The Titans lasted six days, eighteen hours, and twenty-six minutes without her.
Robin was the first to go. They had only gotten back to the tower two hours, forty-one minutes previously. He had been brutally honest and to the point, which probably wasn't the best in this situation.
"She's probably a hundred years in the future. Unless we can figure out time travel, we can't get her back."
Beast Boy had argued almost immediately. Cyborg tried to calm them down to no avail, eventually siding with Beast Boy. Raven didn't even try to stop them. She hated to admit it, but Robin was right. Deep down, all of them knew that she wasn't coming back. By the time she was about to intervene, Robin was gone. Leaving the room radiating of anger and frustration, clearly being pushed to the breaking point.
Beast Boy left after two days, thirteen hours, and three minutes. He was clearly wishing that he could bear staying. Both Raven and Cyborg could see it as he left the Tower for the last time, saying that he could make it as a solo hero. Apparently, he lasted six months.
Six days, eighteen hours, and twenty-six minutes after Starfire had fallen through the portal, Raven left. She said she needed time to be alone, when in reality, she just needed to get her emotions under control in a calmer place than that horribly silent tower.
She never came back.
Cyborg had searched. He found all of them.
Robin was no longer Robin. He avoided the news, his friends...everyone. When Cyborg found him eight months after he had left, he was working alone as Nightwing. He seemed incredibly lonely, though he acted as though nothing was wrong. Cyborg had to admit, it was weirdly depressing to see their leader so damn alone, blending in with the darkness with ease. When he addressed these problems, he had been given a glare to make Batman proud. After that, he rarely saw nor heard of Nightwing.
Beast Boy was working in a zoo. To be more specific, in the ten months since he had left, he had become a one-man zoo. It crushed Cyborg to see his friend living in a cage, seeming so small and helpless. He was clearly incredibly ashamed to be a former hero being laughed at by small, bratty children, only to see them barely even scolded by their seemingly equally terrible parents.
He didn't find Raven. Raven found him. She told him everything. Practically begged for help, unaware that he would've helped her in a heartbeat. She said she went to him because he was most likely to listen. About her powers beginning to take her over, about Trigon, about how she had been so damn alone and had felt so damn helpless.
They defeated Trigon. But the cost was high.
Beast Boy completely gave up any notion of protecting Jump City-and the world in general-after that. They completely lost touch with Nightwing after that, after he disappeared as soon as the threat had passed. Raven...
Raven lost herself. Confined to her mind, fraught with loneliness and confusion, completely oblivious to the world around her, the cell that became her cage.
Cyborg would visit her. She was aware of this. She heard his voice, felt his gentle hand resting on her shoulder. His kind words, telling her about anything and everything. "Oh, the Justice League defeated Brainiac again a few days ago!" Or, "Hey, guess what? I think I saw Robin by the Tower last night. I dunno, it was pretty dark." After a while though, he stopped coming. Some subconscious thought told her that this was because he became obsolete, unable to keep up with the rapidly changing technology.
Beast Boy rarely visited, but when he did, he stayed until he was kicked out by some unknown person. He would talk about nothing in particular, saying those dumb jokes that she could barely hear through her own mind but she desperately wished to respond to. He would lay a hand on her shoulder, sometimes trying to wrap his arms around her before leaving. After a time, she began to think that all of this was fake. She started to shield herself from what her mind, those last traces of Trigon, told her was all just an illusion. He stopped coming too.
Even rarer, was when Robin came. He only started coming after she completely collapsed into a shell. He couldn't get close enough to touch her. He wasn't real...was he? All of this seemed more real than those shadows that plagued her mind. He would nver stay very long, just long enough to whisper an apology that would make what was left of the old Raven hear his crushed, heartbreaking tone.
And that's what you call a prologue. Very short, and mostly a set-up. There's gonna be more on each Titan. Like, at least four more chapters. I'll have Raven's slow descent into insanity...being a prisoner of her own mind...uh..they weren't very clear on what happened, Beast Boy's time as a solo hero, Nightwing bailing the former's ass out of trouble and one instance I have in mind of the reverse, Cyborg slowly falling behind the current tech and probably a long-ass internal monolouge, and, of course, them banding together one last time for Starfire.
Anyway, what'd you think? Love, like, meh, dislike, hate, KILL IT WITH FIRE BEFORE IT LAYS EGGGSSS? Really, I wanna know. Particularly if it's that last one.
