Hey all, and welcome to Colors. This story is the sequel to my other fic, Legacy of the Tamaranian, and several important things, most specifically, my Original Character Titan Collin "Ragnarök" Roberts and his ordeal joining the team. I would love it if you read that one first, but I won't make it to confusing if you don't want to.
Disclaimer: I don't own the Titans. I do own Ragnarök, however.
Prologue: The Legacy of the Tamaranian
The tale begins not here, not in Jump City, but far away in Idaho. And not in this universe, but in another, very similar in many respects. It had a Teen Titans, a Justice Leage, and many other superheroes. One such hero was called Ragnarok. Collin Roberts, grandson of a dealer in black market goods, had found in said grandfather's basement an artifact, that when activated, gave him an incredibly high-tech armor. This armor allowed him to manipulate the earth itslef, much like Terra of the Titans, though with less power and more precision.
Though with this discovery, Collin feared himself a freak, and fled his home, eventually coming to live with the Teen Titans, where he fought evil with his armor, which turned out to be a Tamaranian artifact that had somehow found its way to Earth many centuries ago.
Unfortunately, Ragnarok was not alone, because in yet another universe, another version of Collin Roberts lurked, broken, twisted by his rage into a psychotic being who called himself Delirium. After fighting through five universes, and slaying the Teen Titans therein, Delirium worked his way to Ragnarok's and there, in a great battle, every Teen Titan except Beast Boy, Starfire, and Ragnarok were slain, until the very end, in which Koriand'r of Tamaran went all out, giving her life so that Ragnarok could destroy his evil counterpart.
But his courage failed, and Ragnarok fled his reality, to the one our Titans call home. Joining them under the pretense of being a rookie, and attempting to prove himself by reviving the fallen Titan, Tara Markov. Unfortunately, even his earth-powers could not save Terra from her self-made tomb. And it mattered little, because an attack from Blackfire ended the get together fast, and Collin threw himself into that battle, which resulted in the Tamaranian's apparent death. But much worse than this tragedy was the news she brought: Tamaran had been laid waste by a massive meteor--a meteor made of pure Zynothium. Because of the battle and Collin's demonstration of skill, however minor, Ragnarok was accepted as a Titan on a trial basis and was taken to Tamaran with the Titans in search of some ancient artifacts, mostly because Robin wanted to keep an eye on him.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, Raven and Beast Boy found themselves relying on a newcomer from the future, Impulse, along with Mas and Menos, to protect Jump City in the absencse of the other Titans. This proved a problem when a new villain named Ravager showed up, mind controlling Thunder and Lighting and forcing a confrontation with Raven. As it turned out, Ravager was Slade's none other than Slade's son, Grant Wilson. Unfortuantely, the Ravager got away with supernatural help from his father, and many questions were left unanswered.
Raven also found herself in the middle of a strange relationship with a young man named Trevor. Ironically, Trevor, though for the most part a honest individual, possessed an extreme bias against metahumans. Raven, disguised as a civilian named Rachel Roth, earned his trust, but now dreads the day he discovers the truth and the way he will react to it. And all the while, Trigon the Terrible, her evil father, looms in the back of her mind, waiting for the proper day to conquer the planet.
After many trials, the Titans that had set out for outer space at last made it to the ruins of the great temple on the barren remnants of Tamaran... where Ragnarok revelaed himself to be Delirium!
Or so it seemed. A battle that spanned two star systems ensued, only to end the same way it had before; Delirium, Ragnarok, and Starfire as the last Titans standing. But in this world, a last minute interference by Beast Boy allowed Ragnarok and Starfire the opportunity to turn the tide, and Delirium was crippled, ending his career as a supervillain. And for seven weary teens, the world was right again.
Yes, seven. For an artifact discovered on Tamaran succeeded in acomplishing a task that Ragnarok alone could not--the ressurection of Terra.
And so, three weeks later, the Titans finally enjoy some rest and relaxation. But how long can it last...?
Chapter One: Only New Beginnings
Things were going unusually well today in the bustling town of Jump City, California. No criminals, no explosions. No Slade threatening the city. It was a stark contrast from the previous week, in which the Titans had been called out to repair a long-range interstellar transmission satellite while the JLU had been busy trying to get the Watchtower back in it's proper orbit from the havoc Delirium had caused to it three weeks earlier after destroying Tamaran and almost killing off the Teen Titans.
Then there had been that incident where Val-Yor had come down and requested that the Titans help him with his genocidal crusade against the Locrix machine race of the planet Sention. But Ragnarök had talked some of what seemed like sense into the Titans and Val-Yor had gone of on his own. He hadn't been heard from since.
But the biggest ordeal of the previous week had been when Slade and his son Grant the Ravager had shown up and burned down an old district of town, only to lead the Titans to a library. A very old library. There the Titans had heard a prophecy:
The gem was born of evil's fire
The gem shall be his portal
He comes to claim
He comes to sire
The end of all things mortal!
In the mean time, Raven had vanished. She returned to the tower and opened a portal to her home dimension Azarath.
But she discovered it was destroyed, her mother and her people seemingly slain in cold blood by an other-dimensional demon.
Meanwhile, the Titans were getting their butt's thrashed by the combined forces of Slade and his son, wielding the flaming powers and bearing the mark of Skath. The same Skath who was later revealed by Raven to be none other than Trigon the Terrible, a demon born of the sum of human sin—a literal incarnation of evil!
But the events of the previous week were unimportant now. This Saturday evening, only one thing mattered.
"NO! I can't believe you just passed me!" Cyborg yelled at Collin Roberts, the newest Titan.
Video Games.
"Believe it. Racing games are my thing. And MechRacer is the—GLOMP!" Collin swore as Robin's missile tore into the back of his hovercar and destroyed it.
"You really need to work on your swearing, man," Cyborg commented.
"He doesn't need to work on anything but watching his mouth," Robin admonished.
"You know, glomp isn't a bad word in your dimension, Tim," Collin told him."Why do you care?"
"What's the deal with that anyway?" Cyborg asked, as his MechRacer clashed with Robin's... "What exactly does glomp mean on your earth?"
"To violently bludgeon," Collin replied, hitting a boost pad that sent his car blazing forward into laser range of Robin's and Cyborg's.
Robin glanced over at Collin and arched an eyebrow, and the new Titan used that moment of distraction to blast Robin's car off the rail-free tracks, effectively ending his game.
"Ha! You just got stomped," Collin commented as his racer crossed the finish line in a respectable second place.
Robin fumed, and a vein throbbed in his forehead.
"You may have gotten second," Cyborg said smugly, "but with only two players left, second is still last."
Now Collin fumed. But he hadn't quite mastered the art of veinthrobbing yet. So he didn't' do that.
"Well, this would be more fun if Gar was hear," he sighed.
"Where is the little green man?" Cyborg remarked.
Robin shrugged. Collin shook his head.
"I believe," Starfire said, floating into the room and taking a seat next to Robin, "That Beast Boy has gone to see Friend Tara."
"Again?" Cyborg stood up. "That's the third time in as many days. Guy's gonna burn himself out."
Starfire leaned to Robin and spoke quietly, though everyone still heard her, and Robin really had no idea why she was speaking in such a manner. "Robin, do you think Tara will ever be allowed to stay here with us at the tower again?"
"I don't know, Starfire. That depends on a lot of things... What we might think is best for us might not be what's best for Terra."
Gar Logan, the changeling teen known as Beast Boy, neared the room near the back of S.T.A.R. Lab's Jump City division, and made his way to the familiar door with the familiar name plate on it.
Tara Markov
Subject X-943
Her name had once been Terra. She had been a good friend.
Then she had betrayed the Titans, trying to kill them in cold blood, under the orders of a madman known to the Titans only as Slade. He had taken her in after she'd fled the Titans in a fit of petty, selfish fury caused by an imagined betrayal. Slade had warped her mind to serve his purposes, and gave her control of her dangerous powers. And in the end, her world had collapsed on her, and she had turned on her wicked master, destroying his body, and then sacrificing herself to save the town.
But neither deed had lasted.
Slade had returned, and Terra was healed by the power of the Tamaranian catalyst of regeneration.
Ironic--Raven Cyborg had tried for nearly a year to find a cure, and had given up. Nothing that had tried to save Tara with her interest in mind had worked.
Then Ragnarok had come a long, and, with Beast Boy attacking him in a fit of unthinking rage, it had taken something drastic to release the green teen from his angry stupor. That drastic action had been the healing of Terra...
Beast Boy entered the room.
"Hey, Tara."
The young blonde was on the far end of the room, in a corner with a special floor and ceiling, sparring an image, a hard-light hologram, that looked remarkably like Collin in a Slade's apprentice outfit. She was wearing a simple white karate gui.
It struck high and she dodged it, kicking out faster than Gar's eyes could track and trying to trip him. The hologram jumped the kick, and flipped over Tara and delivered a series of very fast punches, which Tara blocked three of and countered the last one, twisting the holographic dummy into a joint lock and tossing him out of the hologram floor.
"Hey, Beast Boy!" she said, turning the hologram off and running across the room to greet him.
"Tara," he said, and hugged her. "That was amazing!
"Yeah. Slade was many things, but he was no fool. He suspected that my powers might have given out one day, and he trained me in empty hand and sword techniques. I just never needed them--until now."
"Any sign of your powers returning?"
"Nope." Tara looked down, her hair falling to cover her right eye.
She's so beautiful like that, Beast Boy thought—well. She's beautiful period. "That's too bad."
"Too bad?" Tara echoed. "No. My gosh, Gar. You know how great it feels just to be normal for a change. No worrying about accidentally causing earthquakes, no evil overlords coming after me. It's... liberating."
"I was normal once," he joked. "Trust me. It's highly overrated."
Tara laughed. That was one of the things Gar loved about her. She actually laughed at his jokes. "If you say so," she said. Tara walked over and picked up a large plastic cup and took a sip. "Protein shake," she explained. "I don't know if it was the loss of my powers or if whatever Ragnarök zapped me with, but my metabolism is seriously altered."
Terra untied the loose fitting belt and removed the gui top. Underneath, she was wearing a black sport's bra that went all the way up to her neckline, and on it was a blazing yellow "T"...
Gar didn't know if it stood for Tara, or Terra, or Titans. And he barely even noticed it for that matter, because Tara's figure—or more accurately how much it had changed—was far more striking.
"Whoa! You've beefed up!" he blurted. Tara's stomach, once so thin she appeared nearly anorexic all the way up until the day she was turned into stone, now appeared to have a fully-fleshed out figure--fit, but not overly muscular. She looked much closer to her sixteen years than ever.
"I've always had a bit of a growth stunt," she said. "I guess that Catalyst thing fixed that up."
Beast Boy smiled. "You look great. I guess you had a lot of growing making up for after spending ten months as a statue."
"Yeah."
"So, are you thinking about coming back and living at the tower with us again ?"
"No. I'd get in the way."
"Tara, if this is about Raven I can make sure--"
Tara cut him off. "It's not about the witch, OK? Well. It's not just about her. Gar... look. I'm flattered that you come up here so often. It's nice to see that someone has really forgiven me. But Raven and Robin don't trust me. And I can't stay there with that sort of conflict. OK? It's not you, Beast Boy. I've done terrible things. Things I regret, and things not everyone has forgiven me for. I can't come back and be Terra. I don't even have powers anymore."
"You have skills. Robin doesn't have powers."
"But it's not just that! Aren't you listening, Gar? I almost destroyed the town. And nobody is going to trust the Teen Titans if I'm in the tower. Nobody. It's nice here. They've offered me a job cleaning up, and I can make good money here."
Beast Boy looked around at the mostly sterile, sheer metal environment of the S.T.A.R. Complex. It didn't seem like a place he'd want to stay.
"You're sure about this?" he asked.
"Yes. Maybe someday I'll rejoin the Titans, things will work out. But not now. Please."
"OK." Beast Boy tried to change the subject. He glanced over into a corner of the room and saw a set of weights. "Geez. You lift weights?"
"I have to. Working here, you never know what's going to happen. STAR Labs New York is where Cyborg's mother was killed, you know. Dangerous stuff happens here."
"Right. Anyway..."
Suddenly, before Gar could finish his sentence, his Titan Com began to bleep. He opened it and Robin's face appeared on the small screen. "Beast Boy," he said. "We need you back at the Tower. It might be trouble."
There is a bar in Jump City, on the bay, at the very corner where it empties into the Pacific on the south side. It is called the Noisy Lighthouse. It's called this for two reasons. One, it's bright neon signs have for years acted as a beacon for ships entering Jump City's massive harbor complex. So useful it was, that the owners changed the sign to resemble a giant neon lighthouse, and it has prevented many a ship from slamming into the sheer cliffs on the south end of the city on many a dark and stormy night.
The other reason, is that it is excessively close to a corner in the rode, and faces oncoming traffic so that the headlights of passing cars shine into the windows and door as they zip by, casting a sheer white glow on the whole establishment and causing a terrible racket in the process.
Other than those rarities, the Noisy Lighthouse was completely ordinary. Well... except for one instance in which an inadvertently radioactive lager had given a visiting San Fransisco man the power of super strength, but only when he was drunk.
None of that had the slightest inkling of anything to do with why Raven was there.
"What would you like to drink," the bartender asked the couple sitting at the table.
"I'll have..." and the young man went on to repeat the name of a beer Raven had never heard of before.
"And you?" she asked Raven.
"I'll just have tea. If you have it."
"Of course. It is a bit early for alcohol." The bartender walked off.
Raven let out a frustrated sigh, with a bit of guilt mixed in. "Trevor. We really shouldn't be here."
"It will be okay," replied Trevor Washington, the young man Raven had been, dare she think it, dating for the past three weeks. "For someone so concerned about breaking the law, you didn't really have a problem making a fake ID."
Raven sighed and looked again at the ID card she carried with her. "Allison Grover," it said. Date of Birth: October 1, 1980. The normal Caucasian human pictured looked exactly like Raven currently did, using the power of the image falsifier rings that Cyborg had developed to look like a nearly 28 year old woman.
When Trevor had asked her how she managed to look so much older than she was, she had lied, telling him she was good with makeup. Though in reality, few things could be father from the truth pertaining to the perpetually grey-skinned teenager.
"Well I have a problem with it now," she insisted. "Trevor, you're a nice guy. But I can't keep... seeing you if you insist on doing things that are illegal."
"Like you're sworn to uphold justice," he joked. A jab at Raven's misgivings and at her insistence that the Titans were only there for the good of the citizens of Jump County.
It came across as a stinging blow and an amusing irony. Trevor still did not know Raven's real identity. To him, she was just Rachel Roth, the absurdly calm, sarcastic, but beautiful girl he'd met at an ice cream shop.
The bartender arrived, handing Trevor his underage beverage and Raven her tea.
And no matter how much she hated the lies, she couldn't tell him she was a Metahuman. Because he hated Metahumans. He didn't trust them. But why did that matter? What did she lose if they parted?
Oh yeah. The only one on the planet she could talk to about her father.
But, no... even that wasn't an issue anymore. Because now that the Titans knew about Trigon and her destiny, she could talk to any of them about it. She didn't have to refer to it vaguely to them. She didn't have to lie or hide the truth anymore.
And yet she continued to see Trevor, now lying to the people who cared about her most, telling them these nights were spent searching for way to stop or defeat Trigon that didn't involve Raven dying before the day came.
The constant lying was almost more than she could take. She sipped her tea. The truth had to come out. She simply enjoyed Trevor's company. Nothing else to it. He was, for all intents and purposes, her boyfriend.
She gazed off into the other faces of the dark barroom. She couldn't see any of them, so she probed with her telepathic powers. And inexorably they drew her to one near the window, in an older booth in the corner. A car went by and its headlights filled the bar with light.
And she knew. The stranger from the pizza parlor, and the one who had given her the shard of mystical metal in the T-Tower two weeks earlier.
He was here, in the bar.
Watching her.
And he knew she knew. Raven stood up and shot across the room so fast, it looked like she floated (and indeed she did, though Trevor didn't know it.) Raven grabbed the man by the arm and lifted him out of his seat, secretly using dark energy which her body concealed from Trevor.
"What are you doing here?" She demanded. "Are you stalking me? Who are you?"
"'Making sure you don't get hurt'. 'Yes, I'm stalking you'. And 'I already told you,' in that order."
"A friend?" Raven asked, bewildered by his voice that was somehow cynical and world weary, and yet very caring for her.
"Yup."
By this time, Trevor had made it over there, and confronted the slightly older red-haired man. "Rachel," he said. "What's going on here? Is this guy someone you know?"
"We've met before," she said.
"That doesn't sound like the most friendly terms," Trevor said. "What do you want with her?"
"I just want to protect her," the man answered. "I don't want to see her hurt."
"You think I'm going to hurt her?" Trevor blurted, clenching his fists.
"I can take care of my own emotions..." Raven warned. By now they had drawn the attention of the bar's other patrons.
"I know," the red haired man said. "Besides. It's not like your heartache is the end of the world, right?"
Raven reeled from that. How did this stalker no so much about her? A terrible thought crossed her mind for a moment... Her mother had said that when she met Trigon, he had appeared to her in the form of a handsome man to seduce her...
But that didn't seem right. The young man was at least two years older than Raven, and certainly wasn't strikingly handsome in the way a demon's deceptive avatar would be. The stranger walked towards the establishment's bathrooms, leaving Raven with Trevor.
"What was that all about?" Trevor scratched his head.
"I.. uh..." suddenly, a buzzing noise caught Raven's ear and relief washed over her. "My uh... cellphone," she said, referring to her Titan Com. "I have to go. Like now."
"Alright," Trevor said absently. He focused and let out a cheery, but still confused "Later, Rach."
Raven ran outside and opened her Titan Com. "Raven," Cyborg's voice and face said. "You're needed at the tower. We might have trouble." Raven teleported back to save time. She'd... come up with something to tell Trevor later.
More lies...
"What's going on?" Beast Boy asked as he landed in ops and turned back into a human.
Cyborg explained. "A ship just entered the atmosphere and is heading straight for the city."
"Straight for the Tower," Robin corrected.
"That sounds dangerous," Collin said.
"Thank you for pointing out the obvious," Raven sighed. Ragnarok had a propensity for getting on Raven's nerves that almost surpased even Beast Boy's. Almost.
"Please, there is no time for arguing," Starfire pleaded. "The ship is almost in visual range." Cyborg turned on the monitor, and the tiny dot, magnified by the Tower's powerful scopes got bigger.
When it came into view, Starfire gasped.
"What is it? Is it Gordanian?" Robin asked.
"Is it the Citadel?" Raven's voice was calm but concerned.
"No..." Starfire said as the shock wore off. "It is... Tamaranean."