I'll admit it. I'm on crack.
Four teenagers sat on the couch. Raven read, Cyborg and Robin versed each other in a game of Mega Monkeys 4. Starfire sat next to Robin, silently cheering him on.
But where was the grass stain? He had been elusive. The team had seen flashes of green, but nothing else of their friend. He was up to something.
As the two boys played, Starfire sat Indian style happily bouncing her head back and forth. She had pulled her hair up into a bun that morning, just for a change of pace. Robin was having a hard time not admiring her neck.
She felt something tease the back of her neck. She touched back and figured it was just her hair. Then it touched her again, harder. She slowly turned around to come face to face with a huge, ugly, green spider. She let out a shriek and sent it careening across the room. Beast Boy shifted into a turtle before he hit the wall.
Starfire had her legs wrapped around Robin's torso; her hands clutched his head for dear life. She shook.
"Dude! I got you so good! That was awesome!" He laughed heartily and kicked his legs in the air.
Robin detached himself from the frazzled alien. "Beast Boy, that was mean."
"But hilarious!"
"Were you ever spanked as a child?" Raven asked, raising a eyebrow.
His laughter calmed. "Of course I was, even in the Doom Patrol. What about you?"
She blushed. "The monks of Azarath do not spank. Besides, I was a perfect child."
Cyborg laughed. "Psh! Not me! One time I got whooped during church! I was a bad egg!"
Starfire had visibly recovered, since the spider had only been Beast Boy. "What is 'spanking'?"
"This!" Cyborg grabbed Robin and gave him a firm swat to the behind.
Robin yelped in pain.
"And what it the purpose of this?"
Robin sat back down, tenderly. "Usually discipline. Parents cause pain to their child when they're bad as a way to get them to stop. The butt is mostly fat, so it's like the least painful place to get hit." He rubbed the spot Cyborg hit him. "Unless your attacker is unusually strong and has metal hands."
Cyborg smiled in pride.
"Oh, we have no such thing on Tamaran. We were tickled instead."
The team looked bewildered. "Tickled?"
"It is fun at first, but then you cannot breathe and you want them to stop, but they do not. It is most torturous."
"Still better then a spanking."
"How about you Rob? How did Batman punish you?"
Robin paled. "I was spanked once. My usual form of punishment was being punched or slapped...he threw me off a building once too..." He cleared his throat.
"Bat Spank!" Beast Boy and Cyborg laughed.
"No, he wasn't the one who spanked me."
"Your real parents then?"
"Oh, my real dad whooped me good. But no, when I was Batman's sidekick. See, there was this time I decided I didn't want to work with Batman anymore, and I ran away in the middle of the night and found Commissioner Gordon. I told him I was sick of playing the role of distracter/punching bag and I wanted to see if I could do something else, like as a part of the police force. But, since Batman is my legal guardian, Gordon called him up and made me go home. Boy, was he pissed! I thought he was going to revoke my bathroom privileges, or ground me from everything, or lock me in the basement, something like that. But this was sooo much worse.
"I remember the phone call. Bats had tied me to a chair, and was relaying the story over the phone. I'm pretty sure he could hear me crying in the background."
"Who?"
"Superman." He smirked. "He knocked at the door, very ominously, and stalked over to me. It still scares me! He put me over his leg, and delivered one firm swat."
"Just one?"
"Just one."
"Why?"
"He shattered my pelvis."
The rest of the team gaped at him.
"Six weeks in the ICU, three months of the stupid butt weenie, a year of sitting down carefully. Never pulled a stunt like that again."
Beast Boy broke out into laughter. "That's so terrible! But why is it so funny?!"
"'Cause you enjoy seeing me in pain."
"That's it, next time you're too harsh, I'm telling batman."
Robin frowned. "Batman doesn't like tattle tales."