Because everyone hates Author's Notes, I'll make this as brief as possible. For those of you that read it's predecessor, you could tell by the title that this is a sequel-fic. NOW WAIT! For those of you who are like, 'Shit, I didn't read the first one so I ain't gonna take the time to go thru all this.' Know that you really don't need to know anything about the last fic to appreciate this one save for a few key facts.
1) It takes place after the final season.
2) In this time Titans East have disband and all the Titans (honorary and otherwise) operate from the Main Tower and their own HQs if they have them.
3) The entirety of the fic before this was pretty much bent on getting Jericho and Raven together. Also, a bad guy named the Essence came along, got his ass kicked, no big deal. So if romance with Raven and a character other than Beast Boy or Robin makes you angry, you won't like this fic.
4) There are no OCs, and whenever they do crop up, they won't be Titans, or teens for that matter. So don't worry.
5) They're still not gay... they're bi. P
Enjoy.
Jericho takes the sharp curve at an easy 60 mph.
SCRRRREEECH!
A grin of joy melts across the blonde mute's face, hazel eyes flashing with excitement as opposed to the usual metahuman power. His left hand grips the black steering wheel with white knuckles, the right hand on the stick as he rockets thru the rolling hills lying outside the City.
Jericho's mouth opens wide in a mute scream that gives the illusion of being a lion's roar as the engine revs and sends its signature sound reverberating throughout the scene.
To his left the bay stretches out in it's vast blue expanse, salty mist floating up onto the road off the beach. The long blue meets the equally blue horizon at some unidentifiable point and becomes the cloudless sky. As if the sea goes out and then swoops up over the world like a vast hood of blue with one searing cosmic eye hanging overhead and watching as the Mustang climbs a strangely steep hill with relative ease. It reaches the top and catches air for a moment, rocketing along at breakneck pace. In the driver's seat Jericho gives a mute laugh of excitement.
With knowing eyes Jericho notices the road ahead goes straight before taking a sharp right turn away from the bottom of a cliff.
Jericho heads straight forward, not turning.
He closes the distance between the Mustang and the cliff, and goes off the road. The towhead's face sneers in defiance as he plays chicken with the wall of rock before him.
Forty yards.
The tires rumble and shudder from the rock and dirt.
Twenty yards.
Birds and small woodlyn creatures scamper out of the car's path.
Ten yards.
The swirling wind cause the driver's blonde curls to dance.
Five yards.
The mute's sneer melts into a worried frown, complete with a gulp.
No yards.
WHIIIRHSSHH! VROOM!
Just before car and cliff connect to ignite fiery death, the rock wall of the cliff inexplicably shoots up, revealing a metallic tunnel leading underground. As the Mustang drives down into the mysterious shaded depths, the rock wall slides back down as quickly as it had opened.
WHIIIR-CHUNG!
And all is silent.
'The Perils of Titan Living'
Chapter One: Guess Who's Back
"Is it a pony?!"
– Wally 'Kid Flash' West
A young woman stands silhouetted in front of the window that comprises the eastern wall of her room. The thick lavender curtains are pulled to the sides, filling the room with sunlight, the only illumination it ever receives. The bay and the fringes of the City can be seen, and escape into the world of reality is only ever a moment away.
She faces a bookshelf, one that stretches nearly the entire length of the wall opposite the huge window. It's tall, long, dusty, and filled to the brim with tome upon tome of text. The only part of the western wall that is not taken up by the shelf was the part nearest her bed, which is taken up by her closet. But the books, they are escape, portals into the minds of brilliant thinkers, into the impossible imaginings of other realities. Fantasy and terror and love and hate and all the most inner reaches of the human soul, an escape from reality.
The north side of her room holds her bed, a slightly roundish thing, with a swooping headstand that imitates her hood ever so slightly. Three large, soft blue pillows sitting neatly in a row, and purple silken sheets tucked in neatly. Its a soft, warm bed. One that is easy to fall asleep in, to loose yourself to the dreamworld. To fall into your own subconscious and discourse with your soul. An escape to an inner world all her own.
And finally to the southern side of her room is only one thing.
The door; a rectagonal, metal, heartless thing. The opening through which her inner sanctum is reachable, and through which the Tower and all its innumerable distractions are also accessible.
It is the least alegorically aesthetic of all things in her room, from the stuffed doll of the mindscape ravens to the white ceiling and the black floor it is the simplest.
It is her escape from herself and the thing that keeps her in duty.
It leads to her life, away from the timeless walls of her sanctuary.
And in all her years of fighting things too horrific to imagine, stepping out of her room was, in her opinion, the most heroic thing she'd ever done. And indeed she knows best.
But now she stands, facing her bookshelf, scanning it for something nameless, standing in a dress of dark black which parted at the hips, brazenly letting both legs be seen as an old, heavy and battered blue cloak wraps around her person, dull with dust from the astral plane.
She was Raven.
Suddenly, something sounds softly in her mind. Great paws padding at a door in her skull wanting to be let in. She feels a familiar warmth in her bosom, and inhales. The same breath comes out a moment later as words, "He's returned."
"No, but seriously, I'm like, sensitive to this kind of stuff!" Wally West, known in the superheroing business as the Kid Flash, fastest teen alive, jabbers on at rapid pace.
"Truly?" Starfire asks, green eyes wide with enthrallment and trust as per her modus operandi.
Beast Boy merely rolls his eyes, "Whatever dude!"
"Seriously!" Wally whirls on the green one, "Which one of us has control over the vibration rate of his molecules? Me or you? Me! Exactly! I can vibrate thru walls for Hermes' sake!"
Beast Boy frowns with defiance, "That doesn't mean you can tell what's happening in other dimensions, it's all in your head!"
"Truthfully Beast Boy, his claim is not impossible," Starfire starts, "Every dimension vibrates at it's own different frequency in along the fifth dimension. If Wally is so sensitive to kinetic movement, vibration in particular, it might be that he could feel the very residual effects of moments in time in dimension with frequencies very near to our own which might be able to be processed by the more subconscious levels of his brain. Indeed possibly moments of near identical universes to our own, although seeing as how, like all things, the fifth dimension curves then the events he would feel would not necessarily be of a corresponding time, but perhaps in the future or even in the past."
The two jokesters stare at the crimson haired angel, dumbfounded.
Wally scratches his unmasked cheek, "Yea, what she said."
Beast Boy shakes his head, "Or you could just have a bad case of the shits, y'know, whatever works."
"You're just jealous because I know… the FUTURE!" The speedster says in a pseudo-mysterious voice, wriggling his fingers to increase the effect.
"Dude, you don't know the future!" Beast Boy yells.
"Do too!"
"Do not!"
"Do too!"
"Do not!"
"You're going to say 'am not' next."
"Am not! Wha-SHIT!"
"HahaHA!" Wally cheers himself, pulling off a little dancing of joy.
Starfire claps her hands, "Truly amusing!"
Beast Boy crosses his arms as Wally saunters up to him, "Hey, don't feel bad BB, maybe I didn't know the future, maybe I just read your mind!"
"Dude," Beast Boy mumbles, "Superspeed is so versatile a power, its one hundred percent re-fucking-diculous."
Wally raises a reddish-brown brow, "So you admit I can both tell the future and read your mind?"
"Go blow a goat, I'M going to go somewhere where your idiocy won't outshine mine!"
"So upstaging you is another applicability of superspeed? I don't even want to begin to try and explain that one, it just might have to be retconned!"
Without responding the changeling morphs into a flea and bounds out of the Main Room, leaving Starfire and the fastest teen alive alone. The former still in a fit of girlish giggles.
"Hah, we got him good, huh Star."
"In-Hehehe! Ind-deed!" she manages between bursts of laughter and taking gulps of air.
The pair shares a moment of laughter, but the joyous noise is soon accompanied by the sound of bootsteps coming in from the garage elevator.
Starfire looks up expecting to see her boyfriend, the only boot-wearer present in the Tower other than herself, "Oh, Robin, you have so unfortunately been absent at the…" the alien angel's heavenly voice trails off.
His own laughter slowing, the fastest teen alive turns around to see someone he did not expect, for a moment even his mouth froze. There, simple in his white tee, jeans, and leather jacket. Mouth and hazel eyes smiling calmly surrounded by that tussled mane of hair, Jericho.
There is a moment of absolute silence.
…
The air turns warm.
"JERICHO!" Starfire squeals with joy unparalleled and rushes forward with superhuman speed, grasping the mute arrival with a bone crushing embrace. Once again: modus operandi.
"Well smack my butt and call me Susan." Wally mumbles, shaking his head clear as if trying to throw his mind back together from a great rattling.
Guessing at the suffocating effect of her hug, the Tamaranean releases Jericho from her embrace before his face could turn a shade of blue not usually found in nature.
"Jericho, you have return!" She chirps.
The towhead just grins with a slow nod, giving a look of 'obviously'.
"Hehehe! …OH!" the gasp pops in Starfire's throat as a look of divine felicity founts from her green eyes, "We must tell Raven!"
"I already know." The light, throaty voice reverberates metaphysically throughout the room as the mysterious young woman in question melts down from the ceiling in a quiet fount of ebony energy, touching down softly in front of Jericho, nearly eye to eye, she only has to tilt her head back the slightest of degrees, and he doing the same, inverted.
"Hello, Joseph." She says in the same soft, whispy monotone.
He smiles broadly and snakes an arm around her back.
Starfire and Wally watch, silent and wide-eyed. There faces contort in comedic fashion by their childlike curiosity and trepidation.
Raven responds to the gesture with a small, small grin.
And then sends a crackling jolt of searing black thunder up Jericho's arm.
JZZZTT!!
Jericho is thrown back across the Main Room and into a wall. His smoking body leans on the wall, trying to get his air back when he sees three Raven's walking towards him that melt into one as his dizziness dissipates. He gives her puppy eyes in an attempt to stave off further punishment. Raven bends down to his level and, with a smirk, says, "At the risk of sounding cliche, that was for staying away so damn long, and for coming back you get…well, you'll find out later. Alone."
Wally, finally regaining his mouth, sneers ornerily, "Is it a candy bar?"
JZT!
"DAH!" Wally screams as a pulse of black energy sends him failing across the room.
"Normally I would be shocked by the amount of violence that has been linked with the arrival of one's significant other, but it is you, Raven." Starfire observes, the tip of her finger resting on her lip in thought.
Ignoring the Tamaranean, Raven grabs Jericho's hands and helps him up.
This time Jericho snakes his arm around her back and is unpunished. Raven scoots in a little closer.
Wally, having picked himself up, chirps again, "Is it a pony?!"
JZT!
"DAH!"
Before another word is spoken the door leading to the hallway opens with a whir and Beast Boy marches thru triumphantly, "OK Wally, if your superspeed makes you so damn omnipotent, what I'm I gonna say next?"
Wally, in the process of picking himself up again, looks at the green shape shifter blankly, points a hand at Jericho and drones, "Dude."
Beast Boy follows Wally's pointing and, upon seeing Jericho standing silently in his place by Raven impulsively utters, "Dude! … SHIT!!"
Wally keels over, nearly suffocating from laughter. Starfire is also thrown into a fit of giggles as Beast Boy rants a steady string of profanity.
With a fair brow raised in question, Jericho looks questioningly down to Raven. She meets the glance and shrugs her shoulders, "Maybe we should relocate to where there are less distractions."
Jericho does the only thing he can do: smile and nod as they turn and head for the elevator.
Beast Boy notices and, halting is thirty word long sentence of nothing but curse words, says, "Hey, where are you guys going, I haven't even gotten to talk to Jericho yet."
Everyone gives Beast Boy a look of annoyance or disbelief.
"...talk AT Jericho." the changeling corrects himself.
Raven pauses for but a moment, "I'm going to… show him the new additions to the pool."
"Oh."
They step into the elevator and the door closes.
Whir.
…
…
"Wait a minute, there are no new additions to the poo- OOOooh right, make out scene."
Wally shakes his head, "Man, you're slow."
"Sit on it, Potsy."
With a lurch the elevator moves upward.
Jericho turns to Raven and Raven turns to Jericho.
…
…
…
Thud!
Hormones take their course.
A sagacious songbird sits silently, perched on the Spanish shingles of a building downtown, his cape falling down over his red-breasted body, the dark exterior blending him with the shadows.
Even in the daylight the Prince of Gotham fights from the night. It's in his blood as the Bat's Apprentice.
Robin sits on his haunches, peering down relentlessly, unmoving except for the occasional swivel of his head. Like a stone gargoyle he sits, the gaze from his marble-white eyemask piercing thru the window of the pawnshop below.
He sits, the leader of the Titans, hero to countless souls and inspiration to even more. The patron protector of the City, unnoticed by the bustling metropolis beneath.
Underneath him, down a few stories on earth, cars run, people stalk the sidewalks in packs, a living breathing plethora of individuals making up a whole population which stands as an entity all its own.
Friends laugh-People talk on cell phones-Dogs bark-Horns honk-Children play merrily-Lovers stroll down the sidewalks arm in arm-A woman yells at her lazy husband and can be heard from a nearby apartment complex-
Life down on the ground, all witnessed by the Robin while his head is catching cloud dust. Eyemask peering, penetrating, inescapable, blazing in it's simplicity, frightening in its effectiveness.
An undetectable shift near the pawn shop's cash register that the distinctly human superhero couldn't possibly have noticed from his vantage point occurs, and like an ancient golem the cloudy gargoyle erupts from his stone slumber with a fluid sweep of his arm. His black cape slides back and the intense yellow underneath gives glorious shine.
In his green grip is a grappling hook, aimed at some ambiguous piece of city architecture, and it fires.
POW!
It hits, grips, and pulls tight. Robin's legs flex and he shoves off the roof into the open air above the City just as the robbers pull their guns.
People all around on earth look up and watch with awe and glee as their hero swoops down from Heaven like an avenging angel.
And all around Timothy Drake's dark head of hair, the wind rushes.
Confident, sure, and precise in his actions, he still holds on white knuckled to the grappling hook.
Holds on for dear life as his heart beats fast in his ribcage as if trying to escape, just like it had since the first time, just like it always would.
And the air howls about him as time stretches out long.
Three men pull handguns from underneath their jackets, "Put you hands in the air, this is a stick up!"
Before anyone could even think to shriek or scream-
TCHIINGSHH!
The window explodes and a shower of broken glass rains down across the floor of the pawn shop.
A red and green blur plants steel-toed boots into the lead thug's chest, passing on his momentum into the criminal who then goes flying into the far wall.
"Hey!" One thug.
"Whu-what?" the other.
W-WAP!
Robin calmly but quickly brings a palm up and backhands the gun out of one thug's hand, then brings the hand back and bitchslaps the thug to the floor, unconscious.
Cl-click
"Don't move or you go bye bye, birdie." The last thug threatens, pressing the end of the handgun into Robin's temple.
Robin doesn't waste a beat, "Do you know who I am?"
The thug blinks, confused.
He continues on in an even, calm tone, "I'm Robin, the Boy Wonder. I've been jumping over rooftops and kicking grown men's asses since I was ten. I've fought and defeated the likes of the Joker, Slade, Clayface, Bane, the Essence."
The thug gulps, sweat running down his face as his eyes shift nervously.
"And now you think that you, some nameless thug, are going to take me out just because you have a gun? I should tear your arm off and feed it to you, and you know I can."
The thug shudders, pauses for a long moment… and sets the gun down, "Y-You win, man. It's all you."
Robin grins as the man gets on his knees and put his hands on his head. He brings a hand up from his utility belt, handcuffs in grasp. Ching!
VOOSH!
An alien blur of red and lavender streaks past the broken window, stirring up a mini-cyclone in the pawn shop.
A moment of silence as Robin gazes at the window amusedly and the people stare at Robin, in complete awe. With a deft move Robin slaps the cuffs on the kneeling thug's hands.
"H-Hey, Robin."
The Boy Wonder turns his head, trying in vain to find the voice. A little boy points down at Robin's feet. His eyemasked gaze looks down at the thug he'd bitchslapped, now awake, smiling at him.
…
"Yes?"
"Umm," the thug started, awkwardly, "This might be a bad time, but… my kid loves you, think I could have an autograph?"
…
…
…
Bam!
Robin's foot sends the thug back to dreamland.
VOOSH!
The blur passes by again.
…
Ever so slowly Starfire hovers backwards the way she came by. Her face brightens, "Robin! Oh joyous! You must come immediately!"
"Why, Star? I mean… I'm kind in the middle of something here."
She shakes her head, crimson hair flying up like tiny flickers of flame, "No! You must come! The police are only a few city blocks from our position, they will manage the criminals! You must come!"
Robin smiles at the girl and starts to explain, calmly, "Star, I can't just leave my duties, I'll be home soon eno-"
"Unacceptable!" She cries with a mischievous smirk. The Tamaranean-turned-temporary-termagant grabs the Prince of Gotham and- VOOSH- takes to the skies with him, streaking towards the large 'T' on the edge of town.
…
…
…
…
…
A kid runs up to the cuffed thug and kicks him in the groin.
"UGH!"
"Take that!"
"Billy! Stop hurting the robber!" The boy's mother says, pulling him away from the thug, who keels over, eyes crossing.
"But Moooooom! Robin did it!"
"If Robin jumped off a bridge would you?"
Without hesitating he honestly nods, "Yes."
"Augh! Starfire, what is so important that you feel the need to kidnap me?" Robin asks, limply hanging in the fiery Titaness' grasp.
She smiles broadly, "Oh do silence yourself, we both know you adore it when I whisk you away to keep you to myself."
Robin's blush is impressively slight, "You didn't just kidnap me just to make out, did you?"
A pretty Tamaranean face looks down with a somewhat stern inquiring, one small crimson brow cocked over an emerald eye, "And if I did, what of it?"
"Umm… it's cool?"
Starfire breaks into giggles and hugs the Boy Wonder close to her chest, "Oh Robin, of course I would not take you away from your duties just for the sake of 'the kissing'. Something far more joyous has occurred."
"And that would be?"
"Jericho has returned!" Starfire says, voice breathing pure felicity. She somehow skips in the air, and zooms quicker to the door of the Tower.
"Starfire, you aren't going to do this for every Titan who comes back, you know I'm calling them all in right?"
The princess hums merrily.
"Starfire… right?!"
The sun hangs blazing overhead in the sea-blue sky, trying in vain to match the brightness of one Tamaranean girl's spirit as she touches down in front of her home.