Chapter Nine: Remembrance

"So…does this mean that you shall be staying with us Cyborg?" Starfire asked hopefully as the pair traversed deeper into the complex. Emergency lights along the walls flashed red along with periodic computer warnings over the intercom about the radiation danger. It was an effective way to keep the Titans from pursuing, or at least divide their numbers.

"I…I'm not sure just yet," Cyborg admitted reluctantly and coldly. He hated to disappoint Starfire like this but he couldn't lie to he outright. The conversation went on hold as Cyborg halted in front of a strange device that had been mounted upon the wall. "This thing is emitting a huge amount of radiation," he explained after taking a quick scan of the device. It was too small to be the source of all their problems and it was likely that there were many more devices like this scattered throughout the building.

"What should we do with it?" Starfire asked curiously. Cyborg let his fist do the talking as he simply smashed the device on the wall.

"Keep an eye out for more of these," he instructed before continuing on with his mission. While Starfire was relieved to see her friend out of the Tower again, he seemed to be withdrawn and she worried that he might simply be acting out of revenge rather than a genuine concern for his friends or others. There was little she could do and she was reluctant to try as it might distract them from their mission. Sighing softly to herself, she trailed shortly behind her friend and made sure to keep an eye out for any small, circular devices mounted on the walls.

"Why did you come to help us? You do not need to push yourself because you feel have to," Starfire commented as she tried to keep conversation going between them. It was the only thing that could calm her worrying and the empty halls were showing few signs of recent activity. "We would have understood if you had wished to take time off for yourself."

"I know but…this is something that I have to do Starfire," Cyborg explained after taking a hefty pause to think about his response.

"Is it because you are hoping she will be here?"

Her words stopped Cyborg dead in his tracks, making Starfire feel as though she had pressed an issue that should've waited for a better time. Fortunately for both of them, the delay was brief and Cyborg's answer was brief. "A bit…"

"And what will you do if you do meet her?"

This time around, Cyborg's answer came without even a pause in his step. "Exactly what I promised I would do – stop her." On the one hand, Starfire was relieved that Cyborg was not going to be distracted by his former feelings for the person that Athena once was…but it seemed as though his feelings had all been replaced by feelings of vengeance. Needless to say, it wasn't any better for Cyborg. "Are you done with the questioning? Would you rather I go back into my room and wallow like a little child?"

"Um…no."

"Then could you please stop pestering me about it? I'll deal with this problem on my own accord, okay? You keep talking like that and anybody within a hundred feet is going to know we're coming."

Sadly, Cyborg did have a point at the end. She wouldn't be surprised if she hadn't inadvertently warned every Legionnaire in the building already. She promptly silenced herself and followed quietly behind her friend. As they approached the next bend in the hallways, finding and destroying a couple more devices on the way, they could hear the faint but distinct noise of conversation coming from the distance. They slowed their approach, keeping quiet as they stopped at the next turn.

"We lost contact with the four Spartans at the rear guard. All the Titans were reported present," a distinctly male voice, akin to the Spartans from earlier, spoke. "The radiation emitters will hold off some of the Titans but the Tamaranean will likely continue on and I would not dismiss the possibility of Cyborg continuing either."

Carefully, Cyborg let one finger slide out from around the corner, at which point the small camera in the tip of his finger folded out and he was able to watch the continuing conversation. As he had hoped, it was Athena conversing with a Spartan captain, though Cyborg had no knowledge of the more advance Spartan soldiers. "I'd be more disappointed if he didn't," Athena replied, curling a lock of her blonde hair idly with one finger. "This corridor serves as another choke point. Do you think you can hold your ground here?"

"Two Titans will be no match for me," the captain boasted.

"Good. Actually, though, feel free to let Cyborg through – he'll probably want to have a few words with me."

"Yes my lady."

Behind the pair was a massive vault door that sealed away the most valued developments of the facilities' staff. Composed of more than a foot worth of solid steel, likely reinforced with several foot-thick retracting steel bars, the near-impregnable door would surely stand in the way of any run-of-the-mill criminal. However, the Legion was anything but run-of-the-mill. Athena simply walked up to the vault door, deployed both arm-mounted energy blades, and proceeded to carve a large hole through the center of the door. Once cut out, it only took one swift strike to the center to knock the piece of out of the door and grant her access to the other side.

"Okay Starfire, you take care of the big gold guy and I'll go after Athena," Cyborg whispered after retracting the spy camera.

"Are you sure it is a wise course of action for us to separate?"

"Time is vital," Cyborg explained. "Just be careful."

Starfire recalled how difficult fighting one of the Spartans just a few moments ago but she wasn't about to back down from a fight, especially when her friend was depending on it. Though the element of surprise wasn't on her side, Starfire still had speed and strength on her side. Starfire stepped out from around the corner and rushed the Spartan as fast as she could. Though the Titans were expected, the Spartan wasn't anticipating the attack so soon and only just managed to raise his shield in time to block the impact. The force of the collision carried both combatants into the wall next to the vault door; after which Starfire did the best she could to keep the Spartan pinned against the wall while Cyborg hurried to the opening in the vault door.

It was a definite tight fit for Cyborg as he tried to squeeze his hefty shoulders through the small opening. "Certainly a tight fit," he grumbled before finally pushing through, though leaving large scrap markings on his shoulders.

"You cannot stop us!" The Spartan captain growled trying to break free from his opponent. "There is no denying the will of the Legion. The golden age of the Titans is coming to an end!"

"I shall deny you as long as I draw breath!" Starfire angrily growled in response, twisting and prying on the Spartan's shield. The metal bindings of the shield began to cry out from the torque until finally they gave way with a loud crack. With the Spartan's shield in her hands, Starfire swung it with all her might and smashed the bowl-shaped shield against her enemy. There was a near-deafening crash that resonated through the hall as the Spartan was knocked off its feet and sent sliding across the floor. The edge of the shield that struck the Spartan had flattened and split along two lines that left a wedge-shaped piece lying upon the floor. As the Spartan tried to get back to its feet, Starfire struck it again with another powerful blow the shield; this time the shield split down the center and shattered into numerous fragments, with the largest piece still in Starfire's hands.

Gripping the shield fragment so tightly that the broken edges cut into her flesh, she drove the jagged point right for the Spartan's throat. Sparks flew as it grabbed hold of the fragment, slowing it to a halt, just inches shy of its relatively unarmoured throat. "You are fortunate that I am not under orders to kill you right away," the Spartan sneered before driving a knee into Starfire, followed by a strong push with both legs that launched Starfire into the air. It took her a few seconds to stabilize her flight, which was just in time as the Spartan hurled the shield fragment at her. It grazed through her hair before ricocheting of the ceiling. While the shield shard was easy to dodge, the charge Spartan was a bit more difficult. The robotic warrior's shoulder slammed straight into her chest and drove her straight into the ceiling. The blow knocked the wind out of her and her semi-conscious body fell a few feet before the Spartan punted her like a soccer ball down the hall.

Her gut was killing her at this point, making it painful to pushed herself up onto her knees. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the Spartan descending quickly towards her and her first instinct was to dive out of the way. Her instincts proved to be right as the Spartan smashed knee first where Starfire once lay, actually managing to leave a deep indentation of his knee and fist in the floor.

"Ever since I was crafted by Hephaestus' hands, I have yearned for an opportunity to prove my worth to my lords," the Spartan mused as it pried its fist from the hole in the floor. Starfire scrambled to get off the ground but as she tried to lift off she was grabbed by the leg and slammed into the ground a couple times. "Perhaps if I break your will to fight now, they will reward me…"

Greed and arrogance - it seemed that even the lowly soldiers of the Legion had an expansive personality and sentience. If it weren't for the tremendous amount of pain she was in, Starfire might've wondered what kind of reward could be motivating a machine, not to mention what it meant by breaking her will to fight. Why wasn't he just charged with killing her? Being slammed into the ground a third time, Starfire managed to shake her disorientation long enough to fire a concentrated energy beam into the Spartan's forearm, forcing it to release her. Nearby Starfire spotted a broken shard of the shield; as the Spartan tried to grab her again, Starfire took hold of the shard and rose to her feet so that she could stab the metal shard into the most vulnerable spot she could find – through one of the optic lens. She immediately fired another starbolt into the wounded Spartan that knocked him back several feet. It wasn't much but it was enough space for Starfire to take a moment to catch her breath safely.

"It's a good thing machine cannot feel pain or that might've actually hurt," the Spartan taunted as it pulled the shard out and tossed it aside. "A shame the same can't be said for you."

Slowly, the two warriors squared off once more. Both sported the fresh scars of their battle and both were unwilling to back down. Fresh starbolts charged in both hands while the Spartan clenched his fists tightly.

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Despite having only passed through the vault door shortly after Athena, Cyborg was having a lot of difficulty finding her. Though only a handful of storage rooms separated the vault door from the inner chamber that held the Olympus super computer, it seemed that Athena had managed to give Cyborg the slip. His intuition told him that she hadn't made a straight-line for her objective though. No…she was waiting for him. Somewhere in the piles of old metal crates, shelves, and glass storage pods, Athena was hiding…stalking him in the darkness. She might've cut the power to the area but Cyborg's new optics didn't need light for him to see anymore. His sensors couldn't penetrate through all the interference created by the radiation emitters and the background electronics but he was more then willing to search her out the old fashion way. If his sensors were down, then she was going to have the same problem.

"I certainly love the new look," Athena's deceptively sweet voice echoed through the open air. Cyborg tried to pinpoint where the voice was coming from but when it directed his attention to an empty region of the room, he knew that she was managing to keep her location a secret from him. "I'm betting you're not entirely machine…yet. Still, you are a lot closer than you were before – a good improvement to say the least." Cyborg didn't dignify her taunts with an answered and merely kept scanning his surroundings for any sign of her. "Aw, no empty threats? No witty remarks? No comments of contempt? I am disappointed Cyborg – I was hoping your friends had been able to save your sense of humour; it was one of your better qualities."

"Stop playing around Athena!" Cyborg finally shouted. "You might've gotten away with using my emotions to get the upper hand the first time but I'm not making that mistake again. Atalanta is gone so don't bother trying to play that card on me anymore."

"Come now Cyborg, why would you want a weak little robot like her?"

"She was a better person than you could ever be."

"But we're not people – we're machines. We're walking, talking computers - an over-rated palm pilot. A fake. We're a poor imitation of the real thing. What's sad for you, though, is that you're more like us now. You've got chips in your brain, circuit relaying every command, circuit boards where your organs should be, and the only that makes you who you are is sitting in a little jar inside your titanium skull hooked up to a life support machine. Who's to say your friends are even telling you the truth? You could be running off a CPU copy of your personality – the same sort of technology I used to make that clone of you so long ago. You're becoming what you've always feared you would become…a machine. How long do you think it's going to be before you start losing what last vestiges of your humanity?"

Her taunting slanders had grated on Cyborg's nerves long enough. "Oh shut up!" He shouted in a fury as he blasted his sonic cannon in the general direction of the voice, only to blow a few boxes to splinters. "Being a machine doesn't mean I have to give up humanity – it's not necessarily just a state of what I am physically. Atalanta showed me that it took more than just the sum of your parts to determine what you are…it's a shame that such a brilliant mind had to be squandered by being manipulated by a conniving, underhanded bitch like you!"

"Well, you've still got that temper of yours," Athena's voice continued from a new direction. "It's a shame that you think your new body to be a curse upon you. You don't realize how much trouble I've saved you. With your old body, once your technology became obsolete, you'd have to endure days upon days of reconstruction to gut your old components and replace them with newer circuitry. Now, though, you can just build a new body and then plop your brain into it. You'll never have to worry about being obsolete again."

"And I'm supposed to thank you for that?"

"Oh no," she mused, this time her voice coming from much closer by. Cyborg quickly turned about to discover Athena standing only a foot away from him now. "You could thank me for this though…" her voice trailed off as she lightly ran her fingertips across Cyborg's faceplate. His world sudden went black for an instant and when his vision returned, he was no longer standing in the middle of a storage room…but a vast green meadow. The sun was shining brightly above him and a breeze was blowing across the field…and he could feel both of those things too. Shocked by the sudden sensations, he looked down to his hands to see that they had become his real hands once more, down to every little wrinkle and crease in his skin. A few lightly palpations against his face and he realized that it too had been reverted back to its original state.

More importantly, instead of an armour-clad mechanical woman standing before her, he saw Athena standing before him wearing a flowing, yellow summer dress. Her hair was dancing to the wind's tempo and the warmth of her fingertips against his face felt exactly how his memories recalled it from long ago.

"Wh-what did you do?" Cyborg stuttered at first before she silenced him by placing her fingertips over his lips.

"Whoever designed your cybernetics is an amateur at best. They haven't taken full advantage of how adaptable the human brain is. All I'm doing is changing what your sensory bio-circuitry is telling your brain," she explained, moving her fingers aside and leaning in slightly. "Your brain feels whatever those circuits and computers tell it to feel…and I can make it feel as real as you want it to," she whispered softly before pressing her lips against his. Perhaps if it weren't for the intoxicating sensation that he thought he would never experience he might've realized that she was likely just trying to manipulate him again. For that brief moment, though, his emotions overrode his usual rationale. "You might think I've taken away something good but how happy were you really stuck between machine and man? In this form, though, I can give you back everything that you thought you had lost when you first became Cyborg."

"What are you talking about? This is…just an illusion in my mind."

"Remember how warm and soft I felt when you first held my hand?" she asked rhetorically, emphasizing the point by sliding her hand into his. "Remember how I laughed when you poked me in the side or how I flinched when you pricked me? I can give you a body just like mine with all the sensations you've been half-deprived of for years." He remembered back to the days when he first met Atalanta; he went over her advanced cybernetics with a fine-tooth comb in hopes of figuring out the technology behind it with the faint hope that he could apply to himself. When he thought Atalanta had been destroyed, those hopes had disappeared along with it. With those possibilities resurfacing, it was hard to admit that he wasn't tempted at least a little bit. Living with the Titans had allowed him to accept who and what he was but Athena was offering to help him regain a part of what he had learned to live without.

"What do you want from me?"

"My family might object but…I don't think they'd disagree too much if you were to join our little family."

"I…I don't what to say…"

"Now a thank you might be in order."

"I have something better," Cyborg said softly. What he saw and felt might've been an illusion created by electronic hacking but he knew that the girl standing in front of him was real. Taking Athena by surprise, Cyborg sucker-punched her across the jaw and sent the Legionnaire general across the room and crashing into a shelf unit filled with various pieces of equipment. With that blow, the illusion disappeared and he was returned to the real world. "You can take your offer and stuff it!"

"Still just as much of a fool as before," Athena growled as she got back to her feet, using some metal crates for support. "I could've made you into something great!"

Cyborg said nothing as he simply picked up one of the fallen pieces of equipment, a long pole-like drilling device of unknown purposes, and approached Athena confidently. "My friends already have," he simply answered as he drove the lance-like device forward, skewering Athena through one of her wings and pinning her to the crate behind her. Growling angrily, Athena activated her energy blades and attempted to attack Cyborg but by being pinned to the wall, her mobility was limited and her attacks easy to predict and block. After giving her a few quick punches, Cyborg grabbed the nearest, heaviest thing he could get his hands onto and struck Athena so hard that she was torn from her pinned wing and sent crashing into another crate.

"You are going to pay for that," Athena sneered, retracting her good wing so she wasn't off-balance.

"The funny thing is, I already see myself as being dead…so there's really nothing you can do to me that you haven't already done."

"We'll see about that!" Athena shouted as she deployed her sonic disruptor and blasted Cyborg with a well-aimed shot. His new body armour provided a lot better protection against Athena's energy-based weapons as he recovered with little more than a few scratches upon his armour. He promptly returned fire with his own upgraded sonic cannon that forced Athena to dive for cover from the resulting explosion. Cyborg was already sprinting across the room for his own cover as the two continued exchanging gunfire. Falling into a dive for the last section of cover, Cyborg narrowly missed a wide sweep from a cutting laser that sliced the crate he hid behind in half.

Rising to one knee to return fire, he was surprised when he saw no sign of Athena anymore. A growing blue glow around him alerted Cyborg to the danger coming in from above. Athena's energy blade cleaved through what was left of the steel crate, just missing her target by a few inches but making short work of his old cover. Dashing forward, Athena's quick swing and stabs carved serious damage through his frontal armour and he caught a fast stab through one of his shoulders. Thank goodness he didn't feel pain anymore. Working quickly to counter-attack, Cyborg intercepted both her arms and overpowered her to drive both of her blades into the ground, leaving her defenseless for a rising knee strike. He didn't hesitate for a moment to strike Athena while she lay upon the ground, stomping loudly upon her left hand and shattering the energy blade emitter in her hand.

Lifting both feet up, Athena promptly fired both rocket boosters in her feet to knock Cyborg away from her. It bought her the time she needed to inspect the extent of the damage she had received, which was minimal but enough to render the energy blade useless for the time being. Solid blades had always been more reliable than these fragile energy emitters. After flexing her fingers to make sure they still worked, Athena deployed her sonic disruptor again and charged Cyborg again. He ducked and weaved around her blade and close-range energy blasts, while at the same time trying to hit her with his own sonic cannon. The few blows they landed was the occasional punch or kick, such as when Cyborg sidestepped past Athena's blade and drove his elbow into her face…only to be counter-attacked with a swift kick to the jaw. Standing only a short distance apart, both combatants saw an ideal opportunity for another point-blank energy blast; unfortunately, they fired their cannons into each other only a few inches apart. The resultant explosion rocketed Cyborg and Athena to opposite ends of the room with twist, blackened metal stumps where their cannons used to be.

"Dammit! That arm was brand new!" Athena shouted bitterly as she jumped back to her feet. Cyborg answered with a volley from his shoulder-mounted rocket pods, peppering Athena's position in a flurry of small-scale explosions. The smoke was swept aside by her retracting wing as Athena charged again. Still armed with one energy blade, her attacks were just as vicious as before. She was smaller and faster than Cyborg, making it difficult for him to avoid the slashes and often settling for having the tip of the blade drag through his armour. Rattling his brain with a swift roundhouse kick to the cranial plates and then thrust her blade through his lower abdomen. She could've done a great deal more damage except Cyborg grabbed hold of her wrist and held the blade in place.

"If you're going to try and kill me…do it right the first time!" Cyborg growled as he over-powered his opponent, pulling her arm to the side, which tore the blade out of his body. He twisted her arm around and forced the blade back upon her, piercing it through her back before she able to shut the blade off. Upon releasing her, the wounded machine collapsed to the ground in a heap. Cyborg could see how much she struggled just to roll herself onto her back, equating to the sheer level of damage he must have just inflicted upon her. Cyborg pushed any pity he might've been feeling to the side and armed his remaining sonic cannon. "You should have never come back," he growled bitterly, placing a foot upon her chest to keep the girl pinned. The end of the gun began to light up as he put the gun into her face.

"Wait!" Athena pleaded the moment she realized the precarious situation she was now in. "I lied to you about her Cyborg."

"What are you talking about?"

"She's not dead Cyborg…her program was never deleted."

Cyborg didn't allow this potential news to waver his resolve though, nor did he lower his weapon even a millimeter. "Keep talking…I'll give you ten seconds to convince me."

"I was never able to purge her program from my systems. I underestimated her abilities and she managed to hard-wire herself into my central processors and memory cores, including the central core I had used to keep my ghost program secured when I let her take over. I can't take her out without ripping apart the hardware that makes me who I am. She used my own safeguards against me to keep her program active." She took more than the ten seconds Cyborg had allotted but he stopped caring when he heard Athena explain what she meant.

"Why should I believe you?" Cyborg managed to reply while retaining his same level of determination and integrity.

"Because admitting this means admitting that she managed to beat me…and that she's a lot stronger than I gave her credit. She's why I couldn't bring myself to kill you; I have access to more than just her factual memories…but what she felt during all those memories as well. I look at you and I can feel what she felt when she looked at you…what she still feels when she sees you through my eyes."

"Why are you telling me all this?"

Athena simply dawned that devilishly smirk of hers. "Because I needed to distract you for a few seconds."

There was a flick of distortion to Cyborg's side, which lasted only long enough for him to realize that something was amiss. The second time he saw the flicker his good arm was sliced clean off at the elbow by an unseen foe. Right away Cyborg knew he was dealing with the invisible soldiers of the Legion – the shade. Literally disarmed now, Cyborg stumbled back a few feet before a powerful electrical discharge, assumingly from the shade, knocked him to the ground and out of the fight.

"Took you long enough," Athena grumbled as she stumbled back to her feet. "Take me back to Erebus…quickly."

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"The machine had me pinned underneath a section of the vault door when it simply walked away as though it had more important duties to attend to." Cyborg could hear Starfire's voice faintly in the background. Everything was still dark but he could make out the noise of tools and footsteps all around him. If he had to wager a guess from what he could last recall, he was probably back in the tower with his teammates. Sure enough, to answer his intuition, his optics finally came back online and he was right where he thought he was. He had seen his bedroom ceiling enough times to recognize it instantly. Hunch over beside him was Robin, who was doing the best he could to repair the damage to his systems. "Robin, I believe our friend is awake," Starfire commented when she noticed Cyborg lit optics were staring at her.

"Guess I'm better at this than I thought," Robin remarked as he leaned back so his friend could see him better. "Um…how are you feeling?"

"I'm…fine," Cyborg answered slowly. He wasn't quite sure how to answer that question to begin with. "What happened?"

"When the Legion soldier left me alone, I continued to search for you. I found you lying in the center one of the chambers." Cyborg noticed that his alien friend was sporting a number of bandages upon her head, hands, and stomach but aside from what appeared to be superficial injuries, she was fine. "I was so worried that you had been mortally wounded that I carried you back out to our friends for immediate help."

"And ignored the fact that she lost almost a pint of blood in the process," Raven quipped from a seat in the corner of the room with a book in hand. "She almost passed out when she reached us."

"So what did I miss?" Cyborg asked as he sat up on the repair bed. He noticed he was still one arm short of a full set but at least the damaged components had been removed and it was simply a matter of putting a new one on. "And how long have I been out?"

"After we recovered you, we searched the rest of the complex and found no sign of the Legion. It seems like whatever you did manage to force them to high tail it out of there." The approving smile on Robin's face slowly faded. "But…um, you've been unconscious for almost three days. It's been…more than the time we agreed to." There was a long air of silence in the room. All of his friends looked to him for those few words that would either make or break their day. If he could've smiled, he would've done that to reassure his friends so instead he simply muttered a few words.

"Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere," he answered quietly, prompting a huge sigh of relief from his friends. "I don't suppose I could get some privacy now, hm? I can finish the repairs from here." His friends didn't put up any resistance to his request. They were more than satisfied that he had decided to stay with them. One by one, his friends filed out of the room, except for Raven who didn't leave right away. She was probably the only one he didn't mind if she stayed or left.

"What changed your mind?" Raven asked idly, not usually one for such details but something about his change of heart was puzzling to her. "You were ready to put a blaster to your head when you left and now you've changed your mind. Why?"

"Haven't you ever heard the saying about staring at a gift horse in the mouth?"

"I'm making sure you're not doing this for the wrong reasons. She's still alive isn't she?"

"How did you-?"

"Only thing that makes sense," Raven interrupted promptly. "You've clung to that hope for the past year. It's a noble idea but…don't put all your hopes on that. She's still your enemy Cyborg and I don't want to see you get hurt."

Cyborg mentally sighed as he picked up some tools and started his repair work. He knew it wasn't the smartest of ideas but it was something that could keep him going for the time being. His conversation with Athena had reminded him of a few things though and some lessons he shouldn't have allowed himself to forget. If he had be willing to accept Atalanta as something more than just circuits and metal, then so could he. He could find meaning once again.

"I'll be fine Raven," he finally answered. "It just took me a little while to realize what I would've been leaving behind."

"Well, it's good to have you back Cyborg. I really would've missed you if you left."