Well, Witchgirl remains my sole, lonely regular reviewer, but my hits rate appears to be increasing, slowly but steadily. Here's to hoping this latest chapter will continue that trend.In case anyone's waiting for the end of the story to express their opinions, I thought it might be helpful to let y'all know the overall structure I've got planned out. The 'buildup' section of the story consists of three parts, each with five chapters. The 'climax' section consists of one part, of a currently uncertain number of chapters, but probably less than five.So we're about halfway through-ish. Each chapter is exactly as long as I happen to feel it needs to be to get through X number of plot points, though, so sometimes they can turn out real short, and other times Tolkien-esque.
The trouble with this chapter is that Remix17 already did the same concept extremely well in 'Negative Space' that I felt it'd be redundant for me to try the exact same thing... so I did my best to twist the idea around enough to make it different. Hopefully it worked out.
Does it bother anyone else that Robin looks like Tim Drake but acts like Dick Grayson? Making him either one just feels wrong because he's a merge of both, and if you can't explore the identity under the mask it makes character development hard. I'm seriously tempted to make him a clone or something, but then I'd have to rationalize the whole Nightwing issue somehow. Stupid time travel!
Chapter written to various K's Choice and Yohko Kanno songs that have no real thematic connection to the events going on in the chapter. Makes for a nice contemplatively depressing mood, though.
Chapter 4: Divine Rights
To sidestep the usual culinary arguments, Robin had volunteered himself to grab some continental breakfast food for everyone. He came back loaded down with coffee, donuts, toast, fruit juice, and a single lonely biscuit that the other hungry customers had somehow missed. The juice was for Beast Boy, who was strictly banned from coffee ever since the first time he'd been allowed to have any. Normally Cyborg would've been all over the food instantly, but he seemed preoccupied in showing Beast Boy something. Robin wondered what it was.
"...is it wrong to think that that's kinda hot?" Beast Boy murmured, and Robin raised an eyebrow in suspicious disapproval.
"Alright, you two, what are you looking at? Beast Boy, please don't tell me you're sneaking peeks at the underwear section of the JC Penny catalog again..."
"No, dude, nothing like that!" Beast Boy blurted, hiding whatever it was behind his back while Cyborg descended upon the food gleefully.
Robin frowned and held out a hand. "Give it."
"Awww, but-"
"Don't push me, Beast Boy. I'm still angry with you for singlehandedly setting back superhero public relations by a decade. Speaking of which, we've arranged for you to give a public apology today for your rash and dangerous behavior." By 'we' he actually mostly meant Superman and Superman's newspaper connections, but Robin held on to whatever tenuous appearance of authority he still had left with an iron grip. "So make sure you're well-groomed today. The conference is at eleven."
"But I'm a horrible public speaker, you know that!" Beast Boy protested desperately, hands waving about. "Remember the last time I gave a big speech?! Remember the Lego laser thing?!" The item he'd been looking at, a picture of some kind, slipped from his fingers and fluttered in the air before Robin caught it. "Aww, man! Give it back! Pleeeeaaaaase? It's a one of a kind masterpiece!"
The picture was a photograph of Starfire and Raven sleeping next to each other in sleeping bags, with only a Batman nightlight for illumination. Sometime during her slumber, Starfire had rolled over enough to be practically spooning Raven, with her shirt lifted up just enough to expose a little of her stomach, and Raven's own shirt disarranged sufficiently to bare some of a shoulder. He secretly agreed with Beast Boy's opinion of the photo, particularly given that it was the only time he'd ever seen either of the girls wearing actual pajamas, but still, it wasn't the kind of thing he could leave to float around in the team. It was just asking for trouble.
"Don't you think you've pissed off the girls enough for one lifetime?" he said firmly. "I'm going to throw this away. And Cyborg, if you've got any more, if I see them, they're garbage. Got it?"
"Man, you are such a tyrant!"
"And a stupid jerkface spoilsport, too!"
They both made faces at him, Cyborg's enhanced by the half-chewed donut still in his mouth.
Robin sighed and went back outside. He had to find a random trashbin to toss this thing into, or they'd just pick it out again and keep it more carefully hidden. He found a trashcan, held up the picture to toss it in, and... paused.
It really was an interesting and adorable picture.
Quite possibly the only way he'd ever see them in such cozy, peaceful, vulnerable positions, especially together like that.
Which was precisely why it had to be trashed, of course. Raven would be utterly furious if she got wind of it, and Starfire could possibly get quite offended. It was probably dangerous to even know the thing had ever existed, for that matter.
But still, they looked so... so cute...
He glanced around in paranoia, then quickly stuffed the photo into a hidden pocket. He'd just get rid of it... later. When he could find a shredder to dispose of it properly. Yeah, that was it. No sense in just tossing it in a trashcan where anyone might find it. And he would not look at it any more, either. He was a superhero, and superheroes didn't ogle their teammates in even pg-rated pictures. There was nothing wrong in keeping it with him until he could get rid of it in the correct fashion, though. Nothing wrong with that at all.
Repressing the urge to whistle nervously, he went back to their room. The picture thing had made him forget the rest of what he'd meant to tell Beast Boy.
"By the way, Beast Boy, I've got a statement prepared for you to read, so you don't have to improvise, okay? In fact, I'd really prefer it if you didn't." He tossed a carefully-folded packet of papers at his teammate, who unfolded and peered through it immediately.
"'And so it is with great sincerity that I apologize for disrupting the public's lives and the life of the currently anonymous Starfire impersonator...' Dude, you should've trashed this thing instead of that pic! I'm not sorry for disrupting the life of a bad guy! Do you want me to lie or something?!"
"Yes," Robin said without any hesitation, causing Cyborg to guffaw. "Yes, Beast Boy, I want you to lie. I want you to lie as you have never lied before in your life. I want you to lie like a used car salesman, and I want you to make those lies the prettiest, most believable lies you've ever said, and when you walk out of that conference there had better be a lot of people convinced you meant every last word of it. Because if you don't, and they're not, then this cute little fiasco you've gotten us into will officially be the most cataclysmically stupid event to ever occur in the history of superheroes, and you will forever be known as That Guy Who Attacked a Teammate Over Pornography. Do you understand?" It was harsh, but it had to be harsh. Cyborg had been playing good cop, but it didn't work without a bad cop too. Beast Boy couldn't start thinking everything was okay again before he did anything to make up for all his foolishness.
"Yes sir," Beast Boy said quietly, avoiding his gaze.
"Good. Cyborg, make sure he practices that speech. I'm going to hunt down a possible lead to finding the Starfire impersonator and bringing an end to all this mess. I should be back before it's time for the conference."
"Alright, string bean, you heard the man. Start reading that sucker... look, we can make like I'm the audience. I've even got a camera."
KERFLASH.
"Augh! My eyes! My beautiful beautiful eyes!"
Sigh. The disadvantage of not having a communal room was that Raven wasn't around to slap some sense into those two when they needed it. Hopefully this informant would be as good as his word. The sooner this maelstrom of negative publicity was over, the better. Not just for superheroes in general, or even the Titans more specifically, but for Starfire. He couldn't stand seeing her suffering like that anymore. Whatever madness or perverse sense of humor drove the impersonator to do this, he would unravel it and put a stop to it. It was just so bizarre and obscene that, had the impersonator been known for wearing obvious makeup, he would have suspected the Joker behind it all.
Robin didn't really trust vague, anonymous messages as sources of info, but at this point he had nothing better to go on. He was acutely aware that he was in Metropolis, a really big playground for a lot of really powerful people on both sides of the moral spectrum, and that the average supervillain Superman beat up on a weekly basis would probably be able to cream him with minimal effort. Which was why he'd taken care to equip himself with more than the usual quantity of freeze, flash, and explosion birdarangs. If all else failed, they'd make a reasonable distraction so he could run away. But he hoped the lead was real. He was running out of comforting things to say to Starfire.
He was supposed to meet the informant alone at a warehouse... not exactly the most confidence-inspiring of circumstances, but at least the warehouse was in a good district. If anyone wanted to pick a fight, the police or Superman would get involved very quickly. After walking a few blocks, he decided he needed to make some room in the T-Ship for his R-Cycle the next time they went on a trip. He couldn't afford to hop across rooftops, not with the kind of attention that would draw (the only reason he could make it through the crowds in costume was because everyone assumed he was just another dressed up fan instead of the real thing), and depending on public transport was so completely unsuperhero-like that he couldn't bring himself to do it. Even if it would have saved him twenty minutes.
When he reached the destination, there was no one there to greet him. No one at the door, either. He wouldn't have risked going in without backup if it had been dark, too, but no, the place was well-lit even if apparently deserted. So he walked in, slowly, eyes scanning around for his informant, sticking close to the door in case he had to make a hasty retreat. It was a good thing Slade was dead. This was just the sort of situation where the man would pop up from nowhere with a casual hello and a cool speech before trying to smash his teeth in.
"Hi!" Starfire said from directly behind him.
"GAH!" He whirled around, staff out and ready, before he could control himself. "Starfire! What are you doing here? How'd you follow me all this way without me noticing you?"
She shrugged, an odd smirk playing across her lips. "It's easy to follow people when you're a fly. Dude, it's about time you went somewhere quiet! I've been waiting to kill you for, like, forever."
The voice was Starfire's, so was the body, but the words... they didn't sound like her at all, even discounting the weird threat. His eyes narrowed and he took a step back from her, staff twirling slowly.
"You're the impersonator, aren't you."
"Eh? Me? No way. That slut's been doing her thing and I've been doing mine. I just thought this'd be a nice face to kill you with. Unless you'd prefer this one," she said, body blurring and shifting until it was Raven's now, cloak and all. Even the gravelly voice heard at the last few words was a flawless imitation. "So which one's it gonna be, bird boy? Hmm, hmm, hmm?"
Robin felt his mind worked both quickest and best when under pressure. As if in a flash of lightning, he understood. It hadn't been one of Slade's robots back in Jump. It had been a shapeshifter... probably this one, going by what he, she, or it was saying. It had to have followed them here. And there was at least one other that had already been here, pretending to be Starfire. It was all starting to make sense. He didn't have all the pieces of the puzzle, not yet, but he definitely had the corners.
"Why are you here with her?" another Starfire voice demanded angrily. "I told you to come alone!"
It was from the opposite side from the first one, so Robin sidestepped, trying to get his back against a wall without making it obvious that he was doing so, and latched his eyes on the new speaker. Yet another Starfire look-alike.
"Don't blame me," he growled. "Your little friend here followed me with plans of taking me out. Don't think I'll go easily, though, even if you two want to cooperate!" He slipped a freeze birdarang into his hand. Shapeshifters were usually hindered by immobility more than anything else, so he figured it was his best bet. There was no telling how powerful they were... he had to play it safe.
"Oh, dude, it's you," the Raven look-alike said, sounding disgusted. "Shoulda known you'd try to get your slimy alien cooties on him sooner or later."
"Ah. Trickster. You are continuing with your pointless plan of sowing dissent before killing them?"
"You know it, Hooters."
Robin took out a second birdarang, trying not to smirk. If they were so easily distracted by each other, he was going to take advantage of it. This wasn't an anime where the villains got to talk all day, after all.
"Call me that again and I will rip out your tongue, you slarkblagamukuk! You may address me as Starfire. Or, if you wish to keep our guest from being confused, Darker will suffice."
"Aww, you went with our naming scheme! I knew you'd give in. So, are you gonna kill 'im?"
"Perhaps, if he bores me..."
And that was when Robin interrupted their chat by freezing them both in blocks of ice. "I'd tell you to freeze," he quipped cheerfully, "but it seems like it'd be redundant at this point." There. He'd gotten his joke out, the bad guys were captured, and everything was right with the world. The Starfire look-alike's head had escaped the ice, but that was alright. It just meant he could interrogate her before handing her over to the police. He walked up closer to make talking easier, but still kept slightly more distance than was used for casual conversation. He didn't want to get any closer to her than that. The unStarfire-like expression she was giving him gave him the creeps.
"Hmm. Deader did always caution us from becoming distracted," Darker said ruefully, then smiled. "I shall have to work on that. But in the meantime, I would like to share something with you."
"Oh?" he asked suspiciously. "What's that?"
"Pain," she said sweetly, and then her eyes blazed with crimson light, so suddenly that he barely had time to jump out of the way before the beams streamed out, searing a line into the concrete wall behind him.
Even after that, the beams continued to follow her gaze as it followed him, leaving him unable to do anything but run, roll, duck, jump, and tumble frantically from side to side in an attempt to avoid incineration. He threw his last freeze birdarang, wishing they weren't so freaking expensive, but her gaze blasted it to dust in midair before it could freeze the rest of her. Then a flicking movement of the beams caught him offguard and caressed his ankle like a demon's claw, a burning sensation that was so intense it was almost icy. With an angry, pained cry, he collapsed clutching his wounded ankle, trying to inspect the damage and hoping that his foot hadn't been entirely detached.
He heard a sharp cracking sound and knew that she'd broken out of the ice. The burn was nasty, almost to the bone, but not debilitating. He could still get out if he was quick about it, and call for backup. He cursed himself for not thinking to have one of the others tag along behind him at a safe distance. He'd known Metropolis to be a dangerous place, even for him, and he still went it alone out of sheer instinct. Batman had trained arrogance in him as well as competence. Still, even Batman had known when to run!
But when he turned to run out the door, suddenly the Starfire look-alike, or Darker as she wanted to be called, was in front of him in a blur of motion, as fast as Superman could have ever managed, hovering just a few inches over the floor. "I am sorry for hurting you, dear Robin," she said in a gentle tone belied by her satisfied smile, "but you needed to understand that you are no match for me in battle. You are so proud, and I must strip away that pride... along with other things." Her eyes different now, still Tamaranian-looking, but red instead of green. Had the lasers done something to them? "What are you staring at, my Robin? Oh, the contacts... they are so fragile and tend to melt when I use that attack. But it is no longer important. I shall take you to my home, and there I will no longer need to wear any of this wretched disguise."
"Sorry, but I'm going to have to decline your invitation."
Her smile hardened. "Perhaps you misunderstand if you think that I am asking you. I am not so prone to letting others to make their own decisions as Trickster is. What I wish for, I take."
"Firstly, I'm already taken. Secondly, there's no way I'd ever be interested in slime like-"
The punch came so fast that he didn't see it coming. At all. It gave him a flashback to early training days with Batman, when the man had been so far above his level that it was impossible to even tell what he was doing in the heat of combat, let alone counter any of it. He flew back almost twenty feet, tried to spin around to land on his feet, failed, and crashed painfully through one wooden crate and coming to a painful stop at a second one, shards of wood poking into his back like knives. The worst of it was his jaw, where she'd struck him. There was no question, it was broken. Probably in more than one place.
It dimly occurred to him that he'd never seen Starfire move that fast. Hit that hard, sure... but only against enemies like Cinderblock. If Darker somehow had all her powers, which at this point seemed reasonable to assume, then he wondered how Starfire managed to live around the rest of them, who were so much weaker and more fragile. She had been able to withstand the rigors of space travel... without even a suit or a ship! It had to be like rooming with friends made of fine china.
Before he could try to move, she was in front of him again, in another one of those eye-achingly fast blurs of motion. She picked him up by the shirty like he weighed less than air.
"I am aware that that caused you great pain," she cooed, stroking his broken jaw with her free hand. "But it is far less pain than you have caused me by repeatedly denying your obvious feelings towards me. Do not worry, I will not hold a grudge. You shall be a guest in my home, and after I have used Deader's nanites to repair your face, there will be much feasting and merriment."
He wasn't exactly in a position to argue or struggle. So instead, he did the best he could to blank out the pain from his mind, and watched, and listened, absorbing information like a sponge.
The Titans were more than just him. He had faith that they'd save him sooner or later. And even captured, he swore he would do his best to stand by them, acquiring whatever intelligence he could to help them win the fight. One battle lost, but now he was in a position to learn the right strategy to win the war. To his disappointment, though, one of the first things she did was crush his communicator. That would make things more... difficult.
Whoever Deader was, he or she was quite possibly Slade's previously unnamed supplier, judging by the nanite connection. Trickster and Darker seemed to have no love for each other... she was even leaving her fellow to stay frozen, with total disregard... but they both disliked the Titans. Darker thought of herself as Starfire, for some reason, and knew at least some of her life, including some of the Tamaranian language, unless she'd made that part up on the spot. Trickster had had some sort of plan to cause chaos within the Titans, was almost certainly the one behind the Raven thing, and wanted them all dead. Darker, by contrast, seemed willing to kill them, and definitely willing to hurt them, but didn't have their collective demise as a high priority. Ruining their reputations, on the other hand, seemed to be more along the lines of her preferences. One working by way of personal relationships, a second by way of publicity, and a third by way of machines. It all meant something, he was sure. It was too neat and tidy not to. They'd even chosen similar aliases, so they had to have some sort of connection with each other to feel some small amount of kinship over, even if Darker and Trickster didn't seem to really like each other much.
Unfortunately, with all that thought out, he still had a lot of time to kill while being carried slung over Darker's shoulder as she took him through a meticulously well-kept, brightly-lit tunnel that had opened up from the warehouse's basement. And once he ran out of things to muse over, he couldn't block out her voice anymore. At least she didn't expect him to talk, with his broken jaw.
She talked with all the exuberance of the real Starfire, and even all the cute little idiosyncracies of speech, like the non-use of contractions. She talked about how she'd gotten her home by killing its previous resident, a wealthy but weak little supervillain too low on the ladder of power to even warrant notice, and then hired interior decorators and architects, including two feng shui experts, to redo the place according to her preferences, before killing them as well to keep her home a secret. Earth-made Tamaranian style furniture and decorations were in wide use, something he was able to recognize on his own from his visit to Tamaran. Food and other desirables were delivered through a complex series of transactions involving three sets of worshipper-like fans who seemed willing to do just about anything to keep her happy. Probably because she made it known that displeasing her resulted in a lingeringly painful death. She had a small harem of boys (and one woman) that had struck her fancy, but he put them all to shame. He was the ultimate prize. The greatest difficulty to overcome would be finding a way for him to withstand frequent, unrestrained 'coupling' with her without broken bones as a result. There was talk of cloning and Tamaranian-human hybrid mutation experiments to create more properly sturdy bed partners, if Deader would only lend her the appropriate tools and helpers. He appeared to have extensive technological resources, most of them tied up in some grand project or other that Darker couldn't care less about. He also had a semi-cooperative relationship with Trickster, but Trickster seemed to operate on his own and according to his own whims for the most part.
When they arrived at the living quarters proper, she went first to a washroom to remove what she described as intricate full body making up, and returned, shockingly enough, with body and hair all in shades of gray, also exchanging her Starfire-esque outfit for something very similar to Tamaranian battle garb. True to her word, she did indeed use nanites to repair his jaw, injecting them with a syringe and promising that there would be no undue side effects. He believed her. In her position, and with her personality, subtlety was a waste of energy. She controlled him not through psychology or tricks, but through sheer force. When she told him to sit, he didn't dare disobey, unless he wanted another broken bone. When she told him to eat and drink of the vile Tamaranian delicacies, he did so, and pretended to enjoy it, and held back the urge to throw up with all his might. The few servants he saw were similarly efficiently obedient, driven by the same simple fear of physical harm that he was. It was crude. It was thuggish. It was... effective.
"You think of yourself as Starfire, right?" he said finally while prodding at the dessert that seemed to move of its own volition, hoping conversation would distract her enough to let him get away with not eating the thing. "The real one? Or just another one?"
"Both, my fleet little bird," she said after slurping up her own dessert, sounding happy that he was being conversational. "She is all that I am not... I am all that she is not. Everything she keeps hidden, I open to glorious daylight. Everything that I reveal, she hides in the shadows of shame and fear that shroud her heart."
"How were you made? When were you born? You can't have been around long, unless you've just been keeping a low profile for most of your life..."
"Oh, I have always been inside her. But I had not the strength to come out until Raven's father was kind enough to give a helpful hand."
"Trigon made you? Did he make Trickster and Deader too?"
"Oh, what matter are those two? I prefer you to focus on me, Robin," she purred, expression shifting into something faintly predatory. "But if you must know, yes, he was the one who created them as well... we were all born when Trigon attempted to overthrow the world, born for his amusement, to fight our weaker selves to please him. We did not dare disobey, and in any case, it pleased us to show our superiority. But then," she said, voice going icy, "they pulled the cotton over our noses with a most cowardly trick."
"Actually, the phrase is-"
"I do not care what the precise words in the meaningless phrase are!" she snapped angrily, eyes briefly turning into embers. He tried not to flinch in anticipation of coming pain, but couldn't quite help it. But instead of striking him, she calmed down. "My apologies for my rudeness, Robin. But I have no wish to learn any more of this planet than I already know. The way of the weakling is to do the adjusting to her environment, but the way of the warrior is to make the environment do the adjusting to her."
"That sounds like a very dangerous way to think of things," he said carefully, trying to make it sound as though he didn't entirely want her to be in danger. In fact, she scared him more than anyone else he'd ever met other than Slade and the Joker, and he wished a rock would fall on her and wipe her out of the world. Everything about her seemed like an insult to Starfire. Starfire was nothing like her, and Darker insisted she was Starfire's inner self! It made him want to spit, to hear of such a noble, brave, innocent friend so maligned.
"Pah! There is no danger I am not capable of having triumphant victory over! True, I was sealed away for a time... but that was through a subterraneanpalmed deception that will not succeed again, and now that I have returned and had time to recover, I am even stronger."
He very carefully refrained from correcting her to 'underhanded.' "What kind of trick? It had to be a pretty good one, to get rid of someone as strong as you, even temporarily."
To his surprise, she was actually blushing at the flattery. Well, sort of. The tinge to her gray skin was just a darker gray, like her hair, but it seemed to indicate the same emotional reaction. "It was a mere nothing, a swapping of battle partners. Our countering parts switched so that I was battling Trickster's weaker self, and it was like the wise with the others. So we had no choice but to hide for a time. But in defeating us in such a manner, they admitted that they could not face down their own other selves... and so we have grown greater in power for it, in the longer running. I am stronger and faster than my weaker self. My starbolts burn with an intensity she has never known. I am of the thought that I could destroy the Superman, if I wished for such a thing, but that would be a great wasting of my time. I spend my life exactly as I wish it: in pleasure. Pleasure you will share with me, Robin."
"Look... I..." he said slowly, not wanting to encourage that line of conversation further but unsure how he could avoid it without ticking her off.
She leaned closer, grinning knowingly. "I understand why you are doing the hesitation, Robin, but realize that I am a being that does none of the holding back by nature. Weaker people are in chains they make for themselves, chains of guilt. But I have never felt that guilt. I will do anything so long as it is pleasing to me. If you come to accept this, I can show you such glorious sensations as you have only dared to do the imagining of in your most secret moments. I can give you anything she can, Robin. The only thing that is different between she and I, is that I will, and she will not."
"I... I have a hard time imagining her ever having anything like you underneath," he said, somehow finding himself forced into honesty. And why, for one sick, tiny little moment, did he think Darker was beautiful? Beautiful like the porn star she was, beautiful like shiny plastic with no depth and nothing to hide or hide from. Beautiful in the same sick, twisted way the Joker was beautiful... through a mutation of psychology so grossly extreme that it seemed like a kind of pure, insane sainthood if one were only willing to just step outside the common views of humanity, for just a second. To look under the bed and see the monster hiding underneath, and realize that it had the same eyes you did.
The concept of completely unrestrained sex, completely unrestrained life, was so alien yet alluring that he couldn't resist picturing it for one dazed moment in his mind's eye. But the moment after that, he thrust it away, without even a shred of doubt. He knew who he was, and it wasn't that.
"I know what you think of her," she continued, smirking. "I know you think she is fragile! Naïve! Maybe even just a little... of the point-headed dunce, yes? Just enough to make you feel more smartness and superiority when you talk to her. But she is not any of those things. She is a warrior, a being that loves to live life, and you do not understand how far she has bound herself in her little chains of the mind to keep from being rash! I am the real Starfire. The Starfire she was too afraid to allow you to see."
"I can see I've got a lot to think about," he said, and that, too, was honest. "If you let me speak to my friends, maybe we can-"
"Did I not just finish telling you that I am not stupid?" she said with a very careful tone, just enough danger in her voice to provide a warning while still being friendly.
"Yes, of course, I know you're not," he said very, very quickly. "I just mean that maybe we can all find a way to live together and find a common ground for peaceful resolution, if we work at it."
"Hah! Peace is for the argliks," she said condescendingly, making a hand gesture that was probably some sort of alien obscenity. "I have all that I desire with me right now. Except... hmm, I desire a rubbing of the feet. Slave number fifty-three! You will administer a massage to my soles! Would you like one as well, Robin?"
"No, uh, that's okay..." he said slowly as the slave appeared quickly from nowhere, almost like a ninja, lifting Darker's legs onto a cushion and removing her footwear with the smoothness of action that implied the ritual to be a frequent one.
The slave was Blackfire, and so unexpected was this fact that Robin made the mistake of blurting out the first thing that came to him, again.
"Blackfire! What are you doing here?!"
Fortunately, Darker didn't seem to be angry over it. She looked mildly amused, if anything. Blackfire, for her part, ignored everything else in the world, focused with fanatical intensity on rubbing Darker's feet, face utterly blank.
"Oh, yes, you remember her I see," Darker said casually. "She came to this city with an invasion in the planning, but that would have been most inconvenient for myself, so I stopped it before it could become a troublesome thing. She spoke most rudely to me, so I decided to do the indenturing of her instead of giving her a merciful death. Time was taken to do the breaking in of her properly, and now she is such an obedient and helpful servant! Are you not, fifty-three?"
"Yes, mistress," Blackfire replied mechanically, her voice as devoid of expression as her face. "I'm proud to be a part of your wondrous household, mistress."
"What did you do to her to make her act like that?" Robin asked, half in horror, half in wonder. "She's so... so... not Blackfire."
"I have stripped her of that name, Robin. Please do not confuse her. She is fifty-three now. Is that not correct, fifty-three? Are you not so very happy to be serving me that you no longer remember your old life?"
"That is absolutely correct, mistress. I have no recollection of any life but the joyful one I am living now," Blackfire said, but her eyes darted to Robin for just an instant, an instant of desperate, mute pleading. Blackfire still had her will, she wasn't brainwashed. She was just too scared to do anything but obey. Just like everyone else.
Darker had to be stronger than Starfire, much stronger, to beat down Blackfire so completely. Starfire had beaten Blackfire before, but the battles were always rough. Blackfire was an excellent fighter and had both the confidence and the brains to back up her skills. And here the poor snob was, just another toy in Darker's collection. A toy that would probably be broken or tossed away whenever Darker's whims ran in a destructive direction.
After more conversation, of a rambling, idle sort, she tried to take him to bed. Well, one of her beds, anyway. She had seventeen, one for each day of the Tamaranian week. He babbled out everything and anything he could think of to keep her from essentially raping him, and by the time he ran out of things to say she was more amused than lustful. She agreed not to take advantage of him... for the current evening. But she still wanted him to share her bed, even if he insisted on keeping all his clothes on (especially the mask). She was, he found out with some black amusement, a cuddler.
"Blankets are so much colder than bodies," she explained. "I ordinarily have several persons to induce the proper temperature, but tonight I would rather spend more of the bondage time with you."
He frantically hoped she meant bonding and not actual bondage. If she pulled out a whip, he would just scream, and scream, and never stop screaming.
She made him lean up against her back in just the way she liked, and commanded him to put his hands in particular (fortunately, g-rated) spots, and to not breath on her neck because it tickled. And he did it all, hating himself for it. It was like a betrayal, not just to Starfire, but to the team as a whole, because, even though he had no control over anything, for some reason he liked it. It was as completely distant from his Robin persona as he had ever gotten with his mask still on.
"You are doing the tensing up," she murmured after a half hour of just being close, her voice drowsy, half-asleep. "You remain uncomfortable with me."
"I'm sorry," he said, meaning it as sucking up but somehow it came out as being somewhat true. What was she? Evil? She seemed evil before, but now... she just seemed to want the same things everyone did. Simple pleasures and fun. Companionship. She was literal demon spawn, Trigon had made her! But then, the same could be said of Raven. Even demon spawns had hearts. Still, the way in which she went about getting those things was wrong. She felt no guilt, she felt nothing for others except in the sense that they provided her with pleasure. That was all.
"You think I am evil, yes?" she asked idly, tracing fingernails over the hand he had clasped at her hip.
He hesitated. Honesty was always the wrong option with Darker. She could snap his neck like a twig if he displeased her, and probably would if he wasn't careful. But, but, somehow, he knew she wouldn't be angry for his honesty this time. It was just them. No one else would ever know.
"Yeah, I do."
"Earth people talk too much about things that are like the bow of rain, things that are not there if you tilt your head a way that is different. Good and right, bad and wrong. Virtue and sin. I do not believe in these things because I have never felt them and the people who say they have felt them argue with each other about those feelings. Pain and pleasure... hurting and fun... I have felt these, and no one starts wars in disagreement over them. They are what is real. Why do you think the people shout my name with praise in the streets of this city? Because they know this. They know what I do is simply the only thing there is to be doing in life, with all the none of the sense cut away." She yawned. "I am sleepy, Robin. We will talk more of this in the morning of tomorrow. I love you."
The last three words had come out so utterly casually, so smoothly, without even a break or pause, that at first Robin didn't even realize she'd actually said them. When his brain caught up with reality, it was all he could do to not hyperventilate.
She didn't seem angry at him for not replying, though, and fell asleep quickly after that.
He listened to the sound of her breathing, and felt the rhythm of her heart, for a long time.
"I love you too," he finally said with a voice like the ghost of the ghost of a whisper's whisper, not knowing why he was saying it, not even knowing if he meant it or not, just knowing that it was something he wanted to say.
But, of course, she was asleep, and didn't hear him.
