Dear readers,

Sorry if this FanFiction sucks I'm new at this and was just bored. I'll try to keep the chapters updated as much as possible and thanks for reading! Please leave your comments or whatever you do. Thanks!

-Cheshirekitteh141

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to."

"I don't much care where –"

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go."

-Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in

Wonderland

Chapter 1

Dallas, TX. May 17, 3:04 PM. Thursday.

Dawn was dreading going home.

She couldn't show it though, because what 13-year-old would want to stay at school forever? One who had no friends, that's who. She half-listened as her English teacher rambled on about how everyone in her class should read at least 30 minutes a night for 3 days a week or their brain's neurotransmitters would draw back and they wouldn't be able to think as fast and learning would become increasingly difficult for them and they would fall back and fail English.

Well, he didn't say all that, but that's what he meant, Dawn knew.

So, since she already read at least an hour a night if she wasn't being screamed at, Dawn felt no need to listen to his lecture. Instead, she fiddled with her small gold locket. It couldn't open and hadn't been able to for as long as Dawn could remember, yet her mom always insisted she wear it. The one time she had ever taken it off, her mom had used Dawn's head to make a new dent in the wall, and if it hadn't been the middle of July, Dawn would've had to pay even more by lying to her best friend and saying she had gotten the giant bruise on her face from tripping down the stairs. After that her mom melted the clasp so she couldn't take it off even if she wanted to, which she didn't if it meant she would go through that again.

Even though her locket couldn't open, Dawn still found comfort in tracing the ridge around the edge of the small heart with her finger. When she was nervous about something like going home, Dawn would imagine what picture was inside. Her mom claimed it was empty, and her dad wasn't around to be questioned. But Dawn could sense that it held a picture, and an important one. She just couldn't figure out what it was.

The bell interrupted her thoughts, and Dawn grudgingly picked up her school supplies and hefted them to her locker. When she had her homework gathered in her backpack, she hurried out of the school. Her mom might come home early and she didn't want to be screamed at for wearing leggings with only a long shirt over them. She would change into shorts when she got home.

After she finished texting her mom that she had arrived safely home, Dawn quickly changed into her old pair of jean shorts and a faded Batman tee shirt that was older than she was. She sighed in the air conditioning; it had been a humid day and not a cloud blocked the merciless heat of the sun on the walk home. She started laundry, then switched out the dishwasher knowing that both of those tasks not being done could easily lead to a long night of screaming and yelling. Then she pulled out her phone.

Her mom was almost always home after 4:15, and sometimes was even later. Her two brothers and sister didn't come home until about 5:00 so for the time between when she came home and when her mom did, Dawn had the most sacred non-material thing in a teen girl's life- privacy.

Dawn pulled up the bookmarked webpage devoted to most recent Teen Titan news and latest rumors. For the last 6 years of her life, Dawn had been hooked on the Teen Titans. She may not have had any of their dolls, posters, or replicas of their giant T shaped tower, but she still considered herself their biggest and most dedicated fan. Raven was her favorite; when she was just a little kid she had stood up to her father, TRITON, and told him she wanted to help the world, not destroy it. Dawn wanted confidence like that, to be able to fight back or even say something when her mom got in one of her bad moods.

On the newsfeeds there was a live video of the Teen Titans battling a giant slime monster. Dawn wished, not for the first time, that she was there alongside them, fighting. 'If I was there, I could just stop everything and-' wait, what? Dawn shook her head. Stop everything? As in, freeze time? Yeah, right. It was a fantasy that occurred in her dreams more and more, but she knew she could never do such a thing. Still...

No. She was not going to literally go crazy over the idea of being a Teen Titan. To put her mind back in it's place, she quickly searched, 'Signs of being a metahuman.' Opening the first page that came up in the results, Dawn quickly skimmed the list of signs of being a metahuman. 'Glowing eyes.' Duh. 'Visions. Voices. Unnatural temperature in and around body.' Dawn knew all of these by heart, as she had been on this page more times than she could count when she was a little girl and prayed she had some sort of power that could get her out of the hellhole of her life. She had gotten over that phase by the time she was 9. Dawn skimmed the bottom of the page, which usually held related links to quizzes, blogs, anime, and everything else under the sun about being or finding out if you are a metahuman. Instead she found something she immediately regretted reading: 'Note: Signs may not appear at birth, but often instead at times of major change (death of family member, break-up with significant other, 16th, 13th, or 15th birthday, etc.)' This one little disclaimer planted a seed of doubt and her mind immediately started to water it with everything that had happened since her 13th birthday. 'What if...' and that was her cue to clamp off that idea. She turned off her phone just in time to hear a car door slam shut just outside, a sign that Dawn's mom was home. She sighed and slipped her phone under her pillow.

'What if...'