Robin Has a Heart Attack

Chapter 1

Long afterwards, the Titans would remember it as the day the unthinkable had happened. They'd faced enemies of incredible proportions, enemies smarter, faster, strong, just plain better than them... and still won. They all thought they were pretty much unflappable as far as adversaries went, at this point. After all, once you've faced down a demon trying to end the world, you have pretty much nowhere to go on your villain roster but down. But this was a day they were destined to face something not a one of them was prepared to fight. No, not even your favorite Titan, gentle reader, whoever he or she may be.

It was an ordinary fight on an ordinary day, as far as our heroes were concerned. That is to say, it was Plasmus. Yes, again. Really, the hard part was not getting so frustrated that they plastered the monster thoroughly enough to kill the human inside, at this point. A recurring bad guy who required showers afterwards, when the Titans only had one bathroom (many curses had been muttered towards the nameless sadistic architect), was not a thing of joy. Plasmus bobbed and weaved and flowed like a linebacker's wet dream, and whenever things got a little too hot for him, he just divided himself a few times and let the Titans partake of the dubious pleasure of fighting multiple dank, slithery opponents each with different limb structures.

It was not the finest hour for our brave heroes. They were tired, grumpy, frustrated, and thoroughly slimy. Robin and Starfire had had a date interrupted by Plasmus's outing, Raven had been in the middle of a really good book, Cyborg had wanted to wash the T-car (it would need extra, extra washing after this), and Beast Boy had needed just a few more seconds to totally pwn the face of some snipering racist noob in Halo (green was too a valid minority!). They'd been busy having lives, which is important for the proper development of healthy teenagers. And now Plasmus was interrupting their lives, quite shamelessly ignorant of the fact that he couldn't possibly beat them at this point, only annoy them.

So it's understandable if Robin wants to try a few new strategies to get this thing over and done with quicker, right? But the thing about making strategies in Plasmus-oriented battles is that the blob is perfectly capable of changing forms, dividing, and merging at will to make any set in stone plan worthless. So here is the conflict: an irritated Robin trying to get his team to coordinate themselves, an enemy that requires different kinds of coordination from moment to moment, and a team that is not used to being precisely ordered to do completely different things every five to ten seconds.

There was a great deal of yelling involved.

Now, it is important to understand about our heroes that absolutely none of them are deficient in the lungpower area. Cyborg can holler with the best of them. Robin will bark and shout for worry over his teammates expressed in discipline, whereas Starfire will cry out and shout for worry over her teammates expressed in lack of discipline (they were a fun couple to watch interact, but only if one was standing at a reasonably safe distance). Beast Boy's half-coherent, tripping over his own verbal legs hootanannying (as his best bud Cy liked to call it) was further empowered by his ability to recruit a wide variety of animal lungs to his cause. And Raven, well... half-demon and half-human makes for all loud when she gets pissed. In a battle of volume between all five, there is no clear winner (unless it is a battle of seeing who can hit the highest note, in which case Cyborg is always the victor).

So, dear friends, we have the situation pictured clearly in our heads, I trust?

And it is in the middle of all this that Robin, ever-suffering leader, staggers, clutches vaguely at his left shoulder, and collapses without anything touching him.

What is remarkable about this, first of all, is that it somehow empowers the team to completely annihilate in the blink of an eye the enemy that had been giving them a hard time for the past twenty minutes. It's not to say that they'd been holding back before, but rather that the (super)human body's limits are generally more fettered by subconscious psychological restraint than actual physical barriers. Plasmus went down for the count with such splattery, gooshy force that civil servants would be grumplingly cleaning purple gunk out of the local city block for weeks afterwards. Then, driven by the same terrified worry over their leader (composed of approximately fifty percent pure affection, fifty percent the realization that without Robin they were totally screwed if a big name villain came calling), they instantly teleported over to his side, nevermind that only one of them had the ability to teleport in the first place.

Cyborg was the first to realize the awful truth.

"Holy expletive deleted, I think he's had a heart attack," he proclaimed with panicky incredulity.

"...what?!" the rest of the team exclaimed in a rare moment of precise synchronization that Robin would have been proud to see, in any other circumstances.

"Are you serious, dude?!"

"Does it look like I'm joking?!"

Then, in yet another synchronized moment, Starfire, Beast Boy, and Cyborg all turned the resident fix it with magic girl.

"RAVEN!"

"I can't do anything about heart attacks, they're too delicate! I could kill him just as easily as help him!"

This set the Titans on a path to unfamiliar territory. They were used to having Raven as the medical get out of jail free card. Deprived of that, they had no other choice but to go to jail.

That is to say, the hospital.

The white coats gave them all weird looks when they told them what was wrong, but other than that were perfectly professional. Superheroes led strange lives, so naturally they'd be saddled with strange medical problems, right? Although this was strange even for a superhero. Why would someone so young have a heart attack? Was Robin really an ancient shapeshifter who just looked young on the outside? Was he taking secret black market adrenaline-enhancing drugs? Perhaps he'd made a deal with the Devil to get super martial arts skillz in exchange for a weakened heart? No one knew for sure, but everyone would be speculating on the internet by the time the hospital closed for the evening. One of the nurses in attendance was a frequenter of Titans-related chat rooms, and having a Titan in the hospital for a heart attack was just about the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him in his whole life, so we can forgive him for being a bit of a blabbermouth.

As usual, the hardest part of the doctor's job was not diagnosis or recommending treatment, but simply telling the patients what had happened. With a straight face. Doctor Lesion had had a lot of practice at it, though, and at least it wasn't a light bulb up someone's butt this time. The starkly contrasting multi-colored glory of the Titans was a bit distracting, but he managed by squinting a little and not focusing on any one teenaged superhero too closely. Even so, just having someone that orange and another someone that green in the same room was giving him a bit of a headache. And then there was all the purple. Someone really had to talk to them about the purple.

"All the signs point to the heart attack being stress-related," he told them with at least outward calm and poise. "This is, I think, the youngest case of a stress-related heart attack in modern medical history, but that shouldn't affect treatment. He'll make a full recovery so long as the proper precautions are taken."

"My partner for activities of the romance will be well, then?" the orange one asked, twiddling her fingers nervously.

"Yes, he will be, uh, well..." the doctor replied slowly, giving his brain time to digest Starfire's 'alternative' English. Unlike the nurse, he wasn't a big fan, and this was his very first exposure to Starfire-ese. "Perhaps you can tell me a little bit about his usual schedule, so we can get a better idea of how drastically he'll need to alter his routine for safety's sake."

The Titans shared a Look. Doctor Lesion had had a great deal of experience with Looks in his profession. This particular one was the kind that involved them contemplating telling him things they suspected he wouldn't like.

"Well, as a superhero, he's never really totally safe, ya know," Cyborg piped up. "I mean... are you sayin' he'll have to quit the biz?"

"No, no, not at all," Lesion said cheerfully before they had time to swing down into depression with the bipolar rapidity he knew all teenagers were blessed with. "He'll still be able to act as your leader and be quite... um... as superheroic as ever. But he may have to take a more, shall we say, relaxed approach. So, tell me... your Robin seems quite physically fit. How often does he work out? Perhaps he simply needs to lighten his physical workload a little." Feeling that things were going along about as well as could be expected, Doctor Lesion relaxed enough to take a sip of his coffee. Mmmm, Starbuck's. Does a doctor good.

Another group Look. Cyborg was the one to reply, taking the leadership by default, seemingly only because he was the least dysfunctional of the lot.

"Six to half past eight am, noon to one pm, nine to ten pm on Sundays. Six to nine am and eight to ten pm on Mondays. Seven to..."

The half-robot was rattling off times precisely as though he had been forced at some point or other to memorize all of it. A few more days of scheduled workouts flashed by, blurring together in Lesion's head. He decided that this was not a safe conversation to be drinking during, and so he put down his cup of coffee very, very carefully.

"Whoa, now," he broke in gently, holding up a hand. "How about you just sum it up for me? How many hours in a week does Robin exercise, not counting missions?"

Cyborg shuffled his feet and answered with a number that made Doctor Lesion glad he'd put down his coffee.

"I see," he said with carefully feigned solemnity. "That's most likely part of the problem, then. He needs to take it easier on himself or his body will give out sooner or later, if he's working himself that hard and doing all these dangerous missions too."

"But Robin always says you're s'posed to push yourself past your limits," Beast Boy put in forlornly, with the dazed, bewildered look of someone who had found themselves in a strange land where the rules governing reality no longer functioned as expected. The other Titans nodded hesitantly at the statement, agreeing in sentiment but plainly not wanting to risk the wrath of The Almighty Doctor.

"Robin's full of crap, kid," Lesion told him bluntly, and found it difficult to repress an eyeroll as he watched the entire team of supposedly hardened superheroes stare at him in shocked disbelief. "It's good to try your very best at what you do. And I'm not belittling the incredible accomplishments you've all done for this city. Believe me, we're all grateful that you go out there day after day and do things the rest of us can't. But no matter who you are or what you do, there comes a point where you have to admit there are some things you can't do, or you'll end up committing suicide by proxy. Motivational speeches are all well and good, but if they motivate you into martyring yourself then they're motivating you too darn much. So, we've been through the exercise he gets in his, uh, 'leisure' time if we may mockingly call it that... what about the crimefighting side? What does he do in the typical fight against bank robbers and so on?"

Cowed, they related to him in turns a great many tales of his self-sacrificing heroism. It was as bad as he'd expected, and rather touchingly tragic that they couldn't see how bad it was for themselves. Robin worked the hardest of all of them to keep up with all his superhuman teammates. He made himself do things that Doctor Lesion knew left him aching and sore the next morning, and then he made himself do it all over again. And again. And again. Even with fancy, expensive technological help, the strain had to be incredible. And all the while Robin took the additional stress of being leader of a group of teenagers with diverse abilities, different physiological and biology issues, severe personality conflicts, incredibly diverse upbringings....

Doctor Lesion had a couple teenaged kids of his own, and there were plenty of times when he thought they would surely drive him to an early grave. And they were all of the same species!

The Titans couldn't really be blamed for not understanding how tight a wringer Robin put himself through. Firstly, Lesion was good enough at reading between the lines to be able to tell that Robin was clearly a secretive and stoic fellow, who would rather kill himself (literally, perhaps, if things kept going on like this) than complain about pulling his own weight and a little extra besides. Secondly, they were, after all, still just teenagers... insanely strange teenagers with unusual hobbies and abilities, perhaps, but teenagers nonetheless. They just took it for granted that Robin could do the things he did because he'd always been doing them. He was Robin! As in, Batman and Robin... one half of a crimefighting duo of legendary proportions. Of course he would live up to his reputation. That was what made him Robin. He was Different. He was Special.

It was Doctor Lesion's job to tell people that they were not unique and beautiful snowflakes. He liked Fight Club, and only stopped quoting it at patients when his supervisor had threatened to cut his pay for scaring people. Doctor Lesion knew, with all the painful certainty that decades of debt-incurring medical training could give, that no one was Different or Special.

"Okay. Here's what you're going to have to do," he said brusquely when he'd gotten a full overview of Robin's hectic life. He was going to have to do a slash and burn of the poor hero's schedule, but the boy would thank him for it when he was still alive ten years from now. Hopefully. "First of all, you're going to have to give Robin a more peaceful environment outside of the necessary crimefighting duties. That means no more unnecessary yelling, no more tattletelling on each other, and no more fighting, arguing, bickering, pranking, invading each other's privacy, or hurting each other's feelings."

"Wow, there goes all of Beast Boy's quality time with Raven," Cyborg murmured. Beast Boy started to smack him, but looked ashamed and put his hand down at a significant Look from Doctor Lesion.

"That's exactly what I'm talking about. No more of that. Understand?" It was always hard, telling people they had to grow up faster than they'd like. But that was mostly what doctors did. That, and identify when people stopped being people and started being corpses. Doctor Lesion was a cheerful pessimist.

"But... but... Cyborg eats, like, a ton of meat! And I hate meat!" Beast Boy protested.

"Too bad," Lesion said flatly. "Get over it." It was interesting to watch the green kid's ears droop with his demeanor.

"So, a peaceful home environment. Second, you can't let him exercise himself to death. It's good to keep in shape, but the body needs time to rest, too. Keep him occupied with other activities." Now, what did the young people like to do these days? "Go... clubbing, or out to the arcade, or play a board game or something at least once every couple of days, and do not let him skip out on it. You are absolutely not to let him have more than two workouts a day. Keep it to one if you can."

They all nodded, suitably subdued by his medical authority.

"Third, for heaven's sakes, don't let him spend so much of his non-exercising time brooding and fretting away over old newspaper clippings and whatnot. How many cases has he actually solved with all that? Not many? Then it's obviously not so much detective work and a lot more of his brain running around in circles being depressed and angry at himself. Give him his privacy when he wants it, but if he starts locking himself up in his room for hours at a time, you're to snap him out of his funk."

"I can sneak into his room as a fly to spy on 'im and make sure he's being good!" Beast Boy said excitedly, eager to be helpful. "I'm super good at it anyway, I spy on the team all the time!"

Okaaaayyy. That was a little... creepy, from Lesion's point of view, but whatever. "Fine, whatever works. Now, when he's actually on missions... it's okay for him to participate, but he needs to do so in a more low key fashion. You kids have to realize that he's not like you. His only superpower is a self-destructive desire to go down in a blaze of glory, which is probably Batman's idea of earning your way into heaven or something. He shouldn't be able to keep up with you, and it's hurtful to him that he makes himself do so anyway. He can fight if he wants, but you have to keep at least one other person with him at all times for backup. He should be leaning on you kids for support, and you have to make him, no matter how hard he argues. Don't let him take on crooks or robots or mutant slime... things... in equal number to you guys. Watch his back, encourage him to launch quick, easy assaults and then retreat before things get too rough. Try to get him to mostly rely on his weapons and a bit less on hair-raising gymnastics and martial arts, except in emergencies."

"That's going to be difficult," Raven put in, speaking for the first time. Her voice sounded so calm, so dignified, Doctor Lesion almost relaxed and let himself think he was talking to an adult. Then he took a second look at her goth attire and dyed hair (and what was that thing on her forehead?!), and unrelaxed. "Robin's the kind of person who won't settle for anything but the very best from himself or anyone else."

"Well, why don't you just try reminding him that he can't give his best in such a way as to cause him to get hurt or killed? If he's really an important part of your team, and you really need him, then you need to get it through his head that he can't race right over the edge just because he doesn't want to slow down."

Another one of those group Looks.

"We do need him," Starfire said quietly, staring at the floor.

"So much," Cyborg added with a heavy sigh.

"Alright then. I know it's hard, but you have to convince him that this is the way to go if you don't want to lose him sooner or later. Now, there's just one last thing I need to tell you kids. Robin will be in here for a few days for observation, partly to be safe, and partly because this really is a strange case and we want to be sure nothing... uh... weird is going on." Weirder than the four people in the room with him right now, anyway. "But when he gets out, for the next two weeks afterwards, you all have to make him relax. All the guidelines I've given you are for when he's out of immediate danger. But so soon after the heart attack, he'll still be very weak. He may act like he's just fine, but the slightest exertion or stress could push him over the edge. He needs time to recover fully, and you have to give him that, whether he wants it or not. Get him his favorite books, tape his favorite shows for him, cook the meals he likes the most, but don't let him go out to fight crime, don't let him work out, and above all else, don't let anyone fight, argue, or raise their voices about anything. Do you understand?"

They understood.