chance?"
"A good chance. That's what Slade thinks at least, and whatever you think about Slade, he usually knows what he's talking about with this sort of thing. But if you're there, and Trigon does whatever he's planning to do, then they have no chance. Trigon'll destroy the entire world, maybe the whole universe. He says it's an absolute certainty, David. That's why we had to send Cinderblock to kill you."
David fell silent, and Terra shook her head and continued. "But... Robin trained you better than we thought, or maybe you were just stronger than we expected, and you crippled Cinderblock instead." She sighed. "I... probably should've just finished it there, but I... didn't. And then it was too late. You were still alive, Trigon was getting closer, we had to do something."
"But that something didn't work either?"
"No," she said. "It didn't. And now we're here."
David visibly braced himself. "So is this where you try to kill me again?"
Terra took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "No," she said. "Not unless I have to."
"And what exactly is that supposed to mean?"
"It means that I don't know if I can kill you, okay?" said Terra. "It was closer that it looked last time, and I know you've been practicing since then, right? Probably practicing with rocks?" It took only a glance at David's face to confirm her suspicions. "I got you to overload yourself last time, and you already admitted you realized that. In a straight-up fight... I don't know."
"So then what are you doing here, Terra?" asked David. "Did you come all this way just to explain yourself to me?"
Terra took another breath. "No," she whispered. "I came to convince you to come with me."
"Come with you? To where?"
"To meet with Slade."
Genuine shock registered on David's face as he blinked, twice, and stared at Terra like she had just grown another head.
"What?"
"I know!" protested Terra pre-emptively, raising a hand. "I know, but please, you've gotta... I need you to come with me to meet with Slade because he might be able to find a way to stop this without having to kill you."
"I thought you said Slade couldn't do anything without Trigon finding out?"
"I did," insisted Terra, "but we don't have a lot of options now, David! We have to try something, and fast or else Trigon's gonna end the world. I know you're not just gonna let me kill you, and I don't know if I can kill you myself, so this is your only choice."
David was looking more and more bewildered. "You... you want me to come with you to meet Slade?"
"Yes."
"And he's got some way of ending this without having to kill me?"
"He might. I don't know for certain, David. This is like Plan Z."
"Well he must have told you something if he sent you to - "
"He didn't send me."
David stopped dead, blinking in shock for a second time. Terra could only shake her head. "He doesn't even know I'm here."
"But... then..."
"If we go to Slade, he might be able to find some other way, David. That's the best I can offer."
"And if he can't?"
"Then... I don't know, David," admitted Terra. "Then we try something else, then we go somewhere else, take your pick, okay? I don't know. All I know right now, David, is you don't have a choice."
"How do you figure that?" asked David. She saw his baton begining to burn with more intensity again, but took no notice of it as she looked him in the eye.
"Because, David," she said. "Whether or not you come with me, Slade has one more backup plan that he's gonna try."
"And what's that?"
"He's gonna tell your friends everything I just told you."
David blinked once or twice, not in shock but in confusion. Clearly this was not the threat to life and limb he had expected. "I don't get it," he said.
"Slade's with the others right now," explained Terra. "Something he has to do for Trigon. He's trying to flush Raven out of wherever she's gone to hide. Since Cinderblock couldn't kill you, and I couldn't... he's gonna make the others do it instead."
"What?!"
"He's gonna tell them everything. About Trigon, and you, and Raven, everything. Stuff even I don't know. He's gonna explain how the whole thing works, he says he's got a way to do it without alerting Trigon. And once they realize that the only chance for them to save the entire universe is to kill you, David, what do you think they're gonna do?"
"That's insane," said David, no longer even attempting a pretense of holding his baton up and ready. "The others wouldn't believe Slade if he told them water was wet! You think they're just gonna take his word for something like this?"
"David, don't you see?" insisted Terra. "They don't have to take his word for anything, he's telling the truth! They'll be able to see it for themselves once they know what to look for! If Raven doesn't know what's going on already, what Slade tells them will be enough for her to figure it out. And they're gonna come to the same conclusion Slade did. Slade doesn't want to kill you because he's a bad guy, he wants to do it because there's no other way. Not that he can find, and not that they can."
David's face slowly fell as the brutal, simple logic of what Terra was saying sank in visibly. His baton was held limp at his side now, the aura faded to nothing. His mouth was hanging slightly open, in shock perhaps, in disbelief of course, but more and more, in silent recognition of what was happening.
"They're not gonna want to do it, David," said Terra. "You know that. They're not gonna like it. But they're gonna have the choice of letting the entire world die, or killing you. They're superheroes. What do you think they're gonna choose?"
She chanced a step towards him, and when he did not react, she slowly approached. He made no move to stop her or even retreat, indeed she doubted he even noticed what she was doing. She walked straight up to him, speaking evenly and quietly.
"And that's why you have to come with me, David," she said. "We can go to Slade, let him learn more about what that thing inside you is, see if he can find a way to stop whatever Trigon plans to do with it. I know it doesn't sound like a lot, but it's the only way you might survive this. Even if we fight, and it turns out I can't kill you, the others will have to. They won't have a choice."
David seemed almost to be staring through her, and his voice was almost whisper-quiet when he responded.
"Like me?"
Terra smiled, despite herself. "Yeah," she said. "Just like you." This close, she could see tears welling up in David's eyes, of what she had no idea, and he shut his eyes and clenched them tight to force them back, with the result that when he opened them again they were ringed with damp redness. His hands were shaking, she could see the baton trembling against his leg as he held it at his side, dark and cold. No more bluster or threat or angry denunciations. He looked scared, small, alone. A combination she remembered all too well.
Slowly, Terra extended a hand towards him.
"So please..." she said in the most reasonable tone she could muster, a tone that promised help, succor, deliverance, "... David... will you come with me to meet Slade?"
David took a ragged, nervous breath, and raised his eyes slowly to meet hers. He remained there for several moments, before quietly whispering a single word in reply.
"No."
"Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear."
- Ambrose Redmoon
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
Chilled silence reigned within the pumice tower as Raven stared wide-eyed at the trans-dimensional weaponized embodiment of pure destruction, manifested in the form of David, and tried to process what it had just said to her.
"... what?"
The statement was concise enough to have been Raven's, but Raven had not yet spoken. Indeed, only when she heard the question asked did Raven remember that she and Devastator were not alone in this mindspace. But once she had, it took no empathy to determine what the reaction of the others present was going to be.
"You backstabbing son of a bitch! I'll kill you!"
Devastator merely closed his eyes and sighed as the Ice-David lunged at him with a frozen fist encrusted with icicles like a spiked pair of brass knuckles, making no move to evade or defend himself. Raven knew why, and the Ice-David discovered why soon enough, for fist and arm shattered like glass against Devastator's head, sending fragments of ice flying in every direction. Hail pelted Raven's cloak and scattered about the room, sending the Smoke-David scurrying back a half-dozen paces, perforating the Water-David, who was standing motionless in horrified shock, and pinging off of the Iron-David, whose fists were clenched tightly as he stared living daggers at Devastator. But Devastator himself took no notice of the others, or of the Ice-David's assault, and simply opened his eyes once again to look at Raven.
Raven too had no attention to spare for the others though, for she was still trying to decide if this was some kind of bad metaphor, or if Devastator could possibly have meant -
"I take no pleasure in the suggestion," said Devastator, as though reading her mind, "but I make it genuinely, I assure you."
"You want me to... kill David?" asked Raven hoarsely. She found to her surprise that she was shocked, genuinely shocked, not so much at the suggestion, but at who had just suggested it.
"What I want, and for that matter what you want, have no bearing on the matter," said Devastator, stepping forward. "You claim that you do not want to be the Gem of Trigon. I do not want to be the catalyst for David's death, but whether or not either of us like that we are these things, we are them."
"Stop it," said Raven, and she backed up a pace. "This is... some kind of trick or something. You're trying to get me to -"
"I am trying to get you to see reason!" shouted Devastator, loud enough that the walls rang with his voice and even the Ice-David drew back. "I am trying to save the entire universe from Trigon the Terrible! It is he that is coming, not some criminal in a spandex costume! Do you not see? The end of all things is imminent."
Devastator walked towards Raven, eyes unwavering, hands at his sides, and all four Davids followed him with their eyes. "You claimed a moment ago that you loathed your father. That you would be his enemy. That you would fight him in any way you could. Was that a lie? Or were you telling the truth?"
Raven felt her back hit a wall, though she had not noticed herself backing up. Her mind refused to focus, and she stared mutely back at Devastator.
"Answer me!" demanded Devastator. "Are you Trigon's enemy or - "
"Yes!" yelped Raven reflexively.
Devastator folded his arms. "Then tell me, Gem, what are you prepared to do to stop him?"
"This is insane," said the Iron-David suddenly, and Raven looked over and saw all four Davids watching them, the Smoke hiding behind the Water, while the Iron held the remaining hand of the Ice, restraining it from leaping at either Devastator or Raven and tearing them to pieces.
"She can't stop Trigon," said Smoke-David hesitantly, "even by... doing this! You... you said... said so yourself!"
"You're a traitor," snarled Ice-David, in a broken, pained voice, like the ones she imagined her friends using whenever she had nightmares of them finding out the truth about her.
"No, he's a coward," said Iron-David, his voice much more calm, but all the more disturbing for it. "He knows this enemy of his is coming, so he wants to cut and run, even if he has to kill us all to do it."
"You do not know the first thing of which you are speaking," replied Devastator dismissively without turning his head. "But I believe you do, don't you, Raven?" He gestured back with one arm to the assembled Davids. "Do you want to tell them? Can you describe it better than I?"
"We know what's coming!" insisted Iron-David, for the Ice was too livid for words, and the other two not speaking. "Fire, brimstone, the end of the world, you told us already!"
"No," said Devastator, but he made no effort to direct his words towards David's alter-egos, instead stepping up in front of Raven, looking up at her in perfect calm. "You do not."
It was as though his words were some kind of curse, for Raven's nightmarish memories all came back to her in a rush. The lakes of fire, the ash-dusted statues, the endless forest of ruins that had once been Jump City, her city, still distinctive despite the smoke and flames, all of it flashed before her eyes like a repressed memory coming to the surface, and without thinking, she clutched the sides of her head and squeezed her eyes shut, clenching her teeth and trying to force down the vision, but the vision would not be forced. And through it all, she heard Devastator's voice, preternaturally calm, floating through the thick air.
"None of them understand it," said Devastator, "do they? The Titans, I mean. They hear words like 'fire' and 'demon' and 'evil', but they do not feel them. No-one can feel them who has not experienced them firsthand. The depths of Trigon's cruelty... the pain he embodies... to them it's all just another enemy to face. To you... it is different."
"They... they can stop him..." she said, and found her voice shaking and quiet, unconvincing, even to her own ears.
"No," said Devastator. "They cannot. You know this. Slade knows this. I know it. Nothing can stop him. He is evil made manifest. There is no stopping that. Not by any living means."
His words were soft and almost comforting in their certainty, no hysteria, no anger or denunciation, no cackled laughter mocking her presumption in railing against the inevitable. Just fact. Cold, simple, emotionless fact. No blame. No fault. Things simply were.
And yet...
"You... can't know that!" she insisted as she opened her eyes. "There's... gotta be something else that I can do! Some way to stop him or... anything!"
She'd argued this before, and she half-expected, half-wanted him to become angry or frustrated again, but he did not. Instead he sighed, and shook his head, slowly. "Has there?" he asked, and let the question stand a moment. "You are his daughter, Raven. You know him better than I ever could. Likely better than anyone. What I think of Trigon is not important. It is what you believe that matters. And I can see right now in your very eyes, that what I am telling you is not a surprise, is it?"
What else could she say?
"... no."
Devastator nodded. "Then you know what has to be done."
"No!!!" screamed Ice-David, and he wrenched himself free of Iron-David's grasp, his severed arm regrowing in a matter of seconds as he charged and lashed out with all the fury of an enraged berserker. Water-David merely lowered his head, and placed a hand on Smoke-David's shoulder as he looked away and cringed, while Iron-David watched impassively, as though torn over whether or not to join in. In the end it did not matter. No blow could the Ice-David inflict that so much as registered on Devastator's person, an ant beating its antennae against the Great Pyramids. Devastator himself made no move to stop Ice-David, waiting until his fury was spent, and the Ice sculpture stood doubled over, frozen tears of anger clinking to the ground from his face, his impotent rage drained away like water off the back of a duck. And when Devastator spoke, it was again to Raven.
"For what it's worth, Raven," said Devastator. "I am sorry. Trigon's cruelty is unsurpassed, but it did not even cross my mind that he would make an enemy of his own daughter, and then use her as his portal into the world. I... expected that you would be a partisan of his. Though I suppose that would have made it easier."
Maybe it would have. Raven didn't know and refused to ask. It didn't matter now.
"I don't want to do this..."
"As I understand it," said Devastator, "you did not wish to be the Gem of Trigon either. It gives me no pleasure to admit it, but by one means or another I have doomed David by my presence here. Whether you kill him, or Trigon does, one way or another, his days are coming to an end. None could blame you for taking what steps you deemed - "
"This isn't about blame!" shouted Raven, silencing Devastator, and giving several of the various David's a visible start, and she might have continued, but she silenced herself, looking away again, before she could go on to explain what it was about. It didn't matter what Devastator thought of her. All that mattered was...
Was what... exactly, if not the others?
Devastator remained silent for a few moments, and when he did speak, he did not yell or try and repeat himself, but merely shook his head. "I cannot force you to act," he said, gesturing at the other Davids, "and neither can they. They don't have the power, and I don't have the will." He took a long breath, probably for effect more than need, before raising his eyes to meet hers. "But I can tell you this: Trigon seeks only to inflict torment and death upon all life, by any means that he is able. If you do not kill David, if you leave me trapped within him to await the day of judgment, then I give you my absolute guarantee that every one of your friends will die, and they will likely be joined by the rest of the universe."
And Raven knew that he was right.
It wasn't a matter of being "convinced", it was realizing she had always known. Since before he had begun to talk. Since before she had come to this place. Since David had first arrived in the Tower. She knew that her objections were emotional, not rational. She knew that his logic was flawless, that Trigon was the things Devastator claimed he was, and that his analysis of the situation was probably accurate. She could see the fear and the hesitation in Devastator, feel it, drink it up practically, the fear that her decision might be other than what he hoped, the hesitation that perhaps he was wrong to confide this in her, that he was taking a terrible risk that she would turn out to be a servant of her father's, but there was no obfuscation, no lie. The energy being that was the source of David's powers, that had chosen him to be endowed with the energies of the cosmos, believed without question, that there was no solution but David's death.
The certainty in Devastator's eyes was terrible to behold.
"We all must make hard choices," said Devastator, as the other Davids looked on helplessly, their faces in various permutations of disbelief, horror, and dull shock. "I... regret that my decisions have placed you in this position. But you are the only one who can stop Trigon's plan." He thought about his words for a moment, and ended with a simple, final appeal. "I leave it in your hands..."
"That's it..." hissed the Ice-David, slowly standing back up, his voice as sharp as a stiletto. "I've heard enough out of this bastard! I want him silenced, and her evicted! NOW!"
Devastator merely lowered his eyes, but did not turn around as the other three Davids looked to one another and back to the Ice-David, who took their hesitation as a mortal insult. "What the hell are you all waiting for?!" he screamed back at them, and this time there were real tears in his eyes, half-frozen slush, his entire frame shaking as he shouted at the others in a quivering voice, one that plainly could simply not take any more. "He wants to kill us! And she's gonna do it! I say we throw her out and let her try! Her powers don't work on us!"
"The Devastator is commanded by will alone," said Devastator, eyes downcast, and his voice sounded like he was quoting some forgotten scripture. "She cannot harm David through malice or hate. It was a protection laid against Trigon's minions. But there are other means, as she well knows," he raised his eyes to meet hers, "Her healing and sensory magic works well enough in general, but in this place, the protections are bypassed. Strike to kill from within here, and it will suffice."
Ice-David could not reply in words, indeed his pained shriek of impotent rage was enough to shake the walls, and he collapsed to the ground, beating his fist against the floor hard enough to gouge divots in it and freeze the rock solid within ten feet. As Raven watched, Water-David walked to him and knelt at his side, placing a hand on his shoulder as though in some attempt at succor, while Iron-David stepped around them both, planting his feet and folding his arms, and staring at her and Devastator with an unwavering gaze, as though wordlessly demanding to know how they could countenance reducing his icy counterpart to such a state.
"Get them... out of here..." snarled Ice-David, barely able to speak.
"H... how...?" asked the Smoke-David. "I mean... him, sure, but... what about..."
"Have him kill her!" screamed Ice-David. "Don't you see? She's trying to help him kill us! Get rid of her!"
"We... I mean... we can't just..." stammered Smoke-David, looking to the others one at a time. "She's... she's a - "
"I agree with him," said Iron-David, ruthlessly quiet. "I change my vote. Kill her."
The Smoke-David hesitated, and in that moment's hesitation, Raven knew she should act, that if they did order Devastator to kill her, she would likely not be able to fight it off. But she had no idea what she could do here, unless...
Devastator was staring her in the face, but said nothing, his face a blank mask.
Smoke-David shuddered, visibly shuddered, and could not seem to force words out of his mouth, until Iron-David turned to him. No words were exchanged, but Raven saw the hesitation in Smoke's eyes, and caught the ever-so-slight nod that Iron gave him, a nod clearly filled with wordless meaning. Smoke closed his own eyes and breathed out a puff of haze which danced into the air above him. "D.. do it.." he said, and turned away. "Do it... quick..."
She could not leave, not quickly enough at least, but that wasn't what crossed her mind, for there was another option for her to forestall Devastator's attack, and looking at him, she knew that Devastator himself knew it. She was in David's mind, past his subconscious defenses, past whatever physical barriers he might erect or throw into her path. The rules of what one could and could not do inside the mind of another were many and ironclad, for good reason. Deviating from them seriously endangered the mind in question.
And yet until now, it had simply never occurred to Raven that one might... intentionally deviate.
Water remained crouched next to Ice, who was staring at him half-expectantly, half-desperately. Unlike Smoke, he did face Raven, and his expression was almost mournful. Slowly he lowered his head, took yet another deep breath, and speaking in a voice that was tinged with regret, simply nodded his assent.
"All right..." he said, and she saw his grip on Ice's shoulder tighten.
David's entire mind was here. Defenseless, unprotected by any mechanism or power, save for Devastator, and Devastator had just told her how to circumvent his protections. She turned back to him, and saw the expectation in his eyes, the flashes of urgency. He could not delay for much longer.
"I require unanimity," said Devastator without turning his head. "A decision, please."
He already had it, but he was going through the formalities, such as they were, delaying until the last possible minute. She knew it, and so did Iron and Ice, at least. Without even thinking about it, she felt her own fingers tracing the appropriate designs in the air, felt herself marshaling the energy necessary. The spell was so simple it had no name, a simple burst of psychic power, a fraction of what she could unleash, would suffice. From here, she could liquefy David's consciousness and leave him dead on the spot without so much as a whimper. He would feel nothing, no pain, no surprise, it would be over in an instant...
"Do it," snarled Ice, "Do it, goddamn you! I vote kill her!"
"Agreed," said Iron. "I vote kill her as well,"
"S... so do I..." said Smoke.
"I'm... sorry," said Water, and he sounded it, but he did not hesitate further. "Me too."
Devastator said nothing, but opened his hand, and the flaming sword re-appeared within it, downsized to match David's smaller form. Raven could sense the power in that sword, and it pushed her along, mentally, half of her horrified at what she was preparing to do, and the other half cognizant that there was literally no choice. She was caught between Trigon and Devastator, and if one did not kill her, then the other would, and without making any conscious choice, she prepared the spell for launch. Again and again the images of her friends' burnt and frozen corpses, the ones that haunted her dreams and now even her waking hours, flashed through her head. Even now she could see them, fallen in various poses, their faces contorted with pain, their hands outstretched as if in supplication for aid. One by one they appeared to her. Robin. Cyborg. Starfire.
Beast Boy.
Her throat caught as the image of Beast Boy merged with that of Devastator, striding towards her with sword upraised. And yet her eyes could focus on nothing but the sight of Beast Boy dying, screaming, his emerald eyes torn out, his green skin scorched black, blood that was all too red coursing from half a dozen hideous wounds. And all she could make out of whatever words he was screaming to the darkness was his demand to know why, when she had the chance, she had chosen not to save him.
And then Raven took a breath with which to scream the word of power that would tear David's mind apart.
"No!"
The image shattered, and the spell died in her throat as Devastator stopped short, sword still held high above her head, ready to be brought down like a meteor. Both Raven and Devastator stared at one another, and then slowly turned their heads towards the entrance to the tower, from whence the shout had come.
In the doorway stood a fifth David, though what he was made of, Raven could not tell. He seemed to be solid, though small and slightly misshapen, if his silhouette was accurate, and yet at the very sight of him, Devastator seemed to stiffen, and lowered his sword, and Ice stood back up along with Water, and Smoke blinked and turned back to the others, and Iron folded his arms once again, as though curious to see what this might bring. And as the others watched, the fifth David, smaller than the other four, walked slowly into the atrium itself, and from where she stood, Raven could see that he was made entirely of a yellow metal that warped and shifted like clay as he walked.
It took her a moment to realize that it was gold.
"I veto the motion," said the Gold-David, in what was unquestionably David's voice, more similar to his own than the others were, save only that it lacked the hesitation always lurking behind the real thing.
"You can't..." said Ice in disbelief, even as smoke drew nearer to him. "You can't! You heard her, didn't you!"
"This is hardly the time," added Iron, "for a bunch of sentimental - "
"I said no," said Gold. "Not now, not ever. Step back, Devastator." And at his words, Devastator turned back to Raven, and slowly lowered the sword, stepping back several paces.
"NO!" screamed Ice, and before anyone could stop him he lunged for Gold, charging him and diving atop him, sending both of them crashing to the floor. A moment later and he was sitting atop Gold, beating him savagely with both fists, screaming incoherent cries of rage and frustration. Smoke yelped and flew back, and Iron groaned and shook his head, but Water rushed forward and dragged Ice off of Gold, even as Ice shoved Water away and attacked again and again, beating huge dents and divots into the statue's face and body. And yet when Ice was finally spent, and Water had managed to drag him away, and Gold slowly and painfully picked himself up off the ground. His features damaged, his body twisted and bent backwards, he sat up and spoke clearly enough to be understood.
"I forbid it," he said. "No matter what happens. I forbid it." And at that pronouncement Ice screamed anew and tried to push past Water, and Smoke shivered and withdrew to the side of the atrium, and Iron simply hung his head as though in defeat, and at that instant, Raven knew that it no longer mattered what the other Davids thought.
"Besides," coughed Gold. "We've actually got bigger problems right now."
A hush fell over the atrium as he said that, even Ice instantly calming down, and it seemed as though the light in the tower dimmed slightly. All four elements besides Gold raised their heads, as though sniffing the wind, and Ice and Iron looked at one another with wholly changed expressions. Iron was frowning now, upset about something, though she could not tell what, and Ice looked... almost happy.
"I don't believe it..." said Ice, as Iron walked over to him. "I don't fucking believe it!"
"I do," said Iron, and his voice was a low growl. "Come on..." And without a flash or any evidence of any magic at work, suddenly Iron and Ice were both gone, vanished without a trace.
"Wh... what's happening?" asked Smoke, though who he was asking was unclear. Raven was wondering the same thing, but had not asked. It did not seem prudent.
Fortunately, Water remained behind, shaking his head slowly with a smile of disbelief on his face. "I think we're about to have a fight," he said.
"What?!" asked Smoke, genuinely horrified, by the sound of it. "With... why?"
Water did not answer directly, glancing back at Gold and at Devastator. When he did finally speak, he simply laughed a mirthless laugh, at the state of the universe for all Raven could tell.
"She's baaaaaack..."
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------------*
What little light there was, was mingled gold and red.
The stone amphitheater was dark and cold, ringed by lifeless gargoyles watching over the two teenagers standing in the center of it, their eyes locked on one another. Hundreds of feet underground, far from electric lights and the warmth of the sun, the only light to be seen was being emitted by both metahumans. Terra's hands were sheathed in an energy field of shining gold, whose light was cast dimly around her side of the chamber. David himself emitted nothing, but the baton in his right hand flickered and danced with a heatless red flame, which rose and fell in intensity rhythmically, sometimes mere smoldering embers, sometimes flaming high enough to encase his entire hand.
They stood there for one of the longest seconds in recorded history, neither one saying anything, betraying anything with their expressions or actions. Terra's hands were relaxed at her sides, and David's baton did not so much as twitch. They just stared at one another, each apparently waiting for the other to break the silence, or so it might have appeared. As it was, Terra was the one to speak first.
"I know you're... probably guessing why I'm here."
If David was surprised by the casual expression, he gave utterly no sign of it. And when he replied, his voice was utterly devoid of emotion of any sort.
"Not really."
Terra blinked once or twice. "David," she said, "I - "
"I know you're here to kill me," said David. He might have been reciting a lesson in school for all the emphasis he gave the words. "I don't know why. Honestly, I don't see how it matters."
"I'm not here to kill you."
The words produced no reaction whatsoever, and the chamber fell back into silence. Terra seemed to wait for David to say something, and when he did not, she ventured a comment herself.
"You don't believe me?"
"There are very few things you could say right now that I'd believe, Terra," replied David.
She swallowed. There was no point trying to beat around it. "Look," she said, "there's a lot going on here you don't understand. I'm here to talk, not to fight."
"Well that's really too bad, isn't it?" replied David, "because I'm really not here to do either. But if I have to pick, I'll take fighting over talking right now."
"You told me once that you didn't like fighting."
"I don't," he replied, "but this has been a really strange day. And if you think I'm gonna stand here and listen to you tell me another bunch of lies, then you're crazier than I thought you were."
She shut her eyes and took a deep breath, preparing to start over, but he forestalled her.
"Besides," he said, "you're wrong."
Terra paused and opened her eyes. "What?"
David balled his hands into fists. "You are here to kill me," he repeated, again in the same dangerously calm tone. "Whether or not you want to talk first, that's what you're here to do. And I'd really appreciate it if we could just stop lying about everything right now."
"What are you talking about?"
"One of us is going to kill the other before we leave this room. I know that and so do you."
David's stare was unwavering, a unique enough trait from him to give Terra pause. She visibly hesitated, and then carefully moved towards David, one hand held up in a gesture of peace.
"David, please, you've got to listen to - "
"I swear to God, Terra," said David without moving a muscle, his voice now barely controlled, even as the baton in his hand brightened like a road flare. "If you take one more step, I will implode your skull, and splatter your guts all over the walls." He very slowly raised his baton to shoulder-height. "And if you don't think I can do that, then step forward and find out."
Terra had heard many a threat before, including some she had not expected to hear, but this one was delivered with such... absolute certainty to the words, such a depth of anger welling up behind them, that before she could even consider what to do, she had stopped. From this distance, she could see him literally quivering, and not with fear. She had not known David for too long of course, but she had certainly never seen him like this.
She wondered for a moment if the other Titans ever had.
She wondered if he ever had.
"You seem to have this idea, Terra," said David, "that I care what you think, or have to say, or why you came here." He opened his eyes again, and his stare was as direct as a mining laser. "Let me make this really clear, okay? I am through being played by you, for answers or any other reason!"
"David, I'm not trying to play you!" insisted Terra urgently. "We don't - "
"Bullshit!" shouted David, and the walls echoed with his voice. "Bullshit! That's what you do! That's all you do! You play people! You lie to their faces and then turn around and stab them in the back! That's all you do!"
Terra fell quiet again before David's outburst, and could only watch as a torrent of words spilled out of him like a burst dam.
"You think I'm stupid?" he asked, actually stepping towards her, and despite the fact that he was the smaller of the two of them and that she had beaten him once before, she had the unmistakable urge to back up. She suppressed it, but he scarcely seemed to notice. "You think I don't know what you did back there in the park? That little pep talk you gave me about what the Titans would think if they knew I'd been hanging out with you? You read me like a book, I guess it's what you're good at. Got me all scared and angry until I had one of those stroke things, right? You think I'm gonna sit here and let you talk me into another one?"
"David - "
"How did you find out about those?" he asked, refusing to permit her a word. "Those little 'episodes' I get whenever I overdo it? For that matter, how did you find out that I was leaving the Tower that day Adonis attacked us? Did Slade tell you, or Cinderblock? Or maybe you did some research by yourself, huh?"
"David, please!" shouted Terra, the only way she could get a sentence in. "I understand you're angry with me, I really do, but we've got bigger things to deal with here, okay? This isn't about you and me."
To her surprise, David seemed to pause, and then, of all things, started to laugh, lowering his head until his forehead was resting in one hand and laughing uncontrollably, an ironic, bitter laugh that, if anything, was even more unsettling than having him scream at her.
"... what?" she asked, unsure of what else to say.
Slowly David lifted his head. "You think I'm mad at you because you tried to kill me?" he asked, and let her stew in silence for a few seconds before continuing. "You think that's what this is about?" He shook his head slowly. "No, Terra. Slade tried to kill me. "Adonis tried to kill me. Cinderblock tried to kill me. A lot of people try to kill me, Terra. I've almost gotten used to it. You were half-right before. This isn't about me. But it is about you. And them."
By now, Terra wasn't sure what sort of a conversation she was having here. "What about them?"
David waited just for a beat, and then said something she had not expected to hear.
"'I wanted to annihilate you and your pathetic friends.'"
Terra froze solid, the aura around her hands flickering on and off at those words, but David did not even seem to notice, staring at her with a gaze like a basilisk. The words had been deadpan, calm, emotionless, and yet they had struck with the power of a wrecking ball.
"Where the hell did you hear that?"
"You're not the only one who did some research."
"Did... Robin told - ?"
"Told me what you said?" asked David as if the question was some kind of absurdity. Perhaps it was. "Are you kidding? Robin didn't tell me anything about you. None of them did! I didn't even know you existed until that night in the park. I had to look it up myself. I had a lot of time on my hands after you nearly beat me to death. There was a surveillance camera on you when you told him that. No sound of course, but Robin had an audio recorder on him. I got to hear everything."
"What do you mean 'everything'?"
"'We had to find some way to coax you cowards out of hiding?'" said David. "'Hope you're not expecting a goodbye kiss?' Do any of those sound familiar to you?"
"How did you even find all that?" asked Terra, incredulous.
"This city is full of cameras," explained David, "especially when you start a fight in a government research lab or on a major street. Robin had it all cataloged under your name. All I had to do was watch. I had a feeling you and I might run into each other again, so I thought it might be a good idea to see what I could find." He narrowed his eyes. "Guess what I found?"
"Look, you weren't there," said Terra, more curtly than she intended. "You don't... you don't understand what happened."
"Oh, this ought to be good," said David, rolling his eyes. "Let me guess? They were mean to you? They didn't understand you? They were so cruel that you just had no choice but to go make a deal for ultimate power with a guy who might actually be the devil himself? Remember, I have been living with these people for the last six months. At least try to make the lies sound good, okay?"
This was just too much. "Oh, fuck you!" exploded Terra, paying no attention to the flair of yellow light and the tremors that shot through the room as she shouted back. "I don't have to explain myself to you!"
David didn't skip a beat either. With his free hand he reached down to his belt and pulled off the yellow and black communicator held there. "Do you know what this means?" he asked her, holding it up like a magic talisman. "I hope so, you had one once. It means I'm a Titan. It means you do have to explain yourself to me, whether I was there or not. And right now, I really need an explanation, because you're right, Terra. I don't understand. I really don't understand how anybody could take everything they had, everything the Titans gave them, and just throw it all away like that. Because that's exactly what you did. I was mad at you, after you tried to murder me. I was upset that you'd been lying to me the entire time. But then I found out about all this, Terra." He shook his head. "And this goes way, way beyond just trying to kill me."
"It wasn't that simple!"
"Wasn't it?" he demanded, relentlessly, "You had everything I have now. Everything! And you threw it away like it was nothing! They gave you a home, friends, a life, and you threw it all back in their faces and then stabbed them in the back while they were wiping it out of their eyes! And you think you don't have to answer for that just because I wasn't there? I owe the Titans everything, Terra. Do you understand me? Everything I have! More than I will ever be able to repay. You think I'm not gonna care that you did that to them? You think everyone just uses their friends like you do?"
"I wasn't using them!" protested Terra, and her voice caught as she said so. Scrambling for something to say, some actual justification to give, she hit upon the mother lode. "I... I saved the Titans. The whole city! I died saving them!"
"Yeah, except, here you are," said David. "Alive. And working for Slade again, by the way. How convenient..."
Despite everything, despite knowing that the reason she had come here was far more important than this dredging up of old wounds and crimes, despite the fact that David had his baton in-hand, and now, if not before, the will to use it, Terra could not stop herself from shutting her eyes tightly and turning her head away, her teeth clenched shut as she fought to control herself, fought to push back the memories of the Titans' faces staring up at her, and the cold grip of Slade's all-embracing control clouding her thoughts and urging her on to finish the 'jobs', one after the next.
"What you did to me," came David's voice, filtering through her memories like an alarm clock, "is nothing compared to that." She opened her eyes again to find him still staring at her. "And you're right, Terra. I don't understand. I don't understand how anyone could do what you did." He shook his head slowly. "I hope I never understand."
"You don't know what it's like!" blurted out Terra. "Having powers that just... just go off whenever! Yours just do whatever you want! You have no idea what that's like, what you'd do just to make it stop! You don't have any right to judge me!"
"Maybe not," said David, "but I bet Raven does. And besides that, Terra, it doesn't matter what it's like, or how bad your powers got. There are some things you just don't do." He paused for a second. "Even the Hive knows that. And here you are, still doing it."
Her eyes opened wide. "I went after you, not the others!"
"Right, you just left them to get killed by Slade, because that's so much better. Just like you left Beast Boy to go running around the entire state searching for you."
"I couldn't let him know where I was!" insisted Terra. "It would have ruined everything!"
"Oh well we can't let that happen, now can we?" asked David. "What is this brilliant plan of yours that requires you to betray the others and kill me?"
"I'm trying to stop the world from ending!"
That at least was so outlandish that it gave David pause. "What?"
"You heard me," she said. Having finally found an opening, she was not going to relinquish it. "I don't know all the details, David, but... there's something inside you."
"I know that."
"No, you don't. You don't understand what it is."
"Oh, and you do?"
"No," said Terra. "But Slade does."
David's eyes widened. "You cannot be serious. You don't actually think I'm gonna believe - "
"Just listen to me!" shouted Terra. "Slade's... he's not what you think he is."
A flash of anger, punctuated by David's baton which flared up like a bonfire for a second before returning to normal, keyed Terra to the fact that this might have been the wrong way to put it. "Slade just killed two dozen people!" snapped David, "I watched him do it, Terra!"
"I... I know!" she said. "Just... please..."
David opened his mouth to shout again, but appeared to think better of it, and stopped. They stared at one another for a second, before David slowly lowered his baton half an inch or so. Not enough to represent any kind of reduction in his defenses, but enough to signal an opening.
"You want to talk?" he asked. "Talk. No lies, no crap, okay? You tell me what's going on here. Right now."
"I don't... I don't know all the details."
"Then what do you know?"
Terra took a deep breath. "There's something inside you," she repeated. "Something very dangerous."
"I know that already!"
"It's worse than you think," she said. "A lot worse."
He didn't respond, and she elaborated. "This thing in you, I don't know if it's like a parasite or a ghost or something else, but it's... living inside you. Right now. It's what gives you your powers. And it's really, really powerful."
"How powerful?" asked David, and his voice was quieted. That something was inside him was not a surprise, she could tell. But clearly he didn't know much beyond that.
She did not let up. "More powerful than me. More powerful than Slade even. Way more powerful than you. You just get to use a little fraction of its power. The rest of it just sits there. Waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"I don't know," said Terra. "Maybe for nothing. But Trigon is after it."
The word elicited no flash of recognition from David, Terra could tell, but he lowered his baton some more, and asked the obvious question.
"Who's Trigon?"
Terra shook her head and shuddered. "I don't know who he is exactly," she said. "I've never met him in person. But I think... I think he might be the Devil."
She knew that she had overdone it the instant the word left her lips. "Oh, for God's sake, Terra!" shouted David angrily. "You think I'm gonna believe that? From you?!"
There was no course now but to lay it all out. "David, he brought me back to life!"
That shut David up.
"I was a statue, David, dead, but Slade asked him to bring me back, and he turned me into a human again. That's how I'm here. He brought Slade back too, and gave him all those fire powers. I've never met him in person, I don't know who he is or what he is, but he talks to you out of the darkness and you feel like you want to just die or something. Maybe he's not the devil, but he's the closest thing I've ever run into, okay?"
The desperation, the sincerity in Terra's words clearly had an effect, and rather than scream or accuse her of further deceptions, David remained quiet. His baton fell back to his side, and she saw real fear starting to creep over his face. Fear that she might actually be telling some approximation of the truth this time. And she knew that he would never ever have believed such a thing, not from her, unless what she was saying hadn't coincided with some of the deeper fears he had been harboring about this very issue.
"And... this Trigon wants to kill me?"
Terra shook her head. "No," she said. "Trigon doesn't want to kill you, David. He wants to keep you alive, and with the other Titans."
"Why?"
"He's coming. To Earth. I don't know how, or when, but it's happening very soon. And when he comes, he wants you here. With the others. And then..." she trailed off for a moment before jumping back on track. "... I don't know what happens then," she admitted. "But he wants to destroy the world. And you're part of how he does it. Or that thing inside you is."
David looked rather like someone was explaining to him that black was white. "Wait a minute," he said. "If... this Trigon guy wants me to be here when he shows up, why does he keep sending people to kill me?"
"He's not," said Terra, and she lowered her eyes. "Slade is."
"But... Slade's working for Trigon, right? He brought him back and gave him all those powers?"
"That's what Trigon thinks," said Terra. "Slade's trying to stop him."
Plainly, this was making less and less sense to David. "Why would Slade want to stop Trigon?"
"Look, you don't know Slade, okay?"
"And what, you do?"
"Better than you do. Better than the others too. Maybe even better than Robin. Slade's a bad guy, I'm not saying he isn't. But if Trigon destroys the world, then he'll die too, and he knows it. Trigon had Slade send Cinderblock to destroy that orphanage you were in, to make the Titans take you, and he sent him in again to scare you into staying there. But after Slade figured out what was going on, he had me lure you out of the Tower, and sent Cinderblock to kill you."
"Then..." said David, his head almost visibly spinning from all of this. "Then Slade killed Cinderblock after I beat him? Then he was the one who broke into the jail?"
Terra could only shake her head. "No, David," she said. "Slade didn't kill Cinderblock. I did."
David recoiled a step, as though struck. "What?! Why?"
"Because if I hadn't, Trigon would have found out what Slade was up to, and would have stopped him. And then there'd be no stopping the end of the world."
"Then... then you..."
"After Cinderblock failed, Slade told me I had to kill you instead. There was nobody else he could trust to do it." She sighed. "Do you remember what I told you right at the end of the fight?"
It took him a second, but the memory returned. "You said you were sorry..."
"I was sorry. I'm still sorry, David, but I had to do it. But... something stopped me. I think something Raven did, I still don't know what it was. And now it's nearly too late."
"Hang on a minute," said David, raising one hand. "If Slade wanted to kill me, why didn't he do it himself? He's indestructible, he's got demon powers or whatever, right? And he could have done it in that church after you beat me half to death! Why didn't he just kill me then?"
"Because Trigon's watching him, David," said Terra. "Trigon brought Slade back to be his servant, he's keeping a close eye on him. Trigon has this whole ritual he needs to do before he can show up, it takes weeks. That's what Slade's doing now, it's why he destroyed all those buildings and why he attacked Raven and you guys in that church. He has to, I don't know, announce Trigon's coming or something. I don't understand how it works. But if Trigon ever figured out that Slade's actually trying to kill you, he'd take all of Slade's powers away, and probably kill him."
"So he just doesn't mind you doing it?"
"He doesn't know I'm doing it," said Terra. "That's why Slade used me. Trigon's not on Earth yet, he can only watch what Slade is doing, so Slade convinced him to bring me back to 'help' him get everything ready. Trigon doesn't know why I'm really here, but even so I have to be careful."
"Why?" asked David.
"Because Trigon's got other servants besides Slade. Ones who do want him to succeed. And if they find out what Slade and I are doing, they'll tell Trigon."
"Well you can't be too worried about them if you were willing to start a fight in public like that!"
"That was a last resort, David!" insisted Terra. "You were supposed to die when Cinderblock attacked us! I was just supposed to make sure you were in the right place for it, I wasn't ever supposed to get involved myself."
"So then why did you?" he demanded. "Why is it so important that I get killed?!"
"I told you already, Trigon's going to - "
" - end the world, I heard you the first time," said David. "But is killing me supposed to stop him from showing up or something?"
"No," said Terra. "He's coming anyway. Something to do with Raven, I don't really understand how it works. But Slade says that if you're not there, if Trigon can't get what he wants from inside you, then the other Titans have a chance of stopping him."
"A chance?"
"A good chance. That's what Slade thinks at least, and whatever you think about Slade, he usually knows what he's talking about with this sort of thing. But if you're there, and Trigon does whatever he's planning to do, then they have no chance. Trigon'll destroy the entire world, maybe the whole universe. He says it's an absolute certainty, David. That's why we had to send Cinderblock to kill you."
David fell silent, and Terra shook her head and continued. "But... Robin trained you better than we thought, or maybe you were just stronger than we expected, and you crippled Cinderblock instead." She sighed. "I... probably should've just finished it there, but I... didn't. And then it was too late. You were still alive, Trigon was getting closer, we had to do something."
"But that something didn't work either?"
"No," she said. "It didn't. And now we're here."
David visibly braced himself. "So is this where you try to kill me again?"
Terra took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "No," she said. "Not unless I have to."
"And what exactly is that supposed to mean?"
"It means that I don't know if I can kill you, okay?" said Terra. "It was closer that it looked last time, and I know you've been practicing since then, right? Probably practicing with rocks?" It took only a glance at David's face to confirm her suspicions. "I got you to overload yourself last time, and you already admitted you realized that. In a straight-up fight... I don't know."
"So then what are you doing here, Terra?" asked David. "Did you come all this way just to explain yourself to me?"
Terra took another breath. "No," she whispered. "I came to convince you to come with me."
"Come with you? To where?"
"To meet with Slade."
Genuine shock registered on David's face as he blinked, twice, and stared at Terra like she had just grown another head.
"What?"
"I know!" protested Terra pre-emptively, raising a hand. "I know, but please, you've gotta... I need you to come with me to meet with Slade because he might be able to find a way to stop this without having to kill you."
"I thought you said Slade couldn't do anything without Trigon finding out?"
"I did," insisted Terra, "but we don't have a lot of options now, David! We have to try something, and fast or else Trigon's gonna end the world. I know you're not just gonna let me kill you, and I don't know if I can kill you myself, so this is your only choice."
David was looking more and more bewildered. "You... you want me to come with you to meet Slade?"
"Yes."
"And he's got some way of ending this without having to kill me?"
"He might. I don't know for certain, David. This is like Plan Z."
"Well he must have told you something if he sent you to - "
"He didn't send me."
David stopped dead, blinking in shock for a second time. Terra could only shake her head. "He doesn't even know I'm here."
"But... then..."
"If we go to Slade, he might be able to find some other way, David. That's the best I can offer."
"And if he can't?"
"Then... I don't know, David," admitted Terra. "Then we try something else, then we go somewhere else, take your pick, okay? I don't know. All I know right now, David, is you don't have a choice."
"How do you figure that?" asked David. She saw his baton begining to burn with more intensity again, but took no notice of it as she looked him in the eye.
"Because, David," she said. "Whether or not you come with me, Slade has one more backup plan that he's gonna try."
"And what's that?"
"He's gonna tell your friends everything I just told you."
David blinked once or twice, not in shock but in confusion. Clearly this was not the threat to life and limb he had expected. "I don't get it," he said.
"Slade's with the others right now," explained Terra. "Something he has to do for Trigon. He's trying to flush Raven out of wherever she's gone to hide. Since Cinderblock couldn't kill you, and I couldn't... he's gonna make the others do it instead."
"What?!"
"He's gonna tell them everything. About Trigon, and you, and Raven, everything. Stuff even I don't know. He's gonna explain how the whole thing works, he says he's got a way to do it without alerting Trigon. And once they realize that the only chance for them to save the entire universe is to kill you, David, what do you think they're gonna do?"
"That's insane," said David, no longer even attempting a pretense of holding his baton up and ready. "The others wouldn't believe Slade if he told them water was wet! You think they're just gonna take his word for something like this?"
"David, don't you see?" insisted Terra. "They don't have to take his word for anything, he's telling the truth! They'll be able to see it for themselves once they know what to look for! If Raven doesn't know what's going on already, what Slade tells them will be enough for her to figure it out. And they're gonna come to the same conclusion Slade did. Slade doesn't want to kill you because he's a bad guy, he wants to do it because there's no other way. Not that he can find, and not that they can."
David's face slowly fell as the brutal, simple logic of what Terra was saying sank in visibly. His baton was held limp at his side now, the aura faded to nothing. His mouth was hanging slightly open, in shock perhaps, in disbelief of course, but more and more, in silent recognition of what was happening.
"They're not gonna want to do it, David," said Terra. "You know that. They're not gonna like it. But they're gonna have the choice of letting the entire world die, or killing you. They're superheroes. What do you think they're gonna choose?"
She chanced a step towards him, and when he did not react, she slowly approached. He made no move to stop her or even retreat, indeed she doubted he even noticed what she was doing. She walked straight up to him, speaking evenly and quietly.
"And that's why you have to come with me, David," she said. "We can go to Slade, let him learn more about what that thing inside you is, see if he can find a way to stop whatever Trigon plans to do with it. I know it doesn't sound like a lot, but it's the only way you might survive this. Even if we fight, and it turns out I can't kill you, the others will have to. They won't have a choice."
David seemed almost to be staring through her, and his voice was almost whisper-quiet when he responded.
"Like me?"
Terra smiled, despite herself. "Yeah," she said. "Just like you." This close, she could see tears welling up in David's eyes, of what she had no idea, and he shut his eyes and clenched them tight to force them back, with the result that when he opened them again they were ringed with damp redness. His hands were shaking, she could see the baton trembling against his leg as he held it at his side, dark and cold. No more bluster or threat or angry denunciations. He looked scared, small, alone. A combination she remembered all too well.
Slowly, Terra extended a hand towards him.
"So please..." she said in the most reasonable tone she could muster, a tone that promised help, succor, deliverance, "... David... will you come with me to meet Slade?"
David took a ragged, nervous breath, and raised his eyes slowly to meet hers. He remained there for several moments, before quietly whispering a single word in reply.
"No."
Me: Nope, that's why I have you around to tell me.
Nitram: You -are- beautiful. Anyone tries to tell you otherwise kill them.
"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP" -- Leonard Nimoy, last Tweet