The Measure of a Titan

by General Havoc

With Terra's betrayal still haunting them, the Titans rescue a young kineticist in need of a home from certain death. But after their loss, can they extend their trust to an outsider again, especially one being hunted by an unknown enemy? BBxRae, RobxStar

34. The House of Stone and Fire

Disclaimer: I invite anyone who thinks I own the Teen Titans to have their heads examined.

Author's Note: These things always take longer than they're supposed to.

Hello again everyone, and I hope this chapter finds you all well. I have no great speeches to give, nor grand excuses for why this chapter took so long to finish. It's a long one, certainly, but mostly it was an agonizing one. I re-wrote it from scratch several times, and I'm still not totally satisfied with it, but I think it will nonetheless stand as is, and thus I submit it for your approvals. As ever, I beg and plead that if you like (or hate) the chapter (or story), please leave me a token of your opinion that I may continue to improve, be it ever so brief. I shall of course try to get the next chapter out as quickly as possible, but until then, I hope you find some enjoyment from this one. Thank you all once more, my cherished readers, and may you find success in every endeavor.

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Chapter 34: The House of Stone and Fire

"He who has a thousand friends,
Has not a friend to spare.
And he who has one enemy,
Will meet him everywhere."

- Ali Ibn-Abi-Talib

O-O-O

In a world made of fire, one more flickering light went un-noticed.

The structure had once been an underground parking garage, and in a way it still was, for the cars within it were more or less still there, the occasional cracked windshield or broken mirror the only signs of what had transpired to the world above. Eight levels of ferro-concrete sat overhead now, enough to eliminate even the slightest traces of sound, for the power was out, and the ventilation fans were quiet, and the garage was thus more silent than it had ever been since it was first gouged out of the earth.

To anyone else, eight two-meter-thick layers of solid concrete might have seemed oppressive, especially in the eerie stillness of a preternaturally-silent garage, where every creak and groan hinted at some hideous purpose lurking just out of sight. Most people got claustrophobic in such surroundings, expecting the walls to cave in, or feeling as though the very air around them was heavy and leaden.

Terra did not. To her, this place was too exposed, a bare two dozen yards of building material separating them from the open sky, where Trigon reigned and demons flew. Though a thermo-nuclear weapon would have been hard-pressed to shake them this deep in the Earth, to Terra it was not deep enough by a longshot. A large part of her wanted to be a dozen miles below the surface right now, safely cocooned inside a pocket of stone. Instead, this was the deepest she could get, close enough to the surface that she imagined she could feel and hear the fires raging above.

Irony of ironies, it was actually cold down here, at least relative to the rest of the planet, the furnaces of Hell not having yet penetrated the bunker-like subterranean chamber. Indeed it was chilly enough that she had built a small campfire in an empty parking space, assembling it out of wooden signs and lighting it with flint dug up from the ground and gasoline siphoned from an abandoned motorcycle. It was a risk of course, some passing flame demon might see the fire or sense it somehow as a kindred spirit, but one she felt she had to take.

The fire wasn't, after all, for her sake.

No sound, save the crackling of the flames. No light, but for the flickering yellow of the firelight, for she had turned off her flashlight to conserve its battery. The flames cast deep shadows over the cars to either side, and occasionally a flare would reveal the silent cement walls that ringed them in. But mostly it sufficed only to illuminate a tiny patch of bare asphalt, alone in a void of interminable darkness. Terra sat perched on a carstop, her knees tucked up against her chest, trusting to the earth and stone that surrounded this underground chamber to warn her if anything approached. And whispering as loudly as she dared in this cement nightmare of an amplifier, she tried, for what had to be the tenth time, to get her counterpart to say something.

"David?"

She might as well have spoken to the walls.

David sat on the ground on the opposite side of the fire, and stared through it unblinking, motionless save for his hands, which trembled almost imperceptibly, like the nervous shakes of an old man. His expression was hollow and dead, his eyes downcast towards the crackling flames. He looked as though he had been coated in a layer of volcanic ash. His hair, his uniform, his very skin was tinted a sickly, slate gray, gray like an overcast sky, gray like a corpse drained of blood or a golem made of river clay.

When first he had awoken, she had taken it to be some kind of coating, dust or ash or pulverized concrete, and tried to brush it off of him, only to realize her mistake. He wasn't covered in gray soot, he had actually turned gray, like Frankenstein's monster re-animated from the grave. No mere change in skin and hair pigmentation, the change had affected his uniform as well, his flame-orange and fire-red suit, his shoes, his belt, dying them all various shades of gray as though the color had been leached out of them with bleach. She had no idea what could have caused such a thing, if it was some side effect of the depetrification process, or something else entirely. She had no idea if she had made a mistake, or forgotten something. It was not as though she had done this often.

He paid no attention to her, not to her words or her questions. When she had brought him back, she had expected him to fight her, attack her, argue or denounce her, do all of the various things he had done the last two times they had encountered one another. David was a weakling by many standards, but there had been enough of an iron core to him for him to reject her desperate request to come with her to meet Slade that time in the library, following which he had managed to fend her off, with Raven's assistance, and nearly impale her on a shard of her own rock. She had expected something similar this time.

She hadn't gotten it, and that almost made things worse. Instead of erupting or accusing her of further betrayals, he hadn't said one word, not one single word, and beyond an initial agonized look of recognition, hadn't resisted her in the slightest. She had led him out of the burnt remains of the library like an automaton, supporting him when he collapsed, which was often, simply leading him by the hand when he managed to walk under his own power, which was not. She had led him here, to this garage, and down into its depths, and he had followed her like a sleepwalker or a shell shock victim. She could not tell if he even knew where he was.

"David?" she repeated, to the same lack of reaction. He didn't appear to be ignoring her so much as unable to hear her, deaf perhaps, or too far lost in whatever he was staring at. She remembered that he had once explained to her how in times of indecision or stress, he often liked to draw on Devastator and view the world through the parasite's eyes. He'd described it as a mosaic of particles of some sort, entrancing, almost hypnotic. Carefully she got up, walked around the fire, and knelt next to him. "David, can you hear me?" she asked, as she gently reached out and touched his shoulder.

He turned his head to face her, and she screamed.

His eyes...

She fell back in an instinctive, jerky reaction, and caught herself on a promontory of rock that she dug out of the ground subconsciously as she fell. He made no move towards her, nor any indication that he understood her reaction, staring directly at her with blood-red eyes, red like burning coals, washed out and glowing, with no features visible therein, no pupils, no irises, just solid red like a pair of stoplights mounted in his head. His eyes had looked bloodshot when first she had re-awoken him, but nothing like this. Not infrequently, when a metahuman gave full reign to their powers, their eyes, the most direct channel to their brain, would begin to emit a shining glow. It had happened to Terra more than once, to Raven, to Jinx, to Starfire whenever she called on her Tamaranean powers, but Terra had never heard of it happening to David, nor did it look like he was in the throes of absolute power.

She half expected a barrage of explosions, but nothing happened of the sort, and indeed slowly, David lowered his head again and shut his eyes, plunging the room back into campfire-lit twilight. Slowly, Terra picked herself back up, and closed with him again, kneeling down once more.

"David?" she asked, "are you all right?" An absurd question to ask with the world in ruins and himself turned into whatever the hell he was now, but the only one she could think to ask. "What happened?"

No reply, once more, though this time he clearly did hear her, slowly opening his blood-colored eyes again and looking up at her with an expression of confusion and apprehension. His mouth worked a few times, no sound emitted, and he blinked, his trembling hands more pronounced now.

She composed herself, wanting to shake him like a toy to get the information she desperately needed, but knowing that in his state, it might well kill him, if it didn't induce him to kill her that is.

"David, listen to me," she said, taking him by the shoulders and staring directly into the red glow. "Where are the others?"

Deep inside, something was working, she could see that much, even with the un-natural color. He blinked several more times, as though trying to dredge memories out of an unwilling brain. She could practically read the answer he was trying to give. 'Others... others...'

"The others," she repeated. "Beast Boy, Starfire, Cyborg, Jinx. When I found you, there was nobody else there. We need to find them. Did Trigon take them somewhere? Did they get turned to stone?"

His breath came in ragged wheezes, and she saw tears welling up in his molten eyes. He mouthed the word several times before he found the means to actually vocalize it.

"Gone..."

She fought down the urge to scream again. "Gone where, David? Did you see anything before Trigon - "

He doubled over all of a sudden, his hands clutched over his stomach like something was trying to eat its way out of his body, and collapsed onto his side. Soft muffled moans of pain or duress forced themselves between his clenched teeth, as he held his stomach with one hand and closed the other into a fist which he used to grab at his collar as though he was being choked. Terra's questions died in her throat and she hesitated for a moment, unsure of what to do. Yet moments later, the fit seemed to pass, and slowly David unclenched his tortured body, laying spent and exhausted on the asphalt like the victim of a car accident.

"I don't know..." he said, and his voice was raspy and thin, like a wraith's, yet he visibly forced the words out, one after another, at God-knew what cost in agony, for she could see his entire body shudder with each one. "I... don't.... know... where they are..." he said.

She let that sit for now, watching him lay on the ground, wheezing for breath, tears pooling on the oil-coated asphalt next to his head. "Are you all right?" she asked for the second time, but this time she actually meant it.

He shuddered, curling up on himself. "C... cold..." he whispered.

"Hold on, I'll move the fire," said Terra, and she raised her hand to do just that, but he shook his head to stop her.

"No," he rasped, and he laboriously rolled over onto his stomach and struggled to his hands and knees, one hand still clutched over his midsection as though he was afraid his guts would spill if he did not hold them in. "In... inside..." he stammered, voice flecked with pain. "Like I... swallowed ice..."

Unsure if trying to help might make it worse, Terra waited as David slowly calmed down, and managed, with difficulty, to sit up. Slowly, he caught his breath, before opening his unearthly red eyes and turning his head back to her. "What... what did you do to me?" he asked.

She couldn't tell if the question was a rebuke or just fear-fueled confusion at what had happened to him. It didn't really matter. "The same thing Slade did to me," she said. "Trigon gave Slade the power to turn me back from stone. I... know stone. I remembered how."

It sounded so easy in words. There was no way to describe what the unspeakably intricate process was like, nor had she an explanation for what had happened to him when she did it. The red eyes, the machine-gray skin and hair and clothing, she had no idea what had caused that, if it had been something of her doing, or how to reverse it if it had.

Still semi-delirious, David raised his head slowly, his red eyes unfocused as he tried to collect his thoughts. "I was... dead?" he asked.

"Petrified," she said. "Trigon turned you to stone, same as everyone else. I guess you could call it dead."

"But then... the others...?"

"You were the only one I found in the library," said Terra. "Trigon might have taken them somewhere else or..." she shook her head. "I don't know what happened to them."

He seemed to sense the various things she refrained from saying in her explanation, and lowered his head, covering half his face with one hand as he breathed with what appeared to be great difficulty, wheezing like a sprinter trying to catch his breath. "So... now what?" he asked.

"I have no idea," admitted Terra. "I thought the others would be there, and if I turned them all back then maybe we could..." she trailed off, staring into the small campfire before lifting her head again. "We have to find them."

He didn't agree or disagree, in fact he didn't do anything, still shakily taking one breath after another, one hand clutched firmly over his midsection. When he finally did speak, it was to ask a wholly unrelated question, his voice a thin whisper.

"You were working for Trigon," he said, but all malice had been burnt out of him. He had not the strength left to curse her, just to state facts. "Why did you come back for us?"

"I was working for Slade," she corrected. "He didn't want this to happen, and neither did I. We tried to stop this." She closed her eyes, bitterness bringing the words to her throat unbidden. "If you'd just let me... if you'd listened to me instead of..."

She couldn't finish the statement. They both knew how this might have been prevented. They both knew why it hadn't been. She had been angry at him for so long before the world ended, and even afterwards. Yet now here, in the darkness, watching him writhe ever-so-slightly in whatever torment he was shot through with, she simply couldn't sustain her anger any longer.

Apparently, neither could he.

"It doesn't matter now," she said. "You've got to help me find the others."

Her anger had not drawn so much as a peep, but this did. He raised his head, his expression such a perfect image of futility and anguish that she almost laughed. Tears were rolling down his face, his eyes still capable of that much despite their discoloration. It took him several tries, but he finally managed to vocalize his refusal.

"I can't," he said.

A sudden wave of bile rose in her throat unbidden. "They're your friends," she spat at him. "They're in trouble. You have to - "

"I know that!" he half-shouted, half croaked, and the effort doubled him over. He lay on his hands and knees for a moment, trying to catch his breath, fists clenched tightly as he fought for breath.

She watched him fight with equanimity, the bile withdrew as quickly as it had risen. This was the boy, she reminded herself, who had fought her to a standstill twice, who had once told her that he was willing to have the other Titans kill him rather than go with her to meet Slade.

What the hell had Trigon done to him?

Carefully, she crouched down in front of him, taking his shoulder and helping him to sit up against a concrete pillar. "David, what happened? What's wrong?"

He lifted his head, pain visible even through the red fog of his scorched eyes. "He... took it."

"Took... ?" she knew the answer before she even finished the question, and her eyes widened as she suddenly understood.

"Devastator," he said, confirming it, clenching his teeth as he forced the words out. "He... took Devastator."

The implications all hit her with a rush. Her expression went blank, her arm fell limp, and she felt an icy chill grip her heart. "How?" she asked, blankly.

He shook his head. "I don't know," he said. "There was a light and... and pain and... then he just... ripped it out. I could feel it. I can still feel it missing. He winced and shuddered and lowered his head.

Terra didn't know what to say. She had known for months that Trigon had plans for Devastator, but not in a thousand years had she ever imagined that it might be this. She had no idea what Trigon could do with Devastator, but she had sufficient imagination to be able to guess. As images of galaxies on fire swirled around her, she wondered idly if Slade had known that this might happen.

Then again, at this point, did it matter if he had?

"Oh god..." she said, her voice hollow.

"Without Devastator, I can't help them," said David. "I can't help you. I can't even see."

The comment shook her out of her reflection. He was staring right at her. "What?"

He ground his teeth in frustration. "Not... see see, I can't..." He waved his hand around at their surroundings, his voice turning thin and desperate. "I can't see the air. I can't see the walls, the carbon in the smoke, it's... I know it's all there, but I can't see it! I've always been able to see it. Even with no light, but now... I feel like someone ripped my guts out with a scoop and..." His grip tightened on his stomach as he knotted his shirt through his fingers. "I can... feel where it ought to be, and it's not there. I never even knew it was there until he..."

He trailed off, breath coming in ragged pulses, and his hands shook harder than ever. Terra had no idea what to say. She sat mutely as he tried to compose himself and failed.

"I can't..." he stammered, quieting to whispers, "I can't help them. I'm not a metahuman or a kinetic or... or whatever you are. I was just a host. And he took it away and... I can't... I can't help them. I can't help anyone... I... I can't..."

His voice disolved into formless sound. He fell to his side and and dug the fingers of one hand into the sides of his temples, and for a second she thought he was coughing until she saw the tears leaking through his hand and saw him convulsing softly with the effort of keeping them in, and before she knew it, he was crying.

Nothing showy, nothing extreme. He did not wail to the heavens or pound his hands on the cement floor, and indeed she didn't even realize what he was doing at first, and then he was already doing it, and she was sitting there watching him, and she hadn't the first idea of what to do now.

Not in any sense.

She didn't move, didn't say anything, just watched him in silence as he visibly struggled to stop and failed, whatever pains, imagined or real, guessable or wholly unknowable he was suffering simply too much to bear. There had been times of course when Terra would have given everything to let some devil rip her powers away. Most metahumans had such moments. But to actually have it happen...

... not to mention everything else.

She felt a lethargy descend on her shoulders like a leaden weight. What few plans she had managed to scrape together had all been predicated on the assumption that, no matter how bad things got, she had the one ace in the hole, the capacity to reverse Trigon's petrification process. She had gone to the library seeking to use it, but found nothing there, nothing but ruin and death and the rubble of men, and David, whom Trigon had broken more thoroughly than any Dantean hell she had been imagining lay in store for them all. Trigon had stolen everything that he defined himself by, his powers, his friends, his world, and left him to stand a silent monument to the futility of resistance to the Lord of Evil.

The fate of the others could be explained away with ease. Trigon had cared nothing for them, insects and protozoa scurrying beneath his cloven feet. David, former host of the Devastator, had been a matter of personal interest to the Devil. The others had not. Whether by conscious act, or as a mere side effect, the other Titans had simply been destroyed.

Until that very moment, Terra realized all of a sudden, she hadn't truly believed that it would come to this.

David was quiet now, still lying curled on his side on the bare floor, his blood-red eyes squeezed shut and veiled behind his knotted hand. In the stillness of the subterranean chamber, he could still be heard, breath hissing softly through clenched teeth, the occasional stifled sob still wracking his tormented frame. Whether he was mourning his burnt world, or his dead friends, or trying to alleviate his own pain, or perhaps all of the above, could not be determined. Nor did it matter.

She knew what Slade would have done here. She also knew what she probably should have done. And in a twisted way, she knew what would likely be the kind thing to do. But rather than any of these things, all Terra did was to slowly reach one hand out and laid it as gently as she could on his ashen-gray shoulder. She wasn't sure what reaction she would get, if he would throw her hand off or ignore it altogether, locked down in his own grief. Yet a few seconds after she did so, he reached around with his far hand, and took hers, and squeezed it as tightly as he could, like a vice, like a handhold above an abyss. He squeezed so tightly that it hurt, that she bit her lip to avoid crying out herself, but she didn't try to pull away, and when she raised her head, she found to her surprise that there were tears welling in her eyes as well.

The certainty of what Slade would have said in this situation hung before her, yet as she closed her eyes, and felt the tears start to run down her face, she took a wordless breath, silently prayed forgiveness for what she was about to do, and lied.

"It's okay, David," she said. "It's gonna be okay..."

O-O-O

The path wound down, down, down, endlessly down it appeared, to the point that Beast Boy was sure that sooner or later they would emerge in China. A sheer rock wall on one side, a bottomless pit on the other, and rough, uneven steps to descend. Despite the fact that he could fly, Beast Boy hugged the wall and kept well away from the yawning pit. Who knew what lay within it, or how things worked here after all?

Slade didn't seem to give it a second glance, but that didn't make him feel any better.

The darkness was total, no starlight, no moonlight, no reflections from some other, better lit place. His night vision availed him not at all, and he would have been walking blind had not Slade and he both been carrying burning torches, which served to illuminate their immediate vicinity. Not that there was any change in the scenery to mediate on. There was no sound except for their shuffling footsteps, not even an echo from somewhere else in the shaft, and despite the fact that this was Slade after all, Beast Boy finally had to say something, if only to end the oppressive silence.

"So... where're we going?" he asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

He'd have bet even money that Slade was not going to answer him, having taken him on this trip under protest to begin with, but to his surprise, Slade answered cordially, or at least as cordially as Slade ever was.

"I'm not entirely certain," said the supervillain. "Into grave danger, regardless."

"Yeah," said Beast Boy. That much hardly needed saying. "But... is Raven near here? Do we have a long way to go?"

"Raven no longer exists on the same level that you or I do," said Slade. "She is not in a specific location. Finding her is as much a matter of instinct and desire as it is diligence."

Somehow, that actually made him feel slightly better. "Dude, I know instinct," he said. "And I want to find her. Should be easy, right?"

Slade only groaned. "We'll see," he said, darkly.

Beast Boy frowned. "What, you don't believe me?"

"Let's just say that Trigon has a way of altering people's priorities," said Slade.

Beast Boy might have asked more, but at that moment, they found the bottom of the shaft.

The staircase ended abruptly in an enormous open cavern. Beast Boy raised his torch, squinting as he struggled to see in the oppressive darkness, but could discern no features on any of the walls except for bare rock. Slade however didn't so much as hesitate, but turned halfway to the left and moved off into the darkness. Beast Boy followed, and presently they came to a pair of doors in the solid wall.

Carved from the living rock, and inscribed with meaningless sigils, the doors towered overhead at least twenty feet. No handle or knocker was visible, but a sliver of reddish light was just visible around the margins of both doors. Slade walked up to one of the two doors, but paused at the threshold, before turning back to face Beast Boy for the first time since they had left the library.

"Before we continue," said Slade, "a warning. Even if Cyborg is successful at diverting Trigon's attention from us, his will permeates this entire place. Behind this door, you will find threats both physical and mental, and even if we succeed, I can't guarantee you'll like what you come upon."

Privately, Beast Boy wondered what was in the water that supervillains drank that led them all to throw out cryptic threats every ten seconds. He folded his arms, intending to look resolute and committed, but succeeded only in burning himself with his own torch before yelping and dropping it. Slade didn't react, though Beast Boy was sure he saw the supervillain's one eye narrow appreciably, and he quickly snatched the torch back up and tried to pretend that nothing had happened.

"I'll take my chances, dude," said Beast Boy.

"Hmph," was all Slade had to say to that, and he turned back to the door, bracing his shoulder against it. Beast Boy tossed his torch aside and shifted into the form of a cape buffalo before trotting up to the opposite door, lowering his head and touching it to the stone.

"One, two..."

The two of them shoved in unison, and with a loud grinding sound, the doors slid open enough to admit them onto a balcony overlooking the river of fire.

There was nothing else that this place could conceivably be called. Before them loomed a huge chasm, rent in the earth as though cloven by an axe. Despite the untold depths to which they had descended in the spiraling shaft, this place was deeper still, its vaulted ceiling lost in the darkness above, as would have been its depths had they not been flooded with molten lava, which flowed turgidly onwards like a slow-moving river. The sheer walls were lined with spigots of stone, carved in elaborate shapes bestial and monstrous, from whence poured further liquid fire to feed the molten river.

Beast Boy stood on the edge of the balcony, looking down into the pit of flowing flame, feeling the heat that, even at this height, could still be felt wafting off of it. He stared unblinking at it, mouth slightly ajar, conscious of Slade, who was watching him silently, and only after a few moments did he turn away from the river of fire and back to Slade.

"Slade, where... are we?" he asked, hesitantly. An underground catacomb made by Trigon worshipers beneath the old library he could perhaps accept, but there was simply no way that this place had existed all this time beneath Jump City.

Slade only shook his head. "Perdition," he said.

Before he could ask anything else, Slade gestured downwards. Beast Boy followed his pointed finger, and saw that directly below them was a small stone landing on the banks of the fire river. On it was located a small spire of rock, to which was tied a small boat. How a boat could possibly have survived sitting in the midst of a river of lava was unclear, and yet it bobbed there calmly, as though sitting on nothing more dangerous than a slow-moving river in some urban park.

Slade did not offer any explanations of what might be going on. Instead, in one, swift movement, he leaped off of the balcony and plunged down towards the landing, landing on his feet two hundred feet below with the balance of an acrobat. By now, Beast Boy didn't even wonder at how Slade hadn't shattered every bone in his body, and instead shifted into a hummingbird, and quickly flitted down to the landing, switching back to human form as Slade calmly stepped into the boat and took up position at the bow.

Though the boat accepted Slade with ease, Beast Boy was not so eager to leap into molten lava. "Um..." he asked, "are you positive we're not about to just melt?"

"If you're having second thoughts, changeling..."

Beast Boy frowned at the implication. "No way," he said. "This just isn't what I was expecting."

"It's the end of the world," said Slade, "what exactly were you expecting?"

He had no answer to that question, and so changed the subject. "Look, where are we going?" he asked testily. "You said Raven's around here somewhere, right? If you don't know where she is, then how do you know that this is the right way?"

"Do you see another way?" asked Slade. "If so, you are welcome to follow it forever if you like. I will move down this river until another road presents itself."

Beast Boy rolled his eyes, but Slade seemed to consider the matter concluded. He took up the enormous pole mounted in the front of the boat and turned towards the front of the boat, leaving Beast Boy to board or not as he saw fit. Though he hated to prove Slade right, in the end there wasn't another obvious path to take, even if he had felt like trying to fly over this river, and so grudgingly he climbed into the back of the boat and sat down, muttering as he took the rudder. No sooner had he done so than Slade drove the pole into the lava and pushed them off.

The boat bobbed and rolled, but took to the magma stream as though it were water, floating along without the slightest sign of structural damage. Beast Boy crouched lightly in the stern, half-expecting the floor of the boat to melt out from under him at any moment, yet it didn't even seem to heat up, and after a few minutes, even he had to admit that it seemed unlikely to do so.

The lava flow was slow and gentle, and Slade poled the boat forward like a gondola, moving at a steady pace. They passed tiny islets of rock sticking out above the turgid lava, some no larger than checkerboards, others larger than the boat they were in. The sheer rock walls that bordered the lava did not vary, and neither did the monstrous spigots that continuously vomited fresh lava into the river. Beast Boy steered them well around the apertures, having no desire to take an abrupt magma shower, but the pace was slow and the spigots sparse enough that this hardly took most of his concentration, and as the river rolled on and on, despite his best efforts to remain alert, his mind wandered.

And as always, heaven help whoever happened to be with him when that happened.

"So if you didn't want all this to happen, how come you were working for Trigon in the first place?"

They had been traveling for what might have been fifteen minutes in complete silence before Beast Boy asked the question, and for some time afterwards, Slade said nothing, indeed he did not even seem to acknowledge that Beast Boy had said anything. Beast Boy frowned and wondered how exactly he had wound up stuck on a boat in the middle of Hell with the world's only non-talkative supervillain, when suddenly Slade answered.

"It was something of a complex situation."

This, of course, was no answer at all, and Beast Boy snorted. "Right," he said. "I guess the powers and the demon armies were just side benefits?"

"Not everything is as cut and dry as you would have it be," said Slade. "Thanks to you and your friends, I wasn't exactly left with much choice."

"My friends," repeated Beast Boy. "You mean Terra."

Another pause. "I suppose I do mean her," said Slade. "It was her that got me into this, after all."

"What are you talking about?" asked Beast Boy. "She told David you were making her do all this, not the other way around."

That elicited a hollow laugh. "That much is true," said Slade. "Terra never had the stomach to operate on her own behalf after all. If she had, she wouldn't have needed you all."

Suddenly Beast Boy wished he had been stuck with a non-talkative supervillain. "Shut up," was all he could say.

Slade, as always, saw right through it. "Not so eager to talk now, are we?" he asked in a sickeningly sweet tone that made Beast Boy want to throw him overboard. "It's been what, a full year? Does it still bother you, changeling, that she chose me over the Titans? Over you?"

"You tricked her," he said. "You lied to her and manipulated her into doing all that stuff! Just like you did while you were working for Trigon"

"Use me as a scapegoat if it makes you feel better," said Slade, "but even I'm not that good. Terra made her own decisions. I merely informed them." Slade returned his gaze to the lava ahead, poling the boat forward as he continued. "Besides, I think it's unquestionable that she did far better for herself with me, than she ever did with you."

Bitter anger rose like bile in Beast Boy's throat, but he managed to supress it as he twisted his face into a feral grin. "Oh yeah?" he said. "Way I remember it, she killed you and saved the city from your little volcano trap."

"And look how well that turned out," said Slade, his voice just a shade testier than it had been, which Beast Boy took as a victory. "She managed to kill me, and herself, and thereby condemn us both to the service of the Devil for the purposes of ending the world. I offered her status, power, and training in the control of her abilities, not to mention a share in my new world order. You offered nothing but a cheap box held together with duct tape."

Beast Boy's eyes shot open, and his voice died in his throat as Slade slowly turned his head back. "Oh yes," said the supervillain, voice whisper-quiet and dripping with arrogance, "she showed it to me. If that's your idea of romanticism, it's no wonder she tossed you aside."

It took everything, everything Beast Boy had, to remain seated. It took everything he had to not act, to not adopt the form of some eldritch nightmare from the darkest corners of a horror novel, to not smash the boat to splinters in a frothing rage. What with everything, with Raven and Robin and the crises piled upon crises, he had almost forgotten how bad the pain was, but right here, right now, it came back like an old friend, like a spike driven through his chest that brought tears back to his eyes. It was still just as bad as it had been the day, the hour, the very instant that he had hung there, clinging by his fingertips to the side of a bottomless chasm, as Terra brought a massive rock down to seal him off, his last sight of her a twisted, mocking grin that bored through him like a mining laser.

He fought himself, he fought the presence that he called "the Beast" that lay within him always, and now roared like the caged animal it was and beat its fists against his psyche in pure outraged pain, ready to tear Slade apart and festoon the walls with his entrails. He dug the fingers of his gloves into the seat and clenched his teeth tightly enough to bite through a steel bar, and let the tears run down his face as he fought it off. A year, a full year it had been, with chaos and adventure and triumph and agony and pain and joy all its own, and still, even now, it took Slade no more than a dozen words to turn him back into a raging animal. And he hated himself for that almost as much as he hated Slade for it.

Almost.

He had no idea if Slade knew how close he had come to provoking Armageddon redux, but for whatever reason, Slade didn't push it further, returning to his task in smugly satisfied silence. And after a few minutes, once he was calm enough to speak again, Beast Boy pronounced his final judgment.

"You're a monster," he said simply.

Slade didn't even bat an eye. "Yes," he said. "We have that in common don't we? Beast Boy?" He let his voice slither over the name as though it were some delectable liqueur, just long enough to be noticeable. Beast Boy didn't answer, refused to let himself answer, just sat in the back of the boat in stony silence, until Slade spoke again, and suddenly his voice was back to normal, no nonsense, no inflection, no emotion at all, just hard practicalities.

"You think I do this to amuse myself?" he asked. "If you really want Raven back, you must deal with much worse than that. If you can't control yourself, you're of no use to anyone, least of all me. Trigon is not as nice as I am, and he will place obstacles in your path far beyond anything I can do."

Beast Boy had had it with this 'ominous cryptic warning' crap, especially from Slade. "I don't need your advice," he snapped at Slade, "and I don't care what you think about me! What is all this stuff Trigon's got to throw at us that you keep pretending you know so much about?!"

Suddenly, the boat lurched to a halt, nearly pitching Beast Boy over into the gunwales. He grabbed the side to steady himself, and looked up to see that Slade had jammed the steering pole down into the bottom of the river, and brought the boat to a sudden halt.

And before Beast Boy could open his mouth to ask the question, his eyes widened as he saw why.

The river ahead of them was boiling, writhing, as though a school of demonic fish were trying to rip their way out of it. A moment later, and they were no longer trying. First one, then five, then dozens of fire demons, the same legless floating figures of sulfur and magma that had assaulted the Tower and carved a path of ruin through the streets of Jump City, erupted into the air like startled birds. Screaming and roaring like damned souls, they twirled through the air for a moment, before spinning and diving towards the small boat, and the two occupants thereof.

Things got somewhat chaotic after that.

Beast Boy jumped out of the boat, an action which, given what the boat was presently sitting in, was not something he would have ever envisioned himself doing, and only the instinctive choice to opt for the form of a small bluejay rather than a massive pterodactyl saved him from being diced to sushi by the lashing tendrils of a dozen screaming demons. Behind him, the boat was instantly cut to ribbons by demons aiming at either him or Slade, he couldn't tell which. Slade however had also opted to be elsewhere, pivoting off of the pole and vaulting through the air like an acrobat. Two of the demons tried to interrupt his flight, and he smashed them to paste with the fireproof pole before landing on a table-sized rock island in the middle of the river, brandishing the lava-dripping boat pole like a quarterstaff.

For a brief moment, Beast Boy was reminded of Robin. And then the demons blocked his view, and he had too much else to worry about.

They lunged at him from all sides and he clawed for altitude, evading a dozen strikes at a time as the demons flayed the air with their flaming tendrils and elongated arms of molten rock. His feathers wilted as the searing heat passed within milimeters, and he downsized again and again, to a hummingbird, then a dragonfly, then finally a mosquito, so small that the demons could barely see him, let alone attack. A good half of them gave up, and shouldering over like fighter planes, dove at Slade, who was trying to fend two dozen demons off by himself with nothing more than an iron stick.

Monster or not, Beast Boy didn't even hesitate.

From the smallest of insects, Beast Boy suddenly turned into a furious grizzly bear, surprising the nearest four demons, three of whom were ripped apart by claw and tooth before they had a chance to register what had happened. The fourth lashed out, but its tendrils struck empty air, as Beast Boy shifted into a Python in mid-air, spun his body into a loop, and grabbed the demon's extended arm-tendril in one of his coils. He half-hissed, half-cried out in pain as the demon's fiery skin scorched his scales, but a moment later he swung his weight hard to the side and launched the demon like a slingshot straight into the rock wall with enough force that it exploded against it like a water balloon.

The lava river loomed below, but a second later, and Beast Boy was an eagle, not normal but gigantic, an primordial eagle the size of a Cessna airplane, and his talons lashed out and tore another demon to pieces even as his great wings beat the air and carried him towards Slade.

Slade had relocated to a larger rock, impaling a demon and forcing it back under the surface as a pivot in order to do so, but three more demons had seized his pole with their tendrils and were now trying to drag him into the lava with it. Perhaps a dozen more were moving to try and intercept Beast Boy, to prevent him from interfering. But if there was anything Beast Boy was good at, it was interference, something Slade knew, and the demons were about to find out.

In an instant, Beast Boy was simply gone, gone as though he had teleported away. Two demons, unable to abort their lunge, collided in mid-air and spiralled down into the river like shot birds. The others sliced the very air apart, but caught nothing whatsoever, and a second later, Beast Boy re-appeared beyond them all, having traversed the intervening space in the form of a gnat so small that it was nearly microscopic. Now he took on the shape of a peregrine falcon, and before any of the demons behind him could so much as react, he folded his wings and dove at the three accosting Slade.

He hit one of them at nearly two hundred miles an hour and caved its head in like a piece of bubble wrap, bouncing off of the demon's crumpled form and back up into the air so fast that the splashing sulfur and magma didn't even have time to burn him. Another one released Slade's weapon and lashed at him, but he switched to the form of a Rhinoceros and shrugged the blow off with thick armor before landing atop the unfortunate demon and splattering it all across the cavern. The last demon had no chance to even act before Slade planted his feet and hurled it towards Beast Boy, who simply impaled the sulfuric monster on his horn before hurling it off into the river of lava with a shake of his head.

The remaining demons, having lost half their number in less than thirty seconds, fell back to regroup, and Beast Boy switched back into his human form, crouched low, as was his wont. Slade had selected the largest and most stable-looking island in sight to make his stand, a flat slab of immobile granite the size of a tractor trailer, and he now moved into the middle of it, brandishing his ersatz staff, cherry-red at both ends where he had used it to cleave demons apart or plumb the depths of the river of fire. Not without hesitation, Beast Boy backed up towards him, half-expecting to feel Slade plunging the business end of the staff into his back at any moment. Slade however, managed to restrain himself. Whatever the business between them, the demons were plainly a more pressing threat.

Yet rather than resume the attack, the demons held back. Though they still numbered at least twenty, no further demons were surging forth to join their ranks, the lava beneath them once more in calm state it had been in prior to their rising. Wherever the endless legions that Trigon had employed before were, this group plainly was finite, and bereft of the advantage of endless numbers, they seemed more subdued, waiting for an opportunity rather than blindly charging.

"Is this one of those 'obstacles' you were talking about?" asked Beast Boy without turning around.

"This?" scoffed Slade, planting his staff in the rock at his feet. "This is just a minor inconvenience. Nothing two old friends can't handle."

For a brief second, Beast Boy forgot all about the demons, rounding on Slade in righteous fury. "I am not your friend!" he yelled, loud enough to echo through the cavern.

Slade seemed almost bemused by his reaction, and no doubt would have responded with some pithy comment or other, save that, at that moment, someone else beat him to it.

"Of course not!" came a voice from far above, raspy and mocking and instantly familiar, and as both Slade and Beast Boy turned their heads, they saw, far far above them, perched atop one of the stone spigots, a small, lithe figure, crouched on all fours like a cat preparing to pounce. At the distance they were at, so small a figure would not normally have been discernible, yet despite that, Beast Boy's eyes popped and his heart froze, for he recognized the silhouette instantly without need for a second glance. And as he watched, the figure leaped from the spigot and plunged down, landing in a crouch on another rock island, the orange glow of the river of fire revealing its ash-gray skin and clothing, its red eyes burning like coals, its fanged teeth bared in a twisted grin, gloved hands crossed as it stood up and faced itself across the stream of magma.

"You don't have any friends," said the perfect duplicate of Beast Boy in a mocking laugh, and then all the demons charged at once.

O-O-O

Life comes down to a series of choices.

Some of them are hard. The kind that keep you up at night, waiting for inspiration, divine or otherwise, to strike you. They burn at your mind in the quiet hours of the night, second guessing, telling you all about the verdant green of the grass on the other side of the fence.

He stands on a lump of sterile rock that was once part of the waterfront. His systems are telling him that everything is in perfect readiness, within normal threat tolerances. Several encyclopedias worth of information are being beamed through his optic nerves every few seconds, but he's really not paying attention to any of it. When the readouts finally realize this, they switch automatically to a standby mode, waiting for him to call them back up. And then it's just him. And the Devil.

Those kinds of choices will kill you if you let them. They'll drag you down into your own personal Hell, crying all the time, those most horrific of words in the English language: 'If I had only...' They come back at you, years after the fact, gnawing at your mind like rodents in the darkness, when time has worn the memories down to raw fact, and the context is lost, and all you can think about is why... why did you do that... why didn't you do this.

They're enough to drive a man mad.

It looms ahead like the shadow of Death itself. A vast, nebulous figure, diffused by the haze, indistinct, even with polarizers and cutting-edge image amplification software. Draped over the ruined Tower as though it were a cross between a crucifix and a throne. His arms draped across the Tower's. His body resting on its slanted form. His head is invisible, hunched, hanging down where the smoke is thicker. And from across the sea of flames, there is the distinct sound of something breathing.

Cyborg is standing on the shores of Hell, looking across the Lake of Fire at the Devil himself.

And he's got a cannon.

For a brief moment, he's reminded of one the video games Beast Boy used to play...

Most choices though, are a little different.

His arm begins to change, shift, morph. His fingers fold in on themselves and slide back over his forearm, and his wrist expands and slides forward, becoming an aperture rather than a limb. The blue glow that permeates his entire being becomes more pronounced, more concentrated. His forearm glows bright blue, like the skies used to be before the Devil arrived, and he doesn't even need to glance down at it to know that it's ready.

We make choices every day. We make them in split seconds, without even thinking about them. Hundreds and thousands of them, every minute of every day of our lives. Sometimes they're so routine that we don't even need to think about them. Sometimes they're not of any particular importance.

He raises the cannon, taking his time, for what can a few more seconds matter at this point? His targeting sensors are useless in the dust and smoke, but he doesn't need them. Not at this range, not at this target. He sights along the barrel of his cannon by eye, aiming at the center of the black mass, his mechanical joints locking into place to prevent any last-second twitch. Seven hundred and twenty four diagnostic systems perform their checks in less than a quarter of a second, and all of them report back green. Mechanically-speaking, everything is ready.

The great paradox of our lives though, is that sometimes the choices we make are so important that we don't let ourselves think about them at all.

He fires.

His fusion battery has long-since allocated power to the task at hand, transfered through networks of superconductive Magnesium Diboride fiber-cabling chilled with liquid helium to four hundred degrees below zero. Twelve different ultrasonic emitters switch on, and two thousandths of a second later, the micro-distortion field attains criticality, and a brilliant blue-white glow emerges from the end of his forearm, swirling and dancing through the dust-loaded air like a magical spell. It's the light of a hundred billion particles of dust, pollutants, individual molecules of argon and CO2, all undergoing spontaneous nuclear fission as they're subjected to an ultrasonic wave thirty times stronger than that of the most powerful jet engine in the world. In the blink of an eye, the visible beam of ultrasound stabs across the gulf like the finger of God, and slams straight into the Devil's chest with enough power to punch a hole through a battleship.

Trigon notices.

Our brains are selfish, relentless calculators, a thousand million chemical microprocessors churning at once in a remorseless rhythm. Complex simulations running through a hundred probable outcomes a second and discounting ninety-nine of them before they even break the surface of our conscious mind. We analyze, deduce, predict, estimate, all in our own interest, all without even trying to, trying constantly to figure out how best to serve ourselves.

But once in a while, we decide to stop.

The haze closes back in over the ionized trail left by the sonic cannon, and shrouds the target, fogging sensors, obfuscating analysis. None of it matters in any event. Powerful as the sonic cannon is, Trigon is simply beyond it, even in his weakened form. It is as the finite pitted against the infinite.

Low growls, rumbling in the distance like heavy machinery. A shimmer in the polluted air, and then the vast, Dantean shadow begins to stir. It seems to swell, rising like a fume of poison, looming into the air as tall as the Tower itself. An indistinct red glow emanates from the top of it as Trigon opens his four red eyes and turns towards the shore on which Cyborg stands. And then, with a footfall that sounds like the thunder of heavy artillery, he approaches.

We are not creatures of logic and reason by nature. We are animals of instinct and reflexive reaction. Our affectations of calculation are learned, not inherent. We learn as children to think before we act, to draw conclusions from the world around us, to operate the computers of our minds. From our earliest years, we practice with the faculties of reason until it becomes rote, and we no longer know how to set it aside, until one day something compels us to learn.

That something can be anything. Revelation, fear, anger, depression, anything that makes us throw aside our cultivated rationality and revert to base instinct. The veneer is so thin that a thousand things can tear it, even rip it to pieces, sometimes never to be repaired, a single powerful emotion bringing us back to the basics of our humanity all at a rush.

Step by seismic step, Trigon approaches, looming up out of the darkness like a nightmare given form. The fire laps at his cloven feet, and the smoke clouds wreath his head like a coronet. He stretches to the heavens, vast, unimaginably vast, taller than the tallest skyscraper. Still hundreds of yards from the shore, he stares down at Cyborg with four eyes of glowing hate, like charcoals set in a statue of blood.

This is different.

"Insignificant insect," comes a voice that could only be the devil's. It rumbles and rolls like boulders crashing down from great heights, deep and twisted, a voice of animate hate that bores into his metal skull like a drill bit. Despite the ocean of lava not five steps away, he feels the air chill as Trigon speaks.

"Do you think yourself wise?" says the Devil. "To attack me while I gather my strength? Did you deem this to be to be wisdom of a sort? You are a fool, Victor Stone, and your soul shall dance in agony for the rest of time."

He's not here because he's enraged.

All four of Trigon's eyes glow bright red, and beams of purified death manifest from them, blending together into a cone that strikes the sea of fire and parts it like a blade, sweeping over the flames towards Cyborg, who stands on the shores of Hell and watches it come.

He's not here out of fanaticism or desperation.

There's nowhere to run. The cone is fifty yards wide and approaching at speed, and he can't get out of its way fast enough to make a difference. He doesn't even brace himself for the impact, staring up past the cone at the devil who looms overhead, arms at his sides. The sound and the fury of the destruction that Trigon is wreaking before him becomes blinding, deafening, and the ground beneath his feet shatters from the force of it. And then a second later, the cone overtakes him, and everything vanishes.

He's here, in this place, at this time, because he made a choice.

The red beam combs over the promontory where Cyborg once stood several times, methodically reducing it to ash and ruin. And then, when it is done, and complete, the Devil's eyes dim, and the cone of death vanishes, and there's nothing left but a shroud of smoke.

A sudden gust of wind tears the smoke aside, and reveals the results of Trigon's handiwork.

And it was the easiest choice in the world.

Nothing.

The promontory is gone now. Melted and vaporized and cast away into the atmosphere like sand in a dust storm. Yet Cyborg still stands where he was a moment ago, his arms still limp, his eyes still fixed on Trigon. The ground beneath his feet still remains, now carved off into an island in the sea of fire. And all around him, like a bubble manifested from nothingness, vaguely tinted red like the rest of the world, is a translucent shield.

And on Cyborg's finger, a small ring of gold sparkles in the unearthly twilight.

Trigon does not react at the failure of his powers. He does not rage or act in surprise, nor even fire anew. For a second or two, devil and teenager stare at one another. And then Trigon's mouth curls back into a sneering smile, and he laughs.

"You carry a ring of Azar," says Trigon. "No doubt a relic from a former minion." Trigon seems amused, almost pleased by this turn of events. For a moment he laughs, a horrifying sound, like that of a tidal wave drowning a village of innocents. And then his face is stern again.

"It matters not," says Trigon, "fighting you is beneath me."

The lava begins to boil.

To stand before the Devil, and to try and fight him is not rational. To do such a thing is not self-interested, not even in the wider sense that people use to justify living by codes of heroism or justice. It does not advance the causes to which Cyborg has dedicated his life, nor does it permit him to think of himself in a better light. It does not expiate guilt or vanquish doubt. It does not bring him peace. It does not bring him closure. It does not matter.

It is not meant to.

The boiling lava begins to surge, splashing at the rock near Cyborg's feet, as though within it, things were writhing in the deep. A moment later, and the truth of this statement is made manifest, as numberless creatures, demons, beings of flame and sulfur, begin to claw their way out of the fire sea. All around they surge forth, like raindrops in a hurricane, and they rise into the air, damned souls or demons or some other creature of darkness brought forth by the will of Trigon.

Cyborg crouches and jumps backwards, landing back on the shore and backing slowly away from it as the demons form up in phalanxes a hundred wide and sixteen deep. Trigon too is backing away, moving back towards the island, where he sits once more, leaning against the Tower as though it were his throne, barely visible through the haze, yet his words are loud and clear as clarions rung in the morning.

"Die with your world, hero, and know eternity as my slave."

What use is there in shouting defiance at the Devil? The Devil who no doubt has heard every curse and vile malignancy ever pronounced by the living a hundredfold. And so, as the armies of Hell form up before him, Cyborg does not respond to Trigon's taunts. He does not scream a warcry or repeat the words of learned men. Yet despite this, words come to him unbidden. Words he has pronounced only once in four years, welling up from within him, from a place he had thought no longer existed, from a life he left behind years ago. Words that he left behind ages ago, but that he finds, now, here, in this present of death, are with him still.

"Our father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name."

It has been two and a half years since Cyborg entered a church, and longer than that since he prayed. Indeed, Cyborg has never done so. The half-remembered prayers he uttered so long ago were those of Victor Stone, and like so much else, he gave them up when he became what he is now. He did not miss them, liturgical nonsense recited by hypocritical liars who thought themselves holy for pretending to work on behalf of others. He had been drifting away from it before the accident, and the transformation only made it permanent. Rather than listen to a paid spokesman preach morals to him, he put them into practice by himself, and with his friends, and left God to see to his own affairs. It was an arrangement he never regretted, ever.

Nor does he regret it now.

"Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven."

There is no rapture. He does not feel the light of God gracing him. Angels do not descend from on-high, to challenge the Devil and defend their champion, if indeed that is what Cyborg is. Yet he does not stop, and he does not falter, his voice ratcheting up in volume and intensity as he recites the words buried deep in the corner of his mind. The demons range themselves around him in a semicircle, advancing onto the shore, as he continues to speak, louder and louder, stretching tall, his mechanical limbs shining silver and blue in the twilight of the Gods.

"Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us."

He steps to the side, and grasps a street sign, eleven feet tall and topped with a metal board painted to indicate no parking along the waterfront. With one tug, his robotic servos uproot the entire sign like a tree, and he smashes the concrete divot on it against the ground, shattering it like pottery, leaving bare metal behind. He turns it over in both hands, feeling the weight, and turns back to the demons, advancing at the will of their master in lock-step, and he hefts the sign like a poleaxe and steps towards them.

"And lead us not into temptation," says Cyborg, "but deliver us from evil."

Cyborg made a choice, not long ago. Faced with the situation he was in, he chose to consciously set his calculating mind aside. He chose to fight Trigon alone, not because he could win, not because he wished to make a game ending of it, not because he had staked his very self-worth against the notion of acting heroically, and not because he felt it would save the world. He chose to fight Trigon, knowing full well that by no metric anyone had ever invented, did this choice make rational sense.

He has chosen to fight Trigon because every second that Trigon must send his armies against him, is a second in which they are not being sent at Beast Boy and Starfire, and another second in which his only remaining friends in the world, will live.

It is the easiest choice that Cyborg has ever made.

The demons close, yet they hold back out of reach of his ersatz poleaxe, and he does not open fire on them, not yet, for he wishes to save his power for where he feels it will be of most use. But before he can determine whether to strike now or to wait, the demons stop in their tracks, and he hears a loud "crunch" behind him, as though something heavy has just fallen from on high and landed on the ground.

He turns, and he sees himself. A perfect replica, identical in every way save color, for where Cyborg's skin is dark brown, and his metallic components blue and silver and indigo, the duplicate's skin is ashen-white, like a vampire or animate corpse, and his cyborg parts a gunmetal gray, washed out, like a picture denuded of color, save only for his eyes, both human and mechanical, which shine like burning coals in the darkness of the ruined shore. And as Cyborg watches this perfect replica rise to a standing position, and fold his arms in the way that he knows is his own, he hears the duplicate finish his own prayer... in his own voice.

We make choices, every day. Some are important, and some less so. But common to all of them, and to all of us, is one simple truth as creatures of reason: We make the choices, whatever they might be, and we live with the consequences. Sometimes for a moment. Sometimes forever.

"For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory," says the duplicate, and his arm shifts into a cannon, as he crouches low and grins in anticipation. And part of Cyborg is surprised, shocked even, to see this thing here before him, and wonders what it is, and how it came to be here, and why, but the rest of him, the part of him immune to surprise and calculation, the part he has consciously placed in control, only narrows his eyes.

"Amen."

Such is life.

O-O-O

Starfire didn't know where she was going.

The landmarks were still there, but they seemed to have been re-arranged, as though somebody had taken the buildings and moved them, like children's block towers. The familiar grid of streets no longer was familiar, and not merely from the smoke, yet she pressed on regardless, flying over ruins that had once been houses and apartment buildings, factories and office towers. Had she been trying to find a specific place, it would have been utterly maddening, but she had no idea where to look, and so one place was as good as any, no matter where it was in relation to anything else.

The shroud of ash and smoke closed behind her as she flew, blocking out her view of Trigon and Cyborg and Beast Boy and whatever else might be about tonight. She was glad that it did. Had she been able to see the others, she likely would not have been able to muster the necessary joy to propel herself in flight. Indeed, she was only able to manage as she was by dint of memory, dredging up the memories of happier days, of the days before Trigon had arrived, before his minions had reached out, the days when things were still as they had once been. Compared to now, these memories were like ambrosia.

A roar, a sharp, angry roar, was all the warning she got, as suddenly three flame demons descended on her from out of the smoke-cloud, and by pure instinct she rolled to her left as they slashed past, biting through the air she had occupied an instant before with razor-sharp tendrils of living flame. Passing her elevation in a rush, the demons split up, one flying on ahead, as the other two came about for another attempt.

They didn't get far.

Joy required memory, required denial and longing and a host of other emotional exercises to conjure up. Fury however, was close at hand, a hair-trigger away at even the best of times now, and she called on it so quickly that the demons never had a chance to regret their decision. Beams of energy lanced forth from her eyes and skewered one of the flame demons, blowing it to steam and flecks of rock. The other managed to evade her thrown starbolt, and lunged at her like a thrown spear, but she jackknifed in mid-air and met it head on with her fist in a downward swing, tearing a deep gouge straight through it and letting it pinwheel towards the ground below.

The last demon saw what had befallen its fellows, and turned tail, fleeing into the city at best speed. Starfire flew after it, shaking the molten sulfur from her hand like rainwater as she chased it down streets and around corners. Fists extended forward, she conjured starbolts and fired them, splitting the air all around the demon, yet it twisted and twirled and evaded her shots, turning again and again and preventing her from aiming correctly. On and on they flew, Starfire neither knowing where they were nor where they were heading, yet no matter how fast she urged herself, the demon matched her speed, though it did not exceed it, remaining within view at all times, until finally she ceased firing. The demon was plainly not trying to evade her entirely. It wanted her to follow it.

She did so.

Several minutes passed in silence, as the demon flew on, and Starfire followed, until all of a sudden, there loomed an enormous edifice, appearing through the smoke and haze quite out of nowhere. The size of a major skyscraper, it was black and crenelated, carved from what seemed to be a solid block of volcanic stone, rising into the air like a soaring cathedral of the damned. Towers and spires emerged from it haphazardly, reaching far into the sky, and illuminated by bright fires that burned ceaselessly atop their pinnacles. Where this monstrous eyesore had come from was beyond her, for it resembled no other structure she had seen on Earth, let alone in Jump City, yet she did not pause to determine its origin, but flew after the demon as it closed on one of balconies opening up on this side. A moment later and it landed, and turned about, looking up at her, waiting.

She landed next to demon, touching down on the balcony of stone lightly, not trusting that it wouldn't crumble at her touch. An instant later, the demon flew off into the darkness, so quickly now that she lost sight of it in moments, as the smoke closed behind it, and then she was alone.

A pause on the threshold, and then she entered the building.

The balcony led to a short corridor, unadorned with tapestries or any other hanging or decoration, and ahead loomed a massive door made of rusted iron, from which loose chains hung attached to empty manacles. She brushed these aside gingerly, and placed her hands on the door, pushing against it to open it. It weighed more than the T-car, yet she shoved it open without undue difficulties, and stepped inside.

Before her stood a large, vaulted chamber, carved from the same stone as the rest of the place, but with infinitely more care than the outside had been. Reliefs were carven into the walls, spiraling up the freestanding columns that dotted the chamber, representations of horned devils and other monsters devouring numberless beings, humanoid and otherwise, or casting them into cauldrons of flame to be boiled alive. The room was enormous, the size of a temple or the great hall of a Tamaranean castle, and archways, and columns loomed overhead like great trees, yet there was no roof for them to hold up. The chamber was open to the scorched sky, and the clouds of ash that danced overhead.

Carefully, she walked into the enormous chamber, alert for the ambush she was certain was in order, yet nobody appeared to be present, be they demon or otherwise. The only sound was that of her footsteps on the stone floor, and the soft rumblings that augured any number of things, periodically emanating from the rest of the city.

And then suddenly, she saw him.

A light materialized from overhead, a light that came from nowhere, for there was no ceiling to bear it, and the sun remained hidden. Yet light there was, and it illuminated the far side of the room. There stood a dais near the far wall, looming above the rest of the chamber, with steps leading up to it. And atop the dais, there stood a man in Gold.

He was facing away from her, bent over an object at waist height, a basin of some kind mounted on a pedestal, from whence soft light emitted. Initially, he gave no sign that he had seen her. Then slowly, he raised his head, stretching up to his full height, though he did not turn.

"Hello, Princess," said Warp, his voice smooth and calm, barely more than a whisper. "I was hoping that you would come."

She did not answer in words.

Before she could speak, before she could think, a spike of bilious fury shot through her like a spear made of light, and her vision clouded over a radioactive green. With a roar of incandescent rage, she stepped forward and hurled a white-hot starbolt at Warp's back, powerful enough to reduce a man to ash. It sailed towards Warp like a meteor, singing the very air as it passed, yet an instant before it struck, Warp simply disappeared.

The starbolt hit the far wall and exploded, blasting a divot out of the living stone and scattering fragments over the room, yet before it had even struck, Warp simply materialized five feet in front of Starfire, facing her this time, his arms still folded carefully. No flash or burst of power accompanied this sudden appearance. He simply was atop the dais one moment, and the next he was directly before her.

"And here I was hoping we might have a pleasant conversation," said Warp.

Once more, her rage boiled over, and she lunged forward with her fist, tears streaming from her glowing eyes. But as before, Warp simply dissolved before her eyes, and her fist struck nothing but the air. Before she could even recover from the strike, an energy blast hit her in the back, throwing her off her feet onto the floor on her stomach. She rolled over onto her back to find Warp standing behind her, one arm raised towards her with fist extended, and atop his forearm was a glowing laser.

"It's been a long, long time, Princess," said Warp. "Longer for me than you I suppose, but then that's to be expected."

"Warp," she said, spitting the name out as though it tasted terrible, and she got back to her feet carefully, watching him as she prepared new Starbolts. He did not act to stop her, but neither did he lower his hand. She considered how best to hurl them this time, but as she was considering it, he seemed to read her intentions, and shook his head.

"That would be a grave mistake," said Warp, "one I am hoping it won't be necessary to correct."

"You have nothing with which to threaten me, Warp!" she spat back at him. "It was a grave mistake for you to permit me to find you."

"Ah, but some mistakes are worth making," said Warp, a cruel smile crossing his face. "This one most of all. Believe me when I tell you that you have no idea how long I've been waiting for this little chat."

"I will not countenance your lies," said Starfire through clenched teeth. "I do not care to hear them!"

"No!" barked Warp sharply, "No lies! No lies between us, Princess, I won't allow it. Not now. Only the truth. The unvarnished truth."

She didn't know what to make of this. "Why did you bring me here?" she asked, trying to determine if any of the golden material covering Warp's body might be the source of his ability to vanish and re-appear.

He smiled conspiratorially, as though he could read her mind, but chose to play along with her. The thought was unsettling, to say the least. "Because, Princess," he said, as he casually extended his hand back towards the softly glowing pedestal, "there are things I wished you to see."

For a moment, she thought he intended for her to look into whatever the light source on the dais was, as though she were mad enough to do such a thing at his behest. Yet a moment later, the light flared up like a bonfire, and all of a sudden a picture appeared above it, like a projector or holographic display.

And in the picture, she saw Beast Boy, and the relief that she felt in seeing him alive and apparently unharmed, unsuppressible, indisguisible relief, was suddenly overcome by shock.

There were two.

Two Beast Boys, both in the form of great birds, flying high above a river of molten fire. Identical in form, apparently identical in capacity, she watched as both of them shifted again and again, form after form both monstrous and mundane, as they sought advantage over one another. They ducked and wheeled, darting in and out, seeking openings, both endowed with the miraculous shapeshifting powers that the original had possessed. Yet there was no question which was the original, for one of the two Beast Boys was as she remembered, a thousand shades of green, emerald and viridian and harlequin and evergreen by turns. The other was like nothing she had ever seen. No matter what it shifted into, scaled, skinned, or furred, it remained the same sickly gray, like a corpse animated from the dead, its eyes a molten, fiery red. Yet even without the color-coding, she would have known which was the Beast Boy she knew. The gray changeling had Beast Boy's powers, but did not make use of them as he did, his attacks too feral, his motions too aggressive, too sudden, as though someone had amputated Beast Boy's reason and restraint and left only the raging bestial force that lay somewhere within his core.

"Trigon may be the Lord of Evil," said Warp, watching her watch the pictures, "but as with all heroes, you are your own worst enemies."

The picture pixilated, and then suddenly she saw Cyborg. He stood in a ring formed of living flames, and in his hand was a pole of iron, beaten and bent out of all recognition and glowing cherry-red at both ends. Demons lay broken at his feet in numbers unguessable, yet the demons were not the focus of his attention, for before him stood another Cyborg, and it too was gray, as if formed from bricks of ash, staring at the original with red eyes both human and mechanical, a cruel sneer on his face, and his hand replaced with a glowing cannon.

It took great efforts to suppress her initial urge, which was to fly off as fast as she could to find Cyborg and Beast Boy and help them. That she did not do so was more or less only because she had no idea where they were now, and because Cyborg had told her that if there was any chance to find Robin...

Steeling herself, she turned back to face Warp. "Is this all you have to show me?" she asked, loading her voice with regal contempt. "Parlour tricks and cowardice? Is your master so unimaginative that he can face us only with pale imitations of ourselves? Or were you hoping you might break our wills by showing us twisted simulacra and make us fall down and beg you for mercy?"

Warp seemed to find this funny. "They are not mere copies," he said. "Raven was not the only one possessed of a bad side, after all."

"Then am I to assume you have prepared a similar version of me?" she asked, crossing her arms, and looking about, half-expecting a gray-skinned, red-eyed copy of herself to appear from behind some column or archway. "Did you bring me here to watch me do battle with myself?"

Warp however merely shook his head. "No," he said. "Nothing so crass. I've brought you here to offer you a chance at redemption."

"I wish for nothing you have to offer!"

"Not even Robin?"

She froze, silenced as if by fiat, and when she managed to resume speaking, her tone was quieted somewhat, a near-whisper like his.

"Where is he?"

"He's here," said Warp with a soft smile. "I had him brought here as part of my arrangement with Trigon. I was hoping that his presence might induce you to come looking for him. Perhaps, if you give me what I am owed, I will even let you see him."

Her rage boiled up once more. "I owe you nothing," she roared at him, "save for justice!"

"Justice?!" exploded Warp, his eyes suddenly wild with unmistakable fury of his own. "Justice!" he repeated, "you would dare to speak to me of justice?! You know nothing of justice! Nothing! You are a liar and a hypocrite and you will not speak of justice to me! EVER!"

So furious, so explosively enraged was Warp that Starfire actually took a step backwards, yet her own fire did not quench before his. "You are a murderer and a traitor!" she shot back at him. "You murdered Robin, you betrayed your own world, and you have sided with the Lord of Evil against all of creation! I will speak to you of what I choose!"

"Yes," said Warp, staring daggers as he circled her slowly, Starfire turning to match him as he did so. "I did those things. But nothing I have done or will do changes what you are, nor your responsibility for all that has happened."

"My responsibility?!" asked Starfire incredulously.

"Yes, yours," he said. "You were the one who turned me into what I am today."

"You have always been a murderer!" said Starfire. "You attempted to kill us the first time we met!"

"I was never a murderer!" shouted Warp, brandishing his laser. "I was a thief! A THIEF! A petty thief who stole antique clocks from museums! I stole inanimate objects locked away in vaults and curator displays. I only used force to defend myself! And for my crime of petty theft you condemned me to life imprisonment in a hell the likes of which you have never imagined!"

"I did no such thing!"

"You regressed me to the age of an infant and abandoned me in a dystopian hellhole of a parallel universe! You used my time machine to return to your world and left me there as a helpless child in one you knew was an inhospitable disaster zone! And this after your interference was what stranded us in that hellhole to begin with! Do you deny it?!"

"That is not what occured!" shouted Starfire. "Your time machine was damaged during the battle. It reverted you to that age!"

"And who damaged it?" retorted Warp. "And then ran away to your comfortable universe leaving me to rot in the greatest prison ever devised!"

"There was no time!" insisted Starfire. "The portal was collapsing, I... I had to leave!"

"You found sufficient time for touching goodbyes," spat Warp venomously. "Yet not enough to bring me with you." He continued to circle her, eyes aflame with indignation. "And why would you? After all, I was a criminal! A thief! Sufficient reason for a Tamaranean child to condemn me to an eternity in HELL!"

The last word was practically a scream, punctuated by a laser blast that struck inches from Starfire's foot, scoring the floor of the cathedral and causing her to reflexively jump back. Yet though he raised the laser back to aim at her face, Warp did not attack, prefering instead to stare down the barrel at her with eyes wide and unblinking.

"Have you felt pain, Princess?" he asked, lightning flashing from his maddened eyes. "Since Robin died? Have you known anguish? Agony? Have you felt it burning within you like an unquenchable fire? Have you stalked the streets pouring vengeance and rage out upon your unsuspecting foes to try and empty yourself of its neverending flames? Was that the cure you sought for the hell that your life has been these past weeks?" Warp suddenly spread his arms wide, sweeping them over the entire chamber, over the burning city beyond, and raised his head like an emperor overseeing his realm. "Behold my cure!" he said.

Starfire's mouth opened despite herself, her eyes widening in horror and disgust. "You are insane," she said.

"I come from a world of insanity," said Warp. "One you know as few here would."

"Then you have done all this for what? Some twisted sense of vengeance? Against me?"

"Among others, yes, against you" said Warp. "You were the one who caused me to suffer as I have. You were the one who so cavalierly played God with my fate. Now it is your turn to be played with, Princess. Your turn to suffer. I have long since paid for whatever crimes I did commit. Now you will do the same."

Starfire said nothing, staring at Warp as though unsure of what she was looking at. Warp continued to circle, lowering his arm and managing to make the gesture contemptuous, as though he cared nothing for what tricks or impotent attacks she might launch.

"Tell me," he asked her, "did you ever even spare me a moment's thought after you abandoned me there? Did it even cross your mind to look in and see what had become of me? Or was I out of your mind the instant you left that place?"

"I had no means of returning to that world!" cried Starfire. "Even had I wished to! And I did not abandon you anywhere! I left you in the care of the remaining Titans of that world!"

"And it never occurred to you what a poor idea that was?"

The anger returned. "You will not dishonor my friends with your lies!" shouted Starfire. "They would never have permitted any harm to come to you, no matter who you were or what you had done!"

"Perhaps not," said Warp, "but that would be contingent on their survival, no?"

She stopped short. "What are you - "

"They died," said Warp, brows furrowing as his eyes bored into hers. "All of them." He paused, letting that sink in, and a grim smile came to his face as he beheld her surprise. "You never considered that possibility, did you?"

Before, spikes of anger had shot through her like molten arrows, but not this time. This time a guttural, bitter savagery materialized in the pit of her stomach, a mixture of rage, disgust, and indignant fury. "You... vile betrayer," she spat at him. "You... you slaughtered the Titans of your world, and then came here to do the same to ours?! Did you burn that planet to cinders too? Or was that treatment reserved only for this one?!"

She did not want the answers to those questions. She had asked them only to feed her anger, the righteous fury that in turn would fuel her starbolts when she leaped at Warp to strike him down. Yet rather than ignore them, or answer them, or even attack in his own turn, Warp did something she did not expect.

He laughed.

He stepped backwards, throwing his head back, howling in laughter, so intense that he had to gasp for breath and nearly fell over. Half of Starfire wanted to shoot him while he was thus distracted, yet before she could resolve whether to do so or not, Warp doubled over, hands on his knees, and shook his head, a broad grin on his face as he lifted his gaze to stare her straight in the eyes.

"You just can't do it can you?"

"Do what?" she asked.

"Perceive." he said, his voice low and gravelly, and he stood up slowly. "All your vaunted empathy, all your pretenses at mercy and compassion, and you simply can't see past your own hatred to perceive what's been sitting in front of you the entire time!"

"What are you talking about?!" demanded Starfire. "I am tired of your - "

"I was eight," said Warp, voice booming. "I was eight years old when the Titans died," he said. "Eight. Even if I had wanted to kill them, do you seriously believe that I could have done so at that age? You saw that I was unable to defeat them as an adult. How would I have done so as a child?"

Starfire watched Warp in silence as the man in Gold turned slowly about her. "I didn't kill the Titans of my world, Princess," he said. "They were not the ones against whom I desired revenge."

"Then... if you did not kill the Titans of that other world," asked Starfire, "who did?"

She expected more verbiage and self-justification, but Warp said nothing. Rather, he smiled, a soft and almost endearing smile, and shook his head, chuckling softly to himself at some private joke.

She was having none of it. "You will not answer me then?" she taunted him. "What is so amusing? Have you run out of lies to tell me?"

"No lies," he said softly. "Not between us. But what is amusing, Princess, is you."

"Me?"

"Yes... you," said Warp, stopping and crossing his arms. "All this time, and you still insist on asking all the wrong questions."

She raised an eyebrow. "Very well then," she said. "What are the right questions?"

"Only one," said Warp, a feral grin beginning to grow on his face. "One question. The most important one of all. The question that answers all of the others. The one question you have studiously failed to ask anybody, yourself, your friends, even me. The question you refuse to ask, because deep inside, you know what the answer could mean."

The lights seemed to dim, the ambient glow of the horizon flickering down as though commanded to, as Warp took a step towards her, his twisted smile bearing down like a predator.

"Princess," he said, his voice a malevolent whisper, "if I am the one who set all of this in motion, then tell me, how could I possibly have known about any of it in the first place?"

O-O-O

"Why did you come back?"

How much time had elapsed since last any words had been spoken by either of them? She had no idea. Ten minutes? An hour? Three? Two days? There was no sense of time underground, one of the reasons she enjoyed being below the surface, Her mind had been lost, wandering blindly as though through a labyrinth, seeking answers that did not exist to a situation whose conclusion was foregone. And she knew it.

"What?" she asked. The fire had died to embers now, a bare glow that served only to cast inky shadows over everything. Even with his glowing red eyes, she could barely make David out by silhouette, yet she made no move to re-ignite it. Neither did he.

"You..." he ventured, not tentative but hesitant, as though his mind was having trouble converting his thoughts to words. "You didn't come back for me," he said, though he didn't sound upset or angry, or even surprised. "You were trying to save them?"

"Yeah," she said quietly, wondering idly if he would believe her. "I thought..."

She let that one sit. She had thought, idiotically, that Trigon would be fool enough to leave the Titans petrified like the rest of the world, and that she would thus be able to restore them to life. She had not thought far enough ahead to decide what should come after such a rescue. Her assumption had been that the Titans would know what to do. Not in a thousand years had she considered that this assumption might not be accurate, for never, not even in the throes of her most furious hatreds, had she ever ceased to think of the Titans as anything but ultimately invincible. The notion died hard.

Very hard.

"I can't believe they're gone," he said, and his voice reflected the stunned shock implicit in that sentence, though she couldn't see him well enough to see his reaction in the near-total darkness. At this point, it was probably a mercy.

"Me neither," she said, "but..."

"Yeah," he replied. "I know."

They sat in silence for a time, before David broke it.

"I thought you hated them," he asked.

She took her time before answering. "I don't know," she said. "I guess I did, for a while. Slade, he..." she stopped. What use now, hiding behind Slade, when both he and his principal enemies were dead. "I was... afraid of them," she said finally, speaking to the darkness more than to David. "I was afraid of... what they'd do to me. What they'd think of me."

The last time they had spoken, he had accused her of all manner of turpitudes and moral questions over this very question, yet plainly he hadn't the stomach this time to do so. He didn't say anything, until finally she followed up with a question of her own.

"I guess they hated me for it?"

There was a pause, for decorum perhaps, but when the answer came it was solid and unequivocating. "No," he said. "They didn't."

"They had to have," she said. "I... I tried to..." she clammed back up. Why the hell was she dredging back over all this now of all times?

"They didn't hate you," he said, and as before he sounded certain. "They didn't understand, but... they didn't hate you."

Perhaps there was something in the air. Perhaps it was just exhaustion, or the recognition that it no longer mattered. "Do you?" she asked.

Another pause, long and pregnant, before he finally answered. "Maybe," he said. "The others couldn't... they didn't hold it against you, after what happened, after you... died. But I wasn't there for that. And... I'm not like them."

"No," she said, staring off into the darkness that concealed him. "You're not. You're like me."

Two red pinpoints of red light appeared in the darkness, as David raised his eyes. The lights held steady for a moment or two, and then slowly nodded up and down.

"Yeah," he said. "I'm like you."

It was neither comforting nor chilling, neither a blessing nor a curse. It was just a fact. And they both knew all that it implied, all that it said about both of them, summed up in a simple statement.

"But you didn't leave," she said.

"I couldn't leave them," he replied. "I tried. Twice. But... I couldn't..."

"We stopped you," she said, and she lowered her eyes. "I stopped you. And Cinderblock, and Warp, and Slade..."

"It wasn't that," he answered, and the lights were once more extinguised, as he either closed his eyes or averted them. "I... used you and Cinderblock and all the rest of it as excuses. So that I could let myself stay."

She shook her head. "Why did you need to let yourself stay?" she asked. "They wanted you to stay, didn't they? Even after what I did? And you wanted to. So why did you need an excuse?"

She heard him take several deep breaths as he tried to conjure the words up to explain what he meant. "I don't... know how to do this. I don't know how to be part of a group. A... family, a team, whatever the Titans really were. I never learned that. I didn't know how to do it. I always... I always took care of myself, you know? I wasn't strong or tough or adventurous or whatever, but I knew how to not get in anyone's way. I... hated owing people things, money or gratitude or just... anything. I hated being... dependent on other people, like I was getting in their way, or making their lives harder just by being around. And... I knew I was doing it, even before the Titans, I mean I lived in foster centers and all that. There were dozens of people just taking care of me and the other kids, but... it was different then. It was a system, and it was designed for this sort of thing, and it wasn't personal. Nobody thought less of us for being there. It wasn't our fault we were orphans."

He paused for a few seconds.

"But then I got to the Tower, and I couldn't pretend anymore. And they were... well you know what they were like. It was like, all of a sudden I realized that this sort of thing existed. And more than just that, they... they shouldn't have let me into it, but they did. Me. I wasn't anybody special. I mean had powers, yeah, but so did fifty other kids they knew. And they let me in. And they didn't resent me for bringing all this fire down on them, or make me feel like I had to measure up or anything. I kept... waiting for the other shoe to drop, or something, and it never did. They never made me feel like I owed them."

"They made you want to be a hero?" she asked.

"No," he said. "I never wanted to be a hero. I didn't even want to be a Titan, really. I just wanted to be one of them."

She couldn't think of anything to say to that, and silence closed over them once more. Yet the conversation had set her to thinking of the past, perhaps as a way of escaping the Hell she had been plunged into, who could tell, but the memories it dredged up were powerful enough in their own right that she didn't even react with surprise when he finally asked the ultimate question, the one she knew he had wanted to ask since first he had found out her true identity.

"You're more powerful than I ever was," he said. "And you were there before me. They gave you everything they gave me. Without any questions." He paused for a second, as though unsure if he should ask it, but finally gave in. "How... How could you just leave them like that?"

She felt like she was half in a trance of some kind, all the justifications and obfuscations burnt away, leaving nothing but the truth as she knew it.

"I was scared," she said. "I was... scared of everything. They... they wanted to make me into one of them. A Titan, a hero, you know? I was afraid of it. Of the responsibility, of what my powers might do..."

She hesitated once more on the cusp of admitting all, and looked up, and saw David's red, glowing eyes watching her, like the eyes of the judge on the day of doom.

"But... mostly I was... afraid that I was going to hurt them in the end. They were gonna give me all this stuff, just because they wanted to be my friend, and I was gonna hurt them. I wasn't even afraid of it, I knew it was going to happen. Because I've killed or hurt every person I've ever met. And I knew I was going to do it to them, and so I left." She felt like laughing and crying at once. "And I wound up with Slade and did it anyway."

If she was expecting judgment or forgiveness, she was to be disappointed she knew. David had neither to give, and certainly not now. All he had was another question.

"You and Beast Boy," he said. "You guys were... together?"

Terra prayed to every God that might exist that the light had been too dim for David to see the shudder that passed through her as he asked her that. "For a while," she said. "Before I left, yeah." She shook her head, though she knew he couldn't see her do it. "I wish we hadn't been."

"Really?" he asked. He sounded almost surprised.

"Not like that," she said. "But if we hadn't been together maybe..." she sighed. "He took it hard is all. Harder that he would have maybe otherwise. I wish I... I wish I could have spared him that much at least."

David said nothing, and there was silence again, before she broke it herself. "Did," she said, hesitating before asking on. "Did Beast Boy... did he ever say anything? About..." she couldn't finish the question, but David understood anyway.

"Not to me," he said. "I didn't ask, really... I didn't want to know what happened before. I mean I did, but..."

"You were afraid they might not let you stay?"

She saw him raise his head, as if the question surprised him. "No," he said. "I knew... something had happened. And I knew that they were afraid it was going to happen again, and that they'd... made themselves let it go, and trusted me anyway, so that I could stay. I just... I didn't really want to know just how hard it had been for them to do that."

He fell silent for a moment, but just a moment, before continuing. "But I heard him talking a few times," he said. "When he didn't think anyone was listening. And after you... re-appeared, he went looking for you."

"Yeah," she said, "Slade told me. But I didn't know what he was gonna do if he found me."

"I don't think he knew either," said David. "But he never hated you. I don't think he even blamed you."

"Not even when I tried to kill you?"

"No, not even then." David shrugged limply. "I don't know what he thought," he said, "but... he never hated you. I know that much."

"Were... were he and Raven... you know..."

Of all things, that seemed to generate a soft laugh, and she could imagine, rather than see, the smile on his face. "Yeah," he said, "sort of. It was... complicated I guess. It's always complicated."

Despite everything, she smiled at the thought. "I always thought she couldn't stand him."

"I'm pretty sure she thought that too," said David. "Least that's what she said a lot, but... well..."

"You saw through it?" she asked.

"I think everyone did," he said. "Who knows, maybe not. But yeah, I did. Raven wasn't hard to figure - "

A growl.

Deep, full-throated, and unquestionably malevolent, like the sound of concrete blocks being dragged over one another., the growl seemed to emanate from nowhere and everywhere at once, and before she even knew what she was doing, Terra was on her feet, eyes wide as saucers, her heart in her throat. She heard rather than saw David doing the same thing, as the hostile growl faded out, leaving only cruel and hostile silence in its wake.

She scarcely dared to breathe, and if the sound were any indication, David did not dare even that much. The last embers of the fire were dying out now, leaving them in pitch darkness. She could not have relit it now, not even if she had been willing to chance moving, which she was plainly not. She settled for remaining as still as she physically could, staring into blackness, listening for any sign of whatever had produced that horrible sound, and praying that David would do the same.

Nothing. No sound, no sign that anything had occurred, and yet Terra remained frozen as if turned to stone, and as to David, he might as well have vanished into thin air for all the sound or sign he gave. Her mind played tricks on her, imagining that whatever had made the sound had abducted him in perfect silence and was now preparing to do the same to her. Her doubt and fear fed on itself and grew, until she heard it again.

The growl was louder this time, and more prolonged, a lengthy, sinister growl, accompanied by swishing noises, like a tail or wing slicing through the air. Faint shuffling sounds could be heard, as something slid over the ground. Something coming closer.

As the growling sound reverberated through the garage, she chanced a soft whisper.

"David?"

Her voice had deserted her, and she could barely hear herself speak, yet instantly she heard David's reply, from closer than she had expected. No words, just a sharp intake of breath, laced with fear.

But before she could answer, something shrieked right in front of her.

It sounded like a bat or mouse, or hissing cat, but amplified a hundredfold and infused with audible venom and malice, and it was suddenly there, right in front of her, so close that she could feel hot breath on her face, and she cried out and threw up her hands in automatic reflex, her mind blanked by the sudden eruption as she stumbled backwards in an automatic, paltry defense. Golden light poured forth from Terra's body automatically as her powers took commands from her racing heart, suddenly casting everything before her into view.

She took one look and screamed.

A vast, chiropteran horror loomed before her, less than a foot away, broad and tall and leathery, with immense wings spread out five feet in either direction, hooked with wicked claws. Its face was a horrific network of black leather, culminating in a pendulous mouth that seemed to unfurl from beneath its jaw like a toothed octopus. Its eyes were glistening and wide, whether from surprise or anger or some other unfathomable reason, and it lunged forward at her, slavering and shrieking, its clawed feet scrabbling over the asphalt floor as it reached towards her with a hooked appendage.

Without so much as a command, her powers raised a column of stone right through the ground underneath the horrible thing, and smashed it into the ceiling like a hydraulic ram. An awful squishing sound, a splatter of fluids and mashed up parts, and the rock fell back down, now coated with a pungent yellow goo. And then, just as quickly as they had flared up, her kineticist's powers subsided, and they were plunged back into darkness once more.

Moments later, Terra raised the golden glow of her powers once again, this time of her own volition, and turned to see if David was all right, yet before she could speak a word, they heard further bone-chilling howls from deeper within the garage, and the rustling of wings, as though a swarm of locusts were approaching them. And without a word or a moment to think, Terra grabbed David by the wrist, and ran for her life.

O-O-O

"How could I possibly have known?"

The pedastal beside Warp was glowing, burning even, like a torch in the darkness, casting multicolored light into the sky and off of the walls of the open chamber. It radiated upwards, hundreds of feet, soaring like a beacon into the ashen skies, spreading out in three dimensions, forming patterns that could not be discerned, like a projector out of focus.

"The world you abandoned me to live in recorded only that Trigon had come twenty years before, and that the Titans had destroyed him, shortly before disbanding. That world knew him as nothing more than an interruption, a momentary destroyer who arrived and was dealt with and was never heard from again. Against the backdrop of misery that pervaded that place, Trigon's coming was nothing more than a footnote, and the Titans themselves, the only ones who knew any better, said nothing of it"

The lights continued to dance as Warp spread his arms wide. "Yet I pieced all of this together. Devastator, Slade, Terra, the mark of Scathe, the cult of Trigon. Rituals, sigils, cosmic entities and the ancient histories of dead planets. I enmeshed you all in a net of labyrinthine complexity, and you never bothered to ask how. How could I know about Raven's heritage, something she never even spoke of to you, her dearest friends? How could I know how to cross dimensions and contact Trigon, when Trigon himself had been dead for eons, and his very memory lost in the mists of time? How could I know about Devastator, when David himself had no idea that Devastator even existed, and when, before I interfered with them, he was never a part of these events, either in my world or in yours."

Starfire clenched her fists, summoning starbolts to them as she stared at the madman on the dias. "Did you bring me here to brag then?" she asked him, largely automatically, for she knew that he had not. Starfire had met her share of villainous braggarts, evil men who used villainy to cloak grave insecurities, who enacted grotesque and convoluted plots less for the sake of causing misery, and more because they wished others to think them brilliant and clever for having thought them up. Such men could not help but brag, boast, explain their evil plots in exacting detail, often foregoing perfectly valid opportunities to simply kill the heroes trying to stop them in favor of lengthy monologues extolling their own genius. It was a well-known phenomenon.

On the surface, this appeared to be yet another case... but yet... something was wrong...

"No," answered Warp. "Merely to see. To ask, to question. And perhaps, for the first time in your life, to understand."

The light show behind him swirled and twisted, colors running together like water-paints in the rain. Abstract constructions of impossible color and patterns without form spun together. Like a hypnotic dance, the light commanded attention, demanded she watch it, until she had to tear her eyes away by main force.

"Enough!" she shouted. "I did not come here to listen to your justifications! Tell me where you have hidden Robin, or I shall pry the knowledge from you by force!"

Warp laughed, lightly, as though the threat were a thing of no weight, no concern. Perhaps it was not. "Is that what you truly seek, Princess?" asked Warp. "Or is possibly that you fear the answers to the questions you refused to ask?" The golden supervillain smirked as he folded his arms.

"After all," said Warp. "That was Robin's reason for avoiding them."

Starfire stood stock still, face motionless, like a statue writ of living flesh. Warp waited patiently, as she slowly, with infinite care and precision, lowered her hands to her sides, and in a clipped, bitter tone, asked a single question.

"How did you come to discover all of this?"

No expression of triumph. No visible sign of relief. No waterfall of self-praise to butress his own insecurities. Warp, having finally received the question he had theoretically sought, simply took a deep breath, reached his hand to the pedastal at his side, and spoke.

"I watched the Titans die."

O-O-O

Breathless, heedless, Terra ran like she had not run before, as a maelstrom of noise exploded from behind her, screams, roars, howls bonechilling and unearthly, and the sound of naked claws scratching over asphalt and concrete. She did not turn back to see what was chasing her but ran in blind panic, practically dragging David along with her. Though he was running too, fatigue and the aftereffects of his traumatic shift from flesh to stone and back slowed him, and he stumbled over carstops and jagged cracks in the cement floor. She had neither the time nor the inclination to be gentle however, and physically dragged him forward until he found his footing and could run on his own again.

Behind them, all manner of bowel-quaking monstrosities screamed hatred to the scorched skies above, as leathery wings beat at the air and grasping claws gouged at pavement. Terra did not spare a glance backwards, running flat out for the stairs that led out of the garage, trying desperately to recollect where they were. Around corners and cars, past piles of rubble and fallen I-beams, she ran and twisted and ducked and ran some more. Yet before she could find where the exit she sought was, everything went straight to Hell.

There was a crack, and a swish, and a chitin dart flew past her head, six inches long and cruelly barbed, disappearing off into the darkness ahead. She turned to shout a warning, but it was too late. David gave an aborted cry as a second barb struck him square in the back like a throwing knife. What noxious toxins it might have carried went un-discovered, for the dart did not penetrate his ashen-gray uniform, bouncing off of the micro-woven composite-fiber like a rubber ball, yet the kinetic force of the impact hurled him off his feet and threw him forward onto the ground on his face, where he rolled and slid into a parked car with a crash, fetching up on his side.

He shook his head, rising shakily to his hands and knees, yet seconds later, a bat-beast landed before him, mandibles clicking and oozing a foul substance that scored the very concrete beneath it. Clawed wings reached for his throat, and he scrambled back in the only direction open, the corner formed by the car and a concrete pillar. The terrible thing pursued him, grabbing his foot and trying to drag him out of the corner. He kicked at it in vain, panic and terror clouding his mind as the thing pulled him out into the open air, snatching him up off the floor by the collar, and ignoring his frantic struggles, leaned forward to deliver a fatal bite with jaws of dripping acid.

It did not succeed.

A rock the size of a volleyball flew out of nowhere and hit the thing square in the side of the head with such force that it tore its head clean off and left its truncated corpse to crumple lifelessly to the ground. David fell backwards, landing awkwardly on the ground on his back, seconds before the ground itself heaved and the parked car beside him was swept aside by a wave of stone, and then suddenly he saw Terra.

But it was not the Terra of a moment before. She stood where the car had been moments before, her eyes blazing with golden light, hands raised forward, palms extended, and about her the ground shifted like a liquid, like a living thing, as stones and clods of earth burst through the pavement and spun about her like electrons around a nucleus. Undaunted, the monsters charged her in unison, a writhing, screaming pack of nightmares given form, but she hurled herself forward, falling to one knee, shooting the fingers of her right hand towards the legion of the damned, and then her entire body exploded into golden light, and David could see no more.

There was the sound of screams, not wrathful but terrified, and the unholy roar of collapsing masonry and exploding stone, and David could only crouch on the ground like an earthworm and cover his head with both arms. He might even have screamed, the noise was such that he couldn't hear himself. Slabs of stone the size of bicycles crashed to earth around him, pelting him with wasplike fragments, yet as before, the bonded micro-weave that Cyborg had made for him held fast. And then, bare seconds later, the roar of rushing air, of flying stone, of undifferentiated chaos, drowned out all else, and he heard no more.

And then it all stopped at once.

The silence was so profound that it was almost deafening, save only for the ringing in David's ears. Carefully he peeked out of the ball he had almost instinctively curled himself into, raising his head to see what was left.

The monsters were gone. All gone, save for ichor stains and bits of carapace and sodden leather that decorated the walls and ceiling and the floor. Everything nearby seemed to have gone with them, cars torn to piles of twisted scrap metal, motorcycles wrapped around support pylons, the pipes and broken lights that lined the ceiling vanished as if by magic, and in their place lay a knee-deep carpet of dirt and chipped stone. Terra stood nearby, barely a pace or two away, standing up once more, but doubled over with one hand on her knees and the other holding her forehead. She looked exhausted, bent over and breathing heavily, yet she retained sufficient alertness to lift her head once more as David stirred, and turn completely about, seeking more enemy. She found none.

"Are you all right?" she asked then, turning back to David. Though the glow had faded elsewhere, her hands still retained the golden energy that heralded her powers. For his part, David could not remember how to speak. Though he had seen Terra's powers in full force before, indeed he had seen them directed at himself, the stark display of power unbridled, coupled with the gaping hole that he felt within him where his own powers should have been, reduced him in an instant back to the days before he had been a hero, when he had been nothing but David Foster, the civilian, who stood in the presence of Gods and Titans and watched them do battle at the ending of the world.

Another distant roar served admirably to focus his attention.

Both of them turned sharply, expecting to see further monsters loom out of the darkness. Yet all they heard was distant rumblings and the sounds of what might have been footsteps in the darkness. And just as David was about to ask if perhaps they ought to leave, Terra turned, grabbed his arm, and ran for the exit.

The carpet of dirt parted before her with a wave of a hand, and she ran ahead, nearly dragging him off his feet, her grip like a gloved vice, not that he was tempted to wrestle away from her now. When last they had met, Terra had tried to kill him. Now that he was helpless, she was exerting every effort to save his life. The irony would no doubt have been funny had he retained the mental facilities with which to laugh.

Ahead loomed a door, metal, and they burst through it into a stairwell. Terra pushed David through, and slammed the door behind them, leaning against it with her hands aglow once more and her eyes closed. He was about to ask her what she was doing when it became pattently obvious, as a muted roar, thunderous and abrupt, sounded from the other side, instantly aborted as something thudded against the door and was still. Wet earth leaked through the seam at the bottom of the door as Terra slowly stood back. "Come on," she said, and she grabbed him once more and began to ascend the stairs.

They double-timed the stairs, legs burning and lungs aflame, sixteen stories in all without a pause, for neither one of them were inclined to stop. Still groggy and weak from the transformation, David felt his heart thundering in his ears and his vision turning red as they ascended endlessly, before, at long last, they reached topmost landing, burst through the main doors, and entered the windswept hellscape above.

It was hardly an improvement. They stood on an empty street, lined with ruined buildings and burning cars, beneath a smoky sky of slate gray. The air was tinged with sulfur and volcanic gas, and low rumblings on the horizon testified to new tortures that might well lie in store. Yet right now, David's mind simply could not process more devastation and death, and he collapsed to the ground next to the entrance, panting like a dog, one hand still clutched to his stomach, where the cold nothingness that had once held Devastator continued to gnaw at him like a parasitic worm.

Beside him, Terra managed only the comparative dignity of sliding down the side of the garage entrance to a seated position, if not as tired as David was, still blown from the effort of the fight and the ascent. They both sat there, like runners at the end of a race, simply breathing and recovering their breath for several minutes.

"Thanks," he finally said, the word coming out semi-automatically. She let it sit for a few moments before answering.

"Don't mention it," she said, and from the sound of it, she meant it. Why she had turned back to help him, he didn't even bother to ask. He didn't know how.

Slowly, Terra stood up, looking up and down the street carefully before walking over and offering him a hand, pulling him back up to his feet. By now he needed the help. If she noticed him lowering his eyes as she looked him over to see that he was all right, she didn't mention it.

"Come on," she said. "We've got to find somewhere to..." her voice trailed off. Somewhere to what? The question was implied if not asked, for David by now had no means to question her, the absent pain in his midsection and the bitter one in his chest from the twin losses of Devastator and the other Titans had robbed him of all sense of agency. Had Terra suggested they go jump in a pit of lava, he might well have followed her there.

"We'll find somewhere to hole up," she finally said. "Come on." And without waiting for him to protest (as though he would have), she put a hand on his shoulder to guide him towards one of the empty buildings.

But they never got there.

There was a roar, a low roar like thunder rumbling over the mountains, and both of them turned to see a black cloud forming up on the horizon. Twisting and turning like a living thing, it erupted into the air from some source so distant that it could not be made out, yet the cloud itself was easily visible, and it darkened quickly, a null-space in mid-air. Flashes from deep within served to illuminate, of all things, brilliant colors, purples and greens and deep reds. And then suddenly the colors burst forth in a riot, swirling around one another in a technicolor wonder, before they all ran together like watercolors in the rain, and then a picture began to form.

And as Terra and David watched this wonder with wide eyes and silent tongues, they saw, so far away that it was barely a speck, a single, lone figure, slowly walking up the empty street towards them.

O-O-O

A void, like the inky blackness of interstellar space. It surrounded her, encapsulated her, yet it was all an illusion, and Starfire knew it. Yet she did not look away. The fountain of light had projected an image of dark nothingness so vast that it encompased the entire chamber, and indeed most of the castle, visible no doubt from miles and miles away. Yet despite the omnipresent darkness, there was no malice here, no intent to frighten or scare. This was not darkness for its own sake, but merely a default, as the worker of this wonder waited for the artist to fill it with imagery.

And sure enough, it did.

"When you left me in that future world," came Warp's voice, neither near nor far away, a presence unfixed in location, like a narrator's voice over a documentary film, "I was a helpless infant. You were the one who placed me in the charge of the Titans of that world."

"They were my friends!" she shouted to the inky black. "They agreed to take you in, and they would never have permitted you to come to harm. Never!" She turned in circles, as though expecting to see Warp behind her, or at her side. "After all your protestations, did you bring me here to tell me such obvious lies?!"

"No," said Warp's disembodied voice, calm and collected. "You are correct. They did not allow me to come to harm, until the night that choice was taken from them, and from me."

And then suddenly there was light.

Not much light, granted, but light nonetheless. A cityscape at night, viewed from overhead. Buildings loomed like the shadows of giants, barely visible against the darkened skies. They arched upwards, in shapes both familiar and alien, but all dark. The city was without power, and not a light could be seen, save for pinpricks of the lights of vehicles below, and a dull, red glow somewhere off near the horizon.

The buildings were unrecognizable, particularly under these conditions, yet the topography from above was still sufficiently similar to the one she knew for her to realize which city it was that she was looking down into. And when she turned around, looking out over the water that formed the enormous bay in to the north of the city, she saw proof in the form of a golden tower, perched on an island, the only structure that still seemed to have power, shaped in the unmistakable form of the letter T.

When last she had seen this world, the Tower had been a shattered ruin, long abandoned save by Cyborg, whose systems he was unable to decouple from. Evidently the years between then and this scene had given it new life, for it blazed once more as resplendently as ever, shining like a beacon in the overcast darkness.

"For eight years, they tried to reverse the tide of darkness in this city," came Warp's voice, as the view panned about the dark metropolis. "They rebuilt the Tower, they fought back against those who had ruined the city. They even credited you as the inspiration for it. And for a time they even thought they were succeeding."

The vision swept downwards, through the clouds and below them, into the storm-lashed city, as torrents of rain poured down past her sight. Below ran a massive open boulevard, one she did not recognize, lined with darkened buildings and dead streetlights. Cars sat abandoned on the side of the road, empty and forlorn. No lights were visible in any direction save one, for approaching at rapid pace were two lit vehicles that Starfire recognized instantly.

It was not that she had seen these vehicles before specifically, for she had not. Indeed she had never even seen anything like them. One resembled a motorcycle with the wheels removed and replaced by massive electromagnets that sparked and crackled as they levitated over the street. The other was a six-wheeled automobile, long and sleek and low to the ground, with lights mounted atop and in front of it, painted in neon blue, chrome and glistening white. Yet despite this, she knew instantly what they were and who was riding them, for the design, the style, all the thousand little details that added up in her head, revealed that much beyond question, and despite everything she felt her pulse start to pound as the vehicles approached and she caught sight of the man on the hovercraft, a man with dark flowing hair, his face obscured behind a black mask, his clothing entirely black, save for a blue symbol, a double-headed eagle, emblazoned on his chest like a heraldic crest.

"Robin..." she whispered before she could stop herself.

"Not Robin," said Warp's disembodied voice. "His life as Robin had long-since ended. When I knew him, he called himself Nightwing."

The hovercraft screamed past, followed a second later by the automobile, and Starfire's vision turned after them and followed as they raced towards a red glow on the horizon, one that could be no sunset or dawn. She had seen such a glow enough times herself to know what it was. It was the glow of raging fires unchecked, ravaging some distant part of the city. The darkened city cast the hideous glow into stark relief, and Starfire realized suddenly that she heard no sirens, no flashing lights of emergency vehicles, no helicopters or other flying craft. The city was burning, and save for the Titans themselves, there was no sign of response at all.

"There were no alerts by then," said Warp. "No signals save for the occasional furtive call from a private citizen seeking some desperate measure of succor. The police had long-since ceased to call on the Titans. Half of the time, they were the ones the Titans were deployed to fight. But that night it was different."

The vehicles screamed down the empty road towards the flames, their engines the only sound in the silent city, as the glow on the horizon loomed higher and bighter.

"Crime was omnipresent," said Warp. "Violence, murder, gang assault, even metahuman attack, the city was rife with these things, but not like this. This attack struck the Green zone, the fortified heart of the city, where the wealthy and powerful had retreated to erect impenetrable barriers against the suffering of the rest of the city. The banks, the corporations, and what few government agencies or utilities still maintained a presence in Jump, all these were sequestered within a small, impenetrable sector of the city, defended by police and private security forces. It was the most heavily defended location within five hundred miles. Even the Titans themselves would have been hard-pressed to secure entrance to the Green zone had it been opposed. And now it was burning."

Through canyons of darkened buildings and high rises, some gutted by long-quenched fires, some abandoned to squatters and vagrants, the Titans raced ahead, squealing around corners and through impromptu barricades built across various streets by unknown forces. Ahead loomed the so-called "Green" zone, now dyed the red and orange of wrath and war, smoke and flames vaulting into the leaden skies. Yet the Titans did not slow or falter, screaming through the dead city like ancient heroes riding chariots of fire and magic.

"I was a child," said Warp. "I was not permitted to go with them, but I went anyway. I hid myself within the transport's storage trunk and accompanied them because I wanted to watch them triumph. I wanted to see them at their most resplendent and glorious, defeating the forces of entropy and driving back the darkness. Nightwing knew who the attacker had to be, and told the others, yet to me, it was nothing but a name. I had no conception of what lay in store.

"Who was it?" asked Starfire. "Who attacked the city?"

Warp did not answer.

One last corner, and suddenly the Titans were there. Ahead loomed a massive gate of wrought steel, like an armored shutter blocking out all comers, set into a fortified wall of concrete and iron, encrusted with towers and sensors and posts for armed robots or human guards. Yet it had availed nothing, for the gate had been torn apart and cast down in ruin, the wall gouged out and holed in half a dozen places. Shattered fragments of what had once been security robots littered the street, along with the bodies of security personnel, their weapons deformed and broken and in some cases cast vast distances into the surrounding topography. Several bodies had been physically torn apart, limbs and heads adorning nearby cornices or swept into debris-choked corners, still sporting the useless fragments of body armor that their owners had vainly sought to protect themselves with.

Slowing at last, the Titans drove over the ruined threshold and into the formerly beating heart of the city, following a path of ruin and violence unimaginable that led towards its core. Vehicles lay overturned and shattered, some hurled through the windows of nearby buildings, others simply ripped to pieces with such violence that fragments were embedded in the surrounding walls like thrown darts or fired arrows. Here and there, there were signs that someone or some group had tried to fight back, and their dead bodies were heaped in piles or strewn about in a carpet like fallen leaves.

Starfire was no stranger to scenes of death, yet this was beyond the pale even for her. Her mind raced with the thoughts of who might have been the agent of this catastrophe. The signs were those of a massive monster, of Cinderblock or Plasmus or Overload or some unholy combination of the three, or perhaps of Slade with his armies of robots. Yet this was nearly thirty years in the future. Who could tell what bestial horrors could have arisen in the meantime, what monsters from the darkness had been conjured forth in the absence of the Titans or municipal governance? The agent could be anything, she knew.

And then the Titans finally came to the focal point of the disaster, and all was revealed.

Ahead loomed an open area, a hundred yards long and as many wide, in the center of which had once stood a grand fountain of marble. The fountain was gone now, amputated as though felled by a lumberjack, and the cars that had lined it now lay crushed against one another along one side, leaving the plaza empty. The ground was cracked and run through with fissures that zigzagged across the concrete and asphalt, and pockmarked with great craters. To the right of the plaza loomed an enormous building, a power plant of some sort, filled with electrical equipment, from which electrical lines radiated out towards the rest of the city. The plant was quiet and dark now, the power lines torn town in a heap and swept to one side as though by a gigantic broom. Yet the plant was not the source of the firelight.

That was the enormous edifice before them.

Directly opposite the Titans stood an structure imposing even within these surroundings, built like a government building or embassy, faced with stone and festooned with flagpoles and statues. Yet tonight it commanded attention, not from architecture, but from fire. The entire building was in flames, which poured from every window and danced across its roof, producing an unearthly roar as internal structures warped and gave way. Around its collapsed front entrance, more bodies were heaped, but these were not soldiers or police. The bodies were dressed in the remains of business suits and evening gowns, their hands and arms thrown out to defend themselves from whatever had struck them down, their faces contorted with terror.

The hovercycle skidded to a stop, and Nightwing leaped off of it before it had even done so, landing with perfect grace on the broken ground, a small cylinder of metal in one hand. A second later, and the cylinder expanded a dozenfold, telescoping out into a tempered metal staff.

Behind him, the car ground to a halt, and out poured the others. She had known that Cyborg was driving the car even before she had known what car it was, and indeed, he stepped out of the driver's seat. His half-human face was lined with the same premature aging that she remembered from her trip to this future, yet his mechanical parts were polished and gleaming with energy, his circuitry restored to top condition and beyond, and his eyes, both mechanical and organic, showed no signs of slowing, nor of the sadness and despair he had inculcated in his years of exile. Several new devices of indeterminate use were mounted in various places around his body, and he seamlessly shifted one hand into a cannon as he advanced to stand alongside Robin.

Beast Boy, or whatever he called himself now, actually looked better than she remembered. She had found him eight years before in a ramshackle zoo, overweight, balding, and depressed from the destruction of his team, life, and family. Yet barely a sign of that could be seen here. He had dropped the excess weight, or at least much of it, and his hair had even returned, still as green as it was in her time. He did not adopt a new form, but folded his arms, stepping up next to Nightwing and peering into the darkness with his emerald eyes.

Of Raven there was no immediate sign, yet seconds later there was a flash, and she appeared in midair, her cloak, hood, and uniform a dazzling white, as it had been when last Starfire saw her future self, yet the vacant stare of madness was gone. Pale as ever, she nevertheless moved with quiet assurance, wrapped within her cloak, as she touched lightly down on the ground. Beast Boy swiftly moved to her side, yet she neither pushed him away nor scowled at him, nor flew off herself, as Starfire had seen her so-often do.

And behind them all, Starfire saw another flash, a smaller flash, and before her eyes, a young boy appeared, crouched behind the back of the car, peering over it at the Titans and the scene itself from behind. Either none of the other Titans noticed the child appear, for the flash was small and the sound non-existent, or they otherwise did not react. The child wore no uniform or identifying marks, dressed in street clothes and sneakers, with black hair and dark eyes, yet Starfire did not even have to ask who it was. She had seen this child as an adult, as an old man, and as a baby. The identity was obvious.

The plaza was deserted aside from the Titans and the dead, or so it seemed, and the rain that beat down showed no sign of suppressing the raging pyre that was consuming the building ahead. Starfire herself looked around in vain, and she was about to demand that Warp answer her question, when all of a sudden, Nightwing spoke.

"There," he said, pointing with his staff.

To the side of the burning building, in plain sight, stood a lone figure in a long coat. He was half-turned away from them, cloaked in the shadows cast by the raging bonfire. He had not mysteriously appeared without warning, for indeed, upon immediate recollection, Starfire realized that he had been standing there the entire time, so well hidden and unremarkable amidst the scene of chaos and death that her eye had simply skipped over him. The four Titans slowly fanned out, moving carefully towards the semi-invisible figure, as Starfire stared at the man in the coat with a leaden sense of dread building up inside her.

"Nightwing knew," said Warp. "Nightwing always knew. An attack like this, so brazen, so long after the last time anyone had dared attack the city, there was only one person it could have ever been. While the rest of us sought for phantoms in the air, or oversized monsters, he was the only one looking for what was actually there."

Nightwing stood out front, the others in a semicircle behind him, as he extended his staff towards the man in the coat. "Freeze," he said, in a voice that meant business.

For a moment, the man did not react. And then slowly, very slowly, as though he had all the time in the world, he turned his head towards the Titans. One hand was at his chin, holding a lit cigarette which he puffed on softly, a small ember serving to illuminate nothing. Slowly he exhaled a halo of smoke, lowering his hand to his side, and only then did he turn fully. With an air of nonchalance, he raised his head and stepped fully into the light.

Starfire's heart froze.

The man was smaller than Nightwing, thin and slight of build, with light brown hair, cropped short and unstyled, which was beginning to gray at the temples. Despite the fact that it was nighttime, he wore dark glasses, mirror-shined, obscuring his eyes. He had an open overcoat, dark brown in color, long-sleeved and knee-length, over clothing so nondescript that it scarcely caught the eye and was in any case near-invisible in the shadowy firelight. In one hand he held his cigarette, and in the other the neck of a wooden cane, varnished and capped by a molded handle of sterling silver. Yet despite the walking stick, the man neither limped nor leaned upon it holding it lightly as he turned to face the four advancing Titans.

But none of this, not the cane or coat or glasses, none of this was what Starfire was staring at, her eyes wide, her breath frozen, the Tamaranean blood in her veins turning to icewater. No one specific thing caught her eye and chilled the very marrow of her bones. It was no discrete flash of recognition. It was instead a shapeless dread, an amalgam, a thousand little things, features, tics of movement, tiny gestures unconscious and unintended, which all added up to a composite picture, one that stirred the deepest recesses of her subconscious, warning her in ever-escalating terms that she knew what she was looking at, moments before the man in the coat opened his mouth to speak, and removed all doubt.

"Hello, Nightwing," said the man, his tone even and calm, betraying no trace of surprise. "How nice to see you again." The voice was gravelly and dark, twisted by years and the ravages of time. Yet Starfire recognized it instantly. It was a voice she had heard a thousand times before.

"By Tamaran," she said, her own voice wavering in shock. "No.... it cannot... this can't possibly... NO!"

"You wished to know who killed the Titans?" came Warp's disembodied narration. "You demanded the identity of the one who set this all in motion?" Warp's bitter laughter swam about her head as she felt dizziness coming over her. "Had you only the wit to ask this question earlier, you might have realized that the answer has been staring you in the face the entire time..."

"Devastator," said Nightwing, spitting the name out like a mouthful of venom, as he shifted his staff around into a battle stance. "You're going down."

O-O-O

"Oh my god..."

The words came to Terra's lips without her even needing to think them. She stared up at the dark canvas in the sky, on which was displayed Nightwing, and Raven, and Cyborg, and Beast Boy, all older, all standing defiant, and all facing...

"... no."

David stood in the middle of the street like a manaquin, his eyes wide in horror and disbelief. His mouth formed words that could not be spoken, for his voice had deserted him, as he watched in mounting horror the scene before him. He staggered, swaying like a leaf in the wind, stepped back, stumbled, and fell, his movements uncoordinated and jerky, yet his eyes were nailed to the sky before him, and the terrible scene it showed. He tried to move, perhaps to get up or scramble away or some other gesture, but failed, and managed only to repeat himself in a thin, anguished voice. "No... no... no..."

Terra finally stirred, approaching and kneeling down to help him up, unable to even process what she was seeing, but before she could do so, she saw his eyes finally lower, from the sky to the ground, and to the figure still walking towards them. And though an instant before she would not have thought it possible, she saw in that instant his wide, horrified eyes widen even further in horror.

She turned, and she realized why.

The man did not slow his pace, nor did he hurry, walking towards them as if he had not a care in the world. His right hand rested lightly on the silver handle of a wooden walking stick, on which he relied not at all, tapping it lightly on the pavement as though strolling through a park on a bright summer's day. The soft wind that blew from the west kicked dust up about his feet, and shifted the hem of his knee-length overcoat, worn open over his dark and featureless clothing, and he smiled beneath his dark, mirrored sunglasses, the edge of his mouth gently curling upwards towards light brown hair, in which there was flecked just a hint of silver.

"No..." she heard David whisper, and she realized he was speaking for both of them.

Still thirty yards away, the man stopped in the middle of the street, planting the brass tip of his walking stick on the ground lightly with his left hand, while the other fished around in the pocket of his coat before re-appearing with a packet of cigarettes. He drew one out with one hand, replaced the packet, and brought the cigarette to his mouth. No lighter or matchbook did he produce, yet seconds later the tip of the cigarette burst into flame of its own accord and quickly smoldered down to a soft ember. He drew on it carefully, a long, deep pull, before lowering the cigarette to his side, and blowing a soft stream of light-grey smoke off into the ashen air. Only then did he speak.

"Hello there, David," he said with a smile. "I trust I need no introduction?"

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Author's Note: Thank you all for reading this far. I shall do everything I can to finish the next chapter as quickly as possible. In the meanwhile, please be so kind as to leave a review for me to read, as they often provide the energy necessary for works of this scale. Thank you all once more, and until next time.