Warning: In this chapter, I demonstrate my utter uselessness with maps. That's why it took so long... I had to get a proper town. Robeson and Ashkum, Illinois, ARE real towns... although I relocated Robeson... and I have never been to either of them. I apologize if anyone has and is offended by my completely made-up descriptions.
A Matter of Pride: Chapter twenty-five; Ashkum
That day was much a repeat of the others, with one notable exception. Rhea giggled and Slade looked on in satisfaction as Terra vainly tried to avoid Repeto's eye. It didn't work. Emotionless, he grabbed Terra's chin and stared into her eyes. Again, Terra felt the rush that meant she was plunging into her memories.
This was almost a year ago, now. This memory. She and Beast Boy were the only ones in the room, which was unusual, but they were amusing themselves by competing at one of Beast Boy's best video games, the first in the series with the annoyingly long name. Terra won, of course, and Beast Boy congratulated her with kind words and a peck on the cheek.
Now Terra knew why Repeto had asked about her acting skills. She was right - he was trying to make amends. Terra lowered her head when she came out of the memory, making sure her hair shielded her face. She breathed harshly, trying to make it hitch every now and then, and clenched her fists so hard that her arms shook convincingly. She heard Rhea's barely stifled laughter and wondered if the act was working.
"Are you ready to join me, child?" Slade drawled again. "Ready to take your rightful place by my side, destroy our enemies once and for all? That is what stops all this."
Terra let her head droop a little and shook it. Slade sniffed disdainfully. Repeto took a handful of her hair and jerked her head up. Terra winced. He hadn't been gentle. But she could handle it. His eyes captured her and the process began again.
---Beast Boy---
Beast Boy flopped onto the side of the road, panting. It was almost nine in the morning. In the eighteen hours since leaving the Tower, he had traveled across California and Nevada. Nevada seemed to go on forever! He had thought for a while that he'd never see the extremely welcome "You Are Now Entering Utah" sign. He hadn't eaten or slept. Beast Boy pulled out his communicator and flipped it open. Terra's blinking light was still so far away from his. Beast Boy got to his feet and changed into a camel. Sleep wasn't that important. He could go on. For Terra, he could.
---Terra---
Terra wasn't stupid. Following the attempts to break her mind with the memories, the bracelet on her wrist would be switched on. Terra could always feel the drain on her powers. She had, by now, figured out where Rhea's sudden powers came from. They weren't hers at all, but Terra's. Somehow, Slade had thought up a way of draining and storing her powers, then channeling them through another bracelet, which Rhea wore. She remembered the plain metal band from the brief moment in which it had been in sight, at the airport.
She gritted her teeth, determined to bear the burning pain quietly. Her breathing came in sharp hisses, however, which accomplished much the same thing as a scream would have. Namely, amusing her captors and doing nothing to get her out of the situation.
When they called it off for the night, almost three hours later, Terra could only curl up on the floor, weak and shaking. They hadn't let it go on for so long before. The most before now had been forty-five minutes or so. She wasn't really aware of anything except in the vaguest sense. Later, the lights turned off. Some time after that, footsteps creaked around on the old floorboards - the ones that hadn't rotted away, at least.
"Miss Terra?" asked a vaguely familiar voice. She felt something warm on her shoulder and came back to herself with a painful little jerk. The shaking stopped and was replaced by a dull pain. She grunted and curled up more tightly. The voice - she recognized it as Repeto's, now - sighed and said, "Are you okay, Miss Terra?"
Terra mumbled a vague retort and squeezed her eyes shut.
Repeto sat down beside her. "You know," he said absently, "when I use my powers, sometimes I get a ... a glimpse of memories that I don't want to call up. Does that make sense? I know what it felt like for that bracelet thing to do, uh, whatever it does. If I could stop it, I would, but I haven't got any combat-based powers or anything, so..." While he talked, his hand had been gently rubbing her back. It felt nice; really, what was it about someone rubbing your back that was so comforting?
Terra took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "The Titans will come," she mumbled with as much conviction as she could muster... which wasn't much at the moment, admittedly. "Then I'll get out of here."
"Yeah," Repeto said. "Getting better?"
"No."
"Need a bit longer?"
"Yeah."
"Okay." He didn't say anything else, and neither did she. Terra felt like she could trust Slade's strange apprentice. What would the Titans think if she could tell them that?
---Beast Boy--
Beast Boy frowned, examining the blinking lights on his communicator. It looked as if he needed to go north, but he was fairly certain that if he didn't go south he'd end up in Lake Michigan somewhere. Maybe there was more than one town called Robeson, Illinois. Beast Boy admitted defeat and turned to commit the ultimate male taboo: asking directions.
"Can you show me where we are?" Beast Boy asked a gas station cashier. He offered a state map that had been plucked from a nearby rack.
"You gonna buy that?" asked the acne-plagued teen. Beast Boy shrugged - what could it hurt? - and pushed some bills toward him. The cashier opened it, shook it out, and pointed to a place on the map. There was a tiny dot labeled Robeson. Beast Boy pulled out his communicator and compared it to the map. It was hard, as the GPS inside his communicator was just a grid of lime green on a background of darker green. "What's that?"
"Nothing," Beast Boy said, frowning with concentration. "Hey, you think you could help me out? I'm this blinking light, see, and I need to get to the other one. About where would that be?"
The communicator was promptly snatched. "To figure that out, we gotta be sure they're on the same scale... Otherwise you might end up going the right direction but a thousand miles long or short. It looks like I just have to... okay, there we go. There's a distance of about an inch, so that's... fifty miles on the map, and you end up... It looks like it's near... Ashkum! Ashkum, Illinois. Here." The pimpled teen pointed to a tiny dot beneath Kankakee.
Beast Boy committed the location to memory. "Okay, thanks." He reclaimed his communicator and snapped it into its place on his belt, wrestled with the map for a while in an attempt to fold it, and left the gas station. A line had formed behind him by this time, so Beast Boy scurried out of the station and folded his map outside. He tucked that into his belt, too, morphed into a sparrow and flew off again. Fifty more miles and he'd be able to save Terra.