AN: sry about the long wait but truthfully, i did not have any time to write.

disclaimer: don't own em. duh.

Chapter 5 :A Night of Answers(Pt.2):

Raven sighed in exhaustion, finally able to lie in her own bed. It had taken thirty minutes to get Starfire from the forest, two hours for her to wake up, a thirty minute break, and then another hour to find and situate Keenyara, who was incredibly open to sleeping on a couch for someone so arrogant, though the comment that it would not work long term did not serve to decrease the ever increasing amount of questions surrounding the girl.

Personally, Raven accepted Starfire's explanation without question. She of all people understood the need for a certain amount of privacy, and if Starfire preferred her past experiences private then Raven would not ask questions. She also accepted the fact that Robin was like Beastboy in the fact that both were annoyingly stubborn when kept from certain information. She had the feeling that Robin was with Starfire at the moment, pulling the truth out of her, one way or another.

Tiredly, Raven slipped under her slight covers, hardly believing that it was only eleven. She closed her eyes, and was asleep before she could think of anything more.

-!-

Raven looked around her, barely surprised at what she saw. She was standing on nothing, only black space all around. It was as if she was standing in the screen of a television that had been turned off. The surface she stood on was indistinguishable from any walls or sky, if they did exist at all.

"So, someone's found a way to pester me even when I sleep.," she mused quietly, "Why is the world suddenly taking on a Beastboy-like habit?" She hardly suspected an answer, but one came just the same.

"You know when they said that fate was cruel? It really is more of a bittersweet annoyance." The reply had come from a young woman about Raven's height. She was dressed in an elegant lime green dress and plain sandals. She shared the dark chocolate skin that Keenyara had, but looked slightly more cared for and not quite so thin. Her black hair reached a few inches past her shoulders and was separated into what looked like hundreds of tiny braids. Her dark green eyes looked nervous as she watched Raven.

Raven 'hmph'ed and looked the girl up and down. "Who are you?" The girl crossed her arms and sighed deeply.

"Aara. I'm Aara. But we're not here to talk about me. We're here to talk about your new houseguest. Please tell me she's behaving herself." Aara looked at Raven, looking worried. Raven narrowed her eyes.

"I understand that the two of you come from a different dimension, so let's just say that her manners aren't quite up to par here. In fact there are a certain few people around here who would use some very unflattering words to describe her." Raven paused and crossed her arms over her chest, looking faintly irritated. "You mentioned minor annoyances?" Aara seemed taken aback and stepped forward, also narrowing her eyes.

"I don't think you're being fair!" she exclaimed, "Keenyara can be a little arrogant sometimes, and I know she puts things bluntly, and yeah, she doesn't think before she says anything, but… she…" she trailed off, awkwardly and looked at Raven whose skeptical gaze could not have been more disbelieving. "God, damnit she's a bitch…" she mumbled, burying her face in her hands. "She's a bitch, and everyone who knows her knows she's a bitch. Even she knows she's a bitch." Pushing one of her braids behind her ear, she looked up at Raven, looking almost a weary as Raven felt. "It's just one of those passing traits you have to overlook."

Raven arched an eyebrow. "Uh huh. And next you'll tell me that when you get to know her she's a sweet and caring person and her hard exterior is just an act she uses to keep herself from getting hurt. Excuse me, but where I come from, that's called cliché."

Aara dropped to sit cross legged on the floor. "Actually, when you get to know her, you find that she's even more of a bitch than you originally thought," she muttered lowly. "I doubt that she would put up an act for anyone, including herself. She's never found it worth the effort to try to say anything to please people, and if there is only one thing true about Keenyara, it's that she doesn't do anything that isn't worth it." She looked up at Raven. "Please, sit," she said, waving a hand at the barely-there floor. Raven did.

"Keenyara was born a slave, which is why she's so smart, but she escaped when she was twelve, when she finished her training, using her power. You have to understand that she made herself everything that she is now, which is quite a lot. Of the five of us, she was the strongest, as much as I don't want her to know that. Not only that, but all of her skills are self taught, which means that she will never forget how to do what she does. For all of her bragging she's pretty true to reality."

Raven blinked, trying to work out more than one of the facts she had just heard. Hating her own curiosity, she picked the most impersonal question. "Why are you telling me this?" she finally asked slowly. Aara sighed and leaned back on her hands.

"Because Keenyara was sent to your dimension for a reason, though I'm not sure how much of that reason I can tell you. You and your other female friend are crucial to a major battle coming up, and Keenyara's job is to make sure that nothing happens to you two in the meantime. She has an attitude problem, I'll admit, but you're stuck with her, or rather she's stuck with you." Her drained frown suddenly split into a wide grin. "Luckily, you've got a certain amount of power over her." Raven's interest prickled some, though she refrained from showing it.

"You know, if the universe would stop speaking to me in riddles I would really appreciate it. Maybe you'd like to start the trend." Aara rolled her eyes.

"If you two don't get along then you'll kill each other, I swear," she muttered crossly. "Keenyara was assigned to you unwillingly, so there is a bit of safeguard on her. She's bound to you and the other one. All you need is a direct order and she has to obey it."

Raven crossed her arms, unconvinced. "How direct?" Aara tilted her head.

"Say her name; state the command, that kind of direct— being specific helps too," she said thoughtfully. "If she can find a way around it, trust me, she will. And I'd stay away from things like, 'Tell me this' or 'believe that.' If you do, there's most definitely going to be a backlash like hell."

Raven nodded, knowing about such things from her many books. "Anything else I should know? Should I expect you to be dropping by in the physical world anytime soon?" she asked, standing slowly. Aara laughed.

"Ah, well, you'll see me again one day, but no where in the near future. I should be dropping by in a decade or two. Don't back down off of Keenyara. She's like an abused dog. Right now, she'll snap at anything, but once you wear her down… well you won't get bitten as much."

The words seemed to be the end of their little chat and Aara was gone just as instantly as she had come. Raven had time to reflect on what the next few decades could hold for them all, before she faded to herself and returned to true sleep once more.

-!-

"What do you want to know?"

"I want to know about the past you left out in the common room today. Why were you out in space at all? Who was K'trina?"

Robin held Starfire around her waist while she leaned against him comfortably. Although, she had tried to ready herself for whatever questions Robin would ask, Starfire still felt herself no where near as at ease as she would have been had they been talking about anything else.

Starfire took a silent breath and plunged into her story. "I and my brother Ryand'r, or Bluefire, were both born on the same night. I was born a few minutes before him. For a while, everything was normal. We learned to walk and talk and run and laugh. We played with Blackfire and were each given knorfkas to see to our well being. Until I was four, I was a normal little girl, albeit a little spoiled," she added with a faint blush. Robin cocked his head to one side.

It was a little hard for him to think of Starfire as a toddler wanting her way in everything and most often getting it. Starfire was usually so willing to give up things for others. He tried imagining her having a temper tantrum and found that he just could not do it. He gave up for the moment and listened to her explanation.

"Then, a few months after I became four, something important happened. It was all very official and I took no notice of it really, except to know that someone had been keeping information from my father and mother, the Grand Ruler and Queen of Tamaran, and one of the first things that had been taught to me as a child was that you always tell the Grand Ruler everything. Keeping secrets was not tolerated.

"What ever did happen, it changed everything for my brother, sister, and I. For some reason we ceased to be children and instead became weapons and powers to be trained and refined. Our entire lives were being planned out. Entire plots to conquer empires hinged on us and our skills. We began to train everyday in every subject. Everything was a lesson. Playtime was for practicing cleverness and tactics. Even during meals we were expected to be learning the manners we would have to exhibit once we 'defeated the evil and ruled all that was.'

"The new expectations we were bound to were hard enough, but we soon enough found that it got even more complicated. Both my mother and my father wanted control of us, wanted the knowledge that they would have all of the power that we would have. Their dispute became a fight that almost destroyed the castle we lived in. For days we took shelter in various rooms of the palace, hoping that they would not kill one of us by accident.

"And then, one day it was over. The fight came into the great room where we were and," Starfire shook her head, dismayed, "she killed him. She had been known throughout the galaxy for not only her beauty, but her seductions and charms. What she was not famous for was her skill and grace when fighting." Starfire looked up, meeting Robin's eyes for the first time. "She is deadly. She has always been deadly. And what makes her deadly is the fact that only she knew of her skill.

"She then turned to us. We had been hiding with Galifore, Blackfire and Bluefire's knorfkas having gone to find help. She attempted to take us from Galifore. You may have noticed the scar along his right eye. I am quite sure that that is a scar from that battle, but he refuses to tell me. She did not kill him only because we begged her to spare him. We went with her willingly in exchange for his life. She must have planned it out for some months because there was a ship belonging to Psions waiting for us at the edge of the atmosphere. It was there that we spent the next years of our lives. Once we were on the ship, she changed our names. She decided that I was to be K'trina, Power for Destruction."

Starfire silently waited for Robin's reaction. She was surprised at her own reaction. While she had expected tears, or at least depression to come to her with the retelling of her story, what she felt was actually a bit of release. She had never spoken the story out loud to anyone. Somehow, she wondered if it brought her closer to Robin.

Robin was more speechless than anything else. "I'm sorry," he finally blurted out, feeling his cheeks flare. "About your father," he quickly added. Starfire shook her head wistfully.

"It hurt to watch him die, but," she paused guiltily, "I believe I would have been much more devastated if it had been Galifore or my sister or brother. It was one of the reasons royal children were given knorfkas. A king and queen were much too busy running the planet or making sure that their children will marry well. I hardly knew him." She looked up at him again. "You still have questions." Robin had not expected it to be a question.

"What was that vision thing that we saw?" Robin asked. He remembered the girl he had seen, fighting so hard. He remembered her hair. He remembered her eyes. "That girl… that was you, wasn't it?"

"Yes, that was me. Me when I was younger," she paused thoughtfully, "I was not as I am now." Robin nodded, but kept quiet, not wanting her to have to stop for him. "After they found that their experiment was a success, they began to see the value and genius of it." Starfire smiled ruefully. "The perfect soldier. A built in cannon is easy to carry around and hard to detect.

"Once they saw the usefulness of it, they began changing Blackfire, and then my brother, Bluefire. That was when they found that most males did not take to the change the way females did." Starfire noticed the pain welling up inside her. She had been beginning to think that she may have been over the pain, but she found the truth now. "He did not die," she said, more to console herself than for Robin's benefit. "But, unlike my sister and I, the pain did not stop after the machine was turned off. The fire continued to burn him and it drove him mad after only two years. He was still only a child." Starfire tried to push forward with her story, hoping that it would drive the vision of her only twin out of her mind. Her stomach clenched.

"When they finished with us they began kidnapping young girls from all over the galaxy. They only took girls, both because they did not know if males would have a reaction similar to my brother's, and believing that a woman would be even less suspicious than a man. I am also sure that their preference of gender had something to do with a pact that my mother made with them. A deadly disease long ago killed all but a few of the females on the Psion planet and the species was sure to die out if there was not a large supply of females to be given to them soon. So my mother devised a plan."

Starfire looked up and Robin and debated just how far into her own musings she should go. She thought carefully about her next words. "You see, Robin, my mother is not stupid in any sense of the word. She is not like any other females, she does not think with her heart or with her emotions. I do not think that her battle was one she just fell into in a moment of rage. She had been planning it and our kidnapping for some years, and therefore she was in control from the beginning. From the way she interacted with the Psions I think that she had been in contact with them for longer than anyone really knows. So you see, she knew all of the problems and how they each should be resolved.

"She knew that she would be a hunted woman as soon as she turned on Tamaran, so she hid with the Psions, a species said to have died out. She knew that the Psions never did anything without payment, so she brought us, 'chosen ones with immeasurable power'. She knew that she would never be able to take Tamaran without an army, and that she could not have a surviving army with only a group of males or with only a group of females. So she went to the Psions' king and created the 'sport' of Kaie.

"The rules were simple. Twelve men divided into teams of four would fight each other for a girl. The team that wins wins that girl for one night. The man who actually captured her, the one who drove the knife into her, he wins her completely. He must allow his teammates use of her for that on night, but after that she belongs to him and him only. Any daughters that she would have would either be born with the starbolts or would have them 'given' to her. Any sons would become soldiers or generals or something of the sort. You understand Robin, she was literally, breeding an army.

"What you saw was a memory of my own Kaie. As I told you once, I could not afford to lose that battle, but it is not a competition between the girl and the men. The game was not designed to allow a victory for me. I could not afford failure, but failure was inevitable."

Starfire winced suddenly, brought out of her quiet remembrance by Robin's vice-like grip on her hand. She looked up at him inquiringly, only to see him with his eyes shut tightly and his mouth was pressed into a thin line. His face was white like a sheet and he breathed slowly and gruffly. Starfire could almost taste his fury, his fear, his disbelief. Her eyes were wide with wonder. She was in awe at the amount of emotion he felt for her. She was not sure what to say to him, whether to be flattered or saddened, so she blurted out the first thing she could form in her mind.

"That hurts," she muttered, her eyes stuck to their entwined hands, her fingers quickly turning purple. Robin did not move, seeming not to hear her. Gently, she began to pull at his fingers, hoping to relieve the pressure, but only succeeding in awaking him from his own mind. He grabbed her chin, the movement no where near his usual gentleness, and locked his gaze with hers. His eyes were bright with fury.

"They didn't do that to you," he stated, his voice harsh and clear. Starfire was astonished once again. "Tell me that they didn't do that to you." Starfire closed her eyes briefly, trying to protect herself from the memories, but Robin's hand tightened considerably, causing them to fly open once more. "Don't— please don't. Look at me. Tell me," Robin said his voice softer.

Starfire smoothed her knuckles against his cheek consolingly. "I— they— they came close. They came so close. But I did not let them. You saw what happened tonight in the clearing, the starfire that came from me and bent to my will. It happened then, for the first time. I was not in control of myself. The entire ship was destroyed and my sister and brother escaped. But I was too weak."

Robin's grip on her relaxed and his eyes slid closed in relief.

"Eventually, a household ship belonging to a group of Gordanians picked me up. They had seen what had happened and found the power I possessed pretty," she uttered, disgust evident in her voice. "I was so badly hurt and so weak that I could not escape. They put me to work as a performer. Every night I was to unleash the power once again. After doing this for such a long time, I learned to manipulate the fire, creating patterns and things. As long as my performance was satisfying, I was not harmed very much." Starfire saw Robin perk up, noticing her careful wording. She took his hand in both of hers, looking at him intently.

"But I am alive, Robin," she said, before kissing him lightly. Her eyes pleaded with him to forget his anger at her past foes. "I have lived through it. And how agreeable do you think I would be had I been left on Tamaran and spoiled as they wanted to spoil me," she added trying to smile for him. It struck her as odd that she was now trying her hardest to keep him calm, while in the beginning it was reversed. She let the thought go. "Please, please, don't do this to yourself. I have… learned to deal with it," she murmured, looking away again.

Robin frowned and pulled her face toward him. He kissed her gently and pulled her against him. When he pulled back, he looked at her intensely.

"That doesn't make it right. That doesn't make it fair." He slid his hands around her waist. "You didn't deserve it," he whispered.

Starfire smiled wryly, hugging him close, her mind calming a bit with the comfort of his embrace. "We never want to believe we deserve it."