Disclaimer: I do not own the Teen Titans, nor do I have the first idea who does.

Author's note: Firstly I would like to profusely thank all those who reviewed the first chapter, and say that I am deeply honored by your praise. I hope that this one meets the standards you have set. Writing for Starfire in particular is very, very hard (at least for me), and I hope she came out in-character. Once more, any feedback I can get on that subject (or any other) is most appreciated.

One other quick note: I sent a personal reply to everyone who reviewed my first chapter, but as of a couple of days ago, stopped sending Email alerts to me whenever I had a private message or story alert. I don't know if this is widespread or not, but people assure me it simply happens from time to time. Regardless, if you did not hear a reply from me after reviewing the story or sending me a private message, it is likely because of this weird issue. Hopefully it will be fixed soon.

- General Havoc


Chapter 2: But for the Grace of God

"Men should either be treated well or utterly crushed, for while a light injury serves as a chastisement, and a heavy injury serves as an example to others, an injury which gravely damages a man, and yet leaves him able to act will serve as nothing but the instrument of one's own destruction…"

- Nicollo Machiavelli, "The Prince"

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Suppressing a yawn out of decorum, Raven allowed the blue glow around her hands to die as she stood up from the seat she had been in for the last four hours. "I'd say he's lucky."

Beast Boy and Robin both looked at Raven as though she was crazy, while Starfire appeared to be assuming that she had misunderstood. Cyborg merely grunted a small "Hmph," as he continued to adjust the settings on the IV pump he had placed next to the large hospital-style bed sitting in the center of the room, though whether that meant that he agreed or disagreed was unclear. The semi-robotic Titan had barely said a word since his, Starfire's, and Robin's return, completely preoccupied with properly setting up the battery of medical equipment that was now clustered around the rolling bed, as well as running all kinds of tests and checks to establish just how bad the damage was.

"How do you figure that?" asked Robin, pre-empting what was likely to be a far less coherent question from Beast Boy.

Raven shrugged as she gestured at the bed, and the figure that lay motionless atop it. "He's alive, and he's probably going to stay that way," she said. "If he actually had part of a building collapse on top of him, I'd call that lucky.

"We are uncertain of exactly what happened," said Starfire, as she looked past Raven to the motionless figure lying on the bed. Starfire had been worried enough to nearly crush Robin's hand when they had first pulled into the tower, but Raven's prognosis had dulled the worry enough to reduce it to mere concern. "By the time we arrived, Cinderblock had already collapsed the building and was attempting to take him and escape."

Cyborg appeared to disagree. "We all know what happened."

"Forgive me friend Cyborg," began Starfire, "but we do not know exactly what..."

"What happened," chimed in Cyborg with a bitter tone in his voice that revealed just how upset he was, "was that Cinderblock flattened half of Almond Hills before we could stop him. "What happened was that he killed hundreds of people before we could even get in his way, and then we let him go!!!"

Robin forced himself to remain calm. "We didn't let him go Cyborg, he escaped into the bay."

"And we should have gone after him instead of turning around and running!" shot Cyborg back at Robin. "We should have chased him down and made sure he couldn't come back and take out another couple hundred civilians! They're still pulling bodies out of the wreckage man! What if he comes back up on shore and decides to try…"

"The Jump City police have boats and divers out looking for him," explained Robin, "and Aqualad has half the wildlife in the ocean scouring the bay to help. We couldn't chase him underwater anyway, not without the T-sub." He didn't add '…or Beast Boy' to his statement. It wasn't the green changeling's fault that he wasn't on that particular patrol.

Cyborg didn't reply, but simply clenched his fists in frustration and glanced about to see if there was something he could hit. There wasn't, and he settled for returning to his work calibrating the last of the medical equipment. The others all let him work. Cyborg had been in a cold fury ever since they had come across the first signs of the damage Cinderblock had wrought on the city, and every fresh police blotter report of another body found in the ruins only made him angrier that he couldn't have stopped it. He knew Robin was right and that this kid would likely have died had they not raced for home as fast as they could, but that didn't make it any easier.

"Besides," Robin added after a long pause, "I don't think he's coming back for a while. We got what he was looking for."

Robin's gaze was fixed squarely on the unconscious form of the teenaged boy lying motionless on the hospital bed. The boy looked like a survivor of some kind of terrible natural disaster (which, Robin supposed, wasn't all that inaccurate). His face and clothes were covered in scorch marks, dirt, bits of rock, and plaster dust, probably from when the wing of the building he was in had come down on top of him. His light brown hair was matted with blood and grime, and his dark green jacket had been torn apart like a kite in a hurricane. One of his eyes was purple and swollen shut; his left arm was encased in a cast that Cyborg had put together, and even through the haze of the painkillers and sedatives that they had given him, he still winced subconsciously every time he took a breath, likely from the cracked sternum and broken ribs that Raven had sewn back together with her magic.

"Who is he?" asked Beast Boy, sounding, Robin thought, much more like his usual self, even if he was subdued a bit by the setting. Robin had meant to ask Raven how their little talk had gone, but as usual, things had come up.

"He does not have a card of identity," replied Starfire, "and he did not tell us his name before he fell unconscious."

"I wonder what Cinderblock wanted with him?" said Beast Boy

"I don't know," replied Robin, "but when we got there Cinderblock had already picked him up and was carrying him off somewhere. We managed to stop him, but we were almost too late."

"We WERE too late," snapped Cyborg, but before Robin could reply, Raven cut him off.

"That doesn't matter now," she said, prepared to tolerate no further argument, "Cinderblock escaped, and we're all back here, so it's pointless to argue about it."

Cyborg looked disinclined to agree, but he didn't protest further, and in any event, Raven didn't give him the opportunity to.

"Anyhow, I think I might know what Cinderblock wanted," Raven explained. "I noticed something when I was trying to look for internal bleeding. Something abnormal. I'm not totally certain, but I think he might be a psychokinetic."

Raven had expected the word to be a bit unfamiliar to the others perhaps, but she did not expect Beast Boy to literally jump backwards with his eyes wide open as though startled by a firecracker. "He's a PSYCHO?!" he shouted, and morphed instantly into the form of a growling saber-toothed tiger, as though he expected to see the unconscious teen leap from the bed brandishing a bloody knife at any moment.

Raven rolled her eyes at Beast Boy's antics. It was really all you could do with them. "Not a psychopath, a psychokinetic," she explained as patiently as she could. "Psychopaths have disturbed minds. Psychokinetics can disturb other objects with their minds. Agitate them, even make them to explode."

"… oh." said Beast Boy as he sheepishly shifted back into his human form and stood up. "So… kinda like you then?" All of the Titans knew what he meant. It was a notoriously bad idea to anger Raven, as her powers had a habit of explosively laying waste to everything in the immediate vicinity when she was upset.

Raven however merely shook her head. "No," she said. "My powers are mostly magical. I'm not sure how psychokinetics work but it's not magic. I think it has something to do with manipulating the molecules of something, making them unstable. At least that's what I've read."

"Wait," said Robin, still taking all of this in. Now they had some kind of kineticist on their hands? "How do you know that he's a psychokinetic?"

"Because I can read minds, remember?" said Raven evenly and with a touch of annoyance in her voice, obviously not pleased at having to give out all these explanations. She saw Robin's eyes widen beneath his mask and she cut him off before he could lecture her about privacy. "I didn't read his mind directly," she explained, "but you insisted for some reason on dragging him back here, and I had to heal him. Powers like this are hard to mask. He's got some kind of psychokinetic ability. I don't know what kind..."

"What kind?" asked Beast Boy, "but I thought you just said..."

"I said he has kinetic abilities," snapped Raven, tired of being interrogated as to the capacities of a teen-aged psychokinetic she had never met or spoken to. "There's something like four dozen different kinds of those that I've read about and probably another four dozen I haven't. Some of them can start fires, some can blow things up, some can move things with their minds, some can even take an object apart and turn it into something else. I don't know what kind he has, I don't know how strong they are, I don't know if he can control them or if he even knows that they exist! If you want answers, ask him!"

Beast Boy took a step or two back even as Robin stepped forward, holding his hands up as a gesture for her to calm down. "Easy Raven," he said, "we're just trying to figure out what we're dealing with here."

"Then wait for him to wake up and ask him, and stop assuming I know everything about it," said Raven, still annoyed, "and while you're at it, you can explain why you decided to drag him all the way here instead of taking him to the hospital."

Robin wasn't looking at Raven as she spoke to him accusingly, staring past her instead at the injured teen laying motionless on the table. "Because I think someone sent Cinderblock specifically to get him."

"Why would someone do such a thing?" asked Starfire, echoing the same question that was in all of their minds.

"I don't know," said Robin, "but Cinderblock was looking for something. When we attacked, he started repeating something like 'devastator' over and over again. 'Find devastator.'"

"Wait… what?!" said Beast Boy, looking even more confused than before. "Cinderblock can pronounce that? Cinderblock can TALK?!"

"Apparently," said Cyborg. "We all heard it. He was just babbling the same thing over and over 'fore we finally drove him off. Kept going on about this 'devastator'."

"And you think that this child might be the 'devastator' that Cinderblock was seeking?" asked Starfire. She too had heard Cinderblock's words, but she had presumed it to be some kind of war cry, or another Earth custom she had not yet come across. When she found that the others had as little idea as she did about what Cinderblock had meant, it had come as a rude surprise.

"Maybe," said Robin, "but if he is what Cinderblock was looking for, then we can't risk taking him to the hospital. Cinderblock barely has enough of a brain to keep moving. Someone else had to have sent him to 'find devastator', and he was willing to kill hundreds of people to get him. If we took him to the emergency room, it'd put the entire hospital in danger, and we can't take that risk.

Raven let her annoyance subside at the thought as everyone else fell silent. They all knew Robin was right. If whoever was behind this catastrophe had been willing to cause this much destruction in pursuit of this teen, then wherever they took him would be in extreme danger of becoming the target of another terrible attack. Whoever had orchestrated this certainly wouldn't hesitate at attacking a hospital or any other instillation to get what they wanted. While they had no proof, they couldn't possibly take that kind of a risk when the lives of hundreds if not thousands of civilians were at stake.

Which still left them with far too many questions.

"So... we're just gonna keep him here?" asked Cyborg after a long pause. All of the medical equipment was functioning perfectly, and he had stepped back to survey the work.

"We don't have a choice," said Robin, relatively convinced that this was the right thing to do. "We'll keep watch over him in shifts, and make sure nobody but us knows that he's here. If we're lucky, whoever sent Cinderblock will think he's dead. If we're really lucky, Aqualad or the Coast Guard will catch Cinderblock and we can see what he knows. Either way, I can't think of a more secure place than Titan Tower. We'll see what he has to say for himself when he wakes up."

Beast Boy meanwhile had moved over to the side of the bed, and was looking down at the unconscious teen with a puzzled expression. "Dude, I don't know..." he said, sounding unconvinced. "I mean... how do we know that he's this 'devastator'?" The young teen looked to be perhaps 14 years old at the most, and was scarcely Beast Boy's height. He was slight and thin, and there was no sign that he was anything other than another high school freshman who had gotten into a bad car accident or a particularly ugly after-school fight. There was nothing visible that could be construed as extraordinary about him, no strangely-colored eyes, no abnormal skin tone, no obvious indication that he was anything other than what he appeared to be. "He looks like a civilian to me," said Beast Boy at last, as though making some kind of profound judgment.

"Not everyone with powers looks like one of us," said the hulking half-robotic warrior to the dark green changeling as he stepped up to the other side of the bed, his anger finally corralled now that he had another job to perform. "We don't know he's what blockhead was looking for, but Robin's right. We've gotta keep him here until we do know." Cyborg adjusted a setting on the IV pump as he prepared to bury himself in more technical work, his usual method for combating disappointment and anger. "Y'all go on ahead," he said, "I'll keep watch for a while."

One by one, the other four teens began to file out of the room. Starfire still wore a deeply concerned expression, hesitating several times before leaving, as though she wished to stay as well, just to ensure that the injured boy would recover as Raven had said. She had spent part of the car ride back trying to keep the half-conscious boy from injuring himself further as he literally writhed with what was no doubt agonizing pain, and trying as best she could to assure him that everything was going to be alright. She had no idea if he had heard her or not, but when he had passed out at last she had feared the worst. Despite Raven's assurances (and Raven tended to know what she was talking about with these things), she was still worried that they had overlooked something.

Beast Boy also lingered a moment or two, obviously wanting to know more about this mystery. Cyborg could have laughed if he hadn't still felt like putting his fist through a wall after all the chaos of today. Beast Boy was never content to leave well enough alone, not like Robin, the detective, who buried himself in research and investigations, but more like a kid who enjoyed finding things out that he wasn't supposed to know, an ironic trait for someone with the attention span of a fruit fly who by his own admission, never made much use of his brain. There was however, quite obviously nothing more to find out about this teen until he woke up or Robin came up with some kind of breakthrough.

Raven looked as if she wished to know more as well, but her expression was not one of curiosity. She looked suspicious, as though this was all some kind of darker plot the details of which she had not yet discerned. Cyborg normally couldn't pretend to know what Raven was thinking at any given moment, nobody could, but right now he knew that she was thinking of the last time that an apparently harmless teen with unknown powers had been brought into the tower, and exactly what had resulted from that disaster. Terra hadn't been far from any of their thoughts in the couple of weeks that had passed since her death, and to put it mildly, this whole situation wasn't helping them to get over the experience. Raven however was no fool. She knew that there was no basis yet to really worry, and that it was pointless to speculate about what might happen in the future. After all, if there was anything Raven was good at, it was parsing out what was pointless and what really wasn't.

Robin stayed the longest of all, his mask shielding his eyes and preventing Cyborg or anyone else from figuring out what he was thinking. As it was, he was running over the unanswered questions in his head. Who was this kid? If he was the 'devestator' Cinderblock had been talking about, then how had Cinderblock known to go after him and where to find him? And why hadn't THEY heard of him? For that matter, where HAD Cinderblock found him? Robin vaguely remembered that the building Cinderblock had brought down atop the injured teen was some kind of government building, but a mundane one, an office building or a processing center of some kind, not something high-profile like a weapons lab. He'd never thought it important to find out what went on there, and now he needed to know. But once he found out, what was he going to do? What about once the injured boy woke up? They couldn't very well keep him locked in the basement of Titan Tower until they had solved the mystery, especially if he had family somewhere in the city.

As he turned finally to go, it occurred to Robin that Batman would have probably known precisely what to do here, and how to puzzle this all out. Not for the first time, he reminded himself that he wasn't Batman.

He had resolved to go straight to the evidence room and begin researching all the various questions that he still had, but no sooner had he left the medical bay, than he found Starfire waiting for him. Starfire's look was one of worry as Robin walked over to her. Something was bothering her, and Robin could guess what. None of the Titans liked to see innocents hurt, but all the others had ways of dealing with it. Raven would meditate, Cyborg and Robin would plunge himself into their respective work, and Beast Boy would bury himself in a video game or some insane antic. Starfire however did not have the same distractions to fall back on.

"What's wrong?" asked Robin, though he was certain he knew the answer.

"I am merely..." Starfire trailed off, unable to find the words to explain properly. Robin smiled slightly and placed a hand on her shoulder as she lowered her head.

"I know," he said. All that destruction and death couldn't help but affect someone as emotional as Starfire, to say nothing of the helpless sensation of watching someone in pain and being unable to do anything about it. "But we did what we could. We stopped him from hurting any more people. Sometimes that's the best we can do."

"I am aware..." said Starfire, but she still did not raise her head. So it was something else then.

"Look, Star... Raven said that he'd be OK. He'll probably be awake in a few hours. I know it was hard in the car, but you probably saved his..."

"No," she said, "that is not it either." This time she raised her head, and Robin saw that she looked almost afraid. This one puzzled him. Starfire was certainly caring and emotional, but she wasn't often scared of anything. "It is... I am... worried that one day it will be one of us laying on a bed attached to machines, and the rest of us will be wondering if that person will ever wake up again."

So that was it. Robin placed his other hand on Starfire's other shoulder. "We have a dangerous job, but it's our responsibility to keep going," said Robin, knowing that she already knew this, but figuring it couldn't hurt to say anyhow. He hated to see Starfire upset or sad. He hated to see any of his team upset or sad, but with Starfire it was particularly painful for him. Perhaps that was because she was upset so infrequently, or perhaps it was some other reason...

Starfire nodded in ascent. "You are right... but it is just that with the death of Terra, and her attempts to kill all of us, and now this attack, it seems... more likely than it once was. It seems as if things are getting more and more dangerous for all of us... and... I am worried."

Robin was quiet for a moment as he thought of his own fears of losing one of his team, his family. This was a fear they all had, and that there was no real cure for, only temporary relief. Fortunately, it didn't take much to get over it for a little while, or at least to push it away to the back of her head where it should have been. "So am I," he said, "but we all know that we can count on each other to do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening. That's more than most people have. And we've made it this far alright."

"Yes," she said, and slowly her mood seemed to brighten back up. The fear seemed to leave her eyes, or at least recede, and was replaced by her normal look of something between wonder and happiness, "we have." She smiled, and Robin remembered why her smile always seemed to make him feel better. "I am sorry," she said, "after today, I did not wish to add to your worries. I just have trouble sometimes when I see others hurt who could have been us if not for chance and luck."

"It's fine Star," said Robin as he grinned softly, "we all do. But it's not up to chance and luck. Whatever this attack means, whatever's coming, we're as ready for it as anyone can be."

"I suppose so," she said, and this time she sounded as though she believed it. "And after all, it is foolish to worry about what might happen when we do not even know what is happening."

Starfire was perhaps the only person who could make their confusion and uncertainty somehow sound like a hopeful sign, but then Starfire had always been good at finding the silver lining of any circumstance. Robin was still marveling at this capacity when she leaned in and hugged him briefly, hard enough to squeeze the wind out of him, though it was probably no more than a light embrace to her alien strength. "Besides, we would not be a very good team if we did not worry about one another, would we?"

Robin realized that that was what he was trying to think of to say to her. "No, we wouldn't." he said as she released him and he breathed again. Starfire seemed fully back to normal, another sign that perhaps the Titans had taken all of the chaos of the past month better than he had originally thought.

Starfire smiled again. "Come with me," she said as she took Robin's hand and walked back towards the elevator to the common room of Titan Tower, dragging him along with her before he could figure out what was happening.

"Where are we going?" asked Robin.

"On my planet, when people are upset about something, they eat pudding of sadness to drive the painful thoughts from their mind," Robin suppressed an urge to run screaming. There were in fact more disgusting substances on Earth than Starfire's pudding of sadness, but most of them were used for stripping the paint from walls. To Robin's everlasting gratitude however, Starfire continued. "However I am told that on this planet, people eat something called 'cream of ice' instead when they feel bad. I believe friend Cyborg keeps some cream of ice in the freezer. Let us see if it will drive our worries away!"

Robin relaxed slightly, as he wondered if he shouldn't be busy trying to find out the answers to all these questions they still had hanging over them. Starfire however did not seem particularly inclined to take no for an answer, and Robin had to admit that ice cream sounded pretty good right about now. He caught himself up with Starfire as they walked hand-in-hand towards the tower's kitchen. "And when we are done," she said, "perhaps we can get the others together and see if it will help them as well?"

Robin merely smiled. "That sounds good to me," and even as he said it, he resolved that he could probably wait a few hours before going to the evidence room. After all, some things were more important even than mysteries...