You look into my heart and see
A perfect mess, please set me free
Unwind the ribbons that tie me down
I am your princess, you wear my crown
Our fairytale will never end
The love of my life, he's my best friend

-

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Letters are RIP offs.

-

-

Dear Boy Beast. Beast Boy. However you want to say it.

Where am I supposed to start with this? I feel like such a bitch.
Yes! I sold you out. I'm sorry.
Yes, I put cameras around your house, and I'm sorry for that too.
Yes, I totally stole your first kiss experience...
I'm not sorry about that part though.

Should I be?

-

Terra paused in her mental letter writing progression. Should she really include a part about not being sorry? What kind of an effect would that have on Beast Boy? What if someone else read it? What if...

Screw what ifs, she thought. This was supposed to be about the passion.

So, I feel bad. Really, really bad. It's just, kind of cold, and, I was thinking about you...

Thinking about you? Right...

Terra sighed, screwed up the paper, and threw it viciously at the waste paper basket. It missed. She leant forwards over the desk, and banged her forehead into the fake wood. Then she turned to look at the rain through the window.

Rain. It was always, always, raining when she tried to write this.

Okay. It was winter. It was supposed to rain a lot. But still...

Terra currently lived in a glamorous detached bungalow, situated on the northern banks of Jump City, overlooking what would have been the slums, had Jump had any slums to speak of. She paid no rent, probably because there was no one to pay rent to, and she was in the process of looking for a job so that she could start to buy some decent food, instead of scavenging off of the charity packs they gave out at the local church.

While it was entirely possible for her to live off of one meal a day, the thought of such independence as enough money to buy herself some cereal, and a change of clothes that wasn't from a thrift store, and maybe a haircut, was more than enough to make a decent paying 9-5 look almost like a Christmas present.

Terra reached up and raked her hands through her hair. Grease. Yum.

No, not yum. She was hungry. She didn't need words like yum right now.

Terra stuffed a bit of hair in her mouth and chewed it lamely. She was coming up seventeen, by her reckoning. It was time she stopped running, and faced up to the real world.

Slade had taught her some useful things about herself. She was determined to grow up. She could survive alone. And she could control her powers.

He'd also taught her about the less favourable side of her personality, which, as painful a lesson as it had been, was a very beneficial experience.

She knew where her flaws were, not only as a fighter, but also as a person.

She was daydreaming again.

Terra sat up and shook her head, and then she pulled the latest Jump City Saturday paper off the floor, and flipped back to the job section. Of the fourteen jobs advertised that she was qualified for, ten of them were circled as easy to get to.

Right.

Terra left the paper on the table and went to bed early, ignoring the copious amount of paper balls that littered the floor surrounding the wastebasket as she passed it.

-
-

Monday morning saw the earthmover up just before winter dawn, sat cross-legged in front of a long floor mirror, braiding her hair. She left two strands loose at the front.

Her hair had grown, and touched the bottoms of her elbows when she stood up. This made looking after it hellish, and waking up on a bad hair day was absolutely not funny on the morning of a first job interview.

She held the loose strands in her mouth, and braided the rest of it efficiently, tying the ends with green, brown and orange bands. Then she reached to the dresser, grabbed a pair of scissors, and turned the two loose strands into professional looking face framers.

She left the eight inches of severed hair on the floor, and stood up to assess her appearance.

She was wearing a pair of black and grey thick-pinstriped pants, and a blue polo shirt. She wondered, casually, if she looked a bit too thin.

She grinned. There really was no such thing in the modern world.

Grabbing a jacket and a hat, she stepped into her shoes, and exited the bungalow, not bothering to lock the door behind her.

After forty minutes of walking, Terra reached stop number one, a conveyer belt factory. She walked inside, and asked at the office for the number advertised in the newspaper.

A twenty minute wait later, she was seen for ten minutes, and then informed that if she didn't have a working phone line, the factory wouldn't hire her.

Never mind.

Stop number two was another ten minutes along the road, this time a record store. She asked inside to see the manager about the advertised job. The kid at the desk informed her, a bit smugly, that that was actually his job she was asking about.

Terra shrugged, and told the kid to have a nice day. His surprise at her grin amused her, and she left with a bit of a fun dizzy feeling.

She walked another fifteen minutes, by which time it was nearing nine o'clock, and came to the next stop on her list – a service station. They told her the same as the conveyer belt factory – no phone, no job.

She sighed. She really didn't want to get a phone line. It was too expensive, and she had literally got absolutely no money at all.

Never mind.

Each stop was taking her nearer and nearer to the heart of Jump, but she didn't mind. It was a little chilly for her taste, but she wasn't cold, and the buzz of the inner city nearing was a little exciting. She decided to skip stop numbers four and five, as she could see them on the way back if she really needed to, and carry on walking until she got to the next stop on the list.

Which happened to be a comic book shop.

The people began to grow in number as Terra got nearer to the sixth potential job, and she spent the next twenty-five minutes walking figuring out the best bus to catch as soon as she got paid, if she decided to take jobs number six, seven, eight nine or ten.

It was a good thing she didn't have anything else to be doing. Ever.

She reached the shop, which opened at nine, at approximately nine thirty, and walked in. There was no one there save a guy sat with his feet on the desk, reading a magazine.

"Err, hi!" Said Terra. She walked up to the desk. The guy looked up at her, and then grinned.

"Hey," he said. His voice was deep. Terra found herself grinning a bit back at him. "Can I help you with something?"

"I saw the ad in the Jump City Saturday about a job..." Terra gesticulated a bit, and the guy raised his eyebrows and pulled his feet down off the desk.

"I'll go get the boss," he said, still grinning at her. He walked around the till, put the magazine on one of the stands, and walked back, this time sitting properly in the chair. "Well," he said. "Today, I'm the boss. You want the job?"

"Err... Yeah! Please," Said Terra, putting enthusiasm into her voice. She wasn't sure exactly what was going on, but it was good to sound enthusiastic.

"Okay!" Said the guy. He reached under the desk and pulled out a few forms. "Fill these in, sign there," he gestured, and put a pen down in front of her, "and you're pretty much hired."

Terra eyed the forms. "Is it really essential that I have a phone number?" She asked, hopefully.

"Err..." the guy eyed her for a second. "Nope!" He said brightly.

Terra beamed.

-

-

Twenty minutes later she emerged from Cassie's Comics, with a big grin on her face. She wasn't going to bother looking at any more jobs.

She started on Tuesday, which was tomorrow, and she worked from nine till three most days except Fridays and Saturdays, where Ross, the guy behind the counter, informed her she could "unofficially cut early". He also told her that the staff had a rota worked out, so that only one or two of them really had to come in at nine am.

Terra had volunteered to come in at nine am, because this week, Ross was doing Mondays to Thursdays.

She smiled. The winter sun was out. The people were busy. She felt, all of a sudden, and in a most brilliant way, a part of greater society. She had her place. A small place, but a place all the same.

There was a bounce in her step as she started walking to the intersection she would need to cross over in order to get back on the road home.

Everything was working out!

Henceforth, Terra's first thought, as she saw the giant bunny clomping over cars, and kicking into buildings, was 'everything really is going okay.'


Jesus, what a dumb first thought, thought Terra, blinking up at the bunny.

People around her started screaming, and running frantically in the other direction.

"Run, idiot girl!" Shouted a man in a business suit, appearing from nowhere in the sudden crowd. He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her backwards, and then saw why he'd manhandled her, as a car crashed violently down on its bonnet where she'd just been stood.

People were pouring out of the front of the office buildings surrounding. Cars had been abandoned in the road – it wasn't hard to see why. The bunny was kicking vehicles around like footballs.

It's front paws balled up into fists, and it began crashing toward a tower block ominously. Terra balled up her own fist instinctively, and drew earth out from underneath its feet, causing it to stumble backwards, and temporarily forget about desecrating the scene.

The man let go of her arm, and ran off in the other direction. Terra's face contorted. She didn't want to do this. But there was no way she was letting all these damages happen because some lame giant bunny thing felt like rampaging through the city.

Where the hell were the Teen Titans when you needed them?

She flexed a –for once, un-gloved– fist, and it began to glow yellow as the concrete beneath her feet started to separate from it's groundings. She rose up on the makeshift platform, until she was the bunny's height.

If she could get it away from the tall buildings and traffic, it might be easier...

"Hey!" She shouted. She remembered then why she used to wear goggles. It wasn't easy on the eyes flying around at this height. Or at any height, come to think about it.

The bunny stared at her. Its giant eyes looked less like toys close up, and more like decorated glass. The patterns on each pupil complimented the contrasting stripes and flushes of colour on each iris. Its nose was wet. Terra's nose wrinkled a bit.

"Yeah!" She shouted, trying to make her voice loud enough for it to hear. Its ears were almost both pointing at her, she took that as a good sign.

"This way!" She called, slowly flying the platform down a clear road. She kept glancing behind her to check she wasn't going to run it in to anything. The bunny stared at her. She yelled at it some more, trying to make loud convincingly coaxing noises.

Then it made a sort of squealing sound, and began stamping off in the other direction.

"No! No no!" Yelled Terra. She waved her arms forwards, trying to get its attention, then spotted two blurs flying in its direction from the west, one orange and pink, and one blue. She held back an audible start, and immediately dropped the platform sharply downward, holding on to avoid air friction. She hit the ground in an alleyway below just as the sounds of a powerful motorbike rounded the corner.

The R-Cycle span around the street corner, tailing the bunny. Robin was atop, looking as intimidating as ever in his primary colours, his helmet on. He was a good role model, Terra thought, vaguely.

She was more concerned with locating the rest of the Titans, so that she could get away whilst being sure that none of them would see her.

Get away... she wondered why she felt, all of a sudden, like the criminal trying to escape the scene.

Get away...

She ran down to the end of the alley, and hopped up onto a low roof. The bunny was being beat up from all angles. She observed particularly a large octopus; it's tentacles covering the bunny's eyes, while black energy began to bind it down so it couldn't flail and kick and cause more damage.

Something gnawed inside Terra's chest.

Something was ignored. Another platform rose out of the concrete.

Suitably assured that she wouldn't be spotted now, Terra crouched on the flying piece of ground, and held on. She didn't look back as she flew as far back to her bungalow as she dared.



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