Chapter 3:
Siege of the Tower
All throughout Titans Tower, agonized screams could be heard as they reverberated against the steal bones of the intra-structure. They were recognizable as the pained, desperate screams of an individual facing the most horrible of sights and circumstances in their lifetime. Beast Boy screamed once more before finally gaining control enough to speak.
"It's… it's"-
"Five-meat chili, baby!" Cyborg interjected, hefting a pot of a bubbling, multicolored substance and sporting a pink 'Kiss the cook' apron. Beast Boy caught a single downdraft of the concoction before keeling over onto the floor, faint and moaning.
"Please, this 'Chill- E' is some form of torturous ritual?" Starfire spoke up, peering at Beast Boy's prone and twitching figure in confusion.
"Only if you're BB," Cyborg responded, shrugging. He proceeded to dip a metal whisk into the pot. There was an odd noise like a choked growling, and when he pulled the utensil free it had been reduced to nothing more than a charcoal appendage. He shook the handle and watched with a satisfied grin as the charcoal erupted into a small pile of ashes onto the floor.
"Oooooh, just like Grandma used to make!" he said and scampered off to grab a few bowls that wouldn't disintegrate upon contact with the concoction.
"I'm beginning to wonder if maybe you and I had the same paternal Grandmother," Raven muttered, glancing up from her book long enough to raise an eyebrow at the lethal dish. Indeed, she thought it looked like something out of one of her spell books.
Beast Boy recovered enough to get on all fours and drag himself towards where the pot sat on the counter. Holding his nose, he placed his pointed right ear against the belly of the pot.
"I think I can still hear them! The poor animals are still suffering!" he cried. Deliriously -or so it seemed to Raven- he began shouting at the pot.
"Don't worry! Just hang on; I'll save you, I'll" -he made the mistake of letting go of his nose and, inhaling another waft of the chili's stench, he turned a sickly shade of gray before keeling over once more. Fortunately, Starfire revived him by splashing a melted blueberry slushy that had been in the fridge for a suspicious number of days in his face. He sat up.
"Thanks, Star," he said, sputtering and, no longer green nor gray, but blue.
"You are most welcome. Despite giving rather unpleasant chilling sensations to the cerebral cortex in my past experiences, I have observed that frozen sugary products normally invoke positive reactions in residents of this planet," she said, smiling kindly.
"I don't know what you just said but thanks," he responded, getting up and sufficiently wrapping his head in one of Raven's knitting projects to block out the smell of chilly. Raven's personality had mellowed out a great deal the previous few months –obviously a result of having the burden of an apocalypse lifted from her robed shoulders- and, rather than becoming angry as she normally would have, she merely gave him a heavily sardonic look.
"You look like a terrorist," she said before promptly returning to her book. Beast Boy gave her a sulking expression through his turban crocheted with briars and dark birds in flight, but he didn't have the opportunity to retort before Cyborg returned bearing dishware.
"All right, y'all, so who wants to try my chilly?" he asked beaming. Raven and Beast Boy seemed to sink further into the back of the main room, but Starfire cautiously accepted a bowl, holding it as far away as her arms would allow. She gave its steam a timid sniff.
"On my planet, such dishes are used to test the endurance of warriors. It seems… inappropriate to partake in such delicacies while participating in a ceremony as casual as the 'hanging out,'" she said gently. Cyborg just grinned all the wider in his enthusiasm.
"Aw, that's just because you don't have any crackers yet!"
"I see," Starfire said, nodding, though there was doubt in her voice.
"I think Silkie ate them all," Beast Boy spoke up, his muffled voice sounding hopeful for the first time since the idea of chili had reared its ugly head. There was the banging of cupboard doors, then-
"Silkie!" This time, it was Cyborg's anguished, high-pitched shriek that rang through the control room. Sure enough, there was a very swollen moth larva lying in the bottom of the dry goods cupboard, and with watering eyes like those of a man who had just eaten far too much in a bad Thai restaurant.
"Silkie!" Starfire exclaimed, mimicking Cyborg. "I thought you were napping in Robin's room!"
"Apparently not. Does this mean no chili?" Raven inquired, her normally deadpan voice sounding slightly hopeful. Cyborg recovered from the devastating blow that was a lack of Ritz.
"Nothing can stop the chili, baby!" Cyborg exclaimed. "Tell Robin to get his paranoid butt down here. The villain reports can wait till later; it's Chili-Time!"
"Leave him alone. He's sleeping. Something he hasn't been doing enough of, lately," Raven muttered the last bit more so to herself. Through her mental link with Robin, she could often feel the lax, jumbled thought processes that were telltale the signs of sleep, but lately they had been too often replaced with the signs of a person pacing relentlessly back and forth. Stress, aching muscles, inconclusive thoughts; none of it was healthy, and she was starting to get worried.
"He hasn't been sleeping again?" Cyborg asked, slightly concerned, his chili tirade abated for the moment.
"Not enough. He has something on his mind, but I'm sure of what it is, yet."
"What do you expect?" Beast Boy spoke up, his voice still muffled by the turban. "The dude was raised in Gotham, City of the Insomniacs! There are grocery stores there that don't open until ten PM."
"It also has as many rain fogs and cafes as Jump has sunny days and pizza places," Raven admitted dreamily after elbowing the changeling in the gut for the insensitive insomniac comment. She blinked as if a thought had just occurred to her. "Can we move there?"
"With all that rain, Cyborg would probably rust in an hour," Beast Boy quipped, even though he didn't know whether or not Cyborg could actually rust. Rather than getting a laugh, however, he just got another jab in the ribs for the insensitive metahuman comment. And this time it was from Cyborg, so the green titan was sent flying over the couch and nearly displaced his head wrap.
"Hey, where's Star?" Cyborg questioned as Beast Boy spat out his left sneaker, a bizarre result of his awkward crash landing that even he could not explain. Starfire had slipped out so quietly that none of the others had noticed her do so the moment it had been mentioned that Robin was not entirely well.
--
Starfire stood awkwardly outside the door to Robin's room, unsure as to whether or not she should proceed. She wanted to check up on him, but she also did not want to risk waking him. She felt it would be unfair to wake him just to quell her own worries.
"I shall be brief," Starfire told herself before placing her hand on automatic motion sensor. It triggered the door opening mechanism that released with a soft whoosh of air, and she popped her head inside the darkened room.
Robin was deep asleep, his hair mussed and the blankets and pillows tossed to the side. He appeared so peaceful that Starfire wondered why she had ever really worried in the first place. It had been her intention to merely look to reassure herself he was well and then leave, but she was unable to resist floating over to recover him with the blue bedspread. She didn't notice as the door closed silently behind her.
Submerged in darkness, the alien girl soon found herself sitting on the edge of his bed, her smiling face resting on the palm of her hand as she watched him sleep. Her eyes cast a green fluorescence bright enough for her observe his features by but not bright enough to cause him to stir. She thought him so handsome, striking with his light skin and dark hair. Without realizing it, she reached out to gently caress the skin around his mask with her index finger, hoping that it would somehow give her some indication of eye color. With the thumb of that same hand she outlined his lips, the same ones she had kissed when they'd first met, then in Tokyo, and a few times since then. She blushed thinking about it.
Suddenly, she whipped around, her heart racing. She could've sworn that she heard a familiar low chuckle, deep in the dark, echoing metallically as if stifled by a mask. She bolted up from her sitting position, and then her heart nearly exploded out of her chest at what she saw next: a single, glowing eye in the far side of the room. An eye whose cold gaze she would never forget.
Without thinking, she summoned her righteous fury into a starbolt aimed dead-on at that hated image. Letting it loose and watching as it effectively demolished her target, she was shocked to find that the result was an intricate, building web of green light that imploded into a shattering downpour of crystals. Cold fear gripped the Tamaranian's heart before the glass fragments even managed to land, tinkling like chimes, on the carpeted floor. Robin's room had mirrored walls…it was a reflection… he was behind her!
She whipped around in time to receive a high voltage shock from an angry looking electronic device wielded by a shadow. The attack sent pain surging up through her spine and neck, and the aftershock pelted her several feet and into a mirror that had yet to be shattered. The noise of the crash rang through the room. Starfire's alien blood meant that she wasn't badly hurt, but she was dazed enough to have no defense against the shadow lurking up and seizing the opportunity to finish her.
She was saved from a finishing blow by Robin, who had woken immediately after the first crash. Getting a quick grasp of the situation, the teen leader rushed forward and seized the dark figure around the neck and by the elbow, flinging the would-be-killer over his shoulder and across the room. Slade flipped over in the air, landing feet-first on a desk and demolishing it before skidding backwards a few more feet.
"Hello, Robin," he said simply and coldly. "I hope you are as eager as I am to make this our final encounter." And with that, he leapt up to deliver a flying kick. Robin caught Slade's foot in his arm, ducking and rolling to avoid a second kick by the other foot. He reeled to avoid a punch, responding with an uppercut of his own under his opponent's chin and crossing his other arm across his body to deliver a punch to the older man's ribs. He finished by kicking Slade hard in the chest and propelling him to the other side of the room.
He rushed over to Starfire, who had recovered from the previous onslaught. "Robin, the Tower!" she exclaimed. He looked around to notice the room had gone into a full panic. Lights flashed and alarms sounded from every angle, causing a momentary confusion. It was a lockdown that hadn't been initiated since the last time Slade had been in the Tower, in the form of a ghost. Robin knew it as a fact, because he was the one who had initiated it the last time. He didn't know how, but Slade had managed to hack into the Tower's systems, just as he had managed to break into the Tower.
"Come on!" he said, grabbing Starfire's hand. As much as he wanted the end of Slade, nothing good could come from fighting in a cage. He and Starfire bolted for the door as the steel began to fold down over it. Robin targeted it with a freeze disk, the ice cramming the gears long enough to buy them a few seconds. Starfire managed to make it outside the room, desperately yanking him along behind her, but he let go of her hand at the last minute as pain laced through his neck and back. The jam broke free, and Robin fell to the floor. He saw her expression of horror as the steel shield came between them, keeping each outstretched hand from the other.
--Whew! That was a pretty long chapter for me.
Thanks to Tokyo Blue, TeenTitansLover1, jasmine-leigh, WildCat9221, and Unleash The Shadow for your wonderful reviews!