Author's Note: You're questions? The ones you've been having? Well... I told you there was a point to it all. PS: If you get confused as to what's happening, for the record, it's kind of the point. If Robin can't figure out what's going on, well, why should we be able to?
Two seconds flat and Raven was against the wall. Robin had pinned her there. He was breathing heavily, angrily.
"You're not Raven," he insisted.
He wasn't in the Tower anymore. He was in the mansion by the graveyard. He was in the room with the weeping Starfire.
The Raven in the red dressed did not speak. She was paler than usual. Her skin was rough. Her eyes were wide and round. Her nose was shrinking away and her smile was twisting into a wide grin that literally stretched from ear to ear.
As he clutched her wrists in his hands and pinned them to the wall he felt something flakey in his grasp. He pulled his hands away and realized that the palms of his hands were bubbling. Raven's skin was dissolving in his hands. They burned as the acid ate away at his flesh. He screamed and pushed Raven away, now a skeleton with course, purple hair growing out of her scalp. She reached out a decaying hand and grabbed his chin. He screamed again as it burned him. She kissed him again, but this time it was as though she was trying to eat him. His lips burned, his tongue became swollen. He swallowed what felt like gallons of acid. He tried to break away from her, tried to push this corpse off of him, tried to scream for help.
The next thing he knew he was on the ground. She was sucking the life out of him. And as he lay there, dying, burning, spluttering blood and acid, all he could think about was Starfire.
I never wanted you to kill her. I never wanted her dead. I never, never, never wanted any of you dead.
Terra's voice drifted into his head. "Oh you are such a liar."
Robin screamed, though he didn't know how. His vocal cords had been burned away by the acid Raven had vomited into his mouth. The world was black and sickly crimson. He couldn't see Raven anymore, but he felt her skeletal hands everywhere, he tasted Starfire's blood, he smelt decaying flesh. He heard Terra's voice. He felt terribly claustrophobic. He tried to speak, but his abnormally large tongue only let him make unintelligible grunts and gurgles. He felt like he was drowning.
"You're afraid of her because she's doing what you wanted," Terra's voice echoed in his head. "She killed Starfire, so you would be free. And what you taste, it's only a sample of what you're in for when the devil gets you."
Terra's face appeared now. He was sitting in an old, splintered electric chair. She stood by the switch. He begged her not to throw it, but his clumsy tongue couldn't make the right sounds. She cackled and pulled a black mask over her face. The whole room was black but for her gray eyes. Like cats eyes, they watched him, narrow and with slits for pupils.
"I'm not evil, Robin," said Terra, her voice deepening, becoming dark and demonic, contradicting her words. "I've been misrepresented. I keep the balance. Evil exists in human beings. The good are rewarded, but evil, which is blamed on me and spirits like me, evil humans are punished. We keep the balance, the demons and I."
It occurred to Robin vaguely that maybe he had wanted them dead. Wanted them all dead.
It was this thought that scared him most of all.
Terra. Raven. Evil.
What?
"The seventh layer of Hell is reserved for traitors and mutineers." Terra ripped off her mask to show a medusa-like transformation. Her eyes were gray as stone, but she had grown fangs, and the serpents which writhed on her scalp hissed at him angrily. "You understand. You and I, we're the same. We both belong there."
She pulled the switch and Robin thrashed about in his chair. Lights flashed, everything came in jolts. He couldn't move, he had no control over his muscular functions. Every muscle ached and screamed all at once, in flashes, fast, in slow motion. There was a faint buzzing in his ears. His head banged again and again against the back of his chair. He faintly smelt something burning. He couldn't scream, he couldn't breathe, he couldn't move.
Electric shock is far from a humane way today.
Especially when you forget to wet the sponge.
"Robin? Robin, are you awake?"
It was Cyborg. Robin blinked.
He was in the hallway of the tower, just outside of Raven's room. They were all kneeling around him. He had a pounding migraine. He gasped for air. His muscles ached as though he'd run ten miles without stretching.
"What happened?" As he spoke, he realized he felt nauseous. He groaned and turned his head to the side. He felt a little disoriented.
"I was trying to talk to you," said Raven. "You fainted."
Robin remembered the nightmare. "I dreamed you died…" he said.
"All of us?" said Beast Boy, sounding shocked.
"No," said Robin. "Just Raven."
Cyborg and Beast Boy looked at Raven, whose face was blank. "Makes sense to me," said Cyborg. Raven hit him.
"Then she killed Starfire," said Robin.
"What?" said Starfire.
"Wait, she died, and then she killed Starfire?" said Beast Boy.
Starfire shook her head. "Raven would never…"
Robin furrowed his brow and rubbed his eyes. "I also dreamed that Starfire and I were engaged." Starfire grinned and blushed.
"Well that's ridiculous," said Raven. "You guys can't legally do that yet."
"Technically they could, with parental consent," Beast Boy said, feeling smart.
"We don't have parents," said Raven.
"Wait, I'm confused," said Beast Boy.
"I think I'm the king of confused," moaned Robin. "Why do my muscles ache so bad?"
"Sorry about that," said Cyborg, laughing a little. "When you were unconscious, we needed some quick cash."
Robin's eyes flew open. He frowned as he stared at the ceiling. Then, he turned his head to Cyborg. "What do you mean?"
"The dark market is a fair source of income, when you know what is in demand," said Starfire with a grin. "Do not worry. We did not take your brain."
"Huh???" Robin tried to sit up, then realized he couldn't move. Cyborg looked at Starfire, then at Robin.
"Well, we were just talking about it when you groaned. We decided to hold off."
Robin tried to move again and couldn't. His brain screamed to his nerves to do something, but all his nerves did was scream back in pain. "What did you do to me?" he asked, breathless. He realized he wasn't in the hall, as he'd thought, but in the medical wing on a flat, cold, steel operating table. All his friends were wearing gloves covered in blood and sand.
"We filled up the extra space, so you could survive," said Cyborg. "We took out the organs and put in sand instead."
Robin raised his head just enough to see his chest cracked open, overflowing with blood and sand. Raven had a sewing needle she just threaded.
"Don't worry," she said, monotonously. "We just need to sew you up. This won't hurt a bit."
For the first time the real world opened its eyes.
Something was missing. It was quite obvious what it was.
He was lying, twitching, screaming, sweating in the middle of a gave yard, turning, twisting, screaming, dying…
He had danced on a grave and now, he was paying the price.
His friends, they were not there. They were far from there.
He had disappeared a few nights before, led by the voice that told him he needed to go to the graveyard, he needed to go to his friend's funeral.
Like a sleepwalker, he followed blindly, believing every whisper, believing every ghostly hint that everything he heard and saw and felt and knew was true.
After all, reality, like morality, is relative to the person perceiving it.
Now who's becoming the philosopher? thought the shape shifter as she sat cross-legged on top of a tomb. She tilted her head and watched him squirm in feverish delirium. She smiled. She looked up at the night sky and wondered when his friends would come to save the day.
She wondered if they would die before they found them.
His progress was impressive. He had already realized that something was different in his reality. It took other victims weeks to notice that the life they were living was not what they were used to.
The mind is an interesting place. The shape shifter knew that above all else. But this one… Robin's mind was probably the most interesting one she had ever feasted upon.
She continued to watch him writhe as though he was suffering great pain. She wouldn't know if he was or not. She had never been in his position.
It did look painful, though. She supposed it would hurt, to be slowly lobotomized, to be eaten from the inside out, to be hollowed out like a jack-o-lantern by careless knife-happy children. She supposed this was how a pumpkin felt on Halloween.
She heard a noise and she stiffened. Could they have found him already? Impossible. Humans were fools. A man goes missing, they check his usual haunts. They check buildings and streets.
No one checks the graveyards.
Only the dead dwell there.
The shape shifter slithered off of the tomb and kneeled in front of Robin's head. She brushed his wet hair back from his eyes. She wiped his brow and licked her finger. The salt refreshed her somehow. Sweat and blood, human fluids, human flesh… they fascinated her.
They would. She missed having a body. She loved everything carnal. She craved it like vampires craved blood, and for a similar reason.
We always want what we don't have. Vampires lack a beating heart, so they crave the warm fluid that makes it pump. I lack a corporeal form, so I crave it constantly.
But what vampires and I have most in common is that we are damned. We selfishly take from others what will only sustain us for a short time. We take their lives to temporarily slake our thirst. But we will never satisfy our hunger permanently. We are doomed to wander the earth constantly unsatisfied, and our only reason for existing is to search for quick fixes.
The shape shifter smiled. She was putting the boy to rest. She was giving him a gift that she would never be able to attain in her existence: peace. She did not believe that anything she was doing was wrong. After all, just like reality, morality is relative.
The night was dark. And Robin had been gone four days. The Titans would not relent in their search. They all did what they did best.
Beast Boy did constant aerial sweeps of a city as a hawk so he could see as clearly as possible every detail of the city.
Cyborg took the ground approach, driving down every street, every alley, even every driveway.
Starfire did a bit of both aerial and ground exploration, checking and double checking every place that Beast Boy and Cyborg might have missed.
Raven sat cross-legged in her room, searching for Robin's unique mental signature.
After six hours of constant meditation, Raven finally broke her calm with an angry screech and threw a book at the wall across the room. Partly thanks to the last six hours of concentration, nothing exploded.
Nothing, that is, except Raven's patience.
She fell back on her bed and stared at the ceiling. Cyborg, Starfire and Beast Boy collectively had searched every nook and cranny of the city physically, and she had done the same spiritually. Why could none of them find no trace of him? It was like he'd dropped off the map somewhere.
Four days ago, Robin had gone to sleep. In the morning he was gone, and his communicator was out of range.
The state police were on alert. Robin's story had made national news under the headline, "Superhero Abandons His City."
It infuriated Raven. Robin would never abandon anything, although that had been what it looked like. His bed was neatly made, and some of his things were gone. It's like he'd packed up and left.
But that was too fishy for Robin. He'd done a lot of crazy things in the past, but this… He would never do this.
So the conclusion they drew was that he had been stolen away form them. So Cyborg immediately checked the security tapes.
Their findings only fueled the media's story.
Robin was captured by the camera awakening from his sleep at about 2:48AM. He walked to his closet and put on a long black coat and a black hat. He packed a small suitcase, made his bed, fixed his mask, and walked out into the hall. He then posted a note on the fridge alerting them that they were out of milk, and then walked out the door.
There was no intruder. There wasn't even a mysterious disappearance. Just a note that said, "We're out of milk, go shopping."
What an odd farewell notice!
There was, however, no proof from the video that indicated that he didn't expect to return.
The Titans hoped more than anything that maybe this little trip was just a much needed sabbatical, and soon Robin would return. And then they would yell at him. And then he would explain, and they would hear the whole story, and the world would see that Robin never abandoned his city.
The Titans could only hope.
After all, their efforts in scouring the city were fruitless. The only logical conclusion was that he wasn't there. He must have left Jump City. Did he leave the state?
Raven growled, exhausted and frustrated. She raked her hands through her hair and fell back on her bed.
"I think I'm the only one who's accepted it," she said to no one in particular. "But maybe we'll never find him."