A Preface: Please read before continuing.
So, you've come looking for "Teen Titans" fanfiction. You've found this filed away there, with "Starfire" being the only character listed and little in the way of a description. By now, you've noticed that this file is incredibly short, only 731 words, and I'm certain you're wondering what this is.
Imagine the Teen Titans. The characters you've grown attached to. Now obliterate every notion you have of them. This is the first of three interludes that will reveal pieces of larger story, the first part of which will be posted soon.
I am a stranger to your world.
Even still, the locked doors of the House Absolute remain as the symbol of my exile when the stars parted for me. Whether it was the result of the vacuum smothering me, or the metal that shut me from my world, the last I heard was the echo of my sister's laughter.
Before the armigers could escort me to my transport, and almost certainly to the Great Gates, and perhaps the silent desert itself (in truth I did not know), I turned and bowed as was custom; my feet made no noise. As their gloved hands gripped my biceps, I spit. It was wet and splattered against the door with a satisfying plop. They took me through long halls, and up interminable staircases. We passed beneath uncounted archways, and between columns: colonnades, a portico, and finally, an epistyle. The old court towards the east end of the House.
I had not been there since my childhood. My brother, sister, and I used to play here under the supervision of our galadri'm. What came next was obvious: a wait. Then I was to board a transport which would ascend on an inertial tether into synchronous orbit. From there I would be docked on a larger skiff. We'd open a rift and I would be on my way to the Alamushi.
I knew, at that moment, as I sat in the center of yard and admired the efficiency with which nature had degraded my old place, that I would never make that trip, alive or dead. Alive, I would hide or commit ritual suicide. I would not let them have my body. In death, I knew that my pilgrimage would be brief and that I would be reborn with another chance to show my mettle, to sit a throne won by age, not by defect. It will not be an easy road, but it is my choice to make.
The long hours awaiting my digression from the courtyard were spent in a meditation. I needed to soothe my mind, to cage the part of it that wanted to fight, to rise on the air, buoyed by emotion. To ride the rage a first and only time. I imaged all manner of scenario where I would overpower my captors and flee with my poor brother out into the stars. To Phanda Drifts or Goldstone. Somewhere difficult. Maybe even the Tower on the Cliff. We could hurl ourselves into the Lake of Dead Languages: to see all history in one orgasmic moment before our minds were snuffed from this iteration.
It was not to be. It might never be. All I could do was spend it waiting. I chose to let my mind separate into its elemental components, repeating the liturgies I had memorized a long time ago.
From the Water that does not love us, we take our lives
From the Sun that does not know us, we take our vision.
From the Mind that cannot see us, we take our gifts.
From the Air that cannot hold us, we take our heart
From the Heart, we pledge our lives
The five make six: they form me. I chose to abandon them, wandering into the cold hard void of space. Across spans so enormous that one could exhaust a thousand life times effort and not cross them. To planets so ancient their crusts had hardened like a coat of armor, bereft of life and love. By stars that glowed with a fierceness that was familiar as a sibling's face. By creatures not even glimpsed in the most gruesome of nightmares in places where a crudity of nature sustains.
I did not eat or drink or sleep while I saw all these things.
On the third day, they came for me.