"MAIL CAAAAAAAALL!" Cyborg bellowed into the living room shortly after breakfast, a massive postal bag thrown over each shoulder, with Raven following behind him at a more sedate pace with a more-manageable stack of mail in her hands.
"Oh, the calling of mail is such a wondrous event! The letters to which I receive are always filled with such heartfelt feelings and the tidings of much warmness," Starfire said with a megawatt smile.
"Huh… I guess this answers just how much fanmail you guys all get," Kitten hummed from her place at the table.
"It isn't all good. We've had our fair share of hate-mail slip through the cracks," Robin hummed idly. After a few days and Kitten not coming onto him or bothering anyone else in any significant matter, the spiky-haired teen hero was eventually able to find the girl's presence quite tolerable.
Normally he'd have been opposed to having what was contextually a random stranger living in their house. However, her being here kept Killer Moth pacified, and the less the guards at the prison had to worry with as reconstruction efforts went on, the better.
At the very least, he was able to squeeze an assurance out of Ventus that their guest would be going home once her house had been repaired in full.
"There's still so much though…" Kitten awed as the mailbag hit the table with a hearty *whump*
"Well, it is more-efficient, and cost-effective, to let the fanmail pile up over the course of a week before the whole thing's shipped out to us," Ventus stated. "If we didn't, we'd have fanmail pile in every day in a never-ending stream."
"So have you ever gotten anything… creepy in your fanmail?" Kitten felt the need to ask.
"The mayor's office usually does a pretty good job of keeping packages with mysterious substances out of our mail," Robin answered. "For obvious reasons, we can't bring packages shipped directly into our tower without some form of security screening, so we've got the mayor's office that parses out some of the mailed content, and then we run a spectrum-analysis in the garage before bringing it up into the Tower proper."
"So… Do you sort this all by hand or…?"
"I usually take care of that," Cyborg hummed as he began sorting out the letters at a blistering pace. "It lets me exercise both parts of my brain, something that's more-important than you might think for a cyborg since I don't want the organic half to atrophy from under-use just because I can leave the heavy thinking to the electronic half," he said as his organic eye kept pace with his mechanical hands.
"How accurate are you?" Kitten asked, seeing a few out-of-place letters in piles they didn't belong.
"About ninety percent," Cyborg and Ventus answered.
"Howdo you know that, exactly?" Kitten said turning the latter's way.
"The Freaky Friday episode," Ventus answered curtly.
"So… brain-swapping?" Kitten asked uncertainly.
"Yes and don't ask," Ventus and Cyborg said in-stereo.
"What about those letters?" Kitten asked turning to the pile of letters Raven was sorting out.
"Letters from non-citizens. Mainly bills for things like credit cards, Netflix, stuff like that. These come more-immediately than the fanmail which can be put on hold," Raven answered curtly. A minute into sorting her more-streamlined stack of letters, the mage suddenly hitched to a stop, hastily clamping her hands down over an ordinary-looking white envelope.
"Something wrong, Rae? Your face turned a little paler than usual," Ventus hummed.
"Could you come with me for a moment?" Raven asked hiding the letter in her cloak, grabbing his wrist and dragging him off into the hall before he could respond. "Ventus…" She paused to make sure no-one had followed them and that they were out of earshot. "This one's addressed to you."
"Okay, I get that, but why the secrecy?"
"Because the intended recipient is you," Raven said poking him in the chest. "Not the Teen Titan, Ventus. You," she said holding out the letter to him, the intended recipient's name…
"Oh… crap," Ventus gulped as the name Vincent Valentine stared up at him from the upper-left corner.
"How many people know your real name?" Raven asked casting a glance down the hallway. "As far as I know, other than the Kents, I'm the only one who knows it. The lack of a return address tells me this is not from ten."
"Actually, Terra knows it too," Ventus corrected.
"Okay… So the two of us apart from the Kents know your real name…" Raven said digesting that. "Or is there anyone else who knows your real name I don't currently know of?"
"Lemme think…" Ventus hummed as he counted on his fingers. "You, Terra, the Kents, Slade, my parents… Hmmm… Nope. Nope, as far as I recall, no-one else knows my real name. Always went by an alias; some more-creative than others."
And some more-troublesome than others.
"The time I went by McGuffin, all kinds of shit hit the fan," he said mostly to himself.
Unsure how to process that nugget of information, Raven simply opted to focus on the present. "Well then we have a problem."
"Well, hold on a moment. For all we know someone completely harmless is the one that knows my real name," Ventus said as he ripped the envelope open and perused the contents. " . . . "
" . . . "
" . . . "
" . . . "
"We have a problem."
*TEEN TITANS*
"So… What's this meeting about?" Beast Boy asked a few minutes later after Ventus had gathered everyone together.
"Yes, friend Ventus, I am most concerned about the gloom and the doom upon your face," Starfire asked worriedly.
" . . . Someone's calling me out," the teen said flatly.
"Ugh, again? But we already saw that special," Beast Boy whined as he gestured to Kitten.
"Not like that, Beast Boy," Ventus sighed as he rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Damn… I knew that taking Slade out of the game would have consequences, but this… This is so much worse than Slade."
"Why? What is it?" Starfire asked worrisomely.
" . . . We're about to meet the Wall," Ventus said ominously.
" . . . I don't get it," Kitten hummed.
*TEEN TITANS*
Following a minimal be-briefing…
"WALLER!?" Robin gawped.
"You know who this chick is?" Beast Boy asked.
"Yeah. Bad news. And if Batman says she's bad news, you know just how-big a danger she really is."
"Whoa, that is bad," Beast Boy gulped.
"All things considered, with how-dangerous you make Waller sound, you're handling it quite well," Raven hummed.
"Oh no, I'm just putting up a front. I'm scared shitless right now. Speaking of which…" Ventus hummed nervously as he backed out of the room, disappearing into the hallway a moment later.
"I get that it's a brown pants joke, but I didn't think he'd actually go to the bathroom," Beast Boy hummed.
"Either that or he did have to go to the bathroom, and he waited until just now to do so to add to the joke," Kitten hummed.
"So… What exactly do we do about this?" Raven asked staring at the face-down letter on the table in front of them.
Beast Boy had tried to flip it over as soon as he found out Waller knew Ventus' real name, but Raven put a stop to that by magically adhering the letter to the table so it couldn't be flipped over.
The only reason she didn't destroy the envelope was to help reinforce the gravity of what it meant.
"It seems like, as usual, Ventus is a magnet for trouble," Raven hummed.
"Well, to be fair, we are superheroes. Being trouble-magnets is kinda par for the course," Terra said thoughtfully.
"Obviously, this isn't exactly something we can ignore," Robin stated. "Like it or not, Waller has close ties to the government, and the only reason the Teen Titans can operate with the impunity we've been given is because of concessions we've made with the Government. If there's any pressure from her, we could all be out of a job."
"And unfortunately, the Justice League doesn't exactly have open recruitment for minors," Cyborg added.
"Speak for yourself, you actually are old enough to join the Justice League wholesale if you wanted," Ventus said returning to the conversation, now clad in brown pants.
Whether he was intentionally perpetuating the joke or not was left unknown.
"Hold on, how do you-"
"I swam around inside your head during the whole Puppet King thing, remember?" the teen replied. "When the cybernetic half of your brain rebooted itself after I took over, I became privy to all your little secrets."
"A-All of them?" Cyborg gawped. "You mean like-"
"Yes."
"And then the-"
"Yes, again."
"What about the?"
"Yes, and you should be very ashamed of yourself," Ventus said with a flat-lidded stare, Cyborg feeling like he were being scolded by a parent.
"Can we please get back to the matter at hand here?" Robin asked trying to corral the conversation back onto the original topic.
"Waller… She's here for me, isn't she?" Terra asked worriedly.
"I don't think that's the reason for this meeting," Ventus returned. "After it was made public that Slade had been using drugs and brainwashing on you to make you compliant to his orders, with the physical evidence to substantiate those claims, for the mostpart you should've been exonerated of any wrongdoings."
"But then why is she here?" Raven asked.
"Waller called me out by name, my real name. That on top of what's happened recently, and it probably has to do with Slade," the white-haired teen replied, the Titans shuddering a small bit. "She obviously couldn't mention everything in the mail, but I'm pretty sure that's what all this is about?"
"But what is it about? Can't you just hack some computers or something and find out?" Beast Boy asked.
"Hacking and intercepting government correspondence is illegal, if not outright treasonous," Terra stated. "Doubly-so if said correspondence passes by the president."
"Okay, so then we can't hack a computer and find out why she's here," Beast Boy sighed.
"The only thing we really can do is go to the meeting and hope for the best," Ventus sighed tiredly. "Kitten, Waller isn't the sort of person who's above taking hostages, so I want you to stay here in the Ops Center, tint the windows, and raise security settings to the maximum value once we're gone."
"Don't worry, Venty, I won't let her take me alive!"
"What's what I'm afraid of."
*TEEN TITANS*
A few minutes prior to the agreed-upon meeting time…
"Why're we hiding out on this high rise if Waller is right there?" Beast Boy asked, pointing toward the woman sitting in the rather classy open-air café.
"Scouting the place out. For all we know, Waller's trying to lure us into a killbox, where everyone from the customers to the staff are all her agents and want to kidnap us so they can clone us and then replace us with loyal double-agents," Robin said flatly.
"Okay, I know you can be paranoid, but that's way too paranoid," Cyborg said as his head drooped.
"But the Waller is so round and jolly, like the Clause of Santa," Starfire cooed with wide adorable eyes as she gave the woman a once-over with her binoculars.
"Yes, well don't let her appearance fool you. Amanda Waller is as cunning and manipulative as your sister. Hell, she might actually be more cunning and manipulative than her," he reiterated. "What makes it worse is it's her job to do that sort of thing," Robin returned. "Not only that, but she's really good at it."
"Still, contrary to popular hero beliefs, she's still one of the good guys. Remember when the Justice League's Watchtower turned its sights on an occupied city with their Pocket Death Star cannon?" Ventus asked.
"That was a ploy by Lex Luthor to discredit the League," Robin argued.
"By using a weapon that the League constructed in secret," the wind-wielder quipped. "The Justice League is still subject to international law, but half of them up there can flat-out ignore it if it came down to military intervention. That's why people like Waller are a necessary evil. So that way people like them, people like you, don't abuse your erroneous training."
"Cyborg, are you picking up any hidden traps?" Robin asked, deflecting the topic.
"Most-advanced thing my sensors can pick up down there are a couple high-end cell phones and a few small-caliber firearms. If anything was shielded, I'd still be able to detect it."
"So then there aren't any mechanical traps. What about the biological sort?" Robin asked.
"I tried to skim the surface of her mind. Beyond the worrying fact she can actually wall off her thoughts from telepathic probing, I'm not picking up anything outwardly malicious about her intent," Raven answered. "Even though Waller doesn't have any superpowers, she is far from ordinary."
"She wouldn't be the modern-day boogeyman she was if she wasn't extraordinary," Ventus said plainly as he cracked his neck. "Robin, I know you're in charge whenever you're in the field, but I'd really appreciate being given the reigns on this one."
" . . . This is your mission, so I guess you have the right to make that call," Robin hummed, acknowledging that sometimes, the other Titans would have reason to lead more-compelling than his own.
"Alright, here's the plan," Ventus said having everyone huddle together.
*TEEN TITANS*
"I was wondering when you'd show up," Waller stated as the Titans made their way into the café.
Some of the Titans at least.
"I was under the impression there were more of you."
While Robin, Ventus, Terra, and Beast Boy made their way over to them, Starfire, Raven, and Cyborg all remained conspicuously absent.
"There are, but in the event you want to replace us with some Bladerunner knockoffs, it doesn't exactly do to have all our eggs in one kill-box," Ventus replied flatly as he eyed the surrounding rooftops. "You can tell your hidden snipers that if they poke their heads up, my teammate has the ability to literally send them to Hell, and yes it's an actual place; fire, brimstone, circles, all of it."
"You make it sound as though I'm here for something sinister," the woman chuckled.
"Boogeyman, they name is Amanda Waller," Beast Boy said in a rare moment of seriousness.
"Touche," Waller hummed, aware of her own reputation. "Please, sit down. I won't bite."
"Why would you? You've got minions for that," Ventus said examining the chair for anything that escaped Cyborg's initial scans, sitting down once he'd assumed everything was relatively safe.
"So, can I order you kids anything?" Waller offered amiciably.
"No thanks. We'd prefer you got to the point as to the nature of this meeting," Robin said with crossed arms.
"Fair enough…" Waller hummed, taking a sip of her coffee before giving the gathered Titans her undivided attention. "As you might already have been aware, Slade Wilson's death is of a significant interest to the international community. Since the Teen Titans were the most-direct cause of said death, the outstanding bounty on his head is now being meted out to you."
"How much money are we talking?" Beast Boy asked.
"Something to this effect," Waller said drawing a wanted poster from her bag and sliding it forward.
A far cry from the wanted posters you'd see in old westerns, this one included imagery of Slade with his mask on, and out-of-date photos from before he became a supervillain with his mask off, in addition to an in-depth analysis of all his crimes and estimated fighting abilities. However, what drew the gathered Titans' attention was the fiscal value his capture "and/or" death had been appraised at.
$10,000,010 USD
"So… is that last one a typo or-"
"Widows and orphans left in Slade's wake have been chipping in funds to help facilitate his capture. It doesn't always amount to a perfectly flat sum," Waller hummed. "As far as international criminals go, this bounty is a fairly large sum for services rendered."
"This is on the premise we actually killed him," Vincent returned, sliding the poster back to Waller. "None of us Lion King'd him into the lava pit. Slade fell in all on his own."
"True, but you did put him in the position to go out that way," Waller returned, sliding an inconspicuous manila envelope toward them. "Accident or not, you've been recognized as the cause of the death of Deathstroke, and that sentiment won't go away, technicalities or no."
" . . . What's the catch? You line the inside of this envelope with arsenic and cyanide? Maybe a nerve-gas dispenser?" Ventus asked with a raised eyebrow, the other restaurantgoers looking toward their table trepidaciously.
"And why would you assume something like that?" the woman asked with a disarming smile.
" . . . Amanda Waller, born in east Saint Louis, road scholar, PHD in Political Science and served in intelligence under three administrations. Disappeared from public life five years ago. Involvement in secret weapons, illegal cloning experiments, bypassing congress, erasing people never to be heard from again," Ventus rattled off, the slightest twitch of the woman's finger showing he'd hit the nail on the head, despite her poker face. "I know all about your spooks, your Ultimen, all the barely-legal shit you get away with off-the-books, so forgive me if I'm a bit paranoid about the lady who sent bounty hunters after me while you gathered together raw materials for Wind Dragon's artificial genome. Can't imagine what you did to get the DNA for the other Ultimen."
"Wait, he got his powers from you?" Beast Boy gawked.
"The only other wind-wielder of that caliber was Red Tornado, and you can't get DNA from an android," the teen returned flatly. "Cloned baby-batter had to come from somewhere, and superpowers don't come from thin air."
" . . . I guess Slade Wilson really did train you," the woman replied, realizing she wasn't dealing with any ordinary teenager, let alone an ignorant one.
"Slade was many things, but an idiot wasn't one of them. He taught me how the world worked, and who to keep away from. Even back then, you were a woman to be wary of," Ventus waved off.
"Don't take it personally. You were doing a great service for your country," the woman returned.
"Tell that to the lab-monkeys who used me for a game of grab-ass," the white-haired teen bit out as he rubbed the right half of his ass, the customers around them shifting uncomfortably at the implication of his words. "If it weren't for Slade's training getting me out of their initial capture, I'd probably be some government-paid pedophile's chew toy."
If his first statement didn't make people uncomfortable, his second statement certainly did.
"I am… sorry to hear that…" Waller returned, the pauses in her voice telling her she did not expect the day's topic to go in that direction.
Say what you will about Amanda Waller, but there were lines even she wasn't willing to cross.
Ever.
"Pretty sure the guys you sent after me were Catholic. Male Catholic."
"Alright, I get it, my spooks aren't made of the strongest moral fiber," Waller bit out as she looked around, people on their cellphones filling the web with every dirty detail about her conversation with the teen. With a teenager being the victim, that only made things worse for Cadmus.
"You're no saint yourself," Robin returned.
"I do what has to be done. Surely someone like you can understand that," Waller returned to the Boy Wonder.
"I know where to draw the line," Robin said crossing his arms.
"Debatable." *Cough* "Red X" *Cough* Cyborg coughed not-so-subtly into the comm. line.
"I'm pretty sure this counts as blood money," Ventus chided as he stared warily at the envelope.
"Not if no-one intentionally killed him, as you have previously claimed," Waller returned.
"Well, you'll understand if we want to subject this thing to an initial security screening," Ventus said picking up the envelope and holding the corner between his fingers like one would the tail of a dead rat.
"By all means," Waller returned with a smile, glad she wasn't dealing with anyone naïve like Captain Marvel during the whole Presidential Candidate thing.
Sure, it was easy to manipulate people like that, but it wasn't really satisfying.
"Oh, and while I have your attention, let me make something abundantly clear to you, Waller," Ventus said as the other Titans began to leave. "If you ever come after my team, my friends, with any of your Cadmus thugs, I will hunt. You. Down."
"Intimidation is a serious crime, you know," Waller chuckled.
"Only against a person of "ordinary sensibilities", and I doubt you qualify," Ventus quipped in turn. "What is a crime is illegal cloning, bypassing congress, murder, conspiracy to commit murder, kidnapping, conspiracy to commit kidnapping, laundering money, falsifying government forms, and many other crimes Cadmus commits against the oh-so-expendable American people in the pursuit of the greater good," he went on to name, far from afraid to speak his mind. "And let me clear something up, that wasn't a threat. It was a promise. And I always keep my promises," he said narrowing his eyes ever-so-slightly.
"Alright, you've made your point," Waller said raising up her hands in surrender. "Last thing I want is the super-powered ex-apprentice of Deathstroke gunning for me, accidental murder or otherwise," she said rising from her seat to walk away. "Oh, but a quick word of advice," the woman said looking over her shoulder. "Don't get too comfortable in that ridiculously-shaped tower of yours. With Slade gone, there's a vacuum in this city's power structure, and nature abhors a vacuum."
"We'll be sure to keep that in mind," Robin said in turn as he leaned against a nearby wall, less-than-willing to give Waller a clear shot at his.
"And take your pedophilic government stooges with you!" Ventus demanded angrily, the patrons casting one another suspicious glances, not knowing who to trust after their very faith in the government they lived under had been shaken, rattled, and rolled.
'Teenagers…' Waller groaned to herself as she took her leave. 'It just had to be teenagers.'
*TEEN TITANS*
Bet you didn't expect that kind of "wall" with a name like "Meeting the Wall".
Adding Amanda Waller (Earth-12) to the story is another indicator of how in this iteration, Teen Titans coexists alongside the events of Justice League (: Unlimited). Since this is fanfiction and not monetizable (at least in most cases), things like studio ownership can't get in the way of creative liberties.
As for Wind Dragon's genome being derived from Ventus', the spectrum of wind-powered Heroes in DC Comics, or at least as-portrayed in Justice League, is admittedly very small, so it just seemed the most-natural move to make to have Ventus' DNA be harvested for the sake of creating one of the Ultimen.
The whole thing about government pedophilia is inspired by the fact that, since Project Cadmus can and has gotten away with some really dubious shit, there's bound to be some really scummy guys in Project Cadmus.
Hell, even our own presidents aren't always above-board, so what's to stop government agencies from doing really creepy stuff behind the scenes.
Also, I wanted to add a little edginess and really make this story fit the M-Rated shoes I promised readers of the prequel hoping for the sequel.
So yeah, this was a thing. In the comics that were modeled after this iteration of the Teen Titans, the only things that really came about after Slade's demise was that Rose Wilson/Ravager wanted revenge (for all of five minutes) and Wintergreen sold Slade's robot commandos to Professor Chang.
Well, that and the fact he would later be resurrected as a magical flame-throwing zombie but then fade woefully into obscurity after the end of Season 4, but as another great storyteller is wont to say-
"But that, is a story for another day."