Giant in bold warning up front: I come to everything here through secondary sources. I haven't seen the Terra episodes OR the Raven-destiny episodes.
I very seriously considered not even sharing this because of that. Then I realized that putting a giant in bold warning up front would let people who weren't interested in a thing from someone who hadn't seen the source material avoid reading without removing the ability of other people to give it a chance if they were interested.
Other notes:
• Yes: the title is a reference to the Spider-Man quote. However, as noted in the summary, the answer to the question mark isn't going to be "great responsibility" in this story.
• This is the prologue and, as prologues are wont to do, doesn't take place at the same time as the rest of the story. This takes place shortly after the The End three parter where the first chapter will pick up where Things Change left off.
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"Still here, I see," Raven said. Terra was petrified, same as ever. A perfect statue, like a monument carved in her honor. "I thought you might finally have come back."
Raven floated to the pedestal they'd placed Terra on and sat there. "I destroyed all life on earth, you know?
"I never told you -I even didn't tell the others until I had no other choice and by then you were stone- but I had a destiny. The entire reason I exist was that my father, demon lord, needed a living portal to come to earth. It was my destiny, and I didn't fight it when it came. I let him take over, and kill everything.
"Because I thought I didn't have a choice.
"Sound familiar? I was a pawn of someone far worse than Slade, and allowed worse things than you could possibly imagine, because I thought I didn't have a choice.
"I'm such a hypocrite for everything I said about you. For everything I thought. For how long it took me to let you in and how quick I was to push you out.
"When you thought you had no choice you ended up begging Beast Boy to kill you. When I thought I had no choice, I went through with what I thought my destiny was.
"It gets worse, Terra. You know who ended up saving me? Robin did much of the work, but he needed outside help. I'd managed to protect the team -they were the only human beings left alive- but they couldn't do much on their own. With no one else alive, the help came from a dead person. Care to guess which one?
"Slade saved me, saved us, saved the world.
"Your dark master was so much less bad than my dark master that yours saved everyone and everything from mine. You did so much less evil than me, and I condemned you for it. You almost set off one volcano. The oceans burned after what I did."
Raven floated off the pedestal and brought herself face to face with Terra. "Everything died, and -you'll love this- it died in stone. Every person on earth was just like you, and I can only imagine what it was like for the fish, or the birds that had been in flight. But then it was all undone.
"Everyone and everything that had been turned to stone was turned back, everyone but you."
Raven closed her eyes -for just a moment.
"I'm not giving up, Terra," Raven said, "but I was already out of ideas. I already tried everything I could think to try, and if turning the entire world back didn't turn you back. . ."
Raven spun around in the air, her back to Terra's stone form. "Slade's back. He's not redeemed or anything. Everything he did was so he could be alive again. It's the opposite of sacrifice.
"He gets a resurrection. You're still stone. There's something wrong with this world."
