Prologue
It was a still and peaceful night in Jump City.
The Teen Titans were in their tower, enjoying the lull period in crime fighting after what had happened at the Brotherhood of Evil's lair. They had been losing badly, with only five residual heroes that remained uncaptured banding together into a makeshift Teen Titans team. Said five heroes then proceeded to storm the Brotherhood's lair with the odds completely against them, as heroes usually seemed to do. Eventually though, more Titans who were thought to have been defeated arrived and evened them out a bit. Together, they managed to subdue the villains, free their captured friends and leader, then defeat the whole lair of villains by freezing them with their own machine, all while proving that evil would never be able to triumph good no matter how lost hope seemed to be, and complete with a groan-inciting "brain freeze" joke at the end courtesy of Beast Boy.
After a few months passed, most of the villains had managed to escape their icy prison, some with new rage and determination to cause mischief and to take down the Titans, others with less bravado and the decision to slink off elsewhere. The world would never be completely devoid of antagonists. Like vermin they were difficult to completely wipe out, but to be unsophisticated, without evil there would be no good. The extremely dangerous villains were sent off to other maximum security prisons of course, leaving the less menacing ones displayed as ice sculptures until they somehow escaped on their own.
Heroes did not particularly delve deep into how villains came to be villains. Their job was plain and simple. If someone was committing a crime, their job was to go and put a stop to it. Even if the motive of the crime was to aid a sick mother with hospital bills, or due to a grave injustice that instilled a strong thirst for revenge, the fact remained that a villain was someone who participated in the act of defying the law. Granted, many villains did bad things because they enjoyed hurting others, or sought to dominate people by force. However, it should be noted that a considerable number of villains had gone through something that drove them to the darker life. A reason they felt it necessary, or perhaps they had no choice but, to do bad things to others. A villain could be akin to a scared, lost animal. Someone who lost their way and took desperate measures to survive turned to the bottom of the barrel when the people who had been luckier in the world took advantage and looked down on them. Hate is something instilled or nurtured, not something that you were born with. Of course, heroes are not at fault. They too, had gone through their own vicious struggles and come out on top. This arduous journey that many would have, or had succumbed to is what made these heroes as strong as they are today. It is what give credibility to the saying that "Good Always Triumphed Evil". Sometimes, however, heroes and villains are alike, and they all know what it feels like to want to give up on themselves, and to feel hurt and the hot burn of rage within them. There was a familiar fire within all of them that connected them to each other, no matter which side they ended up choosing, because it was, in the end, a choice whether you decided to do bad things or to help people.
It was a still and peaceful night in Jump City, with a lingering of foreboding that felt like the calm before a storm. For Raven, especially, this night would shed light and pierce the shadows that one villain was enveloped in.