Victor considered his friends. He did so in an analytical sort of way, trying his best to forget the rose-gold haze that surrounded them in his usual thoughts on the matter. Dick – sorry, Robin while out here – had a database full of details on each of them. It was hardly secret, and even if it had been Vic would have had no trouble unearthing it, so he pulled it up on his internal monitor and pondered its contents.

Let's start with the man himself. Vic briefly glanced over to where Dick spun through the air, mid-flip, his supporting hand balanced on a surprised mobster's shaven head. Richard Grayson, the guy who told people his name was 'Dick' just to see if he could handle it. He was the tactician. The one who dared to go where no hand had ever set foot. The dual Machiavelli-Romeo, the scheming poser, the undisputed leader. Vic kicked in a man's kneecap and barely registered the scream as the bone shattered. According to this, Dick thought there was a high chance he was autistic in some capacity. He could see that, Vic reflected. It was just something new, and surprising, which was why a stray riff of gunfire caught him off guard and forced him to duck behind a grimy JCB forklift. But that was Dick. The surprisingly warm man with the battle computer in his head. Dick was more machine than he was, thought Vic, but he didn't look it.

The forklift was taking a beating from some asshole with a machine-gun and an inferiority complex. Victor ran a few ideas past his core processor. The small tactical missile in his shoulder would deal with the problem with a 99.5% efficiency rate, but it also risked killing the man. Not to mention, he only had one. He might need it later. Missiles were expensive. His next-best option was a side-on assault, head turned to shield the right-hand side of his face, but even that was risky. 44.2% success rate. Too low. Vic decided on the missile, but just as he was prepping the target lock there was a salvo of arcing screams not unlike one of those throwable NERF rockets and two or three virulent green bursts shot across the large warehouse to blast the inferiority complex guy off his feet.

Victor shot a mock-salute off to Starfire, whose lithe form hovered at the ceiling near the back. She waved, and probably smiled. Even without the enhanced zoom on his false eye Vic could see the muscles bulge in her arms as she did so. He still wasn't over the fact that even with the impossibly advanced tech built into every fibre of his body she could still bench-press something like three times as much as he could. Jealousy? No. More like friendly competition mixed with awe. Kory's usual nonchalant brightness and sheer optimism, Vic decided, were impressively effective at masking the unstoppable force of nature she became when she was angry. Her brain, in a kind of paradoxical naivety, tended to automatically sort people into good and evil, friends and foes, the trustworthy and the untrustworthy. Dick's files suggested that this left her vulnerable to deception if not to physical assault. Bullets impacted her like punches might, solid hits leaving bruises and glancing ones ricocheting off her diamond-lattice skin. Knives just slid off like she was coated in chainmail. But, Victor thought, it was easy to focus on the physical. Many would judge Star based entirely on her otherworldly top-model looks. No, she was the instigator, the spirit of the group, the core of energy who spurred the others on to greater heights. She was warlike and joyful by turns, and – to Vic at least – was a source of perennial awe.

Vic made a decision, and began to shunt the forklift forwards along the rough concrete floor. His systems told him he was at 30% motor capacity, so he re-routed some of the defensive shielding into the piston-powered arm units and accelerated sharply. He was only aiming a couple of metres in front, where he'd be able to get behind a thick reinforced pillar and from there have a greater tactical advantage, but as it happened powering down his shields might have proved fatal. A stray shower of bullets happened to spin towards the forklift, and for a brief moment as Victor's head turned upwards he saw in dramatic quarter speed the tightening of a finger on a trigger followed by the slow curve of the gun as it arced round towards his hopelessly exposed face.

Luckily for him, a green-red-white blur shot into view from the side, twisting and changing, and the bullet that would have burrowed into Victor's exposed eyeball instead embedded itself in an outstretched shaggy paw. There was a grunt of not-quite-pain as the bear-that-used-to-be-Garfield-Logan stumbled from its continued momentum and landed heavily and awkwardly on the pillar. Vic, after a moment of brief shock, leaned forward and hefted Gar back towards the JCB. Gar gave him a look. Vic turned away quickly. His friend's shapeshifting was never pleasant to behold, bloody muscle and bone sliding over twisted cartilage in a truly repulsive manner that left him gagging at an imagined smell. After a moment, the slick wet flesh-melding noises from behind ceased, and Gar breathed out. 'Thanks, dude,' he said briefly.

'Don't bother,' Vic replied.

'Dick says go cannonball.'

This was one of the many standard strategies they'd employ as a team. They were pinned down by a cluster of men taking shelter behind some thick concrete barriers at the back of the room. Running towards the men would just get them shot. Even Gar couldn't take a full belt of .308s from an M240 and expect to retain any reasonably solid shape. If they had good aim, and one or two of them certainly did, Vic saw, they'd even be able to beat Starfire into the floor with the sheer force of hundreds of machine-gun bullets. Several in the same location would break the skin, and then it would be all over.

So instead they used the 'cannonball', which consisted of a strange sort of funnelling manoeuvre that delivered a payload right into the heart of the enemy. If it was executed well, it worked slightly horrific wonders. Gar was the one who carried the payload, naturally – his ability to shape-shift allowed him to shield the payload and protect it from harm. Vic considered his position as Gar upped the keratin shielding on his right side and made a run for it back across the warehouse to the doorway through which they'd come in. Gar was at odds, Victor felt, in a warzone. On the one hand he was inherently pacifistic, but on the other he exuded an overbearing sense of care that extended to just about everybody. In other words he liked to protect people, and if he had to help his friends crack a few skulls together he wouldn't hesitate. Gar did, however, play more of a defensive role in the team. It contrasted wildly with his slightly snarky, good-natured humour in everyday life, but perhaps played into – Vic quoted Dick's database here – his 'own need to be protected'. Whatever that meant. Victor didn't want to pry too deep. The information about them all here was exhaustive, and he wasn't looking to discover anything too personal about Gar. Their relationship was simple as it was, and Vic wanted to keep it that way.

'Alright,' came Dick's voice through his earpiece. 'Vic, I'd like you to move approximately three metres to the right for optimal firing range. I'll count you down once we're all in position.'

Victor grunted in response, and shifted himself sideways, behind the pillar. As he did so, the near-constant rattling drumbeat of gunfire petered out weakly. There was an almost awkward silence. The chamber echoed with every stray footstep or intake of breath. Someone fired a gun, once, with no response. Vic trod carefully, all too aware of how his metal bulk tapped and clinked against the concrete floor, and listened for the fearful raising of gun barrels.

For a long moment, there was nothing.

'Vic,' Dick said in his ear, 'Go twenty degrees at 700 Hertz. Now.'

Vic's fingers folded back onto his wrist and his palm split into three segments. He breathed in, leaned round the side of the pillar and fired.

Two hundred decibels of controlled sound blistered the concrete barrier apart, making several men duck for cover as Kory's toxic lasers scored black lines in the wall just over their heads. Vic kept his focus on his covering fire, but out of the corner of his eye he noted a large green blur charging up to where their opponents cowered temporarily. Victor and Star couldn't kill the men, couldn't even hurt them too much, so there was only a short window before they caught on and began to return fire. Thankfully, Dick had had them train that short window down to a tee. Gar lumbered to a stop shortly in front of the barrier, reached over his back and helped a dark human-shaped hole in reality vault over the concrete and into the small crowd.

Vic ceased firing. His job was done.

There was a brief confusion, a shot or two, the sound of something fleshy tearing, and then roughly thirty seconds of terrified pained screaming. Victor flinched as a line of blood spattered up the back wall. Other than a low sobbing, everything went quiet. Starfire drifted slowly down from overhead, averting her eyes slightly. 'Robin' – Vic rolled his eyes – appeared from nowhere and jogged quickly to the scene, already pulling a roll of gauze from some concealed pocket. Gar shrank and began to force bullets out of his skin, tired. Vic hesitated a moment longer, then walked forward. He nodded to Gar, braced himself, and turned the corner.

All things considered, it wasn't that bad. There weren't any severed arteries this time, just sheared flesh and maybe the odd snapped tendon. Victor couldn't help but find it in himself to pity the men, despite their attempted murder and drug-running. He was a naturally forgiving person.

Raven was not. He looked up at her now, shaking blood from her hands, and felt nothing but discomfort upon seeing her satisfied smile. She was like a little sister to him ordinarily, but a little sister who scared him. Vic's mother had been religious; which was, he suspected, part of the reason she had split from his harshly atheist father, but the end result of that was that he retained a flickering fear of the supernatural. The concept of the devil wasn't something he could reconcile himself to, but from time to time when he talked with Raven he saw the devil in her eyes. She was, nonetheless, a good person. Vic wasn't sure if their moral codes aligned exactly, but he knew that much. She laughed, thought, spoke like the rest of them, tried as hard as she could to fit in. Dick noted a deep-set self-doubt in her that Vic certainly hadn't noticed any evidence of. Her raw, vicious passion tended to overshadow everything else. Raven was a glass sword, Victor decided. She cut hard and fast, but was fantastically brittle. Sometimes he felt like he could snap her in half by tapping her at the base of her spine. Mind like a steel bar, he said to himself. As he said, she scared him.

Vic saw that Dick was already grilling one of the injured men, whose tongue ran like a river the instant he saw Raven shoot a burning glance in his direction. Starfire was busy putting an unconscious boy in the foetal position. Gar was nowhere to be seen. There was a drug shipment to be intercepted and Vic had already almost died twice today.

In other words, it had been an unremarkable Tuesday.

Thinking about it, none of his friends were quite like Will.

Vic had talked to Will in the bar for hours that night, unable to extricate himself from the incessant stream of chatter. Strangely enough, the young man with his nervous manner, jittery hands and thin dark hair made good company. He knew a fair bit about robotics, Vic's chosen area of academic expertise. More than a fair bit. It turned out that Will had studied an eclectic branch of nanorobotics at a top university in his home town of Wuhan in China. Victor didn't think Will was exactly a man of action. In fact, he seemed to shy from any sort of physical contact. Victor discovered this upon attempting to shake Will's hand at the end of the evening, at which suggestion Will recoiled with a flushed face and shook his head violently.

When Vic recounted the story of the drug bust to an enraptured Will on a later occasion, he noticed how the other man physically shook at descriptions of violence. There was some buried past there, perhaps. Vic didn't want to pry.

Vic met with Will increasingly often after that, but it wasn't enough to stave off the hollow incompleteness that beat inversely within his chest. His days were composed of whirling blurs of action, broken frustrating silences and long periods of unfinished thought. His nights were endless circles, wrapping the city like the legendary ouroboros. Vic felt like the snake, then, swallowing his own tail in a fruitless cycle of nothingness. His friends noticed his absent non-conversation, his quiet unhappiness, his dissociation, but none of them knew quite what to say or what to do. Dick tried to talk, but Vic refused to let anything on. Starfire gave him worried encouraging smiles and said little. Gar distracted Vic with innumerable inane rounds of Mario Kart, and Raven just made scathing jokes at his expense. All in all, everything felt just slightly out of joint.

Vic dreamed vividly every night for weeks, and it was always the same. Every night he would wake up sweating, with a voice in the back of his head screaming itself hoarse at the world in general.

'Twelve Hours Zero Minutes Zero Seconds!'

He'd look at the time, and it would be midnight exactly.

One night, though he didn't dare open his eyes, he woke to the feeling of cold breath on his face.

Vic was somehow sure that if he looked, he'd never close his eyes again.