Dark Eyes

by VegetaCold

A redone version of my old story, "Thrifted and Repurposed." When Robin finds himself facing the betrayal of his friends and his one true love, he turns to Slade, who is more than happy to take Robin in. However, things might not be quite what they seem. Robin's POV. Rated for language and possible suggestive themes. No yaoi.

1. Chapter 1

Author's note:

Mother of god. I was trying to decide what type of fan-fiction project would be a good way to ease me back into the whole writing game after my long break. Something easy, not too hard was the goal. I remembered my old story, "Thrifted and Repurposed," which I can honestly say was one of my favorites. At least, the first two chapters were before I did that thing I had a tendency to do where I completely get sidetracked within my own story and go off in some completely random and uninteresting direction. That happened with this story after chapter two, and that really bummed me out when I looked back on it because I really do like these first two chapters. So I thought that a good project would be a re-write of the story. Plan was to edit the first two chapters so that they were easier to read. My writing style has changed a whole lot since I wrote those chapters, so I figured an edit on the first two was only necessary. Cut out some of the flowery purple prose and nonsensical, pretentious writing. I was laughing my ass off as I read some of my old stuff, just trying to figure out what I was trying to infer when I wrote it. Then once I had tackled that, I would write a new chapter to add, post it as one big chapter, and then continue on with new chapters each week in hopes of finally completing one of these stories.

Simple, right?

WRONG.

I would have had an easier time cutting a path through a thick jungle with a butter knife than trying to cut down and make sense of some of the garbage I had written in the first two chapters. In hindsight, I should have just rewritten the whole entire thing, and I think it would have taken considerably less time had I just done that. But like I said, I really did enjoy the first two chapters and didn't want to get rid of them completely, so I went with my original plan. Insanely enough, the chapters actually became LONGER, but that's probably due to me breaking up more of the paragraphs so things are easier to read, or maybe it was just me trying salvage what I could of my old crap by over-explaining myself. Overall though, I think this version is a huge improvement. Hopefully easier to read, so if you're new to this story as a whole, you'll have a much more pleasant experience. If you already read the other story, then you might want to skip ahead to the third section (or really, the third chapter), which has completely new content, beginning directly after Robin leaves Slade after eating dinner with him. Though I will say that I did add a lot new content to the second chapter especially, so you may want to re-read if you have several days to waste.

And that's no joke. It took me several days to edit everything.

However, I will say this: the first two chapters are still not as good as I wanted them to be. There is still a lot of information and they still feel flowery, not as bad as they were but not without that quality. All I can say is that I did my best, and that future chapters will continue to have the same edited and simple quality I tried to use with the new section I wrote. Hopefully, I can only get better from here.

Now, this author's note is already a freaking essay, but I do want to add that I plan to continue this story. I plan to update every week with a chapter at least ten pages or more (the following chapters won't make your scroll bar invisible like it is right now though. You can barely see it, can you?), consisting of story based content and not just inner monologue and garbage like that. If all goes as planned, things will actually HAPPEN in this story. Crazy, right? I really tried to focus my energies with the new chapter I wrote. I set a goal for myself to get to with that one and I think I achieved it this time. I guess planning does sometimes come in handy.

Anyway, this is something I really want to do. My new year's resolution years and years ago was to finish a fanfic, and I think the time for that is long overdue.

I hope you guys enjoy, or at least don't puke after reading this. If you made it through the author's note, then you can probably make it through the story.

Maybe.

Suggestions, comments, and the like are appreciated. I actually really try to take into consideration your input and ideas, and I'm always happy to have constructive criticism.

~Rick

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I guess I thought I never understood Terra—how she could do the things she did to us after what we had done for her. I knew Slade was manipulative, and that it was his fault (he had, of course, caused all the trouble, as he always did)—but somehow I still felt myself unable to pay too much sympathy to Terra. I suppose that since I knew Slade's antics so well, (by then, with the huge role he had played in my life, and would go on to play, I sometimes felt like I could read him like a book) in my eyes if someone else couldn't see how evil and cruel he was, I simply dismissed them as foolish; because it was so easy for me to understand him, I never once stopped to think that perhaps others didn't have quite as much experience as I had in dealing with him (and undoubtedly they hadn't), and might not have this advantage I had in understanding him. And so for quite a while, that was how I looked at Terra—as foolish.

I had never actually liked her, and maybe that's important to understand because maybe I failed to give her a chance—maybe if I had had more conviction for her, it would have been easier to understand exactly what had made her turn to Slade in the first place. I find myself looking back on a lot of things nowadays, and the one thing I wish is that I would have stopped Slade from getting to her. Often, I feel personally responsible for her death, as I regard Slade as my responsibility and not anyone else's. Even though it's hard to feel sympathetic for her betrayal, I often consider the fact that if I had taken care of Slade before he could warp her mind with his twisted persuasion, the whole situation would never have happened in the first place.

But hindsight aside, in reality I had trusted her, and that was about it. Personally I thought very little of her; she seemed to me to be a very foolish and overly sensitive person even before her blunder with Slade, leading to what we had understood as her death—but since then, the truth of that event has come into question, especially since my friend Beast Boy claimed to have seen her at a high school. We had been hearing about her a lot during that time, and the constant talk of the girl could only increase my sometimes daily struggles to try to find answers and rest in the subject, thinking about her more than I normally ever would have. Sometimes, I tried to understand why she might betray us—consider everything and try to give the girl a fair shot. I longed to find something that might justify her. I didn't want to hate her, and I didn't want to believe that she was evil or stupid, but it had become increasingly difficult to imagine that she wasn't one or the other when I slowly started to believe there really wasn't any justifying her actions.

The idea of betraying friends for someone like Slade boggled my mind for quite awhile, and for a long amount of time, I firmly believed I could never become like that—that I'd never turn against my friends because of something so stupid and so irrelevant, meaningless. Maybe I thought I was better than that, than her—

But I'm not. What I'm about to tell you will prove that to you.

The thing is, until you've been in a situation like that, there is no telling how you'll act, really. Terra's betrayal was driven by what she probably viewed as a betrayal on our part—Beast Boy's denouncing of her friendship. But I'd never had to deal with that, not really; up until recently, betrayal wasn't something I had equated to my own life; misfortune? Yes. Pain? Yes. But betrayal? No. I kept few personal connections until the Titans, even considering my former partner, who was never really a partner at all, and more than anything became in my eyes a boss who I began to resent, and was glad to leave. But the Titans were not so easy. They had known me inside and out for the majority of my teenage years; Raven, who had been inside my mind, and who had let me inside hers; Cyborg, a best friend who I had fought with time and time again but our relationship was still strong and powerful; Beast Boy, who had equally brawled with me but never gave up on me even when my leadership wasn't at its greatest; and Starfire—Starfire, who, well, meant more to me than words can convey, even as sappy as that sounds. Since I'm not good with words, she never knew how much I loved her.

That was where the trouble started.

I was set up for betrayal from the moment I set my eyes on her, any of them, actually—and to think that we were above it, that betrayal, was to be as naïve as Terra. But we didn't know any better—mostly because what happened was something none of us could have predicted. We wouldn't have ever guessed something like this could tear our team apart. It was not a death we could have prevented, or an argument or a fight, anything of our own volition—at least, not their volition. It could be said that what happened was mostly my fault, but I didn't act alone. What had started this whole thing was something otherworldly, and horrible. Something familiar.

In the days after defeating the Brotherhood of Evil, there was a quiet that encompassed our city, a time when there was so little crime we had to find ways to keep ourselves occupied, as we never had to before, but we were having fun, and even after my failure as a leader in our attempts to take down that horrid group my team was still as trusting and supportive as ever, and actually the only criticism of my judgment came from my own mind, and went on like that for a while. But again, the team still seemed to love me, and when I tried to apologize for my failing them, being frozen when I should have been the one to rescue us all, Beast Boy told me one of the most endearing things I think he'd ever said to me, something that made me forget my own criticisms, at least for the time being: "Dude, if it hadn't been for you," he'd said, smiling at me with that goofy grin and wild eyes, "I wouldn't have had the guts to go charging in there. You may not know but if you weren't our leader we'd all be dead."

Then he said, "And hey, Madame Rouge is such a slice of crazy I don't know if I would have been able to take her down alone, either."

This was enough reassurance to get me to stop talking about the subject, at least, but I had never been one hundred percent assured by anything they had tried to convince me with. As the leader of the team, it was supposed to be my duty to protect everyone, and having failed there, I felt incredibly unworthy, almost constantly. Still, the kind words they shared with me did more to add to my belief that my team could never think badly of me, could never betray me, would love me no matter what—so there was nothing to fear.

We lingered in an air of innocence and equal ignorance during that time, having quite a bit more fun than it seemed like we ever had, but being more inept to what was actually going on within our city than we ever had before. Little things that should have been red flags were promptly ignored for another round of cards. In one of my past mindsets, the idea alone of Terra's return would have sent me on a hunt, but this time, I was more focused on how to cheer up Beast Boy when he came home sadly after Terra had, supposedly, turned him down. I went with him to the new movie store and we picked out eight of the most awful flicks we could find, and watched them back to back that same night; we called the pizza-delivery person twice and had four pizzas between the two of us and got sick the next morning, and we were lucky the only crime then had already been put in jail or had disappeared off the face of the earth (or so I thought) because we spent the next day passed out on the couch.

High spirits ensued with myself and the other Titans, too. Cyborg, Beast Boy and I went to a video game convention and Cyborg and I ended up getting into a virtual guitar contest which attracted such a crowd that Beast Boy said we should have sold tickets (he liked that line) and we saw our pictures and a video of our battle throughout the internet the next day with our fans like Control Freak battling over who had truthfully won (and I noted with some small silly pride that Control Freak's gang mostly sided with my victory).

Raven subsequently had been teaching me tricks of meditation, which I had been interested in ever since I had used her powers and dabbled in the now non-existent evil she had been supposed to create. What she had done a lot with Starfire she now was content to do with me, especially after having searched in my mind and me having looked into hers. She showed me how to visit the spirit world and come into contact with it, though I had little success, and liked more often to grasp a state of simple serenity through meditation, something she had coached me to do. I was also able to learn many spells, though of course to use them was a whole different, non-existent story, and mostly I served to watch her as she began her practices in distant fascination. Even though I was not really a part of what she did in these deeper, more complex places, I still liked to witness it, as if that somehow made me more relevant to anything else. I liked the idea of the spirit world even if I couldn't get to it; the idea of my parents out there somewhere, though far enough that I could not reach them, was strangely satisfying in its own shy and reassuring right. It was real enough, but not so real that I'd have to justify or do anything—especially because, after what has happened since then, I'm not sure my parents would want me to come anywhere near them, so I'm sure it was best to stay away even if I could have reached out to them in some way.

Later on in this period of peace Starfire took me to the mall, where she had been spending more and more of her time and our money, probably not really understanding its worth, not even after all the years fighting people who wanted to take it; her room, which had for the most part remained a simple, empty thing had quickly transformed into a cluttered, girly mess which she took great pains to enjoy each day. She took me into a youngish accessory store and picked out nail polish, which captivated her, and wanted to paint my nails when she did her own, not understanding yet earthly customs. Hey, I'm not judging boys who paint their nails; I might have gone for a black color myself, but justifiably, when she picked out pink and purple bottles, I was not interested. She asked me what I liked to have and buy, maybe out of politeness more than anything, probably not actually caring for an answer as she raked a great deal more little bottles of the stuff into her arms in an array of sickeningly bright colors. Maybe it was good she didn't really care, because it was hard for me to answer that question.

Since my parents had died, I hadn't done too much shopping or collecting. I didn't care about material garbage, especially during my time with the Titans, probably because crime fighting had made me more concerned about the safety of the people I loved rather than the amount of items I owned, items that could only be stolen or destroyed or lost or whatever, and, actually, I had never been much of a mall rat, even when I was a boy. We had been poor and had little luxury to waste time at a mall using money as a leisure activity, buying for pleasure; but that said I had always liked second hand, thrift, and antique stores, maybe because they were all I could afford.

Even with all the reconstruction in the city during that time, there had still been a remaining antique, goodwill type store at the very end of the city, near the remaining suburban homes, so far away it took more than two hours to get there by foot if you were to walk. I took her there (on the R-cycle, of course) after she had finished spending over twenty bucks on the nail polish, and then another twenty more on our way out when she saw the barrette store she liked more than any other earth shop (well, she'd had the hair to fit plenty of clips in, that was for sure) and came out with several pairs of hair clips I doubted she would ever wear even once after that day, and she was content to giggle as she slipped the clips into her already perfect hair and gaze at her reflection in the same store window. Normally I would have maybe thought that type of girl was catty and shallow, but she was Starfire, as if that was a reason in its own right, and I found myself adoring it more than anything.

And I was not surprised when, as we entered the second hand place, she looked around with a puzzled expression taking her face. She didn't understand why you would buy something used when you could have it new, pretty, and shining, again, probably not quite understanding the value of earth money and what budgeting really was, as she perused the shelves of dusty knickknacks and old household appliances and worn clothing on rusty racks; while I contemplated some old tech at a low price that could be used for rebuilding the tower and the like, she picked up an old necklace, probably antiqued, with a silver hair tangled around it, and gave a disgusted shiver, even though the necklace itself was pretty and only a dollar. "It just needs some cleaning off," I said, and removed the hair simply. "Do you want it? I'll buy it for you." And she shook her head, looking repulsed at the prospect more than anything. "The mall of shopping has ones with no hairs on them," she said in the same simple manner, and walked away.

I was not surprised—but I was a little put off, somehow, as if I should have been surprised; and I can remember thinking, 'Well, that's a little superficial, Star. Just because it's old doesn't make it revolting.' But apparently to her, a mentality like that only made sense. I reasoned briefly that it was probably reminiscent of her days as a Tamaranian princess, but still it seemed somehow really irrational, even if her culture was still, as it probably always would be, a mystery to me. Maybe simply the problem for me was that I was realizing she had a problem with the way I had always liked to live, not spending money where I didn't have to and never forgetting to appreciate something even if it wasn't new, because it still had its worth and value to me as I repurposed it.

I felt embarrassed, and actually for the first time felt a small distance put between me and her—that was, where once before our differences made our friendship that much stronger, now there was an alienation of one another as our mentalities and beliefs apparently clashed. I began to wonder briefly if I was seeing Starfire for the first time, at least one quirk, if it could be called that, inside the vast complication of personality that was her. When we weren't submerged within the world of our goofy antics and crime fighting, it seemed a bit easier to see who the people I had called my best friends really were, or at least, what they seemed to be to me when the veil of busyness that always seemed to be draped over us was lifted. Downtime brings out the worst in people, I've found.

At that point in time, however, I thought maybe I'd been fishing for trouble. Of course we'd have differences, I reasoned; we were completely different people from two completely different backgrounds. I quickly dismissed my negative thoughts about her, even though I stopped to put back the old tech, intent not to be further embarrassed by these such differences since she clearly had a problem with second-hand mindsets, and truth be told, I didn't want her to think badly of me. I wanted to impress her, so as I followed her out, I asked her if she wanted to go to a jewelry store in the nearby suburban strip mall so I could buy her a new necklace. She happily agreed, and the rest of the night was fun. I bought her a little necklace with a crystal star which fascinated her—though I didn't like it as much as the other one, a little gold link chain with a carousel charm on the end that actually spun, and this new one cost me a fortune.

At least now, I could afford such a thing. I certainly wasn't poor anymore, I'll tell you that much. Not after being partners with one of the richest people on the face of this earth. Not after my own accumulation of gifts and rewards for my efforts to save the city. Why shop at second hand stores when I could afford the high end designer stuff everyone wanted?

And to add to that reasoning, I convinced myself that finding a silver hair tangled was a little disconcerting, and that if I was her, I probably wouldn't have bought it either, but, in real life—

I would have just removed the hair.

In the days that led up to this moment I want to talk about, we were getting more restless and crazier than ever, especially because the crime rate was so low, and the most we had done to "save the city" was stop a bad guy, if you could even call him that, robbing a fast food joint as if that would bring him whatever he needed, money, or whatever, for happiness, or, again, whatever. Not exactly the kind of intense caliber heist we usually handled. We had now had several of these sickness inducing all night parties and we had also engaged in a few seriously stupid and dangerous games using the tower to wage them, and to the extent we were bored even Raven joined in for a few of them.

After the incident with the Brotherhood of Evil, I had bought the moped Beast Boy had been desperately wanting for months for him, probably as another expression of my constant guilt and need to make it up to my team somehow (I had been buying people a lot of expensive shit to try to win them over, it seemed), and one day he had decided to ride it around inside the tower, wearing his helmet, goggles and scarf, the whole ensemble.

Initially I was seriously angry at his recklessness…but then I reasoned that at least he was wearing a helmet. I jumped on the back of it when he egged me on and we rode around in the topmost part of the tower, scaling several flights of stairs and then, to capture the attention of the other three Titans, jumping a long flight of steps into the main ops center and just barely landing it. Eventually, my own motorcycle was out and I had Starfire hanging onto my back and screeching as we were engaged in a donut contest with Beast Boy, who had managed to get Raven on his moped, reluctantly, but she was actually laughing even as she shrieked, while Cyborg stood referee but was on the verge of getting the T-Car in as well.

Now, this stuff might all seem really stupid to you—and it probably is. Whatever we were doing in those days was, in my hindsight, nothing more than a façade which strengthened my unfortunate beliefs that my friends could never make me feel the way they eventually did to make me do what I would. But what is really strange is that these small, sad moments really meant something to me, and that I can't deny. It's even more strange to think that something like these moments, so seemingly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, was perhaps actually the closest thing I had ever had to having a real, loose and not crime-based relationship with my friends.

I had always had the conception that maybe I was not the best liked of the group, and that maybe they fought for me only because I was their leader and it was the right thing to do, and I thought this especially of instances like the Red X and my subsequent apprenticeship to Slade, when it hadn't been very clear how they would have felt about me if I hadn't been the leader, what they would have done if I hadn't been the one to have funded our team in its entirety. If it hadn't been for my past and the sort of swagger that was associated with my former mentor, the kind of connections they knew I had to the most powerful heroes to ever have existed…if I hadn't had any of that, would they have still kept me on the team, treated me as a friend? I didn't think so. I was sure that if there had been some clear way to get rid of me, they would have done it as soon as they could, a long time ago.

Ironically, facing my friends after I came back from playing "dress up" with Slade was harder than the act of "dressing up" itself, in both cases. It never seemed like they cared about me as a person, which had been the reason for my fears of rejection, until that brief time in our lives. I thought that by then, I meant more to all of them than just a resource for power and connections, a walking bank, a skilled fighter. If we fought crime again, I had decided by the end of this time period, they would be fighting for me not just because of what my title had been, and because it was the polite thing to do, what their duties and morals required of them, but because of who I was inside, what they had grown to love and consider as a real friend. I hoped this was the case, at least, and if not, I assured myself that I could always pretend.

Even if it was all just in my head, I felt like I might actually be fitting in for the first time in a long time, and I was thankful for what little normality I could take from the peace, again, even if I had just made it all up. I felt like a real teenager, with real friends, for the first time in forever. And subsequently, I was starting, for the first time since joining, to feel secure in my position on the team. I wanted to believe that what I had with them—their respect, their admiration, their trust of my judgment and reverence for my decisions—was forever, wouldn't allow myself to consider any longer that things could change in the blink of an eye.

Of course, it was only when I finally let my guard down and stopped being concerned about this possibility that things did change in the blink of an eye, in the worst way possible.

It was maybe a month before we ever saw crime again, and when we did it still wasn't significant enough to make us cringe—not until now. There were simple things, robbers like Dr. Light who now was enough of a laughingstock that we were able make plans for what we'd do once we got him in jail, down to predicting how long it'd take, exactly, to achieve said goal, and we enjoyed making bets about the specific length of time we thought the task at hand would fetch, which most of the time we used as incentive to work harder, even if the spoils for the winner of said bet was nothing more than an extra hand of cards or slice of pizza or an ice cream cone after we'd put him in jail. Control Freak's friends would have liked this; I won most of the bets.

We couldn't keep this up forever though, and it wasn't long before I found myself facing a real problem—one of the worst I had ever experienced, simply because it was not one I could turn to my team for an easy answer to. In fact, for quite some time, I believed them to be the source of this problem, which had been thrown upon me with a weight like the world itself. I felt so alone, so singularly targeted.

The trouble, I guess in relevance to where I am now, really started the day we heard some of the criminals we'd had frozen after defeating during the battle with the Brotherhood of Evil had escaped. They had been contained in a main, high security prison in the city where they had been separated, and unfrozen accordingly if they were classified as being benign enough. Among the criminals who remained frozen were the Brain, Monsieur Mallah, Madame Rouge, General Immortus, Atlas, Cinderblock, and a host more who were deemed either too reckless or overall dangerous to society. Kept unfrozen, unfortunately, was the remaining Hive Five, Mad Mod, and a few others, like Johnny Rancid, Kitten and Killer Moth, but most importantly the former two, whose so called "encounters" with us would go on to spur a much darker era—just not in the way I might have imagined initially—where donut competitions seemed so far away and silly they were almost untouchable, at least with my friends when I began to gain new perspective on everyone and everything.

Agent Wally aka The Flash, known mostly to us as Kid Flash, and Jinx, who was a lot sweeter than she had seemed when she'd been throwing early punches at us at the request of Slade, told us early on about the escape of Mad Mod and the Hive Five, though confirmation on this was vague. Jinx said she'd deal with the Hive Five, and because she seemed to think that there was a good possibility they might pose a genuine threat to the city, I was all for having someone keep an eye on the subjects in question. Wally, in close tow of Jinx, promised to come back to our vicinity in order to help keep Mad Mod at bay after more speculation throughout underground villain sectors (more realistically, people like Control Freak's friends) told of Mad Mod's coming back to destroy the Teen Titans, and any subsequent honorary Titans, and then conquer the world since there was no longer any stronger, more cunning villains like the main four Brotherhood members to get in his way.

This seemed pretty sketchy to me, because even though Mad Mod was exactly that, Mad, he was by no means stupid. I could foresee a breakout, yes, but it was highly doubtful that Mod would use that breakout to try and get back in, because, in the aftermath of the Brotherhood of Evil, wouldn't he at least wait more than a few months to strike again, when most honoraries weren't still in the area and we didn't have plenty of backup and we were no longer still sort of on our guard, after the stinging of remembrance of that darkness which briefly encompassed us had begun to fade, at least a little? If he was smart enough to build all that crazy tech and a magic cane, wouldn't he at least use a little common sense?

Well, he would; there was a Fourth of July which passed with no incident between the last encounter to feature Mad Mod, when he'd been with the Brotherhood of Evil, and the next encounter I overheard the Titans had had with Mad Mod long after Slade and I were just a distant memory to Jump City, on the next Forth of July a whole year later. He had waited because he was smart; Slade was still alive, and still after us. Mad Mod was brighter than he looked, and I knew that. Maybe in just that sense alone, it was unwise to dismiss him as a villain that couldn't hurt us, because I knew that he could. That understanding made me overcome my initial skepticism, and just the sheer idea of his coming back was at least enough to put me on edge fully again, spurring my decision to invite Wally to the tower. I decided that even if it might be just some stupid hearsay, I liked Wally enough anyway that it wouldn't be a loss at all if the greatest purpose he served in coming to visit us was simply joining in with our stupid fun.

Unfortunately, this was far from what would proceed to happen. The idea of fun seemed non-existent the minute he stepped inside my home.

I had told him to invite Jinx over, and he said he did, but she declined and decided to go directly after the Hive Five, determined to bring them back to jail. I talked to her only briefly over a communicator before we could get confirmation of any of the information we were hearing, and she said that she herself had not seen the jailbreak, and had not been contacted by the Hive Five for any reason, but she had heard word of it from other honorary Titans she had recently communicated with, and Wally's repeated assurances that he was almost positive of a jailbreak were enough to convince her, especially as she claimed that he "got around" considering how fast he was and had probably already talked to several witnesses.

I had expressed some concerns about the shadiness of the situation, especially as we were lacking communication from police about the jailbreak, when usually, we were given information almost immediately after any sort of incident involving escaped prisoners so that we could get to tracking them down as quickly as possible. Still, she seemed absolute in her trust of him, and even if I couldn't say the same for myself, I admired that in her. She said she'd check in if she found anything and would probably come to the tower later on. I also asked her to call me if she found the Hive Five and needed backup, and through she agreed, I never heard from her again after that. At least, not about the Hive Five. In a few days, let me tell you, Mad Mod and the Hive Five became the last thing on my mind.

I want to clear this up right now, so that, as I go on, you don't think too badly of these guys. You might for awhile, like I did, but let's get one thing straight. Wally was right; there was a jailbreak and the Hive Five, Mad Mod, and a few other criminals were missing—but it's also fair to say that since the Brotherhood's defeat and their subsequent jailbreak, we never, not once, actually saw their faces doing anything wrong, or even just on the streets. Mad Mod never had any plans to do away with us, and world domination was probably the last thing on his mind. As Wally had claimed for the Hive Five as well to Jinx and the rest of us, they were not out to rob some really extensive museum outside the city they'd seen on the way into prison.

I remember knowing with a certainty, just by the way he had explained these elaborate schemes that were supposedly to come to fruition, that he was lying, and I'll let you know now—he was. Just not for the reason I thought originally, again, though of course, predicting why a friend was lying to me in this way wasn't exactly the easiest task at hand and I didn't have as clear an understanding as I might have liked of the actual reason, but I had tried to speculate best I could. Back then, I thought that if he was truly lying and was not simply misinformed, it was likely due to some sort of pride issue; considering how much he had pushed information about the jailbreak on us in the early days, perhaps it was all he could do, after he realized how pointless of a thing it really was that he'd started, to lie in hopes of legitimizing the operation he'd had us all undergoing in this ridiculous search for a group of people that no longer seemed to exist. Maybe he hoped that spinning these tales would encourage the actual stars of these tales to act accordingly, so that not only would we defeat and catch them, but so that he could take some assurance in his own competence. If that had been what he had been going for, however, it was far from the result that would actually occur.

I have to admit that I was extremely suspicious of him from that moment on, especially because even though I did like Wally, I hadn't known him all that long or all that well in complete honesty. But we had been friends, and as his friends, and also as Titans, dedicated heroes, we investigated because it was our job. To do any less would be a disgrace to our titles, and legacy. I trusted him more out of the slight worry that his words might have some sort of truth to them, because even if it was the smallest percentage of truth—no life was worth that risk.

So Wally showed up alone one day when it was cold and raining outside, a late and dreary time in the afternoon when we were all pretty sleepy because the weather just had that feeling to it. Beast Boy and Raven were both sick with colds, and even Cyborg, who was half machine, had managed to get a little touch of the flu as well. They were in their bedrooms passed out, and Starfire and I were the only ones awake at the time when he came, and even then I had been the only one really awake, because Starfire was dozing off a little, too, maybe coming down with a cold as well. But it was a strange transaction and I remember it well; I greeted him at the entrance and he regarded me with a big, goofy grin like Beast Boy's. I remember how his blue eyes were standing out vividly even in the dark, raining weather.

"Hey, Robin—good to see you again."

"You too, Wally," I said, and shook his hand.

"You okay? You seem a little tired."

"Just a little. It's one of those days, you know?"

"Yeah. Where's Starfire?"

Now, that was, in all respects, an odd thing to ask, the more I think about it. The way he said it made it sound like Starfire was really the only one he wanted to see, like he had come to see his best friend and was talking to his best friend's mother. If I hadn't said something I don't think he would have even asked about the state or location of the other three Titans, because I seemed to sense, at least in the back of my mind, an odd fixation upon Starfire that of course wouldn't die with our conversation. Again I didn't think much about it then; I thought that maybe somehow he knew that the other three were sick and that Starfire and I were the only ones still clean, and maybe in her absence he thought she too had come down with it and was expressing his concern—but there is really no way Wally could have actually known that the three of them were sick, in hindsight, because even when I spoke to Jinx the Titans still hadn't been hit with this illness. But then I was tired too, and thinking clearly probably wasn't so crucial that it became a top priority on my brain-agenda. What would I need to be very alert for in the presence of someone I had thought was my friend, someone I thought I could trust completely? Well, this was the last time I would think this way about anyone for quite some time afterward, because while this mindset was great to own while it lasted, once it was damaged it any way, it was very hard to repair. And my ability to trust wouldn't just be slightly marred or chipped. It would be completely smashed and destroyed by the end of that week.

"She's just inside. The others…"

"Yeah," he just said. It seemed, based on response, that he either already knew what was wrong with the other three or he simply didn't care enough to hear it.

It's obvious to me now that he had already figured out my friendly reasoning about his own shadiness. The trusting reasoning, that is, that I had cultivated for no reason other than my own stupidity, years and years ago when I had still been young and naïve enough to think that everyone had some sort of good in them, was once again about to define my life in the worst way possible; as frequently seemed to be the case, the moment I found myself wrongfully trusting someone, that naivety seemed always to lead to the king of liars and manipulators himself in one way or another. Slade. It had happened with Terra, and little did I know, I was about to be the next victim of something even larger than I perhaps could have even comprehended, even if I had been given time, which I have since then. All it took was a little dishonesty from someone, or even the idea of dishonesty, a little hesitation, the smallest pause to make you begin to wonder about who you were really dealing with—and Slade seemed to be able to smell that like a bloodhound. All he needed was a little sniff before he would come running, ready to pounce on the opportunity. I should have known that.

"Well, come on in. They're in their rooms and if you just stay away from them for a few days you won't get infected," I said quietly, having convinced myself he already knew the details of the situation, somehow. I had been following this advice myself, staying away from the others, as much as I hated to do so, and coupled with many doses of vitamins and drugs to strengthen my immune system, I hoped to remain sick free until the cold epidemic had passed. I had, so far, seemed be on the right track. For the most part, I felt fine.

"Yeah, no problem," he said with the same disinterested simplicity.

It wasn't.

He came into the main room where Starfire was curled up on the couch with a blanket and Silkie being used somewhat as a pillow. She was half asleep but when Wally entered and she saw him, she perked up immediately, and threw the blanket and the distraught Silkie from her body as she stood up, a smile shaping her soft lips and a light making her green eyes sparkle in a way that fills me with a sad fascination as I recall that moment in time. She looked so young, so ageless, like she would remain that way forever. This is the way I want to remember her as I recall her. Sparkling with something that could only have been a pure, undiluted joy, like that which might come from a reunion with a long lost lover, those eyes were not mine to stare back into, but I liked to pretend that that gaze had really been for me as I remember it. Knowing what I know now, I still wonder unendingly to this very day: if we had been able to live our lives together as I had always thought we would, would the day eventually come when maybe, if just by some sheer luck or chance, I would receive that look for myself? I will never know now, but I always like to think about what might have happened had the next events not progressed as they did.

What I chose not to remember about her that day: she'd been wearing the crystal star and it matched her eyes in its wild sparkling. The light was low enough to make the spectacle strangely captivating, enough that when I find myself accidently recalling the instance, it comes far too easily and vividly to my memory. It is painful in its vividness because it can only make me remember my own foolishness, especially as I remember what had been going through my mind the moment I saw her staring at him that way, and not at me (and you can probably take a good guess as to what it was that I was thinking). Those thoughts encompassed the entirety of my mindset, shaped how I acted in the days that would come, and in bringing to the front of my memory those thoughts that had gone through my head, the conclusions I'd already come to even before I took a moment to really understand what was going on, I can only dwell, painfully, on the knowledge that I was entirely to blame for what happened. My own impulsive, judgmental nature. And when I think about that moment, I can only be left to wonder how I could have been so stupid. It was not something I wanted to remember.

I thought I had understood exactly what I saw that day as I looked on the scene. Thought that I had all the knowledge I needed to make a hasty judgment. In her eyes there was the same look of seeing that star necklace in its box, new and polished as it was presented to her and I forked over a credit-card to the cashier, as when she looked at Wally.

"Hi, Starfire," Wally said, smiling at her—and if I had been perceptively thoughtful then I might have noticed a similar gleam in his vivid blue eyes as he looked at her. "I missed you."

"Wally!" she said warmly, and floated to him to hug him, giggling. "I have missed you too."

"I didn't know you two knew each other," I said quietly as I watched them embrace. Jealousy was probably already flaring, but it was not prevalent enough to make me realize how truthfully wild and uneven my emotions actually were, to alert me about what was going on inside my mind. I was dismissing the small flip my stomach did as something unrelated, meaningless, not something that should have told me to take a step back and breathe and think clearly. If I had understood how jealous I was in that moment, I would have stopped and considered why, worked through my feelings, decided some sensible way to deal with the situation. But without that little spark of understanding of what was going on within me to shock me out of this tunnel-vision of jealousy, none of these reasonable courses of action were taken.

"Oh, well," Wally said slowly as he shrugged himself to stare at me and remove that shining gaze from Starfire's radiant eyes. I can only describe their looks in the way I remember them, and to me the words "longing" and "hungry" come to mind as appropriate adjectives. He still had his arms around her, and I could see him pull her closer, and by no means was their connection over, even as they briefly focused on me. "Starfire and I got to know each other when—you know, you were helping Beast Boy after that Terra girl came back, and Jinx and I were still hanging around."

They did?

"You…did?"

Starfire nodded. "Why did you not tell me how funny he was, Robin?" she said, and briefly giggled. "He does things so quickly he learned Tamaranian."

He did?

"You did?"

Wally nodded, grinning, and then turned to Starfire and spoke a string of strange words I assumed had to be Tamaranian, considering the context of the conversation.

"Errads adianda zazforucha," he paused briefly to laugh with Starfire, who was now giggling uncontrollably, "…Nunkaz mozrran rummaka! Hahaha!"

And the two of them laughed so loudly the windows might have broken, and I probably wouldn't have been too bummed if they had because they'd certainly match the way I was feeling in that very moment—but again, what I think is important to point out here, I was jealous but not enough to bring alarm (but maybe that's unfortunate, because perhaps if I had been more jealous I would have realized what was happening and stopped myself before I did something stupid, like the something that I ended up doing in my ignorance, ignorance of my own feelings more than to anything else). Like if you're in your school hallways and you see someone talking to your girlfriend or boyfriend and know, or think, at least, that they will always be loyal and loving to you, but you still can't help but seethe? That was how I had felt then. I didn't like this little personal thing they shared, what I didn't share with her, but I thought like anything else it would come to pass harmlessly. We'd forget about it and soon she'd be back to being jealous over me when some crazy but cute blonde girl tried to take me to prom, or something similar.

That was what I thought—but I think it's important to explain that everyone has a little sense when something isn't right, especially with sensitive issues like love, and I was feeling that sense then, an itch that was unnerved, upset, as I watched them together, and began to believe, at least in the back of my mind, that there was something so much less benign behind this little seemingly insignificant thing they shared. I felt and knew it, somewhere in me, and maybe, ultimately, my belief alone that this small moment between them meant something was all it took to ignite the fuse that would set off the situation that was to come. And come quickly it would.

Wally and Starfire's laughter began to taper off after maybe a minute straight of laughing at this private joke, but only because I said something, the school-hallway jealousy driving me to speak up and cut in, even though I had never before actually found myself caring what Starfire said in Tamaranian, if only because it had never had this exclusive tone: "Um, guys?...um, don't speak Tamaranian over here…wanna clue me in?"

Starfire wiped her eyes and smiled softly at me, glancing in my direction. Wally, similarly, was looking at me with his goofy smirk and those crazy blue eyes, and I noticed how very similar the two of them looked in that moment, if only in their bond over this alien language. But at least now they weren't embracing.

"I just told a funny joke," Wally said, and Starfire giggled again. "Rummaka," she repeated, and Wally joined in with her giggling.

"Um, so Wally," I said quickly, and walked over to him, putting a hand on one of his lanky shoulders. "—the—information about Mad Mod. We should probably put it into the computer. I can show you where it is if—"

"Sure, Robin—maybe tomorrow. I'm pretty beat," he said.

Starfire smiled at him. "I shall show you to the guest bedroom."

And she took his hand, and they left; he spoke to her in Tamaranian and made her laugh, and I watched as she clasped his hand more tightly and they exchanged that bright, young and greedy look, reminiscent of the shine of the star necklace. They left me alone in the room, and the door's sound as it shut was hollow and cold as it reverberated.

I would collapse with a soft sigh onto the couch and try to let my loneliness drown in the pouring rain as it patted the bay windows.

But I wasn't alone.

Little did I know that a different gaze was fixed upon me as I rested on the couch. A single eye, ringed with silver, was watching me, more intently than usual. I had thought I felt a stare boring into the back of my head, but I dismissed it as simply due to my loneliness. I didn't want to understand how real it was, and always would be. The most real thing in my life.

I could never forget the way that eye gleamed always when I was in his presence, and how my body stiffened in terror when I found myself in the presence of that gaze. And even if I couldn't physically see it then, as I started to drift into an uneasy sleep, lulled by the sounds of the rain, the small itch I felt on the back of my neck with the sensation of being watched—and being watched with that gaze—was unmistakable. As much as I tried to ignore it, I knew it was there. Nothing like the exchanged glance of Wally and Starfire; different in its calculating darkness, absent of the youthful and unknowing ignorance that classified the way they had looked at one another. Hardly benevolent. Always scheming.

And it watched, until the sounds of the rain put me to sleep, finally.

And then, it watched for a long time after that.

---

A few days later Starfire came down with a full-fledged cold which had her bedridden like all the other Titans in the tower. We had been supposed to begin our investigation on Mad Mod with extensive monitoring of the city with Wally's help a few days prior, but with all the Titans out of commission I felt it should be postponed. I told Wally that I did not want to leave the four of them alone in the tower in their present condition, especially if, as he had said, there were villains about and seeking revenge. I recommended that maybe we wait it out, but also suggested that if he liked he could proceed with tracking down Mod on his own while I took care of my friends. But Wally had other ideas.

"You know Mad Mod better than me. Maybe you should go, Robin. I can stay here with these guys," he said early one morning. It was, again, raining pretty hard and there was an ever-present chill in the air that had driven us to crank up the heat in the tower to levels we might have expressed disgust at on any other day with any other weather. But we were all cold, and the weather was terrible enough that even I, who had taken to sleeping with nothing but a pair of shorts even on chilly nights, did little to protest the increase in warmth. If this cold was what had perpetuated their sicknesses, I wanted it to stop, even if I myself couldn't complain about the rain or the cold. In our city, cold was a rare thing, and it was one I welcomed. I just didn't understand how cold it was going to get.

What I also didn't understand was howit could possibly get as cold as it did, and was silently baffled when it began to snow in Jump City a few days later. I couldn't even remember the last time we'd gotten snow.

We were standing over Starfire, who was asleep in her bedroom. I stood by her bedside table, which was cluttered with the recent nail polish and hair clip hauls she'd made in even more trips to the mall, but she still kept that freaking star necklace around her neck though now she wore nothing else but a thin nightgown. Wally himself was sitting on an open spot on the bed on top of the wrinkled blankets, and he had his hand on her forehead, presumably to feel its temperature, though his hand had lingered there so long it seemed as though he could have decided her temperature to the exact degree, based on the amount of time he'd had to feel for it, if you'd asked him for a number. I also had noticed that he, with too much compassion, had begun to stroke gently the smooth skin of her forehead, as if that, too, were necessary for temperature taking or feeling.

My jealousy was boiling, but maybe I had myself convinced that it was simply my anger at the entire situation—annoyance that my team was down for the count while there were potentially criminals roaming the streets freely. Maybe the thing boiling and rising inside me was simply my frustration. Yeah right, but I told myself this then. Calmly I said, in a deflective manner that would allow me to break the tension and simultaneously dismiss my building suspicions about what was really going on in own my mind, "Aren't you afraid of getting sick?"

"Nah," he said quickly, and brushed a lock of hair away from her forehead. "When you're fast like me you got all the time in the world to get better, anyway. And I don't want to leave her."

I'll bet.

"Wally—"

He had turned to look at me when she woke up.

"Wally," she said slowly. Her voice was hoarse and soft and weaker than I had ever heard it, which was strange because—I didn't know that she could get any of our earthly diseases, but maybe her body had just adjusted enough to Earth that she now was human enough for crap like colds.

"Yeah, I'm here," he said, and now I saw that he was stroking her hair, and she was smiling up at him. "How you feeling?"

"Like a plixing Rorfian Zopgar," she said, but she was still smiling.

"Oh no," said Wally, but he was smiling, too.

"What?" I said—but no one actually answered me. The two of them were exchanging that same glance again and like Raven's meditation or contacting the spirit world, I felt a serious disconnect from what was going on. The feeling of isolation was stronger and more discomforting than ever, more trying and tiring, and I felt my face flush maybe just as warmly as Starfire's—and the sickness did not feel so far away, but it was not her sickness, but something else, something darker, more benevolent. Something which, to have healed or cured, was a much harder, more non-existent story. A little medicine and bed rest wouldn't help it. What I was feeling was the onset of the need for years of therapy, which I would never have, because of who I was and who I was supposed to be—and because of where I would end up and who I would end up with. That person did not believe I needed any therapy he couldn't himself give me.

"Will you stay with me, Wally?" she spoke softly, still smiling up at him. Her green eyes sparkled gently in the low, discontented light that illuminated the place.

"Course," he said, and they stared at each other in an expression that was—loving.

"Fine," I barked suddenly, loudly enough to jar their attention to where I stood beside them. Not jealous my ass. "I'm going to find Mad Mod," I growled, and then I started toward the door, my boots tapping loudly on the metal floor and echoing with the same coldness as the door had a few days prior, and in my own footsteps I could hear and feel loneliness. The amount of sadness that sudden onset of isolation brought was disquieting, and suddenly I barely felt like the youth who had defeated the demon Lord Trigon, the evil that was supposed to destroy the world, criminals time and time again—I felt alone, weak, and crippled beyond belief. In their gaze and the word I had associated with it, I felt like I had lost my legs.

"Robin," she spoke weakly to my back, lifting her head up as best she could to talk to me. "Are you—alright?"

She tried but—I was too far gone already. I think if something had changed me in that moment, it was that one word, the word that described what they shared between one another. I had thought that word was "love" at the time. It was a word that felt cold when it didn't apply to me, and almost instantly I felt it chilling me deeply, bringing my consciousness into the worst, most vulnerable place possible. I suddenly felt hateful and angry and in feeling so alone, I had missed the way she was calling out to me. She hadn't wanted me to leave, and if I had been less preoccupied by what I thought was going on I would have seen that. But in reality, I think the moment I decided they were looking at one another lovingly was the moment that my sensibility fell away from me and something—something dark, negative, and extremely self-loathing—overtook me, and encouraged me to turn my back on her to something darker. The silver as it gleamed, watching me, away from the sparkling crystals that were her eyes. I traded her stare for the one I had dreaded ever since my earliest days as a hero in this city. Both of her eyes for his one.

"Fine," I mumbled bitterly, and left the room.

I slammed the door. The tower reverberated with that sound, but—

Maybe it was just the sound of my fate being sealed swiftly. Just like that.

---

"Now—what are you doing here in this part of the city, my little one?"

If I had told you I had looked for Mad Mod when I left the tower, I would have been lying, and pretty thoroughly—because finding Mad Mod was probably the last thing I cared or was thinking about in those initial hours after witnessing that gaze and hearing that one single, crippling word—love—applied to their connection as it replayed unkindly again and again in my already troubled mind, each memory serving like a blow which would inevitably chop at my legs, stability, until I fell like a tree forever disregarded in a forest no one would venture into. You can probably guess what I was thinking about instead, if my ill obsession over that one moment is anything to go by.

Instead of looking like I should have been, I sat in the one place that I somehow found familiar to me now—because it was the one place that had actually really changed since coming back from Europe. That was—what should have been familiar and comforting to me suddenly seemed so cold, becoming something I no longer wanted to be a part of. And since there was little else familiar I could take any kind of stability from (remember the other three Titans were unavailable but probably would have been little help anyway, especially when I consider what happened the next time I saw them all together, their sicknesses all suddenly disappeared as if by some sort of magic), I decided to place my foot into something different. Step somewhere else, somewhere new, where whatever the outcome would undoubtedly be less disappointing than what I might experience from something I knew and cherished. So I sat in the torn down structure that had previously housed the old movie rental store, the candy store, the bookstore and the toy store, what would become soon a series of boring office complexes—but at least that was straightforward. I wouldn't make a connection with the idea of it becoming an amusement park because that wasn't what was promised; I'd think about the office complexes and poof, there they'd be, no matter how crappy. Impersonal things like this didn't lie.

I sat against a stone pillar that was near the center of the construction site, now empty because of the rain. The clay-covered earth was wet and muddy and even under the cover of the developing roofs, floors, or whatever they would become eventually, I had still managed to get quite wet and dirty. I had been soaked by the time I arrived, but I noticed that the concrete cover above me was filled with cracks and rain still pervaded into the space, which didn't help to make me any drier. Inside the construction site there were only a few lights providing visual, and it was otherwise dark and very lonely feeling. I know why I sat there but at the same time, I didn't; I was freezing and exhausted and there was really very little point to wasting time out here rather than just going back to the tower and sleeping if I wasn't going to look for Mad Mod.

But I didn't want to go back, and somehow found it more comforting to sit in the mud and scrape at the semi-hard clay with my gloved fingers while I watched a small, kind of cute (which is why I just watched it) worm crawl along the floor dangerously close to where I sat. I wanted to at least go somewhere a little less dirty and wet, but I couldn't bring myself to move, and whether that stemmed solely from my total disregard for comfort, maybe believing suddenly that there was none to be found, or exhaustion and laziness itself, I didn't know, but I just sat there, listening to the rain patter on the roofs and floors as the leaks and cracks allowed the acidy stuff to drip into the cover of the place, forming cool gray pools in places where the mud had sunken. It seemed to be raining all around me. I briefly fell asleep as I listened to the sounds of the rain, almost having been entranced by its rhythm.

"What are you doing in this part of the city now, my little one?"

I jerked my eyes open. Nearby, the sound of thunder was heard crashing and there was a brief flash of brightness from what was probably lighting. In my residual grogginess my eyes were heavy and there was a dull, not-painful headache taking up my mind, and briefly everything was foggy, but the first thing I found myself able to recognize as I regained consciousness was that it was now considerably darker than it had been when I'd dozed off, whenever that was, and even under the spotty cover of the roof or floor or whatever I could feel the very ominous presence of the sky and that undoubtedly it would storm worse, and probably pretty quickly. It was still raining, and much harder.

"What are you doing here, little one? Sleeping in the mud? You're going to freeze to death, you know."

Oh—maybe the ominous presence just came from the figure who loomed over me. It was an ominousness worse than the storm or the sky or the clouds—an ominousness I knew too well because its own evil had been engrained in me once before, when I was forced to take part in that evil. The ominousness came in one form: the thick and steady metal boots, the soldier-worthy swagger, mercenary style suit, and those strong and practiced hands, gloved as always. And then there was the mask and the one eye as it stared down at me, and the silver of his iris gleamed so brightly it might have mimicked the brightness of the lightning in that place, possessing always what nature itself could only sustain in small bursts: pure hot white energy, all-encompassing and intense. That's the sort of feeling I get when I look back at the moment, even though maybe I was just hallucinating again in my sleepiness. It was hard to tell. Either way, I have a very clear recollection of how passionately vibrant his one eye had been as he looked down at me.

One of those gloved hands suddenly reached down. The worm had wriggled its way onto my leg and was crawling there, but I had barely noticed it until he picked it up between his fingers and regarded it with the eye narrowed as it squirmed and writhed for freedom—and he didn't kill it immediately, but just looked at it, glaring in its direction as it wriggled and fought, as if he was deciding what to do with it, though it was apparent he had no intent to let it go alive. Maybe, he was just trying to decide how to kill it.

Prolonging the inevitable, he spoke softly: "I hate these damn things. You know—when you die they'll eat your skin. That was one thing I was lucky to never have happen from cremation, but—when you work for the devil you see things. And you know—if you die out here in the mud they'll just burrow into your skin when it gets too cold for them in the ground, Robin."

I was now on my feet; getting up now was rough and graceless and there was soreness that seemed to dictate all my movements, but in that moment I barely felt it because—

I was looking at the eye.

"Slade."

He dropped the worm at our feet. His boot rose suddenly and came down in the (opposite to me) most graceful and practiced of fashions as if he were dancing rather than slaughtering this little creature, worthless to him, as his foot twisted quickly, but so fluidly, evoking the dance-like appearance as he ground it into the ground. I looked down at that boot now with the widest of eyes, displaying an expression to match my sudden helplessness and the weakness I had already been feeling without his help. I felt my body begin to shake, and not simply because of the cold, where my body was now too stiff to feel it. And—

Well, you have to understand something. I hadn't seen this guy in over three years since defeating Trigon, and even then it hadn't been one of the most painless reunions after the death he mentioned in "cremation." I had always told myself that if I ever saw Slade again I would be ready and I would not falter at his sight—but you have to understand that more than anything, that's wishful thinking. On a good day, maybe this would have been possible. A day where, maybe, Starfire and I would spend time together and I might kiss her and feel so good about who I was, ready to take on the world with this girl at my side—but today was obviously not that day. In fact, it was probably the day I was mentally at my most weakened. Of course, that was the reason he had chosen that day, out of all of them, to approach me again. Never mind the day of my parents' death, which may have been a more effective choice considering his ever-present goal to gain an obedient son; he hadn't, unfortunately for him, known me back when that had been my big problem. Besides, my old mentor, with the same purpose as he, had gotten to me first.

Isolating the situation from my emotions to look at it physically, I had just woken up and was freezing and sore and covered in mud and worms, apparently. And just waking up takes "seeing Slade and being ready" to a whole different dimension of ridiculousness at my own expectation; to somehow expect myself to keep calm when I wake up to the guy I haven't seen in years who has done little more than fling my life into never ending torment, having tried to murder me more than once, is simply an expectation grounded in another realm of stupidity. Possessing knowledge in that moment like, "Well, wait, if I was sleeping and he woke me up…then that means that he was watching me sleep…," did not help the struggle to gain composure. And this little situation here, in that moment, certainly would be like if you were hiding from a tornado in your basement but then the basement started on fire, and that was how I felt—very trapped and cornered by everything. It was like there was really no escaping anything so heavy today; the universe, it seemed, was intent to set me up for strenuous emotions whether I liked it or not.

And considering all this, looking back, to have expected myself to do anything other than back up irrationally against the pillar, even though I could have easily darted away to either side or attacked, is again stupid of me, because I would like to believe that physical weakness was affecting my ability to think clearly. I wanted to believe I was slowly getting sick, and that that was the reason for my not so stellar handling of the situation. In reality I was getting sick, at least a little. Later I found myself being heavily medicated for pneumonia, even though I was very skeptical when this was the diagnosis Slade gave me. Maybe I did have it. Either way, let's face it—this terrible mix of scenarios thrusting themselves at me simultaneously would be too much for even the most seasoned Slade-battler to handle, let alone handle gracefully. I wasn't thinking clearly, couldn't. Do I attribute that to my situation now? Yes.

Is it my fault? Maybe.

Do I think I could have acted any differently, given the situation, never mind the reason I was feeling this way? No, probably not.

"I like to take charge of life, Robin. If it were up to me—," A cold hand reached near my face and I cringed away as he pulled another worm off me that had crawled up onto my shoulder, probably from the stone pillar. It was already dead. "—Oh, look, this one's dead. Smart, I suppose? Because if it were up to me I'd eat every last one of these before I let them eat me, even squirming."

He let it linger near his mask as he stared at its limp form. I thought he was going to eat it and felt my face pale and then flush green. I felt woozy, and tried my best not to sway, but I could feel it, a faint, what had threatened me many a time in the past but what I had never allowed to completely overcome me, creeping up on me once again.

Don't faint, my mind repeated with as much strength as I could muster. Don't you dare faint. If you faint you're screwed.

"Robin, you look sick. Well…" Thankfully, he dropped the worm, and seemed to decide to leave its form undesecrated as he slowly turned his focus and gaze to me, but then the eye narrowed in what I can only describe as an undying rage as the boot once again rose and fell, now without that grace it had held before, now driven by some strange, out of body anger. It was an odd phenomenon to witness, but then, I was barely witnessing it so much as struggling to cling onto consciousness. It's amazing to admit that that moment had to be the most enraged I had ever seen him, even when I look back and consider his anger in the past, such as after I got him to give up the controller that activated the probes and kept me unwillingly bound to him, or after Terra finally stood up to him and denied him obedience and control. He suddenly barked an obscenity in the direction of the worm and stomped his boot down again. His fists were clenched tightly.

I found words slipping out of my mouth, and they were not mine but of my sickness: "S-stop it…" I was moaning. I tried to press myself against the pillar as if that would somehow make me less visible to him. Briefly I closed my eyes. I didn't want to see him.

I didn't want to see him and—

I didn't want to know how much I looked like Terra.

Quiet encompassed the darkness I had created for a few moments. The only sounds again became the soft sound of thunder crashing and the pitter-patter of the rain as it hit the floors and ceilings of the unfinished complex, where the dripping acid rain evoked an earthy, muddy scent that made it seem more like an enclosed tomb than an open place. The musty, congested and heavy quality of the air only added to this feeling. I could smell damp moss. It was surreal, somehow; along with these few sounds, I heard my own breathing as it alternated between gasping briefly with a sudden shortness of breath and varied panting, with small whimpers here and there, as I tried to calm myself down, to collect myself. I heard myself and felt like I was in a grave, buried alive, and fighting for life.

But something brought me back—something very real and something familiar, something much gentler and warmer, something that brought me back to the days before Raven and Terra and the whole lot. The sound of his voice:

"I'm sorry, Robin…I don't mean to scare you. It's…hm…" I heard as he paused briefly, as if he was considering his words very carefully. "…residual anger from Trigon's powers. It never lasts longer than a few minutes, nothing serious. I'm sure it will wear off soon. Anyway, I didn't come here to hurt you, you know. Come, why don't you open your eyes?"

Oh, I remembered this tone all too well, to replace the crazed, wild one it had previously held. It was that coddling tone he had used in the earliest days of his interest in me specifically, a voice reserved solely for me and strange in its words but always sincere in that speaking: and so was true now, where Slade's words were perhaps stranger than anything I had heard, but that tone itself, the soft, practiced, concise diction became instantly comforting in its familiarity, and was enough to bring back into the real world where the sickness that had consumed me since I left the tower that day could almost not touch me because of that tone alone. His presence, when he spoke that way, seemed to chase it away and back into darkness. The pillar seemed less like a coffin for my premature burial and more like a simple place above ground. The smells were just nature, nothing darker, though they remained a stark reminder of my situation. Still, something had changed. The air seemed lighter, and suddenly—

I wasn't afraid to open my eyes. When I say I wasn't afraid, let me clarify: that is not to say that Slade became unassociated with fear, but rather that at a subconscious level there was something that had already alerted me to a safety in Slade, even if it's a safety I'm not too fond or proud of. Simply put, I believed, correctly, just by the way he was talking to me, that he did not plan to attempt to hurt me in any manner. Whatever toils lay ahead, it suddenly seemed that there was some protection in Slade. I knew that. He was using the voice he had been using when he'd saved me from tumbling off the edge of the building we fought atop years and years ago, grabbing me hoisting me to safety. I remember, as I'd been dangling there, held only by his tight grip on my wrist, wondering something very seriously—if he saved me now, then maybe he doesn't want to kill me? I had speculated correctly. When I saw him again after that, it was because he wanted me for an apprentice, and then wouldn't kill me even after I had ruined his plans completely. He had been using that voice then, too. I realized immediately that when I opened my eyes, it would be to a future predestined by him—a safe one.

So I did.

And in reflection whether or not the power (a power that is simultaneously comforting and so completely horrible to me in its extent over the entirety of my life) in that voice he used with me became the driving force of my life now, the only thing to keep me going and moving each day, I don't know. But hearing that voice in that moment in the parking garage brought me back years and years all in one small second of consideration, and suddenly I felt younger, more exposed, and more in need of something. I felt vulnerable and—suddenly I understood Terra. Things were clearer.

"T-then what did you come here for?" And these words—they were mine. They sounded more like Robin. A stronger, more unaffected Robin. Briefly maybe I forgot about Starfire, but he wouldn't hesitate to remind me, of course. And of course, to say I had any confidence would be a total lie. I was still shaking wildly, and now, having been brought back into the present and away from the delusions of my over-active imagination, I had no excuse for my weakness and could only admit my fear and intimidation of the man before me. I hope my stuttering is not lost to you.

The eye was soft and regarded me warmly, and suddenly he was so close to me that I could see even more clearly the beautiful silver-gray surrounding the piercing black pupil, striking in its strange, horrid depth, enchanting because it was also shrouded with some mystery and inability to be interpreted. And now the hands were at my face and they were clutching my chin, and I was made to stare into the pupil. I tried to squirm out of his grip; what normally would have been a simple task with an easy kick or quick jab was now somehow an impossible task, to make me feel like the worm he had first crushed beneath his boot.

"Relax, Robin," he said softly, and wiped a bead of sweat from my forehead, pushing a lock of hair away as he did, and I was reminded instantly of Wally and Starfire.

"L-let me go," I barked as loudly as I could, maybe briefly fueled by that memory, but even then there was no volume to it as I would have liked. My mind was spinning because—for whatever strange reason, I didn't want him to let me go and would have been just as content to linger in his grip for a while longer. That probably ran back into my wacked up emotions somehow, as, at least, I would have liked to attribute it to, but in retrospect it was probably something more, something more deeply rooted and real, going back all the way to the brightness of our past, evoked by that soft voice and memories that in some respects were good. But in the moment I tried to deny it, because it was all I could do—all the power I had anymore, as I was pressed up against the concrete surface and my face in my enemy's hands, which were strong enough to snap my neck at any moment if he so chose.

But maybe it would have been better to die then, in retrospection, to not have to deal with what I've gotten myself into now—but he had made it very clear to me before: he was not done with me and I would never rest as long as he was around. Maybe the real Slade didn't put it so bluntly, as drug-Slade had when I tripped on that reagent, but I think even then we both had a mutual understanding, something very undeniable ultimately, that there was to be a lot of restlessness between us, even in the restfulness that he would go on to offer in the coming days, because there was really no resting with Slade, as I went on to learn pretty quickly.

Our relationship was strange. If I could explain it even then I probably wouldn't be where I am today; because if I had known the kind of control he'd had then I probably would have never allowed myself to give into it. But it was a sad situation, unfortunate in how some seemingly insignificant events came together to mess with the future so thoroughly, matching the two of us together in a way that never should have been but was, anyway. Wasn't that descriptive of every time Slade did something to us? He shouldn't have been able to do it, but he always could, in every case, by simply doing what he was best at—lying and manipulation. He could take anything and turn it into a potential opportunity for him to gain something for himself. Like I said, he's a freaking bloodhound.

Time for a little of that manipulation now, it seemed, as he began to speak:

"Why?" he said very softly. Maybe he sensed what I was contemplating. "Why should I let you go? You don't have anyone else to go to, do you?"

It was all I could say: "What?"

The eye narrowed and the hands tightened in their caress against my cheeks, but not enough to make me uncomfortable or to hurt me. I guess the best way to put it is that in this he was making it harder for me to deny what he was doing, and that was it. Make me understand what he was doing, maybe try to force me to take comfort in that. The voice again was soft and thoughtful, cooing as it had been before. For a moment I was reminded very thoroughly of the reagent and my hallucinations, but that was not to go on to make me fight him because—I noticed the differences now. I was not hurting, and he was actually being gentle; there were similarities, but they only somehow seemed to enhance my understanding of these said differences. "Robin, did you think I wouldn't watch you when we last departed? Did you have yourself convinced it was over? No. You are still very much on my mind, my little one—and I've watched you."

I closed my eyes again and tried to jerk out of his grip, which, as I tried to move, proved to tighten in a way that was now pretty uncomfortable immediately. I suddenly found myself pushed up against the pillar even further and realized instantly his closeness; his body was pressed up against mine and as he looked down at me with that one hungry and expecting eye, still gleaming, I was suddenly aware of something pretty prevalent and alerting all the same: this stern, disciplinary position he had put me in was uncomfortable but not painful, and then it was not even uncomfortable. I had a flash of remembrance of my early discipline when I'd done something deemed "bad" by my betters. It was as if—yes, it was invasive, but it was as if he had every right to do what he did. However I still found myself protesting because again, it seemed to be all I could do, and seemed that to protest would be reassurance of my hero status. It seemed that if I did not protest, that title I so cherished would be taken away from me, like if I hadn't gone looking for the non-existent Mad Mod. I squirmed. "Let me go…"

"Why, Robin?" he said, and now his face was so close to mine I could feel his warm breath as it rose from the slots of his mask and tickled my face; my nostrils flared but actually it smelled like cinnamon and mints and candies, which was fine as far as breath went, though I was probably turned off by a lingering scent of tobacco that held it. It was interesting because I almost had a clear picture of his habits outside stalking me right then and there: he was a smoker, and he liked to pop mints. Maybe he chewed gum. Okay. It seemed bizarrely fitting for Slade. Maybe a person's breath is an indicator of what type of person they are; that is, if it didn't smell like liquor or something really telling like that, and it didn't smell unpleasant, maybe there was something to be said for that type of person. If that was true, then there was certainly something to be said about Slade.

Myself, however—I wasn't so sure. In retrospect I don't remember if I had brushed my teeth that morning but it was probably pretty likely I hadn't, but thankfully he didn't say anything about it in the course of our conversation even though I was close enough to see the contours of the dark, shadowed skin that surrounded his eyes. I tried to use what little skin I could see from this up-close view of him to get an idea of his age, but it was hard to assign a number to Slade, especially when the darkness within the mask obscured most of my vision. It was hard to tell if the skin around his eyes was wrinkled or smooth. I really couldn't do anything productive that day, could I?

"Why should I let you go? So you can go back to that tower of yours and watch the two of them elope right in front of you?" he said softly, and he seemed to be sneering beneath the mask.

I could feel my eyes open and become wide as a single question was highlighted in my mind and prevailed above all other thoughts: how does he know that?

I might have voiced this question, but he continued steadily, cutting me off before I could get a word in. It was as if he didn't want to give me any time to think before he said everything he had to say, wanted to give me no opportunities to argue or debate. This was purposeful, and it may have worked to his advantage, because by the time he was done, my brain was stuck spinning with his new information and I had little left to say. "You may think I gave up on you with Terra, little one. On the contrary. Things may not have gone as I planned, but—I think more than anything you proved yourself to me, when I think back on it. After the whole mess with Trigon I realized I was proud of you—all the grandeur that became you." The eye flashed with the briefest but most vivid brightness of strange excitement in remembrance of our battle with Trigon, again, brightness that I would never have expected to see from someone like Slade—but it was there. "When we worked together to fight those demons—there was nothing more natural than that, don't you agree? And so—I've been watching you. Waiting until you came back from Paris—"

"And you aren't disappointed when I failed there?"

Now, these words were probably the result of the recent uprooting of things I thought I knew (at least, if "everything" could be defined by the single experience I'd had with Wally and Starfire, though, to my credit, the situation involving the two of them did feel all encompassing, like the effects of that situation alone would reach all aspects of my life if I didn't do something about it), and this new insecurity I had about everything was already beginning to shape the way I thought, the way I approached situations like this one. The words I spoke were not calculated and slipped out before I could stop them, of course, because I know I would never have willingly and knowingly said them. I lacked control in any respect to stop myself from saying them, most likely because they came from a very real, sincere place within me, and stemmed from a subject that was very much on my mind, as I've already told you.

It seemed that I could not help but ask for reassurance no matter where I went or who I went with, no matter how endeared I had been early on by my friends' assurances. I still wanted—no, needed—to hear it again, because if I told you those initial concerns I'd had about my poor leadership had ever actually left, well, I would be lying. And somehow, in that moment in time, for whatever reason, I found myself wanting Slade's approval more than I had wanted anyone else's. It was almost insane to comprehend, but the more I thought about it the more it seemed to make sense.

Slade was not a friend, or someone who was programmed to give me a compliment for fear of ever hurting my feelings. Slade was my adversary, and because of that single fact any praise or approval I could elicit from him seemed special and well earned. I was sure that if he told me I had done well in Paris I would have believed it, simply because I saw no reason for him to lie to me. He didn't owe me any compliments. And maybe…at some level…I admired him. How could I not, as a teenage boy who had always appreciated skilled fighters and sometimes couldn't help but be drawn in by the mysterious mask, the gleaming metal, his insane build? He was the epitome of what I had always strove to be—strong, powerful, and admittedly pretty cool—but he simply served a different purpose than I, worked for a different side. If I was being honest with myself…maybe I wanted praise from him because, much to my guilt, in some ways I looked up to him?

Either way, even speaking the words was a huge risk. If he had told me anything but what I wanted to hear, I'm not sure what I would have done, because that, too, would have been completely true—again, he had no reason to lie to me. But what was much worse than his possible rejection, what I couldn't even comprehend just then—I had given him so much ammunition in just that one small sentence. I had shown my insecurity, and as I said, Slade was good—Slade had heightened senses. He could feel your most uncertain emotions, could see them clear as daylight and examine them individually, with the utmost care, gaining the greatest understanding of each of them until he knew exactly how to pick you apart as a whole. It was with the patience of a traditional artist, perhaps a painter who could spend hours on one small detail alone, and the careful preciseness of a scientist or mathematician that he did this.

And that little indication of my uncertainty in that foolish question was all he really needed to gain control of me. Only looking back on the situation can I understand the cold truth of what was really going on: in that moment Terra and I became an interchangeable person, an embodiment collectively of weakness and self-defacing beliefs. He saw it, too, right then and there. He didn't miss a beat.

"Did they make you feel that way, little one?" he said, softly. I barely noticed he was calling me 'little one' but even if I had I don't know if I would have done anything much in response. What I realize should have made me angry in its condescending quality was not so condescending at all, at least, not in a way that would have given me any justification to attack him for it, whether that be verbally or physically. What I'm ashamed to admit is that, after having almost adopted that pet name after hearing it so many times from him, I've almost come to enjoy it. Why he ever decided to start calling me that in the first place is a mystery to me, especially since I now know he doesn't do it to patronize me. I suppose that by now, I've accepted the fact that I'll probably never really understand his motives for anything.

"Oh, I don't feel that way," he said continued after he watched for my reaction, and even the briefest consideration of his question gave too much away. His hand was again gently caressing my cheek. He had put a little distance between our faces as he calculated the best way to gain his control, but I suppose he knew, like I did maybe subconsciously, that he already had quite a lot over me. Now, he would just have to find a way to seal the deal. "I monitored your combat, and I must say I'm impressed. I don't know much about that little group in Paris, but that doesn't change how well you fought. I thought that you would have grown sloppy while I was away, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that you're still in good shape. A little rough around the edges, but good. We won't have that much work to do to get you back into shape."

I think I was pretending I didn't hear that last thing he'd said.

I couldn't believe it—and can't even to this day—when I found myself almost crying out, "But I failed! I was frozen solid when I should have been the one to be un-freezing my team! I failed and…"

I stopped when I found one of his hands stroking through my hair, in a gesture that somehow proved to be amazingly soothing. The realization that I actually enjoyed the sensation only made me more disoriented. I remember the way I had looked up at him; probably, the best way to describe it is that I looked up at him like I was a confused and helpless orphan child who had just found the only adult in the world for guidance, because at the moment that was how I felt. His eyes had seemed to confirm that same idea as he looked down at me with sympathy and a possessiveness that seemed to suggest he also thought he was the only one who could provide any answers to me, the only one who knew what was best.

"Shhh," he soothed briefly, continuing to pet my hair. "I told you, I don't know much about that group in Paris, but I can tell you right now that you need to put these inhibitions to rest, little one. You did the best you could have possibly done in the situation, and you need to accept that and move on. No more sulking."

"Y-you think that…I did okay?" I sounded more than just a little hopeful. As I look back on this I can only pray that my memory is wrong, and that I really hadn't been starting to smile as I asked him this.

I still can't believe it—why couldn't I stop fishing for compliments from him? How low had that experience in Paris really degraded me that I needed to practically beg my archenemy for praise? I want to scream looking back on the moment, at my stupidity. Even if I was sick, even if I was mentally weak and not thinking clearly, there was absolutely no reason whatsoever I should have been trying to stroke my own ego. It wasn't the time or the place. Instead of letting Slade give me compliments, I should have been fighting him, or doing something to get away from him, to get back to my team, back to my job. How dare I just sit there and let him coddle me when it went against not only everything I practiced as a hero, but my whole identity as Robin? Had I gone insane?

His eye narrowed a little, but not in any maliciousness. It seemed that he was smiling widely beneath the mask, even if I couldn't see it. "Yes, little one. In fact, I think you did better than okay. What I do know about your situation is that those morons wanted to take you down and they put everything they had into that effort. They ignored your friends, subsequently. If anything, your friends are the failures for leaving you with their hardest adversary and taking the easy routes themselves. They're very inconsiderate, you do know that? Especially that Starfire…"

The mention of Starfire snapped me out of this haze of pleasure I was receiving from his gentle touch and simultaneous praise of my work. Instantly, I pulled away, realizing what I had been allowing to go on and knowing immediately that I needed to rectify the situation (and, of course, honor my title as leader of the Titans, the "hero badge" I had been given) in any way I could, as soon as possible. "Don't talk about her that way!" I snapped, as one of my hands came up and slapped his arm away so that the hand resting in my hair would retreat.

The eye narrowed, and now it seemed in displeasure. There was a moment of quiet that led me to believe he might retaliate with some sort of physical punishment for what I had done, but after a moment of just intently staring at me with that heated glare of his (perhaps, as he considered what the best way to handle my resistance was), intimidating me beyond anything else, he simply pulled back, having seemed to have decided how to proceed. He put his hands behind his back, and his eye narrowed even more, this time again suggestive of a Cheshire smile. "Oh, she doesn't need you to defend her, little one. She's got Wally, doesn't she?"

I felt my teeth clench, and where I once might have attacked I seemed to have forgotten my strength, my skills. I was snarling as I once again closed my eyes and pressed my cheek against the pillar, trying to keep myself from giving him the satisfaction I thought he wanted if I were to erupt and throw all my emotions his way, thus giving him all the more ammo he needed to hurt me. Obviously he already knew how I was feeling, and though I probably should have gone on to make it seem like I didn't care, I wasn't above that, able to. And more than anything I found myself scrounging to at least not give him more, to shrink away as if doing so would somehow similarly make it all go away, diminishing the effect of his present knowledge. I was weak, helpless, foolish—Terra.

He took my face in his hands again more tightly and forced me to turn so that I could not look away from him, though I refused to open my eyes—but I didn't need to. He had me where he wanted me, uncalculated, emotional, with little control. He was ready to spring what he wanted to say, and no amount of shrinking away from him would change that, or its impact. I had been right where he wanted me since the moment I woke up—but if there was an exact moment when I think I once again belonged to him, it was the moment my teeth came together, clenching as I looked away from him. Like jail bars clanging coldly in the darkness of the jailhouse to seal one's fate, locking them up for life. That was where I was, and if anywhere—I was in Alcatraz.

"Robin, I didn't come here because I wanted to hurt you; in fact I don't want to see you freezing to death out here because you don't feel welcome in your own home. I can see that—so don't try to deny it. And the fact is not only can't I blame you, but I think it's a good thing because you don't belong there with them. They obviously don't care about you if they're willing to treat you as they have been lately after all you've done for them, and—don't you see how this Wally who's supposed to be your friend is teasing you? How Starfire is teasing you? They're going to hurt you, Robin, even worse than they already have if you allow them to—and neither of them will lose any sleep over it if they do. They were speaking a language in front of you that you can't understand. They were telling a mean joke about you, do you know that?"

I opened my mouth to say something, but the hands tightened and I could not speak—the weight of his knowledge seemed to press my jaw back together, enacted by his strong hands. He knew I didn't really want to talk, because in reality if I had been able to speak, I'm not sure what I would have said, so maybe it was a good thing he didn't give me the chance. Once he had made sure I would stay quiet, keeping my jaw tight with an uncomfortable but painless pressure, he continued. Again, my silence was all he needed, and now he had it, and had the floor for his speech:

"None of them care about you. I tried to make you see that—but this is good because you will finally be able to see it for yourself now. I wouldn't be surprised if the two of them are in bed together right now—she might not even be sick. They just wanted to get you out of the house so they could be together, and while that's good for me, you don't deserve to be treated that way. It pains me that it has to come to this, but ultimately, this is for the best,—in the end you'll see that—because you will finally understand the truth for yourself, and once you do, I promise things will be so much better for you.

"You may not realize it but I do care for you—and for a while, after you betrayed me after all I gave you as my apprentice, I thought that was foolish of me. In fact, I decided to adopt Terra to spite you more than anything else, as you might have guessed. But once I died and had a bit more…free time to think about the whole situation, I realized that the only reason you were hesitant to obey me in the first place was because of that Starfire, because she was interfering, and you couldn't bring yourself to hurt her. You were so blinded by your love for that girl that you couldn't see she wasn't worth fighting for, and you're still just as blind, maybe more so now than before. Blind to how horrible of a person she really is. How horrible they all are, actually. But it isn't your fault, and I hold no ill will against you for what happened all those years ago. If those little rats hadn't gone bursting into our hideout like they did, you wouldn't have to be going through this pain now. By now, if you'd stayed my apprentice, I can't even imagine how powerful you would be, how powerful we would be together, and how much happier you would be. Oh well. No need to dwell on it, because as I always say, better late than never."

"W-what are you…?" was all I managed to croak out. My voice was hoarse and wary, and I felt the weight of his words pressing on my head like uncaring blows, making dizziness once again overtake me and seem to consume me more and more with each second that passed. This time, however, the thought of falling unconscious was less threatening when I suddenly had some realization that if I fainted, he would not hurt me, not if what he was inferring in telling me this was anything to go by. I also suddenly felt how he willed me to stay conscious, supporting me. He held my face and made me lean against the pillar so that I could not fall over, and—I felt that strange support translate further, reach deeper, than just support of my physical body. Emotionally, I felt steadied, and for the first time I felt a warming in the chill that had encompassed me since the moment I left the tower. It seemed the only reason I did not faint was because of him, but I knew that if I did happen to give into a faint, he would be there to care for me. Either way, I suddenly felt very safe, and totally taken care of. As much as I hate to admit it, it had been a good feeling to have someone like that to rely on. I thought about that feeling for a while afterwards.

He continued, his voice gentle: "I still want you, Robin. I didn't give up on you. So here we are. You're cold and weak and alone and you don't know where to go. You're trying to convince yourself that you can go back to the tower and all this mess with her with dispel, but you know, and I know, there's nothing good for you there anymore. She doesn't love you, Robin; I won't deny you that perhaps at one time she was your friend, but she doesn't love you, never has and never will. That's a pity, really, because you don't deserve to have your heart broken, no matter how you've fought and protested me. And I want to take you away from that, Robin—because you are still my apprentice and you're not going to die in the cold. I'd ask you to come with me right now, but I doubt if you'll believe me, so—if that's true, if you don't believe what I'm saying to you, don't believe that I know what's best for you, if you're in denial still, then go back to the tower and see for yourself, my little one. I'm not afraid of you getting away. You'll come back, soon in fact, and I'll be waiting for you right here when you do. I've waited a long time—and if I have to I'll wait longer. I'm patient. Maybe it's best that you see for yourself so we don't have any questions."

I finally managed to pull out of his grip, and he didn't stop me. His hands fell away as I staggered from the safety of the pillar's support and out into the open vastness of the unfinished office complex. I felt the urge to sway but managed to keep myself just steady enough, and managed to glare at him because—again it was all I could do. I hadn't actually really begun to process what he had said, at least not to an extent of thoughtfulness, but I did what I had to. I glared and clenched my teeth and fists but we both knew that I had no real power; there was no denying that between us both. He knew I was helpless, knew that internally, somewhere in the darkest recesses of my mind, I agreed with what he had said, knew that I couldn't deny what he had said was true. Knew that I believed him, and knew that I would come back, eventually.

That was the mutual understanding between us, and we were already bonded by that. He wasn't worried about letting me slip from his grasp now because he knew that this sudden, strange bond almost compelled me to come back. Just the sheer act of my understanding the truths he had spoken would force me to do as he said. He knew that, and derived comfort and ease from that knowledge. He knew that I was his and he knew that, even if I didn't acknowledge it and tried to fight and kick and scream, I really knew it too. This sort of shared knowledge between us was something I couldn't deny, no matter how much I wanted to. I hated the idea that was Slade right in this matter. But more than I hated that, I hated myself for agreeing with him, if secretly. Hated that I would come back, because I had no other choice. He had put me between a rock and a hard place and I hated him for that, too.

Dismissing in that moment what the future might hold (even though I had a pretty good idea even then), I decided to focus on the present. I hissed an obscenity at him and staggered away, maybe having falsely convinced myself that I was going to go get some rest so that I could come back and detain him or something like that, but again the knowledge that we shared was real enough to shame this idea even then. I would do no such thing, and in fact, worse than not going back at all, I would go back to do what I did, what I regret more than anything else. I couldn't have guessed that I would actually give into him the way I did, but I think I knew even then that no matter what happened, I would do nothing to chase Slade if I didn't need to.

I guess I figured that as long as Slade didn't cause any immediate danger to anyone (not including myself of course, because as long as Slade was alive he was always an immediate danger to me, and I had convinced myself I could tough it out), there was no point in trying to pursue him. In this day and age I really had to choose my battles wisely, and to be honest, I had decided quite some time ago that Slade was just not meant to be jailed (even if he certainly deserved to be jailed), if only to justify my failure to capture him. I know that sounds lazy and horrible and self-serving, but could you really blame me in this belief? I just didn't think it was a feat possible, and knowing what I do now about him, about who he really is and what he can really do, only strengthens my belief in this.

Still, in keeping with my revered title, I had to at least pretend that I intended to do something correctly, by the book, and it was certainly easier to simply say that I would come back to fight him rather than trying to take him down right then and there. Smart, probably, but not so honorable, though I can't blame myself. If I had challenged him at that point in time, I would have no doubt been beaten into a bloody mess, completely at his mercy or lack thereof.

Even if I had wanted to fight him (which I frankly didn't, having so much on my plate already), I doubt he would have played along and entertained a fight with me, even if I had charged at him, fists flying. It was something about the way he carried himself that day that seemed to alert me to the fact that he was not interested in any fun and games, at least not at that moment in time. In my mind I could see clearly the result of the stupidity of trying to start something with him: rather than toy with me, I had the feeling he would simply knock me unconscious or restrain me in some way if I tried to start sparring with him. Maybe he'd bring me to the tower himself or leave me there in the mud, but he certainly would not give me the satisfaction of retaliating in an attack of his own. I did not like the idea of any of these scenarios playing out, especially when I imagined him taking me to the tower himself and being there when I looked upon what I knew I would see when I went back, having him witness my reaction to what he had been all too content to lecture me as being true, being able to relish in my pain and the idea that he had been right all along. If only to prevent myself from that humiliation, to prevent myself from giving that sick satisfaction to him, I again agreed with him: there would be no fight, not today at least.

Still, even knowing a battle was impossible, I didn't want to inadvertently do what he had told me by going back to the tower. The fact, however, that made me do just that, was this: I wanted to prove Slade wrong, wanted to go back to the tower and see Starfire and Wally in separate rooms, and have Starfire greet me lovingly with a hug and then take care of me until I felt better—so that we'd share in our sickness, mutually.

I thought that somehow I might still be able to win this one. I would go back, letting his stupid ass think he'd won this round, and then I'd return triumphantly to show him just how wrong he was, rubbing it in his face before I proceeded to beat him down. Of course, this would never happen, because he had known exactly what to do from the minute he first set his eyes on me as I contemplated jealousy of Starfire's attention to Wally, and if everything went according to his plan there would never need to be another fight between us again, at least, one that wasn't simply for sparring and sharpening my apparently rusted skills.

Of course, everything had gone according to plan and he didn't have to be worried. He wasn't a bluffer and I knew that. Why would he be when every plan he formulated was undeniable in its complex sureness and inability to fail? There wasn't a question of if I'd come back or what would happen because—well, he had won this war far before it had even begun, and I was only fighting a losing battle from here on out. All that it would take, presumably, on my part to end this futile struggle was to finally understand and believe that what he had said was truthful, to admit to myself that he had been right all along. I didn't even have to say it out loud to him, and simply had to know it quietly myself. As long as I understood the truth, that was all it would take to truly make myself belong to him. Willingness and acceptance would solidify our bond forever.

Maybe already understanding this, I tried as hard as I could to deny everything he'd said. Not only because I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he was right about everything, because I hated him and didn't think he deserved something like that, but because if what he'd said was in fact true…I didn't know what I would do, in all honesty. And I didn't want to believe it, or even imagine the possibility—wouldn't let myself. It was ludicrous, to put it simply. I couldn't believe it. No way.

I was so stupid.

"You're lying," I moaned, staggering away. "You're a freaking liar and you know nothing about me or Starfire. You know nothing—just because you want me doesn't mean you know me. You haven't watched me. You're a liar and I'll show you."

When I had made it to the entrance, a safe enough distance away from him, I turned back and added, because I was suddenly so totally enraged at him for even suggesting such a ridiculous notion to me, for even daring to try to put it in my head, "And by the way, I heard Terra came back to life! Maybe you should go spite me some more and readopt her, because I would be soooo destroyed inside if you ever gave up on me! Oh, god, I don't know how I'd go on living! I don't know how I'm still alive from the first time! Oh god, Slade, I was sooooo freaking broken up over it! I couldn't even get out of bed in the morning, but you already know that since you were watching, right! Asshole!"

And with that, plus a flip of my middle finger, I turned and limped away, feeling the stiffness in my legs but not allowing it to slow me. I wanted to put distance between us; the more distance, I thought, the less truth and relevance his words would have.

"You know where to find me," he repeated, softly, as though he hadn't even heard my heated sarcasm.

I left that shaky safety of the complex and went into the raging storm.

---

I remembered the necklace; the small carousel that spun around, hanging on its corroded gold chain. It was a thing of simple splendor but it was disregarded by my friend, Starfire, because of its age, and wornness. She liked the crystal star because it was new and defining of her; she never took it off even in her sickness. And when she and Wally were kissing, the necklace was still hanging around her neck; the little carousel, in the thrift store that was undoubtedly now closed, sat alone, dejected, in cold darkness.

I watched them unnoticed for a while as their lips touched in gentle, unhurried passion, moving innocently against one another. With each moment that they kissed and shared this fervor for one another, I felt an increasing crippling pain in my stomach, as if someone had plunged a dagger there; and each time they pressed their lips back together after they had come up for air from the last kiss, it seemed that the knife inside me was being jerked and twisted, until the deepest, widest hole was left in my spirit. I felt my essence and everything I was, maybe my soul, beginning to seep gently from this wound and away from my numb body, falling with the rain and washing away into the storm-drains in the street, disappearing down into darkness, gone from my existence just like that. Almost at once, I realized I no longer knew who I was.

On the bay windows, the rain had fallen into a monotone patter, streaking the glass and obscuring the view of the outside world from looking in on their passion. With access to my home, I could still see them, and I find myself surprised as I look back on the moment that they did not notice me. In their own private world, it seemed nothing could reach them, as they expressed their love and melded into one spirit, one experience. I stood out from this, excluded; I listened as the sounds they made as they kissed became one with the sounds of the rain and I heard my breath as an alienated thing, a thing that didn't belong there. I felt black and white in this tower where their passion streaked the world with vibrant colors of the rainbow, where everything around them instantly brightened. The juxtaposition of who I was and who they had suddenly become confronted me uncaringly, and I could hear one phrase repeating itself over and over in my mind, melding with their sounds.

I don't belong with them.

It was all I could hear and think of as their lips touched and sealed this fantastic connection they had, and I was almost sure I heard them murmur this phrase repeatedly as they continued with their love. You don't belong with us, Robin. Over and over, I heard this until eventually, the language being spoken dissolved into something I could not understand. Tamaranian, I thought—something that was just between them, and not at all for me. They laughed, a sound that seemed to echo for a long time in my subconscious. It was easy enough to hear the joyous quality in their laughter, as if they had both finally found a soul-mate in the other, and were so perfect for one another that their laughter told the other everything they might need to know, no words required. Beautiful laughter, really, and I listened for quite some time, transfixed. I heard the fading of their voices as I found myself drifting into a quiet, dark place, where I felt very alone, and very cold. Complete isolation.

I had finally fainted. Not from fear of my worst enemy as I had thought would be the most likely scenario in which I might faint, but rather, from the gripping wave of emotions that overtook me when I saw before me the betrayal of the girl I loved.

When I eventually woke, I looked into the west, into the rain, where the shaky complex set, and I stared there for a while.

It was a long time before I left the tower, but it didn't matter when I left, really. The only thing I knew then and there was that my spirit had gone the minute they fell into one. I could have left any time after that and the end result—where I would end up, and who I would end up with—would have still been the same.

The truth was I belonged to Slade the moment I saw them together.

---

The complex was deserted again the day I went back. The rain had frozen and turned to soft clumps of snow in only a matter of days since I left the tower, and so the work at the complex was halted completely, and the entrance was taped off. The worms were dead and it was dark inside, but I noticed, every night as I lingered around there, one single light that was left on and near it, the tape cut down for easy entrance. The light stayed on all night, and every day when the workers put up new tape it was cut down again, and so soon enough they gave up, probably figuring some poor homeless person needed shelter there, and no harm could come from that, and so every day the entrance would beckon to me. I lingered there; when no other place came to my mind to go, the complex, maybe just the sight of it, or perhaps the suddenly positive association that I had recently made with it, provided some strange sense of safety, even though I never went inside, even as the cold, wind, snow and rain would beat upon me. But the light's constant glow was a beacon, a lighthouse—but separated by the waves of my emotions, morals, everything I had ever stood for, I would not cross to it.

Sometimes I saw him standing in the doorway, in the latest hours of the night and into the early morning, looking out. He would see me and I would see him, and for a long time we'd just stare at one another, through the rain and snow and wind until I slunk away to somewhere else—but I'd always return. When morning rolled around, and it was strangely colder than it had been even when it was dark, I found myself shyly approaching the complex once again, only once I was sure that he had left for the day, lingering a good distance back. I saw that now, as if to replace his presence, there was a sweater, a hat, a pair of snow gloves, and a thick black coat left for me, stacked and folded neatly. The garments were plain, no S, but I knew to wear them would be a symbol of what we both already knew but which I was unwilling to admit: that I belonged to him. For the first night I did not wear any of the items, but almost took them, just in case I changed my mind, though I quickly resisted. I knew it was pointless to do so, but I just couldn't let myself give up so easily. I would, in time, but if just for that one day only I wanted to feel as though I was putting up some kind of fight to preserve the morals I had prided myself upon, the morals that classified who I was as a person.

The next day, when the rain froze to a harsher snow and my body shook with that cold and a worsened lonesomeness, I relented and wore the sweater, which, even thick and insulating, didn't ward off the cold completely, but for the first night that was all I wore along with the new gloves. By the second day, it was hailing, not violently, but the freezing ice that had begun to sleet made my blood completely chill, and no matter how I tried to warm myself (I even jogged along a pathway for quite awhile, and worked up a bit of a sweat, but found myself even more uncomfortable and cold when my sweat began to freeze after I had used up all the energy I could commit to running and had to sit down to rest), I still found myself internally chilled and needing another source of warmth. While we stared at one another, he watched, unmoving, as I put the coat over my sweater and then tugged the hat on over my ears. I pulled the hood of the coat over that and then stared across at him for a while, but I still didn't feel well enough to cross to him, to that safety. I slunk off, away from the heat that was there, waiting for me. Still, I felt a new comfort given to me in just that small, wordless transaction we'd had, and I couldn't help but admit I was thankful for that, for what he'd done.

I had disconnected my locator, I think, probably immediately after leaving the tower, but then that time still remains quite a blur to me because my mind was somewhere else entirely, and in keeping with this I took no provisions; no food or clothing suited for the surreal weather, nothing to suggest I wouldn't ever again return to the tower, but I wouldn't, at least not for several days, and never again permanently. I didn't even take my motorcycle; I walked out of the tower and across the bridge and down to the antique store. I bought the carousel necklace with what little cash I was carrying in my pocket; I had left my credit card on my nightstand and of course had not thought to take it, so by the time I spent that dollar I only had about two dollars left—not even enough for a cheeseburger from the drive-thru when you factored in sales tax.

I probably would have been able to get food anywhere I went because everyone knew me and wanted to repay me for everything I did to save the city, but not once, in that whole span of time, however long it really was, away from the tower and not quite close enough to Slade, did I go into any restaurant to even try. It might have been a result of my pride—not wanting to show the city who had once bowed down to me what I had become, but looking back I realize it was not that, because as egotistical as I know I can be, I realize that what really kept me out of any place I could get nourishment was my genuine disregard for my state of being; that was, if I lived or died, it seemed not to matter.

I bought the carousel necklace, and with it I would sit in the park surviving demolition near the complex and would turn it around in my hands, playing with it as it seemed to be the only thing keeping me sane for a span of time entirely too long. I would watch kids from afar having snowball fights and laughing; young lovers skating on the city's only ice-rink, and my spirit could only sink at this sight especially. I tried to distance myself from it and sat in a quiet, unplowed area of the park, where the snow was knee deep. I could still hear laughter but did not see the sources of said sounds, and lapsed into a cold, somehow comforting anonymity as I sat far away, almost invisible to everyone else, somewhat nestled in the snow, freezing, my legs cold and damp—but better than sitting somewhere were I had to watch people having a good time while I was completely miserable. Still, I enjoyed the sounds of their joviality, and would close my eyes, imagining what sort of face might match a certain voice I heard. I made a bit of a game of that, and it also helped to keep me sane for the time being.

I never wanted to leave my spot near the park, and always found myself silently dreading the approaching twilight, when kids would be called home to dinner and the park would clear out, once again leaving me surrounded by what felt like a horrible, soundless void, virtually empty. I wouldn't leave until I had to, when it got too dark and became honestly a little frightening; to stay later and be left in that lonely place would be the worst thing I could have done for my already fragile heart, my unraveling state of sanity. I needed to hear sounds, even if it was just the sounds of far off traffic. At the very least, I had to be somewhere bright. So when the kids left the park each night I would go and find the light of the complex.

I saw Slade leaning against a pillar inside the complex, looking out at the city lights. On the concrete railing near the subway, where I had taken to waiting and watching him, this time there was new boots and socks, a change of pants and underwear, and a pair of snow-pants. I didn't want to take the things because he was watching, and I thought if I did, I would be letting him know the blatant truth of my situation—how much I needed these things, how much I depended on these small gestures he had extended to me, how much I needed him. But it seemed he already knew. He tilted his head slowly, regarding me with that one eye, unmistakably strained, before turning away and looking down at the ground. He would never know how much I appreciated that gesture specifically, so seemingly small and insignificant, but which meant more to me than he could have ever guessed. It was a gesture that enabled me to accept this help; when he was not looking, I took the pile of things and slunk away again, but it was very hard to leave that time.

By this point the nights in the snow were pretty comfortable, I suppose—not comfortable, preferable, or anything like that, but not hostile, either. With the new clothing, I was pretty bundled up, and warm enough that I managed to get a little sleep even lying out in the open, exposed to the elements. I took shelter on nights it snowed heavily in a little opening between the side of the bridge closest to the complex and one of the thick, insulating concrete supports that held the bridge up. It formed a small, snug space that became sort of a little cave for me, protected enough from most of the snow storms I waited out there, even though there always seemed to be snow inside. Warmed by the bridge's light, however, I barely minded the edition of snow and was even able to sleep once while curled up comfortably inside, while I'd been waiting out a particularly nasty snow storm that had started that morning.

That day, I slept for a few hours in my hiding spot and woke up feeling better than I had before I'd dozed off; groggy, and a little disoriented by the shock of coming out of warm sleep and into the cold, but I was doing better. It was the first time I had slept soundly in several days (I had thought at least three, though in retrospect it must have been more) aside from my faint of course, and a few occasions when my eyes would drift closed for maybe five or ten minutes. I hadn't been off to a good start, either, because even before I left the tower I hadn't really been sleeping, when the circumstances allowed us to let our guards down and stupidly stay up all night for fun, something I had done quite a lot, something I now regret doing. In the days since Wally had arrived, my sleep had also been quite infrequent and had almost never been very restful, for a different sort of reason than the all-nighters we'd pulled off, but with the same harmful effects. I had definitely needed to nap, and I was thankful for whatever small peace I had been granted that day which had allowed me to rest undisturbed for a few hours straight.

I think finally resting also clarified my thoughts quite a bit. When I woke I found myself suddenly faced with crucial information that my brain had seemed to miss, or ignore, or maybe had just dismissed when I'd been running on zero sleep, with more restless nights than I could count. And I hadn't just been flooded with crucial information—it had been very crucial information. The first thing I realized was that I was starving.

In terms of food, I had had only a very light breakfast the day Starfire came down with her cold, which had consisted of an apple and some yogurt. And that, then, had been over four days ago, without having consumed anything since that time. My stomach growled helplessly; my mind moaned for nourishment and my judgment cared little for anything else but satisfying bodily needs. I found myself at the complex again, in the early afternoon, when the storm had finally decreased to a simple sprinkling of light, harmless clumps of fluffy snow. I had probably been expecting him to leave a hot dinner for me—at least it was what I had hoped, but in truth I wasn't too far off.

When I got there, however, he wasn't there, and the concrete railing was empty. I slunk down on the bench beneath the railing and nodded off for an unknown period of time until I was woken by a presence as it sat itself next to me on the small bench.

"Unusual time. So has your choice been made, my little one?"

The first thing I thought was: It's great to hear someone else's voice. To have someone talking to me.

I looked over at him, sitting there next to me on the bench in that freezing weather. He looked probably as exhausted as I did, and he was making no attempt to hide it, and that in itself was obvious too. I had never seen him so passive, but then, so could be said for myself, and the less than amazing state we both appeared to be in (though, to be fair, I looked ten times worse, and that went without saying) seemed not to matter to either of us as we looked each other over. There was no personal judging of character, no disdainful glances cast at the other at the pathetic nature of their condition, no snide remarks or laughter about how they'd been reduced from their former self to this. There was a sudden neutrality that seemed to envelope the two of us right then and there, one which I welcomed as a positive change. We looked at one another, purely to get an understanding of the condition of the other. Nothing more, nothing less.

He was staring at me intently as if he was trying to decide how seriously I needed help. I, on the other hand, had concluded that he was simply very tired with only a brief glance at him. It was probably more important to him to have a good understanding of my condition than it was to me at that point to have any understanding at all of his, for obvious reasons (after all, he was in much better shape than I was). Still, I noted his appearance, not caring much, as it didn't mean much; he wore everything he usually did, the soldier swagger with the gleaming metal, and seemed unaffected by the cold, at least, at face value, but if he was beneath the suit he didn't show it. I noticed he had another black garment folded neatly in his lap.

Eventually I shook my head in regards to his question. I did not move, and did not speak—my face did not contort and I did not jump into fighting stance. I sat still next to him and just shook my head. The truth was, I had not been at all alarmed to see him. During that afternoon, the streets were mostly empty; a squirrel or rat or something would scamper by, detachedly, and the wind would make the remaining old wood buildings moan and the trees sway with a whisper, and would make the snow falling whistle hollowly as it resisted against its force, but the place was devoid of people, movement and sound. Wherever there seemed to be emptiness, Slade couldn't be too far away, as I'd come to learn, but I don't say that cynically of him. It was not lost upon me that there was no one else there for me but him, and that I was so alone—but I shook my head.

It still seemed all I could do.

And he didn't seem to expect any deviating response from that. He unfolded the garment, which turned out to be a long black cape, and said, simply, almost immediately, "Well, then you will at least wear this, my little one." He stood up and circled the bench until he was behind were I sat, and he slipped the cape between my back and the concrete surface of the bench and pulled the clips around my neck, fixing them snugly and comfortably. I didn't protest the action. Staring at the office building across from the complex, which was new and shining, I watched windows fill with steam, memorized patterns of snowflakes and water drops dotting the glass—anything so I wouldn't have to see what he was doing. And I did not look at him when he came back around and stood in front of me and fixed my cape in the front so that it was closed to keep the heat in.

Distractedly, I imagined myself inside one of those buildings; I imagined having a small office sandwiched between other offices of other white-collars just like me as I worked to support my family at home, filing papers and typing on a computer all day and night, but I'd be content.

In the end, the bad guy didn't care about those white-collars. They were only something that could be used, wastefully, like running water or toilet paper, in the pursuit of an ultimate goal, and nothing else. They didn't care about your past, what you'd gone through, who loved you and who you loved back. If they wanted the attention of the stupid young kid they were after, they'd blow up your office building as a warning to that stupid young kid. That was your only worth in their eyes. Maybe that would have been okay. It would have been so much less painful had the bad guy been willing to let me off the hook so easily with a quick, painless death. But my bad guy wasn't so merciful. Wasn't done with me. Never would be.

"You've gotten so thin."

I had barely noticed that one of his gloved hands was still lingering on my chest where he had secured the cape around me. Even through all the thick layers of clothing he had given me, he could still probably feel the ribs I knew jutted out. Because it wasn't as if I had been the biggest eater in the first place, especially not since Paris and getting back from fighting the Brotherhood of Evil, when somehow something so important as eating became almost irrelevant. At most in a day, I might have a piece of fruit for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and sometimes nothing for dinner. If I had anything, it typically consisted of whatever was most readily available, and sometimes that meant a bag of chips or a candy bar.

I hadn't been much of a health nut because weight had never taken to me, no matter how much I ate, but I didn't take pains to enjoy that privilege. I was restrained, at least in the quantity of what I ate. I admit, however, that before the incident with Terra and Slade, I had been much more mature about my eating habits; a big, healthy breakfast everyday, a light lunch, a dinner with plenty of protein and iron, all the food groups checked off on some imaginary master list each night before I went to bed. No dessert. But for some reason, after Terra's death, I fell off the wagon of good eating habits, and quickly. It was really the only indication that I had been affected by her death, which I tried not to talk about, but the change was obvious. I only ate when I could not function, and, a rare occurrence, it became frightening to feel the hollows in my stomach when I had let myself go hungry too long. But now, in retrospect, maybe there had been more to it than just being rattled over her death. It was the guilt, I realize now. Maybe I had, at some secret level, wanted to die, even back then, when I was still reasonably competent.

"God," he said, softly, staring at my chest. "You were already so thin as it was, Robin, and now look at you—you're as thin as a stick. When was the last time you ate?"

I still did not look at him when I spoke: "I don't know, Slade."

I saw out of the corner of my eye that he was still eyeing me warily, taking in the thin but unmistakable lines of jutting ribs and bone, the shrunken skin even beneath the layers I wore. The thickness of those things he'd given me could not conceal what he had correctly phrased, a paper, or stick like figure that looked as if it would collapse with a slight breeze. He ran his fingers over my chest and I could feel my ribs groan with this feeling; like being played like a xylophone, the ribs seemed to clack and cry in harmonious rising tones—but maybe I imagined that too. My stomach contorted in hunger, and it was probably then and there that I felt, for the first time, tears coming on; since leaving the tower, sleeping alone, avoiding people and avoiding the reality of my situation, refusing to confront it— it was now that I felt the urge to cry as I now looked down at his hand running against the length of my ribs.

Maybe it was that I saw what I had become for the first time, in finally looking; maybe it was that I saw that he was part of it too, or maybe it was both, or neither. Maybe I was realizing my situation, truly and without lying, for the first time, and maybe I was just beginning to comprehend what this situation meant for myself, my future. Maybe it was the first time that I realized what had really happened, remembered Starfire, and Wally, and that realization in its completeness seemed to crush me all at once. I saw what the two of them had done to me; I saw Slade's hands and saw what he wanted to do for me. A single tear drop slid out of my eye and beneath my mask, and splashed upon my knee. Another followed until I was weeping, and I watched my tears fall onto my snow-pants and gather into small pools on the waterproof material.

He sat down, and suddenly I found him pulling me into his arms and holding me. To think back on that moment is odd, and I don't forget that moment easily. It's strange, of course, to think that an enemy like Slade could do something like that—let alone have, in his spirit, the capacity of kindness for that such action. It's also odd to think that, again, neither of us seemed to care what was being done anymore. He didn't care about how it may have looked to be holding me—and if he thought that showing me this kindness was an act of weakness, he'd never looked stronger than when he did it. In turn I didn't care, either—didn't squirm or writhe to get out of that grip. It seemed for a moment that neither of us knew each other; that we were two citizens in the city just living and coexisting, like I had been in a car crash and a bystander, Slade, had been there to hold me until the ambulance came, keep me from going into shock and dying.

To be honest it didn't feel like this was the same guy who had tried to kill me; this was not the person who had planted probes in my friends or caused me to dabble in evil like I did. He was a virgin to me, unchanging in his sudden, imaginary anonymousness. A presence that seemed all at once impermanent but lasting, like, in the imaginary car crash scenario, the bystander who would not stay long after said car crash, but when I woke up in the hospital, alive because of that person, I'd remember that person always and thank them unendingly, even though I would never even know that person's name. This was Slade now. We both had seemed to believe or pretend this, coming into this strange new light and out of the darkness of our past. In the light falling snow we were reborn, it seemed, and suddenly there was hope for something new and brighter between us, only hindered by the remembrance of our pasts, which did not dissipate so easily.

Slade held me and I laid in his arms, unmoving, but I thought, tiredly, still trying to cling to who I used to be: I can't. I can't do this. I can't give up on her.

I realized in that small moment that it was not Slade who was keeping me from giving in; it was Starfire. The memory of the love she had given me was stronger than the past pain Slade had caused me. I could replace the memory of the uncaring blows his hands had dealt me in the past with the sensation of his hands now, how they comforted me, but I would not allow myself to forget how much Starfire had done for me in the past simply because of this thing that was happening now. I suddenly felt very trapped, stuck between a rock and a hard place as I laid there in Slade's arms, feeling him run his fingers through my hair. I could only think about Starfire as he did. I realized it was no longer about Slade; he didn't need to do any more to convince me that he was my friend, that he was on my side. It was about her, what she would or wouldn't do. She was, perhaps, the only thing keeping me from giving into him right then and there. I wanted to, I think, but I had thought—I can't. I needed something from her first, something to make me decide one way or another. Seeing her with Wally hadn't been enough to make me give in. I needed something more.

He held me close, and I laid there, listening to the city birds, sparrows I think, in the far off park chirping quietly and benignly. He was warm, and it almost didn't feel like it was snowing around us as it was, increased now by falling darkness of late afternoon; the metal of his suit and his strong arms served to insulate me thoroughly, and it was not lost upon me that I was the warmest I had been in the time since leaving the tower, untouched by the cold and freezing rain and elements around us. I laid my head on his chest and listened to his heart beat beneath the metal; it was clearly heard, maybe a lot louder than I had been expecting, like a hammer against cloth. I was glad to hear it, especially after the incident with Trigon when I hadn't been quite sure if while I was dealing with Slade, I was simultaneously dealing with an undead (not the first time, but it was Slade we were talking about, and a zombie Slade sounded nothing short of terrifying). Nonetheless it was steady and comforting, slowly lulling my tears back into my eyes and quieting my shaking until I was still and calm.

I felt his fingers running gently through my hair and was soothed by that; the hands that had once dealt painful and unrestrained blows to my skin now caressed the tresses like they had the fragility of a newborn bird. He shushed me until my tears had stopped and then he did not speak, but he didn't need to. I laid in his arms and listened to the heart beat, the gentle thumping that drew me calm, and felt grounded in reality for the first time since leaving the tower. I suddenly felt that I had some purpose—felt that, if he cared enough about me to comfort me this way, then I must be worth something—and I felt whatever disregard I had had for my own life slipping away with his touch. Suddenly, I cared about the future again.

I realized why I came and stared at him every night; the human side to him, which I had almost known when he'd made me his apprentice, was there and real and beckoning. I wanted to go to him, and wanted to hear his heartbeat and know that there was still something warm in the world. I had wanted to know that there was something left for me, something that I could meld my life into if the worst scenario possible, the thing I had been fearing ever since I first realized how much I loved Starfire, manifested itself, something new I could become a part of. I wanted human companionship and wanted comfort my friends had not given me, a fatherly touch, where I didn't have to fend for myself, and things were taken care of for me. In him, I had found that person I could go to, a new path my future could take if need be. Just the idea that he was there if I needed him comforted me.

And had he not found me on the bench that day and instilled me with this comfort, I might have let myself die, or…killed myself, if from fatigue and altered judgment (at least, I believed I would never take my own life if I was thinking clearly), as soon as that very night. My enemy had saved my life again. I thanked him for that.

I nodded off briefly while laying in his arms after I stopped weeping. I was soothed and warm and even suffice to say comfortable—and again, without much consideration to the past or who we used to be or how we had viewed one another, it seemed not to matter what either of us did in that time or place, and I did not blame or fault myself for allowing myself to give into sleep after I woke up with hunger pains and realized what had happened. At the most basic of levels it would not have mattered to me if he had been the one to kill me in my sleep, if only because the resurgence of my zest for life had come from him and him alone, and if he had only been doing this to lure me into a false sense of security so that he could finally end my life once and for all, then I didn't really want to be living anyway when suddenly his comfort to me was the only thing I could find to justify my life in that sad moment.

In reality though, I didn't even consider this possibility for a moment. I was not at all worried for my safety and did not think to keep myself awake, to move or squirm or protest, though I little knew when I fell asleep anyway. It seemed either way not to matter—because either way I had a primal understanding that I would be fine, that, if he was the one in charge of looking out for me, I would be okay. He became like a god to me instantly—and I like a blind follower, who believed that whatever his plans were were only for the best, and would be the best for me in the end. But I was not so blind because in retrospect if I were to pick anyone to be this so called god then Slade was undoubtedly the most fitting; he who knew me, who was stern but caring, ultimately as he appeared to be as I lay there so close to him, who wanted a son as much as I needed a father.

And I was okay, as I had always believed I would be: even reaching to the earliest battles with Slade, my life never seemed to loom or deter over the line of death and living. It's strange to say but in a lot of ways I think I trusted him more than I could ever understand, and he knew that, too. How reassuring, I have to say it is, to fall asleep in the presence of someone like that—to be there, weak and sad and helpless, and then to wake up better than before you'd fallen asleep, having been protected by this so called enemy. Allowed to mentally and physically rest as they watched over you. That moment might have been all it took for him to gain my trust completely, even if I did not realize it at the time. I was a fool to think I could avoid him—and I was a fool to still try, even then.

When I woke it was night, and the streetlights had gone on. The closest one to where we sat was a few yards away, so we were now sitting mostly in darkness, but Slade had not moved me. It was still snowing though it was considerably falling lighter, more harmlessly, in soft, fluffy clumps. Snow fell on the metal of his suit but I was still dry and very warm, actually, very comfortable nestled against him. I was woozy and my head felt heavy, and even after waking initially I laid there for a while against him, half asleep, listening to the sounds of the city echoing far away from our little dwelling, our own spontaneously created world. He stroked my hair silently and I nodded in and out of light sleep for a little while until I was unable to deny my stomach any longer and moaned in wakefulness.

I was hungrier than ever when I woke up, and what was happening with my stomach was strange and frightening. A basic emptiness, one that was painful but dulled (which was arguably worse than a merely painful sensation as now it suggested that I was perhaps dying of hunger), consumed me suddenly. I felt the need to vomit even though there was nothing in my stomach for that function. I groaned again, and looked up at him, tiredly, struggling to keep my eyes open. I almost wanted to go back to sleep, but I resisted, somehow suddenly feeling that if I didn't resist I wouldn't wake up again—and again, this new liveliness, the desire to remain, was probably a credit to his own will for me to live, not my own. I was doing things for him even then, even before I knew it.

Barely clinging to consciousness, I had looked up at him quietly and said nothing. His own eye found my sleepy gaze and looked down upon me as he continued to stroke my hair. He was noticeably tired but I could see, instantly, that he would not fall asleep as I had—a protector mentality that was not lost on me. His eye squinted a little bit, indicating his sensing of what I felt. He shifted me closer, drawing me in so tightly that, even if I had had the strength to move, I probably couldn't have.

"Have you made your choice yet, little one?"

I stared up at him, and it took me a minute to formulate the two words I said, that bound me, that pained me, what made it impossible to escape from my previous relations to Starfire. But even on that dreary night in his arms, warm and comfortable, protected and cared for, it seemed all I could do for anything I had once been. "I can't," I said softly, and blinked at him slowly, receiving for what was perhaps the first time a sigh rising from the mask, and watching the eye close in what seemed to be brief defeat. I felt his arms tighten around me, and I found myself maybe unconsciously curling closer to him for warmth. I wanted to give into him, I really did, but I repeated, the words seeming detached, not my own—I can't. I can't.

It was a minute before he spoke again. "Alright, Robin." He sounded tired and wary, and maybe there was a hint of resigned frustration in his voice. Mentally, he seemed to be exhausted, maybe from fighting the then losing battle that was trying to help me; physically, exhausted from always staying awake to watch, to make sure I didn't get too far over that line of life and death. He was tired but he didn't stop stroking my hair, and he didn't loosen his arms. That, either, was not lost to me.

His voice was soft, but very stern when he continued: "Alright. I will let you go back out there tonight, because you will come back of your own free will, but I am not going to let you leave now without eating. You will die if you don't eat something soon, do you understand me?"

I nodded, silently.

"Will you let me get you dinner?"

I nodded again, slowly.

He closed his eye, this time, as if in praying thankfulness. He sighed, in that same fashion. "Alright. Good boy. You were worrying the hell out of me with all this nihilism bullshit. So unlike you, but we're going to get you back on the right track now."

And then fluidly he stood, without faltering even slightly, and hoisted me in his arms and laid me over his shoulder. I groaned a little, but didn't protest. I felt secure in his arms and knew he wouldn't drop or hurt me; didn't care where he took me, because I knew it wouldn't be bad either way—knew that he knew what was best for me and how to take care of me. I rested my head against the crook of his neck and closed my eyes, listening to the sounds of the night contrasted comfortingly with the heartbeat I could sense in his spirit, maybe hallucinated, and his breathing, which was calm and soft. He walked easily and the slight bounce in his walking seemed to lull me effortlessly into a calm that seems unimaginable in being associated with someone like Slade, so far away from who he was supposed to be, his character—and therefore all the more comforting.

"My god, you're light," he said softly, and ran his hand down my back soothingly, still bouncing me lightly as he walked, maybe making a point to after he had realized how much it was relaxing me. "We'll have to fix that, won't we? I'm going to get you a nice big steak and we'll see if we can fatten you up a little bit, hm?"

With my eyes closed, I felt myself blush ever so slightly—a little indication of my old self returning, my spirit warming, and something brighter on the horizon. I mumbled an "okay" and nodded off again, as he carried me to wherever to do what he had promised.

He took me to what I realized very quickly was an underground villain hangout—where the bad guys came to mingle and eat and have drinks and speak of their evil plans, the kind of place I had hoped did not exist, at least in my city. We had gone down what reminded me of a secret tunnel to get to this so called "speakeasy" and though I was barely awake I remember it pretty well. It was a sleek metal tunnel that ran beneath the city for quite some length, reminding me a lot of the hideouts in Gotham that were on police radar, always watched, for whatever activity might be inside. How the hell could the Titans and I have missed a place like this? Maybe once I patched things up with Starfire, I would spend some time figuring out exactly where this place was and what exactly was going down inside so my team and I could go do our thing once I had confirmation of illegal activity.

…Ah, who was I kidding?

I couldn't have given less of a shit.

A man in a nice black suit opened the door and welcomed Slade in like he was some sort of respected regular there, though he cautioned him to keep an eye on his "guest," which would be me, because the majority of the people who hung out there hated my guts and would have done anything to put an end to me, and everyone knew it too. Slade had the butler take us in through the back way, because he did not want any trouble (not that he couldn't have handled trouble, but like before, he seemed far from interested in fun and games), and into a private room that probably belonged to him. There was a table in the center of the room, with two leather wingback arm chairs on either side, but otherwise it was sparsely furnished. The table was set with folded cloth napkins and silverware and a pristine white table cloth. A heavy crystal ashtray sat in the center of the table, also pristine as though it had never been used. I remember the room hadn't had any windows, had smelled of smoke, and was very warm. It had been a little hard to breathe as we sat there, I remember.

Once we were seated, he sent this butler back to get me the meal he had scribbled down on one of those ordering cards used in informal restaurants. The butler asked if he wanted the usual for himself, which he did; the "usual" turned out to be various cocktails along with a more threatening tray of shot glasses, their contents mysterious and probably pretty powerful, if the dark color and copious smell was anything to go by. Slade told the butler to do the task at hand quickly, or he'd have him killed. He also told the butler that if anything made its way into my food, for any reason, he would not only have him killed but his family and friends as well. In all seriousness, the guy looked like he was about to piss himself and quickly agreed to the terms and conditions: he had everything at the table within five minutes, reportedly giving away a steak for another patron so that I could have it. On the plate also, there was those breakfast potatoes that I really liked with steak, and a chocolate milkshake on the side.

In that time between the event with Terra and my trip to Paris, when I'd been at my most unhealthy and unbalanced in my eating habits (though I can't gripe at myself too much—at least then I was eating something), I would often eat meals like this any chance I got, because steak and potatoes was my favorite, keeping my metabolism up for when I trained rigorously. Chocolate milkshakes were also my favorite, and I liked them for that same reason.

"How did you know," I asked, but it came out as more of an uninterested statement as I watched him cutting the steak with a carving type knife and fork. The steak itself was medium rare, just how I liked it. I watched him cut it into very manageable squares with a certain practiced care that was almost a phenomenon, seemingly, to witness.

"Well—you remember Terra, of course, if your little rant to me the other day when you were having your temper tantrum was anything to go by. It seems that while you were de-bugging your tower you missed a few of the cameras she put up, little Robin…"

I blushed a little at his reminding me of how I'd acted as I'd been leaving the complex that first day. I could only be embarrassed, remembering how I'd mocked him and called him an asshole, especially after what he had just done for me, more or less saving my life. But even if being embarrassed was perhaps something I deserved, it was the last thing I should have been obsessing over in that moment.

Considering what he'd said about the cameras, it was clear what should have been the most prevalent thing on my mind. If I gave two shits about the security and safety of myself and my friends, I should have been interrogating him at lightning speed about the whereabouts of the cameras, not feeling guilty that I'd torn into him the other day when the information I was learning now was proof in itself that he truthfully had deserved it. The kind of person who can spy on underage teenagers and not feel the slightest hint of remorse in doing so does not deserve anything but nasty words and hatred. He was a huge asshole, and I had every right to have torn into him like I did.

But to be honest, Terra's cameras were the last thing I wanted to hear about as I sat there, if only because I didn't want to have to confront him about it, consumed by this new shy manner I had adopted. If I acknowledged what he'd said, really took it into consideration, then I would have had to be disturbed at the fact that he'd had ways to watch us even after we realized what was going on and did our best to remove any spying devices from the tower. If I had acknowledged that, I would have had to realize that he could have potentially gone and checked in on the Titans at any time, and I couldn't even imagine all the things he had seen since he had Terra put those cameras up. I sure as hell didn't want to try, either, willing myself not to think of specific instances he could have peeked in on had he wanted to. The last time I'd been in the tower, how I had fainted in my ultimate weakness after I watched Starfire and Wally together, was the first of these instances I told myself not to think about in regards to this new knowledge.

Looking back, however, I don't let myself off the hook so easily. I had thought that by leaving without a fight the day Slade had confronted me for the first time since our battle with Trigon, when he'd woken me from my nap inside the complex, I was avoiding the very real possibility that he would take me to the tower himself after subduing me, to force me to witness what he had been speaking of. And I had thought that by going back myself he would never have the pleasure of seeing my reaction to that betrayal as it played out before me.

But through the eye of these cameras he spoke of, it was a distinct possibility that he had been able to enjoy my reaction anyway.

The thought would have devastated me, so I didn't think it. I forced myself not to consider it thoroughly or with any real conviction, even though somewhere in my mind amongst everything else, I already knew the truth. My restraint, if you could call it that, against fighting him had been all for nothing.

Wanting to move away from the subject of Terra's actions and all the dooming realizations that subject would bring, I quickly said, not giving him the chance to elaborate, to tell me more about how I'd failed and how he knew everything about me, "I'm sorry about that the other day. I didn't mean to…"

Yep. I could have screamed my head off about the fact that he was still spying on us; could have berated him with questions and demanded answers, called him every horrible name I could think of in retaliation for his disgusting actions. And if I didn't want a fight, I could have simply stopped him from continuing and then stayed quiet. I could have done any of these things, and again, I had every right to do any of them. So what do I end up doing? I apologize to the man.

I truthfully had gone off the deep end.

He stopped what he was doing and looked up at me, maybe a little bit surprised. His eye was a little wider and brighter than usual when he first fixed his stare onto me, but quickly, his expression, what little I could see of it, warmed and softened, and I was sure he was smiling. He put down the cutting instruments and reached across the table, taking one of my hands in his and caressing it briefly.

"I know you didn't, little one, but your apology means very much to me. My, you've grown so mature since we first met. Astounding, really," he said softly, giving my hand a squeeze before releasing it, only to reach up and ruffle my hair lightly before retreating completely back to the task of cutting up my steak.

The ruffle of my hair hadn't been a gesture I much liked, but in that moment I felt too shy to say anything about it. Maybe it was simply that I couldn't think of anything to say that would be meaningful enough to even justify a response. I didn't get the sense that Slade had done it to be spiteful or condescending, but there was something about the way in which he'd done it that made me dislike it all the same. Since I'd been little, I usually hated people touching my hair, and it was crazy to think that he of all people would be the one able to touch it as much as he had, more than anyone else ever had been able to. My archenemy; I hadn't even allowed my parents to touch it! And yet Slade seemed to think he had that right. I know that Slade wasn't hurting me or anything like that, and I know that I had been comforted by the way he'd been stroking my hair earlier when he'd held me, but I just didn't think it was fair to allow him this privilege that no one else had, and I certainly did not want this to become a regular thing with him.

I was maybe working up the courage to tell him off about the issue when I found myself instantly disregarding the subject completely as I watched with deep confusion what he did next. Setting down the carving implements, he pulled a sort of thermometer-looking device out from his belt and stuck it into one of the pieces of steak that he'd carefully cut. He glanced down at the device, holding the tool with one hand and drumming the fingers of the other on the table as he waited, I assumed, for something to happen.

"What the hell is that?" I asked after a moment, bemused.

"Testing for poison," he said like it was the most normal thing in the world, like it was something everybody did before they ate. In reality, I didn't think it was something anyone did because I was almost one hundred percent sure technology like that did not exist, at least not on any widely known scale. I now know he must have created it himself; back then I would have thought that something like that would have had to come from some rocket scientist or expert mathematician, but back then I had no idea the type of things Slade was able to craft, and all on his own. He did everything on his own, of his own volition. No one working for him but himself. Similarly, what he created was for him, and him alone. He made inventions he could have sold and made millions upon millions of dollars off of but chose to keep all for himself—and for me.

He must have thought, concerning my expression, that I was confused at his reason for the testing, because he elaborated a little: "I don't trust that asshole. He associates with some of the worst kind of scum this world has to offer. And, no, I'm not referring to myself, before you make some witty remark, thank you very much. I'm talking about people who would give their left arm to see you dead."

I understood why he was doing it, but I didn't understand how. Even before having seen all the things I have since then, before having a good understanding of all the kinds of things Slade could do, I think I realized even then that it would be a really bad thing to be on this guy's bad side. He could do so much to you, and I was realizing that even then, I think.

"I wasn't going to make any remark, Slade," I said quietly.

The thing made a small sound, drawing me out of my pondering about this device. He glanced at it, seemed pleased, and then went about testing the potatoes and the milkshake in the same fashion. When he was apparently satisfied, he removed the gadget, wiped it clean with his napkin, and put it back away in his utility belt before pushing the plate and glass in my direction. "Poison free. Now eat that slowly. You're not leaving until you eat all of it but there's no need to rush. Just relax."

I didn't even touch the plate at first, feeling a little horrified in knowing that he was concerned enough about me being poisoned that he'd actually had to test my food. It wasn't exactly a ringing endorsement of the chef of my meal or the place we'd been at, and it made the plate look a lot less appetizing. Again, I suddenly found myself not wanting to die, and a potentially poisoned steak was the last thing I was going to eat, even if it had been the only food left in existence, if I hadn't eaten for three weeks rather than three days, or however long it actually was. I must have been feeling a little bit more like my old self because I would have rather let myself wither away slowly and painfully than be taken down by some lowlife who happened to realize a certain steak was being sent to everyone's favorite hero, and had decided to act. No way, I thought.

Again sensing what I was feeling, Slade nodded and unfolded his hands, grabbing one of the pieces of steak off the plate in his gloved fingers. His other hand went up to his face and unclipped his mask, shoving it to the side just enough to expose his mouth and nothing else, simultaneously obscuring my view of his eye. He smiled at me as he did this; a smile that exposed perfect, white teeth, stretching his thin, chapped-looking lips. He had a rough, white goatee, and he looked unshaven from what I could tell. His skin was very tan. I was glad he had skin this time.

He threw the piece of steak in his mouth and I watched him chew and then swallow the morsel down. He repeated with a potato, and then threw back a small swig of the milkshake.

"Tastes good to me. Good meal. I'll have to compliment that moron of a chef they've got working here," he said, the last part more to himself than to me, I think, as he clipped the mask back into place, blinking when he had secured it so he could once again see out of the hole cut into it for his eye. He fixed his gaze onto me and gestured to the plate, as if to say 'help yourself,' before once again folding his hands in front of him on the table.

I was floored. Slade had just willingly shown me part of his face, like it was nothing to him at all. Had he meant to do that?

Well, even knowing now how far over the line of insanity he'd already been teetering, even then, it's hard to decide. Something tells me he hadn't even really realized what he was doing when he did it, but then, I wasn't sure he even really cared by that point. To be honest, I don't think he would have fret at all if the whole world simultaneously found out his identity, if his name and number became common knowledge amongst the entire population. Why would he fret over something like that when he had so much bigger things to worry about?

"Okay," I breathed out weakly, but it took me a moment before I was able to pull my bewildered gaze away from his now completely masked face and onto the plate before me.

Even with the idea of my food being poisoned having been put to rest by the confidence he had shown me in eating it himself, the simple idea of eating the steak, even cut into small pieces like he had for me, seemed like a real arduous task. Still, I was really hungry, and the good smells coming from the plate seemed to be enough incentive to finally get me to start eating.

I picked up the fork and jabbed one of the pieces of steak, and brought it to my mouth. It was soft and almost melted in my mouth. Really good. Had I cared more about the present time, had I not been thinking about Starfire and Wally and everything else I had just learned about Slade, I might have been really impressed. The milkshake was also very good. After the first couple bites, I felt myself getting lost in the food and the pleasure it was bringing me, my mind beginning to slowly drift away from my previous worry and discomfort and to a less concerned frame of mind. How couldn't it have? It was the first real meal I had eaten in who knew how long, and I didn't think there was any harm in enjoying it.

I was so hungry that I barely noticed him watching me with that one speculative eye. With the idea of poison completely gone from my mind, I had gone from a few nervous nibbles on the food to eating like an animal, getting crumbs and butter and stains and the like on myself, dirtying my face, but if it bothered him he didn't show it. He seemed very pleased and his shot glasses went untouched, disregarded, as he watched me—and had I really looked into that one eye I would have noticed the adoring, fatherly quality had come back, and even as he scolded me to slow down I could see his eye shining and could hear him purring just very slightly.

"Slow down, my little one," he told me as I shoved more of the food in my mouth, ravaging the plate like a madman. "I know you're hungry but you'll get sick if you eat that too fast." And when I wouldn't slow down to the way he liked, because I had really gotten going by tasting the food and it was too hard to resist, he gently tugged the plate away and pushed the milkshake in my direction, as more of a chaser than anything, so that I would take a break from the food and not get sick.

I didn't protest—it was what he wanted, and unconsciously I had already set out to please him, even if I didn't realize it—and I sipped the milkshake even though I wanted more steak pretty badly. I looked up at him and noticed that now, without me eating like I had, his gaze had somehow slipped sadly back into that tired, deplored presence, not so avidly showing that quality this time, but I could see what he was thinking in his one eye, for the first time very clearly, whereas before I had always been unable to read him. He was thinking about what I would do once I finished my dinner; where I would go and who I would go to, and how it wouldn't be to him.

He threw one of the shots back with intense skill between the slots of his mask (I wasn't sure why he didn't just remove his mask again, since he'd seemed so comfortable to do it before, in order to drink the shot, but I think that he probably wasn't even really aware what he was doing, maybe not even realizing he was drinking, or didn't want to exude any energy he didn't have to) and seemed not to miss a drop, slamming the glass down on the table as bar-hoppers triumphantly do, but there was none of that exultant quality in his demeanor as he did. His eye was sad and drooped, like he was feeling the effects of the alcohol hit him suddenly and was winded. But he wasn't. As I've come to learn, Slade does not get drunk, no matter how much he drinks.

"How did you know that one wasn't poisoned? You didn't test it," I asked, in a deflective manner, knowing what he was about to ask just by his sudden expression and the way he was staring at me, and wanting to avoid it.

His expression did not change, and his voice sounded openly sad when he answered my question after a brief pause. I don't think he appreciated the way I was trying to dance around what he really wanted to talk about. Still, he raised his hand again and tapped his finger twice in the center of his mask, where his nose would have been beneath it. "I can smell it with the drinks. Alcohol was the first thing I learned to test because it's the first thing someone will spike. It's the easiest to spike, because most people don't know enough about alcohol to really know what to look for as being out of place. They think that bitter, bitter taste that starts to burn their throat is supposed to be there. It isn't. It's not just a powerful shot. That's the cyanide, the arsenic, the rat poison, even. I have a lot of enemies, Robin, and I like to drink, so I had to learn the skill. And, recently…I've….gotten relatively decent at…sensing things, if you know what I mean?"

I didn't.

"Anyway, can I ask you something now?" he continued without even giving me a chance to answer, though if he had I don't know what I would have said.

"Yeah, go ahead," I said, looking into the milkshake. I already knew what he was going to ask even before he said it. I started to nervously suck on the straw in my milkshake glass, chewing it between my teeth in anticipation for what I knew would come.

"Won't you please come home with me, my little one? I'll be honest with you. You've just been worrying me to death. I can't sleep."

And there it was.

I took my mouth off of the straw and stared at him, my eyes tired and wary and matching his. I didn't know what to say. "…You can't sleep?"

"No, I can't, if you want to know the truth," he said, and threw another shot back. "I told you I haven't given up on you and every night you're out there…—why are you protesting this? You know you'll come back to me, don't you, Robin? You're a smart boy, so you must know you'll come back to me, don't you?"

The word slipped out before I could stop it, but it was true. "Yes."

"So then why are you doing this?"

I could hear the conviction in his voice and it was that conviction that made a very real truth become known to me, one that was simultaneously disturbing and comforting, somehow. That conviction told me immediately and without any wondering on my part that no matter what he would not give up on me. I had thought, as I sat there listening to him ramble about poison and alcohol, that he didn't even sound like himself, but now I know that he sounded more like Slade than he ever had before. Because now I could hear it: there was nothing to mask the true driven nature that is only characteristic of Slade. Nothing to obscure what he wanted and how he would do anything to get it. Nothing to hide his intent. No condescending words. No cryptic bullshit. He was finally being straight with me, for maybe the first time ever, and I realized quickly afterwards that the Slade I had been sitting with that night had been probably the closest I had come to the real Slade since meeting him. Not the closest I would ever come, but the closest I had come at that time.

This was not the Slade I had grown to know, to despise; the Slade who had never seemed to care about anything but himself. He seemed torn apart by my absence, worried to death like a father for a sickly son, maybe even derailing a little bit. Something about the way he was acting seemed more than just a little strange. At first I was sure he was drunk, but it seemed improbable that he would be able to carry himself as smoothly as he did during some of our moments together if he had been. He had, it seemed, put all his effort, his energy, his sanity, into making sure that I was cared for, comfortable. But when it came to himself? It seemed that he had let himself fall apart just ever so slightly—not enough to be a mess, but enough that it was noticeable—and he had done it so he could focus on me. I couldn't believe it, and couldn't believe how flattered I felt for quite some time afterward.

That is, until I found out the real reason he was acting so strangely.

But during that time, I maybe had had myself convinced that he really had changed, and I remember how horrible I had felt, the guilt crushing me with an unmatched intensity to any other emotion I might have been feeling that night, when I realized that it was because of me that someone was feeling this way. Someone was losing sleep because of me. Sounds romantic and endearing, and even though it really flattered me I really would have rather not hurt someone in this way, even if that someone was Slade. Even if he deserved to toss and turn night after night after what he had done to me and so many others in the past, I did not want to be the one personally responsible for that kind of pain. I could pretend that I hoped someone else would deal this sort of pain to him—so that I would not have to feel that guilt myself but he would still get what he deserved—but that would have been a blatant lie, a charade anyone could have seen through. The truth was, I did not want to see him like this, do this to him. That wasn't who I was, or ever wanted to be.

"I'm sorry, Slade," I said softly, and looked down into the frosty milkshake glass on the table before me. I didn't touch it, feeling suddenly ashamed, unworthy.

"Why?" he said. He set down the shot that he had been pulling to his mask to throw back, and the eye fixed upon me, drooped in sadness of what I realized was my fatigue.

"I can't come with you—n-not now, okay? I just—you were right, okay?" I was crying again; tears started quickly and fell in rapids. "You were right, okay, but I can't—s-she was everything to me and s-she—I d-don't…"

He stood up and came over to me, pulling his chair over to my side of the table so he could sit next to me. He took the napkin up from the table and dried my eyes gently, with what I can only describe as an almost loving touch, the kind of practiced nature that made me believe he was as sober as can be, until I was quiet again and I had stopped. I didn't resist as he cleaned my face, wiping off some of the crumbs and smears of food that had been ignored while I wildly ate, and I could just barely turn him down when he asked me, softly,

"Will you take your mask off, please?"

I closed my eyes and shook my head. I know he had shown me a part of his own face, trusted me with that (even though really there was little I could learn from just a brief view of the lower half of his face), and even though I felt like I owed him something, I was not sure I could give him that much. However, I gave him what I could: "I c-can't—not n-now, okay?"

And I started to cry again, and he continued to clean my eyes with that care and lovingness and did not ask me to remove my mask again that night. He heard me say "not now" and inferred that I would eventually do this for him, just not that night. He was inferring correctly, because I would, eventually. It seemed the little I could give him and owed him, and even though it went against everything the old Robin would have condoned, I could not deny that what I had done felt right. I had always vowed to do the right thing, and that little reassurance to Slade had been no exception. Well, that's what I had convinced myself anyway, that I had only given him that reassurance because it was the polite thing to do. But I know that wasn't the case. I'll tell you right now up front. The truth was, simply: I cared. That's just it.

When I had stopped crying I opened my eyes and looked at him. He was looking back at me and the expression of fatigue in that eye was unchanging. I heard him sigh within the mask, and for a while he said nothing—just sitting there, looking at me, thinking, observing, speculative. Appearing even more tired than before, if that was possible.

"I h-have to talk to her," I said softly.

His eye dimmed at my words and he sighed. He got up and walked back over to his side of the table, dragging his chair with him, and briefly regarded the remaining shots before passively swiping them off the table with a gentle but uncaring hand. I watched the sturdy shot glasses, made to withstand those triumphant bar-hoppers or Slade, roll unharmed across the floor in several directions, their contents splashing everywhere as they did and pooling on the metal floor. He watched them too, his eye following their paths in the same objective manner, and said, as he did, "I don't want you to. If you go back to her, she will only hurt you more and you're already so broken. But I am not keeping you hostage here. You are free to do as you please, and I suppose that if you truthfully think that's best then you should. But, you will come back to me, won't you, Robin? Promise me."

I looked up from the floor, where I had been focusing my attention, only after I had finally worked up the courage to look him in the eye, and to say what I did.

"Yes. I promise," I said softly, and meant it.

I finished the meal and stood up, feeling tired but a lot better since I had eaten. He walked me out out the back way and when we reached the street I turned to start my walk back to the tower, but before I could get even a foot away from him, he pulled me back and made sure my coats were zipped up and my cape was secured. I started off again, slowly, and I thought I would get away that time, deciding that there was nothing left to say between us. However, after a long moment of hesitation on his part, he called me back again, a second time.

"Come here, Robin," he said, sounding stern, and I turned and made my way to him without hesitating. I couldn't have expected what would happen, but I found myself completely unafraid for whatever possible scenario I might be faced with. I mean, if he had wanted to kill or kidnap me, he would have done it already. He'd had ample opportunity. There was no risk to my freedom or safety and I knew it.

I came to him and he put his arms around me, and hugged me. I could hear his voice falter in a wary, tired pain when he spoke again, breaking on the verge of something that may have been tears. It was almost impossible to tell, because even though he did sound very weakened in that moment, conducive of tears, I was convinced that Slade had never cried once in the entirety of his life, and I wasn't even sure what tears might sound like coming from someone like him. I'm almost certain now, looking back on the situation, that I had only been imagining this tearfulness. Maybe I liked the idea that I could possibly reduce Slade to do something so uncharacteristic, and wanted to believe that he was actually shedding tears over me. I'm not saying that he didn't care about me that much back when this was going on, but I'm saying that I can't be certain about anything when it comes to Slade's emotions. Without a face to use as a guide, it's very hard to tell. The only thing I could have been sure of at that point in time was that he had a hell of a nice smile. Lots of dental work in that one.

As he was holding me tightly and protectively, in a way that made me feel firmly that he did not want to let me go, ever, now that he had me in his arms, he murmured in his low, coaxing voice, "I can help you, Robin—stay with me. Stay."

"I'll come back," I said. My arms somehow found their way around his body. I embraced him. I don't know why or how I did it, but I did, and it was what he needed to gain the confidence to let me go, finally, and release me back into the world after what seemed like a century of lingering in his arms again and thinking about Starfire.

"Keep that coat zipped," he said tiredly.

"I will."

"That's my boy," he said, and watched me walk off, back into the cold night—

But this time I was a lot warmer. There was no denying that.

---

The moment the door of the tower swung open, I realized I had made a mistake—a mistake in coming back at all, that is, because I couldn't have been prepared for what I encountered inside, not if I had had time to consider every possible scenario that could have described the truth of what was going on inside that tower while I spent those moments with Slade. I could not have, in a million years, imagined what would take place when I stepped back inside my former home, so as far as being prepared, well, you might be able to imagine how far from even stable I was and would be when the events in question unfolded as they did.

I hadn't even made any attempts to prepare myself, either; since leaving Slade's arms, the only thing that had been on my mind was simply Starfire's image with no negative associations, and had simply focused on the bliss that I had experienced the first and only time we kissed, as if I was trying to use that small moment to convince myself of what I could only hope our relationship really was, even while I think somewhere within me, I already knew the truth. I was not the one she would spend her life with, and little did I know, this didn't just apply to romanticism, or just to her—little did I know, she and the other Titans had decided that I wouldn't spend their lives with them at all if they had anything to say about it.

I found myself staring into the cold eyes of Cyborg, who had answered the door after perhaps the third forceful knock I had given on the door. It hadn't taken me very long to get back to the tower, and it was still lightly snowing when I arrived. The cold was not as prevalent as before, however, and almost regrettably deciding it could only be due to the warm food I had just eaten, and the rest I had been given by Slade, I silently thanked him as I waited there.

I tried my best not to think of the events that had passed between us, but each time I looked down at my feet I saw the new boots he had given me; and when I scratched my hair nervously as I wondered why the Titans were not answering the door, I remembered how he had petted my hair even more gently than I touched it now. When I hugged my chest in a feeble attempt to ward off the cold, I remembered how my arms had wrapped around him in a similar embrace to his, and it wasn't just the cold that made my cheeks flush pink as I felt myself consumed by that memory, that small but powerful moment; I might have stood there until the end of time and recalled how those arms of his, with the capacity to crush and deliver the most uncaring of blows, had wrapped around me and held me in the most careful but somehow simultaneously urgent way. I might have stood there and recalled that moment until I withered in the cold and slipped away unnoticed, but the hiss of the door sliding open drew me sharply back into the present. Cyborg, who almost always looked happy, was glaring. Apparently, not so sick anymore.

"You're back," he stated before I could even say "hello," sounding not only resentful, but perhaps angry as well, and I picked up on his demeanor immediately. I was not stupid and it was instantly clear to the most rational part of my mind that he did not want me there, even when the part of me that remembered how we had had the best of basketball games between us and the most laughs pranking Beast Boy or ganging up on him while playing video games dismissed that idea as pure insanity. Cyborg was my friend—of course he was happy to see me, I told myself.

"Yeah," I said, and smiled a little at him, trying to appear unconcerned as I spoke: "I guess I was gone awhile. You guys—uh, the passcodes to the tower got changed. I tried them a few times and couldn't get in, so that's why I knocked."

Well, I had tried to sound unconcerned, but the truth was I had not only been concerned when I'd first arrived at the tower and realized that the passcodes that had been the same since years ago when we changed them after the incident with Terra now suddenly did not work—I had been a little terrified, and a lot panicked. I had struggled with the keypad for what might have been fifteen minutes in the frigid air, feeling my fingers tingle, as I'd had to remove the gloves Slade had given me to put in the combination, checking my memory once, twice, three times to make sure I had the right password, before finally resigning to the fact that the codes had definitely been changed and that, if I continued to try to type in whatever the old password had been, I would be vaporized on the spot. We had a defense system that activated after so many failed attempts at using the keypad and I sure as hell did not want to be in the line of fire, at the mercy of the defense systems I had built to be as accurate and effective as the technology would allow.

As I stood there in confusion, I had tried to tell myself that there had to be some logical reason for the change to the passcode. I had considered for quite some time that with the recent supposed jailbreaks, my team had simply been taking wise precaution against a break-in, enacted with the use of the stale codes that may or may not have been leaked to prying eyes. I considered other possibilities: the Titans had had some problem with the system while I was away and had to reboot it and reset everything, or perhaps one of them—probably Beast Boy—had forgotten the combination and had had Cyborg change it to something they could more easily remember. My mind also considered what had, at that time, seemed to me like the worst possible reason they could have done this: I feared that Jinx had had a change of heart and had gone back to her criminal ways, and in case she'd gotten her hands on the code while being friendly with us, the code would have had to be changed, for obvious reasons. Logical, but I really hoped it was not the case because I had really grown to like her when we were able to converse like friends and weren't trading blows like enemies.

I could never have guessed the real reason they had done this, nor could have imagined how horrified I would be when I actually found out why. I hadn't thought I'd had the kind of capacity for such terror as I felt when the realization about this truth finally dawned on me. After everything I'd faced since becoming a crime fighter, I thought I could never be more scared than at my worst, most helpless moments while I fought crime, like when Slade returned in the form of the drug dust. But the events of that day would prove that, yes, indeed things could get more terrible, and more frightening, and due to the most unlikely source imaginable.

"Yeah, we know. We changed them on purpose," he said with that same icy tone, and I realized he was looking me up and down, his human eye narrowed. "Where'd you get those?"

I was a little stunned by his demeanor, and my shock was increasing. I had wholeheartedly believed that the moment I returned home, the Titans would have expressed joy at seeing me, and would have swarmed me with questions about my mission and what I had done, voicing their concerns for my health and well-being. But the way Cyborg was standing drew up a small wave of fear inside me. It was as if he was blocking the door, and had no intention to let me past him and into my own home. Again, I had thought that whoever greeted me at the door would have hugged me and expressed their gratefulness at my safety, and would have promptly swept me inside to proceed about helping me warm my frozen limbs. But Cyborg…he was just staring at me coldly, stolid and unmoving in the doorway, looking me up and down like he had never seen me before.

And what had really thrown me off in that one moment was when I looked more deeply into his eyes and saw that simply, something was not right, and that's the most eloquently I can phrase it because I myself am not sure what I saw. His eyes, which were almost always bright with good nature, were dark, and it was not just the lighting or his unusual demeanor. It was something physical, as if his actual appearance had changed, almost as if he was not the same person. I wondered briefly if he'd done some sort of upgrade to his bionic eye, and tried to bring some reason and logic into what I was seeing, as I liked to do, when he spoke again, drawing me out of my thoughts.

"I said, where'd you get those?" His voice was colder, and sterner.

"H-huh?" I stuttered, baffled as I stared back at him, my shock intensifying and stiffening my features with fear as it suddenly donned on me what was different about the one human eye. Did his eye color change? Is his iris darker? I thought. I was almost certain it was. Immediately, I tried to reason this too. It must be because he's sick, I thought quickly. The sickness must have—

"Those clothes," he clarified, sounding deeply angered now. "Where'd you go to get those? You left your money here. What'd you do, rob somebody?"

To put it simply, I was dismayed. What the hell did the origin of my clothes matter? The only thing that should have mattered was the fact that these clothes sure as hell weren't warm enough for me to be standing out here while my supposed friend questioned me like I was a criminal being interrogated in a murder investigation. The fact that he knew I had had no money also disturbed me greatly, because it not only meant that he, or someone in the tower, had gone into my bedroom and inspected its contents, but because it also meant that he had to know how deteriorated I was, how hungry in my inability to buy food, and yet—he was just letting me stand out here? If any of my teammates had come back from being missing for several days and I knew they had not eaten or had sufficient clothing, the first thing I would have done is got them inside and personally treated their injuries myself, and made sure they were stable and comfortable after what they had been though. To me, the treatment I was receiving at that moment was an insult, a slap in the face. I glared at him.

"I don't know what my clothes have to do with anything, Cyborg. Nor do I have any clue as to why you look so pissed off at me. All I do know is I have to go inside before I freeze to death out here. I haven't had a warm place to sleep since I left."

Without waiting for him to grant me entrance, I pushed past him and walked into my home without hesitation. He didn't resist me, but as I continued into the hall I could feel his glare boring into my back like a hot dagger, and for a small moment I thought—no, was sure—that he was going to attack me. I readied myself as I could see the scene play out in my mind; prepared to be attacked as I saw him lunging at my exposed back, ready to drive his steel fist into my spine with the most unrelenting of fury. Looking back it seems ludicrous to even imagine one of my teammates betraying me in such a way, but I had no idea what I was in store for when I encountered the rest of the group. It was not, to be honest, the first time I had sensed the hatred of a teammate strong enough to give me the sense that a fight might progress; when Beast Boy had undergone his transformation into that beast due to the chemicals he'd been exposed to in an animal testing facility during one of our fights oh-so long ago, I had also feared for my safety and the safety of all of us. Beast Boy and I had been very close to fighting then.

But somehow this felt so much different. During the instance with Beast Boy, it was apparent to me that behind that anger, the goofy kid who was my friend and who would never hurt me was still in there somewhere, and what he was doing was not real, and not of his own volition. Similarly, when I'd been Slade's apprentice the first time, my team had been fighting me, trying to subdue me, doing what they had to to stop me, but on the inside, I knew none of them believed that I had really run off to work for Slade, knew I would never do so willingly. They did not want to hurt me, and did not have the ill-will against me within them to fight me as intensely as they probably could have. The change I felt in Cyborg, however, was very real, and it hurt and disturbed me when I slowly realized that there was likely no looking deeper past this outward display of distaste towards me, because suddenly I was sure it was the same on the inside as well. In that moment, I believed he really hated me, and really wanted to kill me.

But no attack came, and I quickly hurried my way to the elevator and got into it, not waiting for him to join me before pressing the button to take me to the main floor. The thought of being stuck in an elevator with him for as many floors as our tower had—to be honest, I can't quite recall how many—terrified me on a basic level (too many horror movies with Beast Boy, probably), and I was happy to see the elevator doors close without even witnessing him round the corner after me. I think if I had seen that, my heart would have stopped.

As the elevator approached the main floor of the tower, the top of the T where we all came together to relax and eat junk food in front of the pride and joy of the place, our flat-screen TV, I could hear discussion softly floating down to my earshot from up above. At first what was being said was inaudible, and even as I strained to hear it, there was little I could actually make out until I was almost to the very top, when I could clearly hear my name, which I had been trained to listen for as it was often associated with the cries of help from my fellow teammates that required my immediate response during battles and the like, being uttered amongst other not so clear words.

As the elevator stopped at the top, I heard the sentence perfectly before the soft ding that announced the elevator's arrival sounded and the doors slid open, silencing everyone: "Well, hopefully Cyborg will have gotten Robin to leave already, and we won't have to deal with him." It was Raven's voice. Raven's. The girl I had gone down into the depths of Hell itself to save had just said this about me. The person I had, for the longest time, called my best friend.

When I stepped out into the living room, all conversation ceased abruptly, and all heads turned to look at me where I stood, still half in and half out of the elevator. Bodies shifted on the couch in my direction to stare at me more completely, and suddenly, as if all at once, I felt five pairs of eyes fall upon me, and the stares were like a collective wave of ice that washed over me in the quickest of instances, seeming to freeze my heart with a soft, climbing terror right then and there. The scene was surreal, and at first, I thought I was dreaming—was sure that any minute, I would wake up in my warm bed to another day of goofing off with my team and pretending like everything was okay.

Gathered on the couch, each lounging in a strangely stiff and unnatural way, my team sat. Raven, Beast Boy and Starfire were not strangers to the couch, and they had assumed their usual places, as if preparing to watch a dumb movie like we did all too often, but the TV was turned off, and where I should have sat next to Starfire, there sat Wally. One of his arms was wrapped around Starfire's shoulders, and even with a hindered view from my distance, with most of the view being obscured by the couch, I could see that they were very close. Near Wally, Jinx sat. Cyborg's spot looked as though it had been sat in recently, still indented from his weight, and looked ready to receive him again whenever he should return.

Apparently, Cyborg hadn't been the only one who appeared to be feeling better. Neither Beast Boy, Raven, or Starfire showed a hint of the sickness that had previously seemed all encompassing of their character, if only for a short time while the sickness lasted. However, I would barely even ponder this fact, as what I would ultimately be faced with was already more than I could comprehend on its own.

The first thing I thought, before I really looked at the scene, was: Where am I going to sit?

"Hi," I said timidly, nervously, as a first reaction, and raised a hand in greeting. I don't think I quite realized what was going on until the silence I received in return stabbed me with the suddenness of a cowardly criminal's knife, taking me by surprise and filling me with an undiluted burst of dread when I did more than just simply take in the scene in its entirety. When I looked from face to face, rather, that was when I felt the real terror grip me, grip me as terror had never done before. I had faced bloodthirsty criminals and monsters and the incarnation of pure evil himself, and none of that could compare to what I was faced with in that moment, and I mean that in all seriousness. Because what I saw was, to put it simply, a room full of people who had once been my friends who I knew, the instant I looked at each of them that day, now detested me.

Unique faces cast the same glare at me, the same emotion seeming to encompass all of them in the same, static way. My own eyes moved from person to person in order on the couch, studying their features, looking into their eyes, at first trying to decide if I was simply hallucinating and trying to justify each look I saw with some bizarre logic my mind formed on the spot, and then, by the end of the line, simply searching, desperately, for some hint of compassion, some hint of the person I had grown up with and fought with and for, but finding none. It seemed to be a very long moment, almost the length of an eternity, as all they did was cast that look in my direction, unchanging, unmoving, and silent. I don't think any of them blinked once. The downturn of their brows into this omnipresent, heated glare that seemed not to change—to vary even slightly between them—seemed to engrain itself into my mind almost at once, and I have not been able to forget it since. And it was only once I looked at all of them collectively again did I realize that the irises of their eyes were like Cyborg's. They were darker, somehow, and—

The elevator door slid open again with its cheery ding! that startled me, actually making me jump from where I stood. I saw Cyborg eyeing me with his cold glare as he walked around me and went to his spot on the couch, where he promptly sat again, and then, without missing a beat, turned to stare at me with the others. The force of their glare, and the tenseness in that room, was like an encroaching presence. I took a nervous step back, toward the elevator.

"G-guys?" I spoke. Again, my voice faltered, more noticeably than I would have liked. Now, I found that I could not form a coherent sentence, probably couldn't have if a gun had been held to my head at that moment. "Guys, I…what is…are you guys…is everything…"

I was silenced when Raven raised her pale hand, and the movement was extremely surreal because her expression did not change at all, like looking at a porcelain doll with an unchanging face that could somehow move its limbs. "We don't need to hear any more of your rambling."

Her voice, I remember, had been even more quiet and low than usual.

Beast Boy continued, his childishly annoyed tone rising, looking me straight in the eyes, something he had been hesitant in the past to do on even the best of days if he'd had the most sensible of things to say and I was in the best of moods: "Man, you're annoying. I can't even explain how much you were driving all of us crazy banging on the door. We thought that the different passcode would have given you the hint, but no, of course it didn't. You're so freaking loud. Do you ever stop talking?"

So that was why they had changed the passcode.

Not even bothering to glance at Beast Boy as he addressed this question, still keeping that disgusted look directed at me, Cyborg chimed, with a tone that similarly sounded disgusted, "Why would he? He loves to hear himself talk."

Jinx sniggered. She was using an emery board to absently file her nails, which I could see had been painted with some of the nail-polish Starfire had had me buy her that one day when we went to the mall, a day which now felt as though could have been a century ago. Even as she did this, her eyes, like the eyes of all the others, were fixed coldly upon me. "I bet he thinks he has some pretty important things to say, too."

The group laughed along with her, a chortling that was short and shot with malice, as they still cast their gazes on me; their faces seemed not to move or wrinkle with the laughter, and again, it was surreal in how frozen they looked, like their expressions had been painted there. Still, as unchanging as their faces seemed in that moment, the joy they seemed to be taking in what they were telling me was unmistakable. They might have hoped I wouldn't have gotten past Cyborg, as Raven had suggested, so they wouldn't have to talk to me; they might have been having a private conversation about me behind my back, not having to confront me while they threw me shade. But it was clear that they had no problems in saying these things to my face, that they took no issue with sharing their true feelings with me while I was right there in front of them. The only good part about my being there, in their dark eyes, was that they could mock and humiliate me. It seemed that if they had to deal with me, they would make the best of it, and elicit from me what they could;

Maybe they wanted a reaction, and unfortunately, I gave them one, if that was what they were looking for, but I could not help it. My eyes widened even more and a warm flush of embarrassment crept up onto my cheeks. I had been leading this team for years, and since becoming the leader, and even before that, no one on my team had ever talked to me like that, not even as a joke. We had always maintained respect for one another and one of the "house rules" we had all agreed to was that we wouldn't insult or degrade one another. Even if what I had been saying hadn't been coherent, if I had been rambling as Raven had said, I still felt quietly betrayed that they could treat me like this after they knew what I'd been through, how I'd been cold and hungry. Anger flared in me.

"How can you…" I began, but was cut off again, this time by a new voice.

"Listen, crybaby," Wally said, his gaze tightening on me in that moment, fueled by the fiercest intensity, magnified in general as the others mimicked him; it seemed everyone was giving me the most heated death-glare they could manage, spurred on by my attempt to counter their laughter. Wally was the only one to stand, however, pointing an accusatory finger at me as he did. "Let me explain something to you before you start up another temper tantrum. This team doesn't need a leader who goes running off when he doesn't get what he wants. And you're a failure—who needs a failure like you? When the Brotherhood of Evil captured us, you should have been the one to save us, and look where you were—you were frozen! You're weak. And when everything was said and done you couldn't even catch Mad Mod. Some hero you are."

More laughter sounded. My cheeks reddened more intensely, and my fists clenched. "Is this a joke? You have no idea what—"

"Shut up," Wally snapped, his now darker blue eyes flaring briefly with the fire of his intensity before cooling like black ice. "Here's what we decided—you're booted, kiddo. And it's no joke. I'm taking over as leader, and you have one day to get your crap out of here and leave, before we throw you out. Got it?"

At first, I was so dumbfounded I thought it was just some joke—not a good one, however—that they had decided to play on me. This whole thing. There was no way this could be serious, could there be? Of all the years I had led this team, not once had I ever heard anything about anyone on my side wanting to take my place as leader, and complaints about my leadership were usually rare and worked out pretty quickly between myself and whoever was complaining. If one of them had had a problem with my leadership during the incident in Paris, I thought I would have heard this speech—or at least something—much earlier than at that moment in time. Beast Boy had reassured me, and I remembered how my entire team agreed. The other honorary Titans could not have been more understanding about the situation. And I would have been fine with complaints, if only because it's true, because I did fail, but—kicking me off the team?

This had to be some kind of mean joke, some sort of weird new game they wanted to play with me to see how long they could go before they burst into laughter and explained how they were only trying to see what sort of reaction they could elicit from me, or something like that. Maybe they were trying to re-initiate me into the team with this cruel joke as punishment since I'd been gone so long? Something, anything had to be able to explain what was going on. This could not be for real.

My fists unclenched, and I tried to laugh it off. How could I be letting myself get so worked up over this joke? Even if what they were doing was uncalled for, being angry at them didn't seem appropriate of me. I mean, it was just a joke. "Guys, come on. This is…look, I don't really appreciate this joke…I'm not feeling the best and you guys know I'm already sensitive about the thing in Paris…" I made myself laugh again, lightly, and shrugged. "And, I'm not at all sure where I'd go if I got kicked out. It's pretty cold out and I don't exactly—"

Cyborg stood, glaring at me with such a hot intensity that I felt my stomach twist up in knots. My laughing was immediately silenced by a cold fear that overtook me as he spoke, as if he were spitting the words at me, "Well you'd better find somewhere, Robin, because you ain't staying here."

Before my brain could even get a chance to register the words, Raven also stood. Her expression was even more darkened. "And you should feel bad about Paris. You let every one of us down, and then, after we had to come save you, you tried to take all the glory and credit for what we did. You're pathetic."

I didn't think my jaw could have dropped any further until Beast Boy spoke, his eyes narrowed and his lip drawn up, baring his teeth, in an animal-like snarl: "Maybe we should have just let the Brotherhood of Evil have you since they wanted you so bad. You're the reason they attacked all of our friends and not only couldn't you help any one of us, but you couldn't help yourself, either. We all got hurt because of you. I hope you're happy."

Jinx added easily, sounding jovial in her cruelty, but, like all the others, her face remaining twisted in that single, heated stare, "The only joke here is you, Robin. Everybody was hoping that after you left you'd just stay gone, but I guess anyone would come back when their life is so worthless they've got nothing else to do than bother the only people who can barely stand to be around them." She shook her head, tisking. "Pathetic is right."

A short round of laughter made my fingers curl again tightly, not of anger this time, but simply with the hope that if I could pinch myself hard enough, I would wake up from this nightmare. This was, of course, a fruitless gesture, though for the most part I don't think I really even realized I was doing it. However, I think I recognized that, at some point, it felt almost as though I couldn't unclench my fingers, even if I had wanted to, as if I had lost control of the digits completely. Was I really so far gone in despair, in desperate hope? I must have been, because for a moment I was sure…it almost felt like something was forcing my fingers to clamp against my palms, some sort of unnatural, unseen pressure, increasing with unreal strength…but that just couldn't be. I must have been losing my mind by then.

Wally narrowed his gaze at me once again and pointed to the door. "Get it now, Robin? This isn't a joke. Get your stuff and go. We've all put up with you long enough. We've been wanting to do this ever since we got back from Paris, and all that time you were gone made us realize just how much we needed to do it. We don't care where you go, just get lost. Hey, at least you've got some warm clothes there that'll help with the cold, right, guys?"

I was barely listening by then, because by then my gaze had shifted to Starfire, who seemed to be consumed by Wally's tall shadow as he stood over her, one hand on her shoulder. The others were chuckling and answering Wally's question with varying affirmative sounds, but Starfire was just looking at me coldly, and it seemed all I could do to focus on her. She hadn't said anything, and she hadn't laughed. I had thought that maybe she didn't share their opinions, that maybe she sympathized with me. I ignored Wally and the others, having heard more than enough, even if I still couldn't bring myself to believe this could be happening (this is a nightmare that I'll wake up from in a few minutes, I kept thinking over and over; in a second they'll all laugh and say, "We really had you going, didn't we?"), and began to plea, quietly, weakly, with what little air was left in my lungs, "Starfire, you…can't…agree with them, can you? After all we've been through—"

"You need to move your things, Robin. Jinx is going to be moving into my bedroom, and Wally and I will be moving into your bedroom," she spoke softly, glaring at me. As if in some different time zone, I watched in what might have been slow motion as she leaned back against Wally's chest and he put his arm around her, pulling her closer. He leaned down and they kissed briefly, but to me it felt like forever, and when they retreated, it was only to glare at me more.

I stared at the two of them for a moment more, and then my fists unclenched, my fingers loosening. The only way I can describe what happened then, looking back on it now, is like this: in the most basic of ways, I felt my entire body being consumed by numbness, spreading like ice the instant I registered Starfire's words and processed them, seeming to freeze my heart immediately. I was cold from then on out.

It was a moment before I spoke, a moment before I could form the words.

"Okay. I'm sorry guys. I really am. I'm sorry," I said simply, and went to my room to pack. As I left, I heard them laughing at me. In the past, a younger version of me might have slammed the steel door behind me, sworn some curse to them about how I would show them all, something of that nature. But I didn't have the energy. I wouldn't, at least, not for quite some time.

When I finally left the tower, something damp on my gloves began to freeze in the frigid air, and I realized that I had clenched my hands so tightly at one point during my conversation with them that I had drawn blood, which had spread across the surface of my palms. I looked down at my hands and remembered who had given me the gloves, and all of the other winter garments. For awhile, standing there, looking at the dark spot where the blood had soaked the black cloth on each palm, that person was the only thing I could think of.

Wally had been right—I did have some very nice clothes to brave the weather, but I think I already knew subconsciously that that was the last thing I planned to do. Not anymore, I wouldn't. At that moment in time, there wasn't even a question in my mind as to my seemingly only other option.

And anyway—when I had that person to go to, what was the point of clothes to brave the weather?

---

I dropped the box I had packed onto the dirt floor of the complex without much care, regarding the thudding and clunking of the objects inside without interest. My duffle bag fell on top of it and rolled off onto the floor with the force I had thrown it, causing some of the wet mud to splay up slightly. I sat down on top of the cardboard box, feeling a wave of nausea overtake me with a sudden vengeance, returning from my earlier bout of sickness when I thrown up on the floor in my room when I had been trying to box up the entirety of my teenage years into only what I could carry, in sort of a slow, dreamy haze that had made it hard to focus on what I was doing. I don't think I had gotten sick out of fear, or panic, or anything like that, because in that moment—and many moments from then on, actually—I could feel almost nothing.

Later I chalked my vomiting up to having simply been in shock, which likely did not agree with the full meal I had eaten only hours earlier. Looking back on the moment, however, it's hard to agree with myself on this matter, because for some reason, I remember how very clearly unsurprised I was by the whole ordeal once they had gotten out into the open everything they wanted to say. Maybe a part of me had been expecting this, to the full extent of what actually did happen, ever since we came back from Paris—how couldn't I have been, at least at some level? I had let my team down, and it hadn't been the first time. I remember very clearly thinking that I had had this coming for quite some time. So perhaps the bodily function had not been out of shock, but I had thrown up for some reason.

With a clearer head after throwing up, I had supposed with some satisfaction—one of my most vivid feelings since the incident—that when they redecorated they'd have to deal with the mess on the floor (carpeting, much to my joy), and with that thought lingering in my mind, I became a minimalist and decided to leave as much of my useless shit as possible for them to deal with, wishing that I had invested in heavier equipment and hoarded more garbage or had a mouse problem. I took a lot less than I had imagined I would, though I suppose that it was not only out of my desire to make it harder for them, but because I was genuinely seeing how little I actually needed when I considered the fact that I might not have a place to put anything for awhile. Unlikely, because I had been kidding them, and myself, when I told them all I had nowhere to go, but still, just in case, I did not want to have to deal with a truckload of furniture or other crap.

I only took everything important to my security or identity, anything they could use against me, a now very real possibility to me, and then quietly snatched up a few items I had that were sentimental to me. A blanket that I had had for years and couldn't sleep without, a teddy bear my mother had given me before her death, an item I had not shown anyone since I had been much, much younger (and had not actually looked at myself since then), a few pictures, odds and ends, this and that.

I remember my credit card was still sitting on my dresser where I had left it the day I left the tower for the first time, and a small part of me argued as I went through my belongings that it didn't look as though anyone had been in here since then, even though Cyborg claimed to have known I had no money. A thin layer of dust on the keypad to open my door confirmed my suspicions that no one had been in my room since I left, but at the time, I thought nothing of it. Later I assumed Cyborg might have just guessed that I'd had no money, but looking back I realize that that is unlikely, because I was the kind of person who always kept a wallet on me, mostly because I was usually the one who got the bills for our pizzas or movie rentals. It was almost always my job as the team leader. If he'd really been guessing with the logic I knew he possessed, then he would have assumed I'd had plenty of money on me, and not the other way around.

I sat there and let the wave of sickness pass, and it did, rather slowly. I had put my face in my hands, and trying to gain a moment of repose I squeezed my eyes shut, watching spots of color dance across the darkness I saw before me. Anyone who wandered upon the scene might have thought that I was crying, but this time, I wasn't.

It was hard to believe that just that afternoon, I had been sobbing in my once archenemy's arms, having been reduced to the simplest form of weakness, and simply because I had seen Wally and Starfire together days before. I couldn't have possibly had any idea what was in store for me then, and I suppose that if I had, I wouldn't have allowed those tears to fall. What had just happened to me was ten times worse, inconceivably worse, a horrible hit of mental anguish, and maybe you think I should have been crying—screaming through my sobs, yelling about the unfairness of my life and the inability to trust anyone without being stabbed in the back, convulsing and lying on the floor, yelling more about all the times I had saved everyone, had been there to help, to win for them. The first time Slade ever attacked us, I was the one to pull the team back together! I can't defeat Mad Mod? I sure can, and I did, the first time he kidnapped us, I was the one to get us free! I was the one who got Raven back from Trigon, not anyone else! I could have screamed any of these things, but I didn't, because I had real reasons not to.

I wasn't always very proficient when it came to Slade. I couldn't save Terra from him, and since her death, I had considered it fully my responsibility and fault. I should have been there to stop him before he got to her.

I can't always defeat Mad Mod, either. I was the one who sat back, completely crippled, while my friends were the ones to defeat him with the plan they'd concocted. I was the one who got to press the button to stop his tirade and finish their fight, but maybe that was just me stealing the glory from my friends.

And Raven? Well, the only reason I went down there in the first place was because Slade knew what to do. Without him, I maybe wouldn't have even had the courage to go down there, and I don't think I would have gone on my own either way, if I'm being honest.

These and many other examples rolled through my head as I sat there, my face in my hands. It was for these reasons I didn't cry, and in that moment I believed that I fully deserved what had happened to me, how I had been treated. I wasn't going to sob in self pity (been there, done that, I thought). Why would Starfire want to be with someone like me, anyway, when she had a real hero like Wally right there, one possibly more handsome than me, who was fast enough that he didn't make mistakes like I did? Why would any of them, for that matter, want a leader like me, a leader who could not protect them—hadn't even been there to—and had not ever protected them sufficiently? I couldn't blame them for kicking me from the team.

At least, this was what one part of me believed, the very emotionless and relatively rational part. But the other part? Well, that part of me was far too angry to cry. It was an anger hidden deep inside of me, a sensation of swelling that seemed to be increasing with each minute I thought on what had just happened, but not really enough to notice it, not then at least. At that point in time, I mostly felt guilty that I had let my team down, and there was only enough anger to subconsciously push me to do what I did that night, to become who I became. Just enough—too much. That night, all I knew was that I needed somewhere to stay so that I did not freeze; I knew what had been offered, and the more innocent part of me focused on that. The angry part only fixated on what it would mean, what my acceptance of that offer would ultimately entail and require me to do, what the angry part of me was quickly beginning to resist less and less…

I remember, as I sat there, having a brief flash of my battle with the Titans when I worked for Slade the first time.

My foot colliding with Raven, hearing her cry out.

You're pathetic.

The blaster, aimed at Beast Boy, sending him flying back and away from me as he crashed into the ground. A pained sound from him also.

Maybe we should have just let the Brotherhood of Evil have you.

And throwing Beast Boy into Cyborg, watching him fall backwards as I easily skirted away. He had said before that he didn't want to have to hurt me, but could he, even if he tried?

I didn't think so.

You ain't staying here.

And Starfire…setting her down as I obeyed Slade, firing the blaster right at her, at a point-blank range. I had apologized as I did.

Wally and I will be moving into your bedroom.

At that moment, with my face in my hands, for just the smallest, most miniscule fraction of a second, I wasn't so sorry.

And I was wondering why the blast hadn't…well, I suppose you probably know what I'm about to say, and I'd rather not admit it to myself. I can't believe that I could have even contemplated why the blast might have…failed in its…objective. Had I held back, I was wondering as I tried to remember that moment completely, and if I did, why did I? That fraction of a second that the thought crossed my mind, dancing there almost unnoticed and leaving just as quickly, is the thing I'm the most ashamed of in the entirety of my life, even now.

Revenge. It wasn't a word I actually thought, and much less said, until quite some time later, but that little word had been there all along, festering within me, burning brighter with each day that I spent in the wake of this rejection. I supposed that single, small word buried deeply within me was the reason why I had come back, even if I had refused to believe it then. He offered me a place to stay, I reasoned quietly. That's all I'm here for, a place to stay, otherwise I'll freeze in the cold.

But it hadn't really been all that cold—much warmer than during the day, strangely. And the clothes he had given me would have sufficed in keeping me warm enough if I had wanted to stay completely exposed to the elements for a few more days, at least. And if I did want a place to stay inside, why with him? There were so many others who would have been glad to take me in—the many citizens who I had saved countless times, and who professed that if I ever needed anything, I just stop by (I had each of their addresses, which I had to collect for the crime reports we filled out). The owner of the Chinese restaurant I went to quite frequently, mostly on my own since the only place my team had ever seemed to want to go was to the pizza parlor, would have been happy to take me into his home just above the restaurant. He had offered before, but I had never needed it. Why not go to the owner of the bank, the owner of the electronics store, the owner of the antique store, the guys at the police station—anyone but him?

Maybe because he had already seen me at my lowest, with my pride crushed and laying at my feet. I had a reputation to keep up, and I couldn't go, as the once high and mighty Robin, crawling to any regular person on my hands and knees begging for a place to stay and food to eat. This reasoning wasn't so good, considering that either way, my reputation as the usually flawless hero was about to be completely smashed, one way or another. I just had to decide how. Do you want to be the hero who was rejected for their poor leadership—want to become a laughingstock to your former partner, let him know how you failed—or do you want to be the hero who went rogue and became a criminal, want to really stick it to that old bat, show him what a mistake he made in letting you go? This thought was also very brief, but it was there, and it's hard to admit now that, even then, I had already chosen the latter.

So I stayed beneath the now dry, frozen over roof of the complex, waiting in the pure silence that had overtaken the night. When my nausea had calmed, I silently lifted my head and saw that he was standing not three feet from me. I had not heard him approach me, even though it had been very quiet, and I had been listening very carefully. Normally I might have jumped back or cried out in surprise, but that night I just looked at him like I had been expecting him and had been waiting longer than I would have liked. Looking back, it's clear to me that the minute he appeared before me was the same minute I became bound to this deal I'm in. Bound to him. If I had wanted to change my mind when I opened my eyes then, take my belongings to someone else, someone less dangerous, and beg for a place to live, I don't think I could have. He had me where he wanted me, and I didn't have a good comprehension back then just how unwilling he really was to let me go.

Looking into his visible eye, it seemed to me almost immediately that he looked very tired—not tired as though he had just been woken up from a sound sleep, though it was late enough that that might be possible, but rather, tired in the sense that he had been doing something insanely arduous. Usually, I couldn't see the skin beneath his eyes, but tonight, I saw that it formed heavy bags and was very dark, suggesting sleeplessness. Still, he held his usual proud stature and looked down at me, and I couldn't deny that even in his tiredness he looked very strong, as usual.

However, I wanted to show him that I, too, could be strong in my weakness. That night, I decided I wanted to get the first word in, a privilege that had thus far seemed to belong only to him when it came to the two of us, if just to demonstrate, in the simplest way possible, that I still had a little bit of power and dignity left, even in what I was about to do.

"Still not sleeping?" I asked, sounding a bit more haughty than I had been intending, in all honesty. Considering how numb I felt as a result of what had just happened to me, I was a little perplexed at the tone my voice had taken on, as if all on its own.

Similarly, I lightly enjoyed his surprised look, even in my distant, uncaring state (perhaps it was the rareness of the look I got that really brought up emotion in me), but it was something I had to enjoy very quickly, because it was gone before I knew it. With a small snort, he nodded, crossing his arms over his chest, looking a little displeased. Later I learned that Slade was not the type who liked you to speak unless he spoke to you first. I suppose he must have felt that I disrespected him.

His voice was edged with an unpleasant malice when he spoke: "Something like that. And you, clearly not. I assume you're back from your chat. So soon, I must say. How did it go?"

It took all my strength to glare at him. Was this bastard toying with me, even when he probably knew what I was about to do just as well as I did? I mean, I was sitting on a cardboard box, and there was a duffle bag next to me. Even though I know I probably initiated this attitude of his with the way I had begun talking to him, I still felt that he, of all people, should have had the self control not to retaliate with those harsh, spiteful sounding words, especially because he of all people knew what I was going through, had just come back from, what was clearly obvious. I was a little hurt, bizarrely, that he had decided to sink to my level.

In response, I spat, my voice lowered to a dismissive hopelessness that I saw affect him instantly: "How do you think it went, Slade?"

It was a strange moment when I watched him soften a little, the displeasure in his eye melting away at my tone, and maybe he realized he'd been just the slightest bit too harsh in his response to me, and regretted it. Because of course, he had to have known what was going on—you would have to be brain-dead not to understand that I had just gotten kicked out of my own home—and of course the last thing I needed after something like that was a sardonic, unkind remark, one that mocked me like my friends had, even if I myself had been immature in the way I'd begun the conversation.

He seemed to pause as he considered his mistake, and as I watched him, it became apparent to me that he regretted the remark not only because it would infringe on his ultimate goal of having me for himself, but because genuinely, somewhere within him, he really didn't want to hurt me, and cared how I felt. Even after all that has happened between us since, after all the dishonesty and lies he's thrown my way, I still know that this is true. It was never the goal to hurt me, but often he couldn't keep himself from snapping at me like he would anyone else, retaliating as if I wasn't the only other person he regarded as highly as himself. Often, I couldn't blame him; like I said, he had a lot to deal with, a lot on his mind.

And even if hadn't appreciated his response to me, in that moment I couldn't help but realize that information just by the sheepish look in his eye. I realized then and there that he did genuinely care for me, and disliked what had happened to me, how I'd been quickly sinking into depression because of how I'd been treated. His little slip up couldn't change that, and couldn't make me forget how much I truly did appreciate just the idea and reasoning alone that in him I'd found some kind of comfort, even if I didn't really understand at the time what type of comfort he truthfully had to offer. And in reality, I don't think I was actually very angry, even at his admittedly hasty response; I remember I had talked myself down from my initial anger, if you could call it that, convincing myself that it had been my fault, that he would never have said anything like that to me if I hadn't tried to take away the control that he rightfully owned.

And the more I looked at his new expression, the more difficult it became to uphold my glare. How could I be mad at Slade? Coupled with what I was seeing now as I stared at him, I realized that, insanely, he had been the nicest person, extended the most kindness to me, out of everyone I had interacted with for what might have been a complete week, but which felt so much longer, the brightest and most positive presence in my life since Wally came back, since the last time I'd talked to the other honorary Titans, and who knew if they hated me now, too. Maybe I was reading into it, but even looking back and knowing more about what Slade actually did, it's still very apparent to me that he was disturbed at seeing me in that state. It didn't please him to see me emotionally destroyed, even if that was what he needed me to be in order to achieve his ultimate goal, finally.

"Not well," he answered very softly after an almost painful while of nothing but silence. The contemptuous tone was completely gone from his voice, and now I could only hear sympathy.

I looked down at my lap and closed my eyes, not wanting to have to explain anything to him. After what I had just been through, the thought of rehashing it for my once archenemy sounded as appealing as sticking my hand into a tank full of sharks. So I said simply, hoping I would get away with it, my eyes still closed resignedly, "You got it."

I felt his hand touch my shoulder, and this time I jumped. I had not heard him move any closer to me, a habit that was quickly becoming very unnerving. Maybe I was so distracted I was simply blocking out his footsteps, but it still bothered me in a way that is almost unexplainable, especially as a small part of me argued that it was something that was very important to consider thoroughly, something I shouldn't just dismiss as a new habit of Slade's and leave at that. Still, my mind reeling, it was the last thing I cared or wanted to think about.

Moving behind where I sat now, he kept his one hand on my shoulder and put the other on my back, beginning to rub in soothing circles as I sighed, maybe out of relief, my adrenaline dropping back down slowly from that unexpected jolt of fear.

"Relax," he murmured quietly, soothingly, leaning down to speak softly in my ear. This wasn't exactly my idea of a relaxing situation, but I tried to remain calm, if only for my own sake. At this point, I wasn't sure exactly what might happen if I didn't keep calm, though if those brief, shameful thoughts of mine were any indication, I might have had some idea.

I could foresee another rant in my future if I didn't calm myself, and this time it wouldn't be against him. This time it would be comprised of the one thing he had perhaps wanted to hear out of me more than anything else in the whole world, maybe along with an admission that I loved crime like he did or enjoyed killing, or thought of him as a father. Hateful words against my friends, even more ammunition he could use against me, to warp me. And he didn't need any more ammo—he already had a loaded gun the way it was, with what I'd already given him, if I'm being honest. To give him more would have been beyond unfair to any chance for hope I might have had for my future. I like to think that even then, I'd still had some hope, if miniscule.

"I don't know if I can tell you what happened," I said gently after a minute, once I had composed myself best I could. "It…just…really hurt, and I…"

He squeezed my shoulder, not painfully, as if to gently silence my struggle over my words, and continued to pet my back. "You needn't tell me what happened, at least not right now. All you need to tell me is why you've come here."

I turned around to stare at him. I could feel desperation creeping up into my expression. "You're really going to make me say it?" I asked softly, feeling any sense of strength or dignity I'd had left, that which I had been trying to so carefully preserve as the only indication I had left of my former character, slip out of me, maybe in that very instant.

He nodded after a pause. He stopped rubbing my back, but didn't remove his hand from my shoulder. "Yes, I am, my little one. I believe you owe it to me. After how long you've kept me waiting, and all you've put me through. All my sleepless nights worrying about you, and before that, all the wasted time after you ran away from me with those friends of yours. All my sadness. I believe you owe me this, don't you?"

I spent a few long moments staring at my bloodied hands. "Probably."

He squeezed my shoulder again, this time with a bit more force. When I looked back at him, I saw that his eye was arching in a way that indicated a raise of his eyebrow beneath the metal mask.

"Probably?" he asked, sounding very annoyed.

Again, I had to pause, but it slipped out eventually. "No, I do. I do owe it to you."

He nodded, and then, without taking his hand off of my shoulder, he slowly walked around until he once again stood in front of me, close enough that my knees were touching his legs. The hand that wasn't holding my shoulder was raised slowly, and he slipped two fingers beneath my chin, gently tilting my head so that I could not look away from his intent gaze. Holding me in this way, he spoke very tenderly. "I'm not going to ask for an apology, Robin, nor an admittance that I was right. All I want is to hear you say it—just to hear the words come out of your mouth."

"Slade," I murmured, struggling to talk with the way he was holding my chin. Subconsciously, maybe I had already given in, but I couldn't help trying to fight what was happening, at least a little. "We haven't even…talked about the terms and conditions and…"

He gently pressed my jaw shut to silence me. Clearly, this was not something he wanted to be talking about, and if I am being honest with you, I'm not sure it was something I wanted to discuss, either. It might have been better to allow myself to think this was just some informal thing, that leaving with him wasn't like signing some horrible contract that would bind me to him for the rest of eternity, that once I entered his home I would be able to just freely leave whenever I worked up the courage. It's just for tonight, I kept telling myself. It was easier to believe that he didn't have other ideas, and that he, too, was relaxed about the situation, as he made it seem: "We won't worry about that now. We can talk tomorrow in the morning after you're rested and fed. For now, please just let me hear you say the words and the minute you do we can both go home and get some well deserved rest."

Yes, it was better to believe that he really was that relaxed, only because it enabled me not to have to make a real decision in that moment in time. It was much easier not to think that I was sealing my fate with the words I was about to speak; to think that it was an expensive fee for tonight only was much better than to have to realize that it was a very cheap rate for the rest of my life. All it took for Slade were those words to make him believe that I now belonged to him, and to him only. They cemented that belief within him.

"Alright," I mumbled, shyly looking away towards the street when his gaze seemed far too intimidating for me to handle, but he wouldn't have any of that.

"Look at me," he spoke sternly, tightening the grip on my chin just slightly.

Again, it took a while, but I blinked and looked at him, slowly, demurely when I finally did.

"Good boy. Now do as I told you. Come, before the cold worsens your condition even more." His voice was again very stern, and it was clear that he was not joking around, if he ever had been. He gave my chin a small tug that wasn't quite painful, but it was all it took to elicit the words from my mouth. By that point, the dominant tone in his voice had perhaps warned me against any defiance of what he had asked. It seems that, again in retrospect, I had already belonged to him long before I even uttered the words. If it was my sinking spirit from what I had just experienced or my realization that I could have the result of that one unspoken word that was still just a small, untouched flame within me, that word of revenge, if I just did this for Slade now, neither or both, at that moment it did not matter. Because no matter how I felt about the Titans now, the situation was still the same: I had no home and I had no more strength to resist. That was it. I had given up, for one reason or another.

"I'd like to…go back with you…if you'll allow me to."

His eye again indicated a rise of his eyebrow. "Go back with me?"

"Go home with you," I corrected myself quickly.

"And isn't there a certain word you're also forgetting? Remember your manners, little one."

"Please," I mumbled. "May I please come home with you?"

His next command made me blush as I realized what he wanted me to say.

"Now address me properly."

This was where I really hesitated, because the idea of addressing him in this way was encroaching far too much into apprentice territory. Just the idea of what he wanted me to say filled me with a sudden, horrible dread as memories flooded me. "Slade—"

"Say it, Robin," he snapped, obviously losing his patience, and tugged my chin again. It hurt a little this time. "You owe it to me to say it. After all I did for you when you were my apprentice, the one thing I asked in return was that you address me with respect. Nothing more. I wasn't asking you to kiss my feet, or to praise me undeservingly. All I wanted was this small, meaningless word from you, and I never got to hear you say it, not even once. Do you think that's fair to me?"

I looked away. I guess I had decided that he was right, that I did owe it to him and that it wasn't fair to him, after a long moment of consideration, because I responded weakly, "No."

"Then say it," he said firmly. "And look at me. I won't ask you again."

When his grip on my chin tightened even more, I quickly snapped my gaze back to him, suddenly fearful. I suppose, in retrospect, I should have known right then and there that what I was doing was so completely wrong, that trusting him was the last thing I should be doing. If nothing else had alerted me to this fact, it should have been that moment when I realized he was hurting me and commanding me as if he owned me, as if he had the right. But somehow, in that moment, I could not see that. I was fearful, but only at the idea of punishment, not even really realizing that I didn't deserve punishment, that he shouldn't be treating me this way.

I was so far gone and disoriented by what had happened that I couldn't see what was clearly in front of me, spelled out in the largest and clearest of fonts: what he was extending to me was not an act of kindness that he wouldn't ask me to repay. It wasn't really an extension of anything at all, at least, not anymore, because there was no longer anything to extend. Because by then I had already made my choice, and because he was already sure he owned me. No more asking required or gentle persuasion needed. I was already his apprentice, maybe had been in his eyes for quite some time. There was never any question of if I would give into him, only when. And once he realized that I was too weak and too alone to resist him any longer, he knew he could do anything to me, make me do anything. I was already his. My obedience that followed his command confirmed it.

"Master," I mumbled quietly, again demure.

I remember the word had hurt my throat to speak out loud.

"Louder," he said easily. Another tug on my chin.

"Master," I said again, more loudly this time.

"Now ask me, Robin."

"May I please come home with you, master?"

He stared at me with that one grey eye for a small moment, looking briefly and very clearly as though he'd just reached self-actualization, some sort of nirvana. Honestly, he looked a little dazed, a little stunned, as if he himself could not believe he'd actually gotten me to say the words, finally, after all this time of trying. I didn't get to consider this look for very long, however; he must have realized how he was staring at me, because he quickly recomposed himself, simply nodding, as if to declare a less intense state of pleasure than what I knew he was really feeling in that moment. He wasn't fooling me, and even if he'd beaten me at everything else up until then, I considered that look he'd accidently volunteered a small triumph for me.

I had to believe I got something out of all this.

Still, it was meaningless when ultimately he'd won so much more. When the surprise left, I watched the eye that had heated at my resistance cool quickly with this new victory of his, that dominant gleam it had held fading away almost at once. The hand that had been gripping my chin loosened, much to my instant relief, and traveled up, stroking the side of my face smoothly and softly, and then brushing the locks of hair plastered against my forehead aside and out of my eyes before quickly ruffling my hair, as if he was rewarding me for my obedience—again, touching my hair. "That's much better. Good boy. Good, good boy. Yes, of course you may come home with me. You've made me very pleased."

I didn't have a chance to respond before the hand that was resting in my hair traveled down to my other shoulder, stroking the other side of my face as it did, gripping gently as he easily pulled me up from where I was still sitting atop the cardboard box. His hands lowered to my forearms, which he squeezed comfortingly. "Now, time to see your new home."

I watched as he grabbed my duffle bag from the ground, throwing it over his shoulder easily. He took the large cardboard box, which I had struggled with, believing that it was pretty heavy even with the little I had managed to pack in it, in one arm as if it weighed absolutely nothing. I let out a little squeak of surprise as he grabbed me and hoisted me over his other shoulder, as if I, too, weighed absolutely nothing. Securing me tightly with one arm, he started to walk, and the ease in which he did while carrying all that shit still surprises me to this day.

Turning his head towards me, he murmured in my ear, "Close your eyes, Robin. Rest. Home is a long way away. I'll wake you when we get there so we can get you fed and cleaned up, but for now, I want you to sleep. Do as I say, don't resist."

And I didn't. I started to fall into a very deep, undisturbed sleep, and amazingly, laying there on his shoulder, being carried and bounced just slightly, somehow managed to induce the same kind of calm that might be associated with a warm, soft, stationary bed, the kind of place you would be happy to collapse after a very long day. This sleep I felt myself slipping off into was coming on with the ease that that type of setting might stimulate, and how he managed to create this kind of tranquility in me as he carried me I don't know, but this was not the first time I had slept while he carried me off. I didn't know where we were going then, and I can't say that even now I have the most clarity about where I truly ended up—but before I fell into this thick sleep, I heard myself asking, softly, just barely clinging to consciousness: "Where is home?"

I heard his answer before I dozed off.

"Deep underground," he said.