Disclaimer: No, I don't own Teen Titans.

Chapter 8

"Hold still!" A green lion cub pounced out of Cyborg's reach, landing on Beast Boy's cot.

"Uhmnuhwa..." the teen mumbled incoherently. The present one of the two resident doctors had told Beast Boy to take it easy, but not fall asleep. He definitely had a concussion and...something about something bad if he caught some shut-eye. It had been hard for Beast Boy to focus. Well, harder than usual. On the bright side, at least Cyborg's attempts at taking blood samples from the kids meant a lot of noise, which made it a little easier to stay awake. Unfortunately, Beast Boy was pretty great at falling asleep regardless of the circumstances, so it still wasn't a guarantee.

"Get back down here!" Cyborg yelled at the other mini-titan, who was showing off her levitation abilities. Judging by how she kept grazing the walls, Cyborg felt it was clear that she needed a little more practice. She also needed to work on controlling her dark energy. The way the medical equipment was flashing black was kind of concerning.

"Hey Robin! A little help here?" For someone who claimed to be their all-powerful, holier-than-thou leader, he sure wasn't acting like it.

"Where are they?!" Robin demanded, completely sidestepping Cyborg's blatant request for aid, "we need to brief them!"

Beast Boy had incapacitated himself. Raven was having an emotional breakdown, possibly taking down Starfire in the process. Robin was being completely unhelpful. Why was it always Cyborg? These weren't even his kids! Cyborg silently vowed that if he ever got married his wife was not going to have superpowers. No way was he going to have to chase after little terrors that could shoot laser beams at him and throw him around like a rag doll. No sir. When it came to his own kids, HE was going to be the one in charge. He was also going to take responsibility for them. Unlike his teammates. Granted, the kids' existence was not the fault of their current selves, but that didn't mean they couldn't help out. This was unfair. And Cyborg had reached his limit.

"Fine! Forget it!" he cried, throwing his hands up in the air, "you win! No needles - it's not worth it."

The blood tests were going to serve more as an interesting medical investigative tool for the metal teen more than anything else. They weren't essential. As far as he could tell, from what readings he got before the kids got hold of the stethoscope and ripped off the electrodes monitoring their heart rates, they were pretty healthy. Even if he didn't do their blood work, he was pretty sure they'd be fine. It was his own health he was worried about. Not to mention Beast Boy's. Cyborg walked over to the green teen and checked his vitals. Concussions took a while to heal. If Raven could just get herself together and get her butt down here to heal him, he'd be good to go.

SWISH

Cyborg sighed in relief when the med bay doors slid open, revealing an exhausted, but very much present pair of titans.

"Man, am I glad to see you," he grinned, "now tell the little nightmares y'all's future selves created to calm down. Uncle Cy needs a break."

Cyborg plopped onto the bed next to Beast Boy's, closing his eyes.

"And Raven," he pointed in the changeling's general direction, "BB needs some serious healing. Kids did a number on him. Especially little laser eyes over there."

Raven made her way over to Beast Boy while Starfire coaxed the children down from the air and the ceiling, respectively. The empath tried to heal Beast Boy as best she could, but was still feeling a little off-balance, so she only did enough to remove the most serious of the star beam burns and resolve the concussion, but did nothing about the splitting headache that would remain.

"Ughh," Beast Boy held a hand to his head, "why can't you just fix everything?"

"Why can't you act like a mature adult instead of angering children that are clearly more powerful than you?"

Normally Beast Boy would have had a comeback, or at least a defeated pout, but his head was throbbing and he couldn't think straight, so he just batted his hand at her. The empath rolled her eyes and walked away.

Now that their mothers were back, both children had calmed down considerably, and Ryan had eagerly rushed into Starfire's embrace. Raven was kind of shocked to see that the little girl had joined in the group hug, snuggling up to Starfire as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Raven hoped that kind of physical contact would not be expected of her as well. She was going to try and deal with this as best she could, but constant motherly affection was just not happening. Hopefully Starfire wouldn't mind subbing in on that front.

"Alright titans," Robin addressed the now fully assembled group, "Cyborg and I have some information we need to share."

Obviously, Robin preferred conducting these kinds of briefings in the main ops room, where he could easily project the evidence on a big screen and had access to their various surveillance technology that tracked the goings-on inside the city. However, contrary to Cyborg's beliefs, Robin was indeed paying attention to the madness the older boy had endured while trying to keep their charges under control, and Robin did not want to disturb the present, relative peace by changing location.

Cyborg made his way to the front of the group next to Robin, while Starfire sat on the floor with Ryan on her lap. Raven felt a tugging at her cloak, and saw two big, blue eyes urging her to join them on the ground. Raven sighed, but obliged, lowering herself onto the ground in lotus position. As soon as she was seated, the little girl scrambled into her lap, and luckily, unlike the boy who held Starfire's arms in place, wrapped around him, with a death grip, Raven's daughter merely grabbed her cloak and wrapped it around her like a blanket, holding one edge against her cheek. Raven relaxed. Maybe, in the possible future that the girl was from, Beast Boy was the one who provided the hugs and cuddles, so Raven wouldn't have to. She stole a glance at the green teen, who was rubbing his head and whining to himself, shooting obvious glares at his two small attackers. Far, far in the future.

"We took a look at the footage and the other readings from the main ops room last night, and it looks like a big portal opened up and spit the kids out. It looked a bit like that portal Star flew into that time we went up against Warp, so I compared the heat and energy signatures from his portal to ours, and got a pretty similar reading.

"So Warp's our guy?" Beast Boy summarized.

"Not sure," Cyborg shrugged, "all we know is that a similar device must have been used. There may only be a limited number of ways, to travel through time. Even if there were different types of technology for it, the basic physics principles should be the same.

"Um...so he's not the guy?"

"He could be," Cyborg shrugged, "but we can't tell. It could be anyone with their hands on that type of tech. And we don't know how common it could be one it's developed. The world could be a completely different place."

"This is making my brain hurt more," Beast Boy frowned, trying not to strain himself.

Raven smacked his shoulder, "you're fine."

"Anyway," Cyborg continued, "I'm not too familiar with how time travel works, just got some basic theory in here," the teen knocked on the metal plates of his head, "so I'll need to do a bunch of research to even understand the topic before I get to engineering our own time travel machine."

"This means that the bumgorfs will be...permanent guests in our home?" Starfire inquired.

"Yeah," Cyborg grumbled inwardly, "they might be here for a while."

"There's one more thing," Robin directed the conversation back to the matter at hand, "I watched the footage, and if you look very closely," Robin wished, again, that he had his giant screen in the ops room to show everyone what he was talking about, "it looks like someone pushed them through. We're not sure if it was our future selves or someone else, and that's the next thing we need to find out."

Raven, for the first time, took notice of the little girl's light pink pajama set, brown puppies scattered across the fabric, and the boy's yellow onesie, covered in pictures of mustard bottles. Raven was impressed that future Starfire had managed to find so specific an article of clothing. The rest of the titans followed suit, taking in the cotton pjs and Marie's bare feet.

"Someone took them from their beds and threw them into a portal to the past?" Raven raised an eyebrow, "that doesn't sound like something parents would do. Especially us."

"Agreed. I am sure that future Starfire would at least provide some sort of note. Perhaps..." The Tamaranean lifted Ryan up and turned him around, searching his outfit for any hidden messages of scraps of notepad paper. Finding none, she set him back down, dejected.

"I was thinking that as well. It could definitely happen in a crisis situation, but I wouldn't expect two happy, healthy kids with no obvious trauma to have come out of an apocalypse," Robin conjectured, "I'm going to try and clean up the image from the security cameras and see if I can get a better idea of whose hand it might be. Or at least, if it's one of ours. In the meantime," he nodded towards Marie and Ryan, "these kids are our responsibility. We'll need to decide who-

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

Why did the alarm always sound at the worst possible times? Beast Boy's fragile ears were ringing more than usual with his recent injuries, and he clamped his hands over his ears.

"Make it stop!"

The titans ignored him, the girls springing up and depositing the children on the floor.

"Titans," Robin stated with authority, "who's staying back?"

Beast Boy's pupils shrank, eyes opening wide.

"NOT ME!" He shrieked, "don't leave me with them!"

The kids giggled, mistaking his cry for a joke instead of real, gripping fear.

"I vote one of the girls," Cyborg said, "they need someone who can fly to watch their crazy butts. And BB's right-he can't take them."

"They literally tried to kill me!"

Ryan and Marie laughed louder.

"I shall stay," Starfire volunteered, "I believe Raven is in need of a break to do the processing, without the ancient books and the crushed beds and the suffocating of friends."

"Uh..." Cyborg raised an eyebrow.

"Dude," Beast Boy gasped, "what were you guys doing?"

"Let's just go," Raven started out the door.

"Wait," Beast Boy followed her out, "what kind of books were you guys using? Did the choking happen on the bed? Is that why it bro-" A black band of magic slapped onto Beast Boy's mouth, and Starfire and the kids watched them go, confused.

"Your dad is weird," Ryan stated.

"I know."