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

36. Judgment Day

Disclaimer: As always, I am afraid that I do not own anything related to the Teen Titans.

Author's Note: You ever have one of those chapters?

Hello again everyone. I've missed these chats of ours deeply, and I'm very sorry that so much time has elapsed between our last one and this one. I have, as always, a new chapter here for you all to read (or not) at your own pace and discretion. Without a doubt, it is the most difficult chapter, indeed the most difficult single thing that I have ever written for any purpose ever. How many hours it took me to produce this chapter is something I am probably better off not knowing. At long last, however, it is done, and I present it to you all in the hopes that you might find it diverting.

A word of caution. Given the time elapsed between chapters (for which I cannot apologize sufficiently), I suggest that it might be beneficial to re-read the previous chapter so as to more easily make sense of this one. I appreciate of course that this is not something one can simply do at the drop of a hat, as the two of them together come to more than a hundred and fifty pages, but should you have the inclination, it is my sense that it might help.

It has also come to my attention that some infernal gyration of the mechanics that underlie this website has rendered many of my older chapters totally illegible by deleting the scene breaks which I had inserted into them. Once I have recovered from the trauma of this chapter, I plan to go back and re-add those scene breaks in a more conducive form. My apologies to any of my readers who came later to this story and had to puzzle their way through such confusion.

I know that I have promised this before, but I am terribly sorry for the time required to post this chapter, and I shall indeed exert every effort I can to make certain the remaining chapters take barely a fraction as long to write. Something that never fails to speed the process along however, is feedback, be it good or bad, from those who have undertaken the not inconsequential task of reading this enormous work. Should you do so, and should the mood strike you, I beg of you to leave me a review, be it ever so brief, that I may try and make the remaining chapters more to your liking.

Thank you all once again, and as always, dear readers, may you find success in every endeavor.

---

Chapter 36: Judgment Day

"I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free."

- Niklos Kazantzakis, Epitaph

O-O-O

There is no such thing as perfect silence. Sound is a medium of vibrations in the air, and air is constantly moving, even without the demons of Hell to agitate and flay it to motion. Silence, as with all things, is relative, a facet of the absence of the more obvious distractions that assail the ear. So long as we exist within a medium wherein sound waves may be transmitted, it is never, ever, absolute.

But there are occasionally moments when one might mistake it for being so.

"My name's Devastator," said the other boy, the one dressed in red, the one with flesh-toned skin, the one who was not presently afflicted with some twisted symbolism of counter-factual judgement. He stood in the middle of the street, his baton clipped quietly to his belt, his hands held at his sides, looking calm and almost mournful, and the wind that gently stirred the dust around his feet did not affect him, not even rustling his hair, as though all that had transpired was nothing to him, and did not affect him in any way.

David did not react, could not react, did not even remember how to react. His capacity for surprise was gone, overshot by such a degree that he no longer even recalled what it felt like to be surprised by some new and startling event. Following demons, devils, Hell, the end of the world, and the appearance of his own older self, servant of Trigon and slayer of the Titans... following all that, this here was nothing at all.

"And... I was hoping we could talk."

Everything seemed to slow down. The perennial roar of the eternal pyres seemed to quiet. His reactions were muted, stilled, like the aftereffects of a concussive stun. In movies and television, such things as the world slowing down around you happened in moments of extreme danger, and perhaps to some people they did. But having had the opportunity to test such theories, it had become David's silent opinion that the movies had it all wrong. The world didn't slow down around you when there were bullets flying overhead. The world slowed down when you lost all sense of what to do about it.

"You can't be Devastator," he heard himself saying, though where he was conjuring up the words from he could not have explained if given half an eternity to do so. "Devastator's dead."

The hallucination, the image of David as he had once been, only shook his head. "No," he said. "Not yet at least."

"I watched Trigon eat you!" shouted David with a surge of blind anger. He had not come through all of this just to be lectured on more mistakes by a figment of his own imagination.

"David, I can't die," said the hallucination patiently, "or be eaten. I'm an incarnation of Destruction itself. Even Trigon can't kill something that was never alive. And he wouldn't want to kill me even if he could. He needs me."

David blinked at his counterpart, hallucination, manifestation, whatever it was, his brain moving like molasses, unable to process anything except the most basic of thoughts. "What... what are you doing here?" he asked, his brief burst of anger having given way to more fear. "Did Trigon send you after me?" he asked, backing up a step as he did so.

"No!" The figment's voice sounded surprised, even horrified at the prospect, and David saw his own features blanche with fear, but only for a second. "No, I... I came myself. I have a little time... I think. A little time before we finish..."

The double trailed off, and showed no inclination to continue the thought. "Finish what?" asked David.

"Integrating," said Devastator, and he pronounced the word like it was some vile liquid to be spat from his mouth. The figure shuddered almost imperceptibly. "It takes a little time."

David remained poised for further retreat, though he didn't move yet. "With Trigon?"

"With everyone," replied the other, averting its eyes. "Trigon especially... if I can manage it at all."

"What do you mean if?"

"I was created to be Trigon's enemy," said Devastator. "I don't know if I'm even capable of integrating with him properly. I've never tried to bond with an immortal, let alone the Devil."

David was not exactly in a position to sympathise. "If you're 'bonding' with Trigon right now," he said, "how are you even here?"

Devastator, or whatever he was, didn't reply immediately. "It's... hard to explain."

Of all the answers in all the world that he could have received, this was the last one David wanted to hear, and his frustration, to say nothing of everything else, boiled over like a pressure cooker letting off. "What do you mean hard to explain?" he shouted back at Devastator, forgetting entirely that a moment ago he had been about to run away. "What's going on here? Why aren't you with Trigon?"

"David, please - "

"No!" spat David, cutting Devastator off with a wave of his hand. "You told Raven that you can't exist without a host. You're some kind of energy parasite, right?"

"I have a host, David."

"Yeah, Trigon!Who's not here right now! And you weren't even able to appear like this when I was your host, so what the hell are you even - "

"I don't know!"

Devastator was using David's own voice, and the anguished cry was one that drove home in a way that no words could have. It was the same tone of barely-controlled frustration, fear, uncertainty, and knife-edge stress that he recognized from within himself. And in the fraction of a second's hesitation that it engendered, Devastator said his piece.

"I don't know how this is supposed to work," said Devastator, his voice distorting as his image rippled through a thousand other forms, beings humanoid and otherwise. "I wasn't party to my own creation, and I've never been in a position like this, any more than you have." Slowly, the image of Devastator settled back on the image of David once again, flickering like a candle flame before stabilizing. "All I know is through experience and experimentation. I've never been devoured by Trigon before, or taken from a host by force. And I've never had multiple hosts alive at the same time."

"Multiple hosts?" asked David, refusing to let his mind get distracted by the impossible sight. Nothing was impossible anymore.

"I pick hosts," said Devastator. "I inhabit them for their entire lives. Most don't even know I'm there. And when they die, I choose another. That's how it's always worked. But..."

"But now Trigon's got you?"

Devastator lifted his eyes. "Yes," he said. "And not only that, you're still alive."

David didn't say a word, not for what seemed like a long time, watching his own image in silence. When he finally managed to speak, his words sounded muffled even to himself, as though he were listening to a playback from a degraded audio source.

"Let me guess," he said. "You're here to fix that."

Devastator's image flickered for a few seconds, as though a power surge had run through the projector of whatever he was now. When it stabilized, Devastator looked like someone had just fed him something vile and disgusting. To see the expression written across his own face was quite a thing.

"No," he said, more quickly than before. "David, I'm not here to hurt you. I'm - "

"You're what?" asked David, no more anger, just the calm of a barren desert. Despite it, Devastator seemed to hesitate.

"I just... I found that I was able to come. And so I did. I don't..." he trailed off, lowering his eyes again. "I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry, David. I never meant for any of this. I didn't know that Raven was on this planet. I didn't even know she existed, that Trigon had a daughter. I never thought, for one minute, that this might happen. If I had..." He shuddered, visibly, steeling himself against the awful truth of what had happened. "I'm sorry," he finally repeated, and then he said no more.

In a strange way, David knew exactly what he would have wanted to say, had things been any different. All the questions, all the mysteries, everything he had lain awake wondering about, in the Tower, in the centers, ever since he had first realized what he was capable of. Whatever he had felt for his powers, fear, excitement, frustration, even perhaps the modicum of resentment which he knew now was common to all would-be heroes, this here was the agent of all of them. What he had once thought was a product of himself, now known to be an outside agent, a hijacker who had affixed itself to his life, for better or worse, this was him, standing here in the street. And David knew that there had been a time when he would have given anything, anything in the universe, just to have the chance to stand before Devastator and speak to him.

But the world was changed, and broken. And all David saw standing before him was the gaping hole he still felt somewhere inside him, in a place he could not localize, but that he could feel nonetheless. The shadow of something missing, something that stood for all that he had lost, and everything that was gone forever.

"It doesn't matter anymore," said David, and Devastator lifted his head. There was no anger in his words. It was pointless to rage at Devastator, or at himself, or at Trigon. He might have anyway of course, but he couldn't muster the will. "You're too late."

He saw the words hit home. He saw them take effect, saw the unconscious flinch, and from somewhere deep within him, there was a moment of almost perverse pleasure, but only a moment.

"I know," said Devastator. He seemed to struggle for words. "I wish it could have been different. I never thought I was putting you in danger. Not like this - "

"It doesn't matter what you thought, or what I thought," said David, his voice drained of all emphasis. "It's all over, now, isn't it?"

He didn't respond. David could see his own features flickering as Devastator tried to think of something to say, and found nothing adequate to the situation. It was answer enough. Slowly, David closed his eyes, shook his head slowly, and turned away.

"David..." said Devastator, as David began to walk away, not in a huff, but slowly, his head lowered. "David, I - "

"Leave me alone," said David, not turning back. He might have infused the words with anger or fear, but he was no longer up to the task of either. He could feel the tears coming to his eyes, and he clenched his fist and squeezed his eyes shut to force them back. "Just... leave me alone," he said once more, wearily. And leaving the weaponized incarnation of Destruction behind to do as he would, David Foster slowly walked away.

O-O-O

Beast Boy ran.

Everything was a blur, in motion at once, as he ran as fast as his legs (four, currently) would carry him. There was no room for subtlety and tact here, and he had chosen the form of a bull elephant, twelve feet tall and eleven tons of dead weight, propelled over the ice at twenty five miles per hour. Yet it was not the height or weight or speed that commended the form to him, but the carrying capacity.

Raven was held in Beast Boy's trunk, a trivial matter in this form, even had she been her normal size, which she was not. He had wrapped her up in it and held her now as tightly as he dared, trying to strike a balance between letting her breathe and making sure he neither dropped her nor let any of the chaos swirling about him reach her.

And chaos it was. What was happening behind, Beast Boy neither knew nor dared turn to face, but the sound was enough to turn a man to stone on the spot. Slavering, howling roars that echoed over the wastes, even as the surface of the frozen ground cracked and shattered. Great sheets of ice vaulted into the air around and before and even beneath him, upthrust by some gyration of the rock below, or perhaps by some malignant will of its own. A hailstorm of stones, sized from baseballs up to fire hydrants, flew at him from behind, pinwheeling through the air like projectiles fired from some infernal catapult. Other forms there were that he could have taken, some faster or more agile than this one, some even retaining the ability to carry Raven. But of all of them, this one was the one wherein he judged the risk to her to be the least, and thus there were no other options at all.

Where speed did not suffice, mass and momentum did, and he lowered his head and charged, ignoring anything that might impede his progress. Ice shards rained down from explosions in the fractured surface. Rocks burst like meteors overhead and underfoot, hurtling down from above in parabolic arcs. Entire sheets of ice burst from the ground, as though to trip him up, but Beast Boy knew well how agile elephants were, despite their size, and he negotiated them successfully, lowering his head and crashing through the sheets where necessary. Though his form was hardly suited for it, he tried to swerve back and forth, the better to throw off the assaults that were coming from behind.

He had gotten perhaps a hundred yards when something zipped past his head to the right, something that was most definitely neither a rock nor a block of ice. He turned his head in time to see it morph spontaneously into a Tyrannosaur, which began running alongside him, keeping an even pace as it slowly edged closer. The ice continued to explode in every direction, forcing his concentration ahead, and he could do nothing to stop his counterpart from angling towards him until suddenly the dinosaur lunged to the side, jaws capable of tearing out even an elephant's throat primed to do just that.

Beast Boy did the only thing he could think of to do.

Throwing his head back as hard as he could, he flung his trunk into the air, uncoiling it like a whip, hurling Raven up into the sky. No sooner had she left his grasp than his entire body shifted, shrinking down into that of a python. The Tyrannosaur's jaws clashed together over empty air, moments before Beast Boy snapped his body sideways and grabbed the dinosaur around the ankle with a grip of iron. The broken and slippery ice did the rest, as the Tyrannosaur tripped and fell forward with a tremendous crash. An instant later, and Beast Boy burst into the sky in the form of a giant eagle, deftly avoiding a shower of stones as he pumped his wings and flew up beneath Raven just as she reached the arc of her flight, permitting her to land softly on his back before jetting away with all the power he could muster.

There was no rush of victory or success, just further mortal terror, less for himself than for the fact that Raven was on his back, nearly senseless, unable to hold on, forcing him to fly a straight and level course that left him open to all manner of assault from behind. The flung stones came closer and closer to the mark, even as they grew ever more tremendous in proportion, until boulders the size of office buildings were flying past in stately majesty, colliding with the ice sheet below like comets striking the surface of some alien, frozen world.

Behind he could hear the thunder of footfalls, his counterpart approaching fast, though whether he was in the form of a Tyrannosaur or Mastodon or Godzilla or some other monster he could not tell, for he dared not turn his head back to see, half his concentration on the course ahead of him, the other half on the painfully light pressure of two small hands weakly gripping the feathers on his back.

A shadow falling over him was all the warning he got as a rock capable of levelling a city block loomed overhead, and he reacted on instinct, winging over sharply and diving as it plunged towards him. Ice shards whistled past on every side, as he saw the edge of the shadow ahead and pumped his wings to try and reach it before he was crushed like a hydraulic press. Yet moments before he reached it, he felt the grip on his back vanish entirely, followed by a shrill shriek, different than anything he'd ever heard from Raven, and yet all too familiar.

Suddenly, he forgot all about the rock.

In a split second, Beast Boy took on the form of a hummingbird, turning around in mid-air as though he had bounced off an invisible wall. Shooting back the way he had come, he waited a second and a half before switching back to his giant eagle form. Twisting his wings around and throwing his weight to one side, he managed, just for an instant, to scoop Raven up with one of his wings and throw her like a baseball player back towards the edge of the looming shadow. She hit the ground at a shallow angle well inside the shadow's bounds, but the ground was yet-unblemished ice, and she slid effortlessly beyond it, an instant before the enormous rock smashed headlong into the ground.

A shower of snow and white ice blotted everything out of view, cascading over Raven in a great wave, dissipating only after some time had past, leaving her laying near senseless, half-buried in ice shards and snow. The jarring impacts, the flights through the air, the successive shocks had all served, if nothing else, to shake her back to some degree of consciousness, and slowly, she managed to sit up, letting the snow pour off of her head and shoulders, and looked back at the skyscraper-sized block of granite, now half-embedded in the ice.

Of Beast Boy, who had flown back to get her out, there was no sign at all.

From Raven's right, a growl, deep and threatening, boiled up from the winter storm, as slowly a shadow emerged from within the walls of swirling snow, which finally parted to reveal a hulking dinosaur, sickly-white with eyes of burning red. Towering overhead like a living thundercloud, the dinosaur's jaws dripped with saliva as its claws dug into the ice for purchase. Raven, still barely able to move, could only stare in wide-eyed horror up at the looming monster, as it barked savage roars into the air, before ducking down to devour her whole.

It did not get there.

The roars of the Tyrannosaur were buried all of a sudden by an atonal howl of pure rage so loud that Raven clasped her hands to her ears and screamed, and the ice beneath her buckled and shattered like a pane of glass struck by a sledgehammer. The Tyrannosaur wobbled and staggered, seeking to recover its balance, snapping its jaws as it sought for its unseen assailant, moments before a tentacle twelve feet thick and fifty feet long burst through the ice like a geyser and seized the dinosaur's leg.

A green tentacle.

The tyrannosaur roared, this time in surprise and perhaps even fear, and jumped back, evading the swipe, but seconds later, five more tentacles exploded through the ice and seized the dinosaur with suckers the size of dinner plates. No sooner had they done so than the ice shook and cracked and burst into the air, and from the ice between all five of the writhing tentacles emerged a hideous green monster, beaked and jellied, with a head vaguely conical and emerald and eyes the size of small cars, fixed now on his albino opponent with an alien glare. Rearing up, beak snapping in the frozen air, the monster bodily lifted the dinosaur and slammed it back down onto the ice like a lump of wet dough. Lurching upwards, he lifted it again, but this time the Tyrannosaur shrank in a matter of seconds to a small sparrow, which flitted up and away, slipping easily between the gigantic tendrils and flying several hundred feet back before switching to a hummingbird and hovering in place.

Carefully, Beast Boy lost volume as well, reverting this time to his human form, a default position from whence to adopt anything necessary, but his counterpart overhead did not attack, lowering himself to the ground instead as Beast Boy climbed out of the enormous hole in the ice and onto the lip of the pit he had gouged. The alternate landed on the far side, perhaps a hundred feet away, and took the same form as Beast Boy, his features twisted into an evil grin as he crossed his arms and leered at the changeling.

"Where do you think you're going?" he called across the gap, his voice mocking as ever. "Running off to escape with her?"

Beast Boy tried to think of some witty retort to make, something like what Robin would no doubt have said were he here, but he came up empty. His counterpart seemed to take his silence for an answer, and simply laughed. "There's nowhere to go," he said. "This is where you both belong."

"We're leaving anyway," said Beast Boy, more for Raven's sake, should she be listening, than for his own. "You can't stop us."

"Sure we can," said the alternate, and from behind him, Beast Boy saw someone else approaching, someone silhouetted against the ambient light, standing tall atop an uprooted boulder, a yellow glow advertising her identity to all the world, as if Beast Boy stood a chance of not recognizing her instantly.

"You really need to make your mind up," said Terra as the boulder lowered to the ground, permitting her to step lightly off next to Beast Boy's counterpart. "You spend nine months chasing after me, and now that I'm here, you can't wait to get away?"

Something very unpleasant began to stir deep inside Beast Boy, and he clamped down on it with all his might. "I went looking for Terra," he said. "Not you."

"Well you're not looking for Terra anymore, are you?" asked Terra's twin. "And it's not like you looked very hard in the first place. Just enough to make yourself feel like you'd done enough before you - "

"Stop it," snapped Beast Boy, louder than he had intended, and the sadistic grin that crossed both his counterpart's and Terra's faces told him that he had somehow just lost a point. He swept his hand in front of his chest, as though sweeping an invisible desktop clean, brushing the issue aside as it were. "We're both leaving, and neither of you can stop us."

"You're not going anywhere," said Beast Boy's clone. "Both of you belong down here, with us."

"Especially Raven," chimed in Terra. "She gets the place of honor."

"Raven didn't do anything!" shouted Beast Boy. "Nothing except get stuck with some stupid destiny!"

"Then why didn't she tell you all about this beforehand?" asked Terra, the same sickly smile still stuck to her face. "She came here to save this planet, right? She knew this was gonna happen. Don't you think she might have mentioned something about it? Wouldn't that have helped?"

"She was afraid!" insisted Beast Boy. "She didn't know what to do! She tried to stop it!"

"Well I'm sure all those billions of people up there understand real well that they had to die because Raven was afraid," said Beast Boy's twin sarcastically. "That would make me forgive and forget."

"She betrayed and murdered the whole planet," said Terra. "Makes what I did look pretty tame, don't you think?"

"Stop it!"

"Oh, should we talk about you instead?" asked the other Beast Boy. "After all, this place is yours too."

"I didn't do anything and neither did Raven!"

"You stabbed me right in the back," said Terra. "Or do I not count since you found your new girlfriend?"

That one stopped Beast Boy short. "Raven's not my girlfriend!"

"That never stopped you from pretending," said his counterpart bitterly. "The instant Terra was gone, you turned to Raven, even though she didn't want anything to do with you!"

"That's not true!"

"It's the only reason you're here right now!" shouted back Terra. "Robin's dead, so you get to play knight in shining armor and run off after the damsel in distress! You've been waiting for this chance your whole life! And when I wouldn't play damsel for you, you threw me under a bus!"

"I did not!"

"Oh really?" asked Terra.

"Slade was right," said the alternate Beast Boy, "you don't have any friends." The albino changeling crossed his arms. "Sound familiar?"

"I was looking to you for help," said Terra, "help when I needed it most, after you told me you would help me no matter what I had done, and you threw it back in my face."

"I..." stammered Beast Boy, "I... tried to help you!"

Terra merely snorted. "Great job," she said.

"You belong here," said the other Beast Boy. "With us. With Raven. Forever. That's why we let you come here, and that's why you're going to stay."

"I don't belong here," said Beast Boy, trying desperately to keep his voice even, "and neither does Raven, no matter what you think. We both tried to stop this. We both tried to help you. And now we're both leaving."

"You wanted to help me?" asked Terra, sounding almost whimsical.

"Of course I did! I... I tried to - "

"Well... why didn't you say so?" asked Terra. "No time like the present, Beast Boy."

Terra lifted her hand, and above the chasm that separated them, a circle of blue light appeared, shimmering momentarily in the ethereal twilight. For a moment or two it remained as it was, an opaque disk shining silently above a gaping pit. Then suddenly, the colors swirled and resolved to a picture of...

Beast Boy gasped. "T... Terra?"

Terra. The real Terra, alive, in proper color, dressed in the same vest and shorts and gloves and rock-crystal goggles that she had been wearing when they had first met, standing alone on a street surrounded by burnt buildings and shattered vehicles. Her fists were sheathed in gold, and she stood her ground, staring ahead at someone not visible yet.

"Where is she?"

"Someplace with its own problems," said the other Beast Boy. "Take a look."

The image zoomed out, revealing another figure standing some twenty or thirty paces in front of Terra. A man in a dark, knee-length coat, worn open, holding a silver-handled cane which was glowing with orange - "

A light clicked in Beast Boy's head.

"David?"

"No," said the other Beast Boy. "Devastator."

There was no sound from the portal, no sign of what the two of them were saying to one another, but the tenor of the scene could not be any clearer despite the lack. The man with the coat and cane was advancing towards Terra, his gait unhurried and even, and Terra fell back before him, rocks sliding out of her way as she retreated, so as not to trip her up. And then all at once, between one step and the next, she half-turned towards the man in the coat, and from the ground before her, uprooted a rock the size of a refrigerator, and hurled it at him.

He didn't even raise his hand.

The rock exploded so thoroughly that not even pebbles flew away from it, morphing spontaneously into fine dust with the force of a bomb, blowing the street clear of debris and knocking Terra back several paces. His pace unbroken, the man spread his arms wide, and cars launched themselves into the air and towards Terra as though of their own volition. Several were impaled on spikes of rock, upthrust from the ground at Terra's command, but two penetrated the defenses, detonating over Terra's head like missiles, and blocking all view of the proceedings under a pall of black smoke.

"You wanted to help her?" came Terra's own voice, light and airy, drifting across the frozen terrain. "Well there she is. And I don't know about you, but I'd say she could use the help right now."

Beast Boy could not think of how to answer, and so did not, staring instead off into the window as the smoke stubbornly refused to clear, leaving his imagination to speculate on what was happening.

"So what'll it be?" asked the double.

With difficulty, Beast Boy forced his eyes to close. "Why are you even showing me this? I can't help her now even if I - "

"Sure you can," came the reply, smooth and easy. "Just shift into a bird and fly through. It'll take you right to her."

His eyes snapped back open, staring at the two figures on the opposite side of the chasm. "You expect me to believe you?"

"We never lie, Beast Boy," said Terra. "If you want to help her, if you want to help me, then all you have to do is choose to."

Frozen in place momentarily, Beast Boy was on the cusp of grabbing Raven's hand, shifting to a condor or eagle, and flying at the portal, when his doppelganger pre-empted him.

"Offer's only good for one," he said with a cruel smile. "Raven's a proven traitor. She stays here."

"No!" shouted Beast Boy. "We're both going!"

"Then make a portal yourself, and do what you want with it," said the other. "My portal, my rules. You can leave any time you want. But not with her."

The smoke within the portal's field of view began to clear, albeit slowly, revealing Terra laying prostrate on the broken asphalt, the man in the brown coat advancing towards her with his cane held by one end like a shepherd's crook, strolling, rather than walking towards her, the fiery aura from his cane wafting up through the air as he advanced.

"Better get going, Beast Boy," said Terra with an edge to her voice. "I don't think I can last much longer..."

"Stop it," hissed Beast Boy between his teeth.

"I can't stop it," said Terra. "Not even if I wanted to. But you can."

"I can't!" insisted Beast Boy.

"Just like you couldn't before? Just like you couldn't stop me from dying the first time?"

"STOP IT!" shouted Beast Boy in a voice that was more roar than cry. "Stop it! I can't... you know I can't - "

"No," said Terra. "You won't."

The portal vanished like a burst soap bubble, blinking out of existence like it had never been there at all."

"You said you'd be my friend no matter what I did. You said you'd make sure nothing happened to me. You said you'd find a way to bring me back. And you said you'd never forget me." Terra glowered at Beast Boy from across the way, her red stare so direct that he dared not meet it. "Everything you said to me was a lie."

"Terra..."

"You had every chance to save me," she said. "But you never had the will. Too busy chasing after someone who wanted nothing to do with you." She shook her head dismissively. "The Great Beast Boy," she said. "Who runs away as soon as it comes time to deliver on his promises."

Blinking back the tears in his eyes, Beast Boy succeeded, with difficulty, in preventing something bloody and violent from surfacing. "Why are you doing this?" he choked out.

"Because you're a liar and a traitor," said Terra, "and this is where you belong. "And if you think that's not true, then say the word, and we'll send you back to Terra. If you hurry, you might even be able to save her."

"Or you can walk away," said Beast Boy's counterpart, "like you always have. And try and convince yourself that you and Raven don't really belong down here. Because if you turn away from Terra now, Beast Boy, you won't have any excuses left."

Deep inside himself, Beast Boy could feel something, the Beast perhaps, or just his better nature, clawing and screaming and beating against the inside of his eyes, trying desperately to get out, gathering up all the pain and the heartache of the last two years like a weapon and bludgeoning the inside of his psyche with it, howling in terms unspoken and unhesitating to leap for the middle of the ice chasm and go to Terra, to tear her enemy apart, save her, rectify everything that had failed to do over and over again. It was the part of her that still, even here, every day, still tore at his insides at having once lost her, and having failed to ever find her again.

But by the time that feeling inside knew what was going on, Beast Boy had already turned away.

Only Raven wasn't there.

She had been right behind him, he knew that. Someone with his senses simply couldn't fail to know where everyone else was in relation to him, yet she was gone, vanished like she had simply melted into the ice. And he stared dumbstruck at the empty place where she had been standing for several moments before he turned around, half-expecting Terra and his alter ego to be holding her and mocking him. But when he turned back, they were gone as well, disappeared as if by magic, leaving Beast Boy alone with his thoughts and recriminations on the broken, featureless ice.

O-O-O

Step by patient step, David walked through death and tried not to look.

All around him lay more ruins, but these ruins, at least, were quiet, their fires quenched, emitting no flames and little smoke. The statues that lined the streets were more sparse here, hidden within the small buildings that had once been homes. He wasn't sure where he was, everything seemed to have been twisted around, but it looked like this place had been one of Jump City's suburbs. It was quieter than the rest of the city, at least.

He had no idea where he was going. He had no idea whether there was anything to go to, save for endless roads filled with burning cars and broken houses. Worse yet, here and there, dotting the streets, stood the statues, standing, crouching, laying prone on the ground, individually, in clumps, an endless parade of people frozen into their last reflexive gestures, their features betraying some kind of terminal fear. Men, women, kids, all of them locked in place, staring out at nothing.

As best he could, he avoided looking at them at all.

The communicator on his belt would have told him the time had he bothered to consult it, but the time it told was relative, vestigial on a planet that, for all he knew, was no longer even orbiting the sun. As such, he did not know how long he had been walking for, nor did he care. He spared as little glance as he could for those things he was walking past, preferring not to know if he was passing a burning elementary school or a ruined hospital. His head bowed, his eyes on the charred ground in front of him, he walked on, like an automation, one hand in his pocket, the other held tightly over his stomach as though he were trying to staunch a gaping wound. There was no such injury, but it was the closest place to where he could feel the gaping void inside of him, neither physical nor non-physical, where something he had never missed before was no longer there.

His mind wandered, for he refused to let it land on any one thing for too long, be it the faces of his dead friends, or his own, hideously scarred, yet smirking, confident in his total superiority. He shied away from the image whenever it appeared, stumbling and scrambling over the debris-choked streets, trying to force it all out of his head. It was useless, and he knew it, but he tried to do it anyway, for what else was there to do?

How long he might have walked was impossible to tell. Maybe forever. Maybe until he finally collapsed from thirst or fatigue. But before either of those two things could happen, he slipped while trying to climb over a pair of burnt-out cars that had crashed into one another and blocked the road entirely, and fell, and tumbled down them onto the ashen asphalt, landing on his stomach.

He lay there for a second, stunned, and mentally checking himself over to see if he had broken anything. Only after he had confirmed that all his limbs were still responding, did he open his eyes again. Yet when he did so, he stopped short, for the shock of the fall had knocked loose his communicator from the clasp on his belt, and sent it scurrying forward, sliding to a stop several inches before his eyes. He had paid it no mind before, indeed he had practically forgotten about it, but now, with it sitting right in front of him, he noticed something he had not seen before.

A red light, silently blinking on the side of the golden communicator.

He blinked, several times in fact, clearing his eyes from the omnipresent dust, yet when he opened them again, the light was still there, clicking on and off softly, unhurriedly, colored red like everything else here, but presenting no other obvious signs of urgency.

Slowly, he sat up in the middle of the street, and picked up the communicator, turning it over in his hands and clicking it open. The tiny screen showed only static, the symbol at the top indicating that there was no signal found, not from the Tower itself or the repeaters around the city. That much was to be expected, yet the light at the side of the communicator kept right on blinking, on and off, on and off.

Cyborg had been the one to explain to him what the various symbols, gizmos, and indicators on the communicator meant, and he remembered the lessons well, for Robin had been absolutely clear on the necessity of knowing, at a glance, what the communicator was telling him. Lives quite literally depended on him knowing this, his own as well as others. Yet this symbol, a red blinking light with no sound, was not one of the ones he remembered from the lessons, try as he might to recollect them. He opened and closed the communicator several times, tentatively pressing the small buttons that ringed it, trying to coax the palm-sized device into telling him what it was trying to say. Yet no matter what he tried, nor how he racked his exhausted, shell-shocked brain, he could neither discover nor recall anything at all about a blinking red light.

"Don't bother."

David froze, but not from fear, letting the words sink in before he lifted his head. Before him, standing some ten feet away, stood his own perfect duplicate, his red uniform pressed and clean, his skin and hair of normal tone, his eyes calm and voice even, as he clasped his hands behind his back in the way that David knew he always did when he was trying to make it look like he wasn't as worried as he really was. Whatever else he might be, Devastator was a capable mimic.

"You've never seen that before."

"How do you know?" asked David, not stirring from where he was sitting. In the back of his mind, he already knew the answer, or at least could guess, but he asked regardless.

Devastator shrugged, the mannerisms unquestionably David's own. "Because I've never seen it before," he said. "And I saw everything you did. At least until recently."

David looked down at the communicator again, which sat blinking quietly in his hand as though nothing at all were the matter. Gently, he ran the tips of his fingers over its gold electroplated exterior, feeling its metallic surface in the only way still available to him.

"It has to mean something," he said, as much to himself as Devastator. He held the communicator up to his ear and shook it experimentally, before lowering it again, the blinking unchanged in either color or rhythm.

"Maybe it's the battery?" suggested Devastator.

"It's a radium-decay battery," said David sharply, raising his eyes. "Cyborg said it would last fifty years. I thought you heard everything I did?"

"I did," said Devastator, calmly, "but Cyborg didn't count on this sort of thing happening."

"Cyborg - " snapped David angrily before he could stop himself. He caught himself after barely a word, and shut his eyes and clenched his teeth together, holding his breath until he could recover his equilibrium. "Cyborg," he restarted, "counted on everything."

Devastator only nodded slowly. "All right," he said, in the tone of one who is unconvinced but unwilling to argue, "then what is it?"

David didn't answer, slowly standing up, holding the communicator in front of him. He looked up, first at Devastator, still standing calmly in the street, then at the surrounding area. There was nothing of note here, just more charred ruins and smoking ground, but he did not shy away from it, looking past it, putting it out of his mind as he peered into the smoke, looking for something, a half-formed idea in his mind.

"Maybe..." he said aloud, and tentatively walked across the street, ignoring Devastator for the moment. Mounting the sidewalk, he crossed to the shoulder of the road, which had once been a lightly wooded hill that ran up into one of the semi-rural parks that ringed this part of the city's suburbs. The grass was gone now, replaced with bare, blackened stone, the trees reduced to cindered sticks that still smoldered in the hazy twilight, but he ignored all of the decor, instead stopping at the base of the hill, and looking back down at the blinking communicator.

It could perhaps have been his imagination, but it seemed to him that the light was blinking incrementally faster.

"Anything?" asked Devastator, and suddenly he was right next to David, practically looking over his shoulder. David barely even blinked, indeed he didn't turn his head, staring at and through the communicator as the wheels turned inside his head.

"I think I know what this is," he said, to Devastator perhaps, or himself, or nobody, and then suddenly he took off, scrambling up the incinerated hill, the communicator clutched in one hand, the using the other to help himself up the steeper bits, leaving dislodged stones and showers of earth in his wake as he clambered towards the summit of the hill.

The hill turned out to be more of an elevated plateau, formerly covered in woods and undergrowth, a place for hiking, picnickers, and bicyclists. Nothing remained but the burnt stumps of trees and the occasional half-melted slag of what might have once a bike path. He paid none of it any mind at all, zigzagging through the uneven terrain, dodging dead trees and uplifted boulders, glancing every few seconds back down at the communicator in his hand, as the blinking light, slowly but unquestionably, began to accelerate in frequency. The confirmation gave him speed, and he switched from a jog to a dead run, ducking under grasping branches and circling around rocks too large to climb over. He had no idea what direction he was running in, no proof that he wasn't simply running in circles, save that every time he looked back down, the communicator was blinking faster.

The blinking light was racing now, and David redoubled his pace yet again, even as the terrain became rougher, cut by deep gashes in the surface rock and channeled into canyons and broken cliffs. He entered one of these, hemmed in now by rock walls to either side. Around bends and through narrow squeezes he crawled and scrambled, until finally he emerged around one final corner, and found himself at a dead end.

He stopped short, surprised, so sure had he been of the half-formed theory as to what the communicator was trying to tell him. The canyon he had selected had led him to a cul-de-sac of solid rock, a round open space perhaps twenty feet across hemmed in from every direction except the one he had come by walls of unbroken stone at least fifty feet tall. The burnt remains of vines and creepers adorned the scorched walls, but otherwise there was no sign of anything else present. Turning slowly in circles, he considered backtracking for a moment, looking for another canyon or a wrong turn, but when he looked back down at his communicator, the red light was now solid, no longer blinking at all.

"Where are we?" asked Devastator, and when David looked up, Devastator was standing opposite him, arms clasped behind his back in a way that was very familiar.

"I don't know," said David, and he turned the communicator over in his hands, holding it up to show Devastator the now-unbroken light. He half-expected Devastator to take the communicator, but he did not, and David lowered it once more.

"It's a transponder," said David. "Something's sending it a signal, and I think - " he clipped the communicator back to his belt, "I think the light means how close we are to it."

Devastator's expression turned puzzled. "I don't remember anything about that. Where did you - "

"Nowhere," said David, turning back around to the walls behind him, running his eyes up and down the rock face in search of... anything really. "Cyborg told me some stuff about transponders once. I'm just guessing."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Devastator materialize beside him, also facing the wall, but this no longer even registered a blink. "I remember all that," he said. "But why would a transponder send you out here?"

"I don't know," said David, largely so that he wouldn't have to admit out loud that he was likely making this all up. Devastator kindly refrained from pointing that out himself, and David slowly approached the wall, lest he turn around and see the incredulity that he was certain was written all over his own face.

The rock wall was solid, or near enough, with small fissures running down it where water or plants had gouged out a tentative hold. He ran his hand over the wall, moving around it slowly, looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything to indicate that he might actually have guessed right.

He got halfway round the cul-de-sac before he saw something.

Above him, some fifteen feet off the ground, there was a divot in the rock wall, an enlargement of a fissure that ran from top to bottom. By itself this meant nothing, for the rock walls were uneven, and had hundreds of similar divots. Two things alone caught his eye about it. One was perhaps just a trick of the light, for the divot seemed... darker than it should have been, the shadow veiling it deeper than a shallow crack warranted. The other was its shape. Alone among the hundreds of cracks and fissures in the rock wall, this divot was almost perfectly circular, roughly the size of the palm of his hand.

Carefully, with no real idea of what he was doing, he began to climb the wall. Had it been an actual rock-climbing wall, he would have had no chance of success, possessed as he was of neither equipment nor training in the art. But whether from Trigon's cataclysm or the ravages of time, the wall was pitted and cross-cut by numerous fissures and cracks that served admirably as foot and handholds, even for someone as ungainly as David. Slowly he managed to scale the broken rock, until finally he was within reach of the divot. He braced himself and reached up, inserting his fingers into the hole in the rock, feeling around the edge. It was deeper than it looked, deeper than his fingers could reach, but when he felt around the sides of the small hole, his fingers touched not the warm stone of the wall, but cool, smooth, metal.

Slowly he withdrew his hand, steadying himself as best he could, trying to decide what this meant. His hand slid down to his belt, and to the palm-sized communicator that hung from it, moments before his brain belatedly made the obvious connection. Straining to hold on with only one hand, he detached the communicator once more, slid it up to the divot, and inserted it into the hole, feeling only an instant's resistance before there was a soft, but audible, click.

And then the wall threw him off.

The rock shook, bucked like a living thing, and effortlessly tossed him free of his precarious perch, sending him tumbling down back onto the floor of the cul-de-sac as an avalanche of burned dirt and loose stones tumbled down around him. He landed on the ground on his back with a crash, and managed only to curl himself into a fetal position with his hands held over his head before the rockslide landed atop him.

Had the entire wall come down, that would have been it, but it was merely a shower of loose debris and pebbles, and it lasted only a few moments, before the rumbling and crashing gave way to the sound of something heavy being dragged over stone. Slowly, David untangled himself and sat up, as before him, an entire section of the stone wall in front of him receded into the wall a few inches, and slid aside, revealing a dark, open passage from whence emitted a gust of wind.

Cold wind.

"David?"

This was not a question but a shout, and David started, whipping his head to the right to find Devastator bent down over him. It was only then that David's mind snapped back into the present, and he realized that Devastator had been calling his name ever since he fell off the wall.

"Are you all right?"

He needed a second to remember how to answer that one.

"I... yeah," he said, and he shook his head and slowly got up, brushing the rocks off of himself as he did so. Nothing appeared to be broken. "I think so..."

Devastator looked, for a moment, like he wanted to say something but thought better of it. "What is this?" he finally asked, though how he expected David to know was anyone's guess.

"I'm not sure," said David, turning back to the doorway, for that was what it obviously was. It was pitch dark inside, but a steady stream of cold air was emitting from it, and there was a low humming sound that seemed to emerge from within. Carefully, David approached the entrance, half expecting some hideous abomination to leap out at him from within it. No such abomination materialized however, and as he reached the threshold of the entrance, lights flipped on within it, revealing a metal staircase that descended into the earth along a shaft lined with steel.

He entered the doorway. There didn't seem to be anything else to do, and slowly descended the staircase, the only sounds his own footsteps on the metal stairs, and the low hum of what might have been machinery from within whatever this complex was. He did not hear Devastator following him, nor did he expect to. Devastator seemed to move between locations without traversing the points between. It didn't seem prudent to think about how.

The stairs finally ended some sixty paces down, and led to a short corridor that terminated with a plain steel door, above which was a large vent gently blowing chilled air down the hall and up the stairs. The door had neither knob nor handle, but mounted next to it was a small keypad set in a metal frame. Tentatively, he approached, looking for instructions or some hint as to what to do now, but there was nothing else present. He stood puzzled for a moment, but the thought occurred to him that if his Titans' communicator had triggered all this, then perhaps his Titans' security code would get him further.

The code was a twenty-four digit number, unique to David alone, randomly generated back when Robin had brought him onto the team, a time that now seemed like ancient history, even though it was barely a couple of months ago. For more than a week, Robin had made him memorize and re-memorize the code, until he was able to recite it on command, even while half-asleep, for the code would identify the bearer as David himself, and not some cunning impostor, and grant access to the Tower in the event that the security alarms had been tripped and all the other Titans were gone or incapacitated.

But apparently, it wasn't enough for whatever this was.

No sooner had he entered the code, than a panel above the keypad slid open, revealing a mounted screen that blinked on, displaying only the word "Devastator". From beside the screen, a tiny port emitted a red, wide-beam laser over the top of David's head, which it swept down slowly over his entire face. Before David could so much as blink, the lights turned red, a klaxon alarm sounded, and his name disappeared from the screen, replaced with the words "Unidentified Subject Detected".

Dazzled by the sudden barrage of noise and sound, David stepped back in confusion, in time to see a sickly, greenish gas begin to flow out of the vent above the metal door. The gas was heavier than air, and poured down the front of the door like a waterfall, pooling on the ground around him like a liquid. He had no hope of identifying what it was, but it seemed to augur nothing good, and he turned back, intending to ascend the stairs to escape it, only to find that a metal grate with thick steel bars had slammed shut behind him, blocking off all escape.

Stunned by this fresh turn of events, he tugged uselessly at the bars, trying to dislodge them and escape, but the cage was plainly designed to withstand the assault of someone far stronger than he was. He struggled and tugged, to no avail, as the gas continued to rise around him. Desperately, he turned back to the screen and keypad, re-entering his code as quickly as he could. But the procedure with the laser only repeated itself, and the screen once more called him an Unidentified Subject.

"Let me try."

David turned back, to find Devastator standing behind him, unperturbed either by the gas, or by the fact that he had apparently just walked right through the steel bars that blocked the passage. David blinked, but the subconscious part of his brain was still working, and he managed to step aside to let Devastator do as he would.

Given that this was Devastator, Lord of Destruction, he half-expected him to blast the door to pieces, snap the bars like twigs, or crush the vent that was spewing the gas. It was, after all, what David would likely have done were Devastator still resident within him. But rather than unleash explosions and flames, Devastator simply stepped forward, and paused before the mounted screen.

"Type in your code," said Devastator, though why he did not do it himself, David could not tell, for if Devastator had seen everything David had, then he too had to know it. Still, this was not the time to argue, and so David reached around Devastator, and typed in the code, before standing back nervously, the gas by now eddying around his waist and rising quickly. As before, a laser was projected, sweeping down over Devastator's head, but no sooner had it done so, than the monitor's message switched to "Identity Confirmed", and the gas abruptly stopped pouring into the room, as the gas began to recede into invisible vents hidden at the base of the walls.

Devastator turned around a shrug of what looked like relief visible on his features. "It was a retinal scanner," he said. "And... your eyes..."

David tried to prevent the tremor that comment brought to the surface, and might even have succeeded. "Oh," he said, gently touching the side of his own face, his fingers ashen grey and gently illuminated by the red light pouring from his discolored eyes. "Right." The last of the gas swirled away around his shoes, vanishing down the vents. "Thanks," he said, eyes darting away from Devastator's face, unwilling to rest for too long on his own features.

If Devastator noticed his reticence, he said nothing. "Don't mention it," he said, moments before there was a loud hissing sound, like the venting of steam, from somewhere behind the metal door. Both David and Devastator turned to face it, just as the door slid aside.

The room inside it was dark, only ambient light serving to illuminate a few feet inside, revealing nothing. Nothing stirred within, no sounds or movements to indicate hostility, and when Devastator made no move to enter, David stepped forward, over the threshold. Instantly, lights illuminated within, bright, fluorescent lights, mounted overhead, momentarily blinding him if only for how unexpected they were. And when finally his eyes had adjusted and he realized what he was looking at, he gasped, whether he would or not, in sudden recognition.

The room was enormous, the size of the Tower's common room in all dimensions, but the resemblance did not even come close to ending there. It was the common room, or at least clearly was designed to resemble it in every way possible. It had the same metal paneled walls, the same vaulted ceiling with the same maze of ductwork, the same open division between kitchen and lounge area. The same everything, down to the furniture, only three differences distinguishing it from the real thing. First, the far wall, where the real common room's vast windows sat, was occupied instead by an enormous bank of monitors, all presently offline, that stretched from ceiling to floor. Second along the sides of the room, there stood large black boxes, three to a side, perhaps nine feet tall and four wide, their purposes indeterminate.

Third, and most elemental of all, there was the knowledge they were standing not atop the shining tower in the middle of Jump City bay, but in a hidden chamber, locked and secured and buried beneath a thousand tons of solid rock.

For a few seconds, David just stood there and stared, his brain unable to distinguish if he was actually seeing this, or if it was some hallucination dreamed up by his subconscious. It was only after some indistinct time had passed that he managed, barely, to descend the three steps into the replica common room, and slowly walk into it, moving in a daze.

"What is this place?" he asked, staring around himself in wide-eyed astonishment, as though he expected the walls to come crashing down at any moment, revealing another ruined Hellscape or another horde of monsters.

"I'm not sure," said Devastator. David heard no footsteps, but nevertheless felt Devastator entering the room behind him, though he did not turn back. Instead he walked slowly into the room, feeling uncomfortably similar to the way he had felt all those months ago, the first time Robin had led him into the common room to be interrogated by all five of the other Titans together. The same reticence, the same sense of being alone in an alien environment in which he did not belong, the same knots twisting themselves tight inside his stomach, only this time they tied themselves around a gnawing void, until he felt like he had just ingested a powerful acid.

Into the center of the room he walked, running his fingers over leather back of a couch, approaching one of the black boxes. When he got to within ten feet of the monolith however, some invisible sensor tripped the lights, and all six boxes lit up at once.

They were display cases.

David stopped where he was as lights flipped on within each box, revealing transparent cases in which was mounted equipment, piles of equipment, the paraphernalia of every single Titan, one per case. The cases were not arranged decoratively, stuffed with uniforms on coat hangers, weapons and spare accessories laid out in quintuplicate on shelves and end tables, ready for use by all appearances, yet the overall effect was nevertheless that of a museum case, a monument to the people who had worn and used these items.

Behind David, Devastator stood, regarding the cases and the room that contained them, looking around from ceiling to floor and back again. "It's a safehouse," he said, sounding almost excited. "A bolt hole. A hidden backup base. It has to be. Robin must have had it built before all this - "

He turned as he spoke, and got no further.

"David?"

David stood in the center of the room, back to Devastator, eyes on the cases that lined the right wall, his hands clenched into fists at his sides, head bowed and quivering with visible strain. A moment later, and the tremor reached his entire body, his entire form tensed up, as though he had just absorbed some tremendous physical blow and was trying desperately not to let it show. Devastator approached with care, moving around to David's side, only to see that his eyes were squeezed shut, his teeth clenched tightly, breath coming in fitful gasps. He slowly bent, digging his fingers into the chair at his side, trying to keep himself together by main force, but to no avail. With a sudden jerk, his balance failed, and he fell, grabbing at the side of the chair with one hand to catch himself and slowly sliding down it to the floor. He landed in a heap, a tightly-constricted heap, head folded down into his arms, refusing to raise his eyes and look once more on the assembled symbols of everything lost and gone and burnt to cinders.

Devastator said nothing and did nothing, only watched as David slowly collapsed. With care, he raised his head, David's head, beholding in turn each of the six cases, which held what had once been the tools of the city's finest heroes, finally coming to rest on the one which contained a series of two-piece uniforms of orange and red, in front of which stood a weapons case with a half-dozen retractable police batons.

"I'm sorry, David," said Devastator, his voice a whisper like the stirring of wind. There was nothing else to be said.

O-O-O

"You are one stupid sonofabitch, you know that?"

Right now, laying on the pavement with his mechanical systems explaining in patient detail all of the things that were wrong with this situation, Cyborg was inclined to agree. The fact that his own voice was the one lecturing him only made this seem more like the conversation he was already having inside his head.

Cyborg climbed back to his feet for what had to be the fifteenth time tonight. He'd counted. Up in front of him, his evil counterpart was crouching leeringly on top of a low concrete retaining wall, staring down at him with a cockeyed grin, his sonic cannon held laconically to one side. He made no move to stop Cyborg as he peeled himself off of the pavement.

"It's one thing to want revenge, man, but this was just a bad idea," said the double. "This was basically the ultimate in bad ideas."

"You just gonna talk at me all day?" asked Cyborg, "or are you here to do business?"

A grin that augured no good appeared on the double's face as he stood up and leaped lightly down onto the pavement a dozen feet from Cyborg. The small army of flame demons followed in his shadow, as though unwilling to attack by themselves. "Your show, man," said the double. "You're the one who decided to kick the hornet's nest."

"Yeah," said Cyborg, slowly getting up, shoving the warnings out of his head. He did not move against his double immediately, waiting a moment this time to consider the best angle of attack. Yet he had not so much as decided if he should use his cannon or his fist before the double hit him.

Earlier that year, Cyborg had designed a pair of rocket thrusters, built into his robotic legs. Not powerful enough for sustained flight (the fuel requirements by themselves would have rendered that impossible), they were designed to provide split-second bursts of power to lend him speed at a moment's notice, a surprise for those who assumed that the hulking half-metal Titan was as ponderous as he looked.

Given that, there was something ironic here.

In a split second, Cyborg's alter ego accelerated from a dead stop to eighty miles an hour. Before Cyborg could react, before even his electronic sensors could react, the fist of his adversary struck him right between the eyes with the force of a locomotive, a punch that would have liquefied a normal person had there been one present to receive it. As it was, it hurled Cyborg through the air like a rag doll, smashing him back into and through a brick wall. Through desks and countertops he flew, finally coming to a halt against a solid concrete-and-steel pillar, sliding down it onto the ground.

For a moment he wasn't sure if his neck had broken, as his systems tried to reconstitute themselves, ran diagnostics, and tried to figure out what in the name of all that was Holy had just happened to them. He let them do their work. His concentration was focused on trying to determine which way was up.

"What are you even doin' here, huh?" came his double's voice. Or was it his own voice manifested through some mystical means? Come to think of it, might it not just be a hallucination brought on by damage and stress? "You actually think you're gonna take on Trigon, me, and his entire army all by yourself? When did you get this stupid?"

The voice was getting louder, punctuated by footfalls that were definitely approaching. And before Cyborg could ascertain where they were coming from, something grabbed him by both sides of his head and lifted him into the air, bringing himself face to face with his own features writ in red eye and ashen skin.

"Your friends are all dead," said the double like he was stating the answer to an arithmetic problem. "All of 'em. If you'd gone with 'em, maybe you could'a held it off for a while. As it is, you just managed to - "

Cyborg's fist ended the bragging before it could really begin.

It wasn't the equivalent of the hammer-blow that the double had inflicted, but it was a pretty decent facsimile, all things considered. A nice side-effect of having more than half your body replaced with computer-controlled cybernetics was that, no matter how addled your mind got, all you needed to do was to tell your arm to hit someone, and the stun-proof computers that governed its movement would do so for you. As such, despite the fact that Cyborg was still trying to recover his equilibrium, his arm smashed into his evil twin like a wrecking ball, picking him up off the ground and driving him across the room as though fired from a cannon. The double careened into the far wall, and, though he did not break through it, the impact sent cracks spiderwebbing across the painted surface of the re-enforced bulwark.

"You think I don't know that?" asked Cyborg, shifting his arm into a cannon.

It visibly took the evil twin a second to recover his balance, and in the instant's hesitation, Cyborg raised his arm and fired a sonic blast that could have flayed the flesh off a dinosaur, a blue streak comprised of a hundred billion motes of dust undergoing spontaneous nuclear fission from the very force of the ultrasonic waves. The double's equilibrium might have been out of order, but he could still tell when something terrible was about to happen to his present location, and he dove to the side, evading the strike by bare inches as the sonic blast tore the concrete wall apart like wrapping paper and drilled a three foot hole through the next two buildings. As he dove, the double extended his own sonic cannon, and returned the shot with one just as strong, scoring a direct hit and sending Cyborg hurtling back into the far wall.

Both metal teenagers struggled back to their feet at once, Cyborg shoving damage reports out of his mind, while his double spat words back at him.

"If you know, he said, then what the hell are you doin' here?"

"I'm here 'cause someone had to stand up," said Cyborg, kicking a desk aside as he strode towards his evil twin. "We all did what we had to do. If I've gotta go out, then that's how it's gotta be."

He broke into a run, charging with his fist cocked for business, but when he brought it forward, his counterpart preempted him, grabbing his fist with an open hand moving so fast that he could barely see it. The impact was like a thunderclap, yet the double did not so much as flinch, gripping Cyborg's hand in a vice of iron and steel.

"You are so full of crap," he said. And then he threw him through the wall.

He barely seemed to move, simply shoving forward, and yet his gesture had the force of a howitzer, hurling Cyborg back and into and through a wall of brick, mortar, and steel rebar. Over the sidewalk and into another burnt-out street he flew, landing on the ground in a hail of sparks and sliding to a stop next to the opposite curb.

"Is that really all this is?" asked the double as he followed Cyborg at a leisurely pace, stepping through the hole that he had smashed in the wall and exiting into the street. "More 'I gotta be a man' bullshit? Ain't you done with that yet? You really think you can hide behind this macho crap from me?"

Cyborg slowly pulled himself off the ground, forcing his limbs to work despite the ever-more-urgent warnings that they were giving him not to do so. He rose at a run, charging his adversary with fists raised. But before he had taken more than five steps, a horde of fire demons poured forth from the ground and the walls that lined the street, and hundreds of red lava tendrils snared him like lassos.

"You ain't a man" said the double scornfully, as Cyborg struggled and roared. "You never learned how to be a man. You're not here for some damn last charge, you're here 'cause you're afraid."

"That's right," spat Cyborg contemptuously, letting the sarcasm roll off his tongue, "I came here to fight the Devil because I was afraid."

"It's written all over you," said the double, approaching at a stroll, as the combined force of the demons forced him to his knees. "Tryin' to act all tough, you think that makes you a man? You think I don't know what this is? You're here 'cause you can't face watching the others die. You'd rather delude yourself with a bunch of fantasies about blazes of glory. Shrink off to the side and pretend you're somebody else under all that armor and circuitry, just like usual."

"Shut up."

"Make me, Victor," shouted the double. "There ain't nowhere for you to hide this time, no garage, no workshop, no time portal gonna whisk you off to adventureland. Just you, me, and the end of the world. No more hiding."

"I ain't hiding!"

"You been hidin' your whole life, boy," crowed the alter ego. "Hidin' in plain sight. In the spotlights, where nobody'd ever think to look for you. You were afraid of becoming your old man, so you hid on the football field. Afraid of running your own show, so you hid behind Robin's. Afraid of your own shadow, so you hid behind God. And most of all, afraid to watch your friends die. So you ran off and hid behind Trigon." The other Cyborg shook his head. "I gotta say man, that one was balsy."

"So what are you?" asked Cyborg. "My goddamn shrink?"

"I'm your worst nightmare, Vic. I'm somebody who can see you even when you're hiding. I was there when you watched your mother die. I was there when you pretended to quit the Titans all those times. I was there when you turned on the Hive. And I was there when you watched them put Robin in the ground." The double approached even closer, lowering his head and sticking it in Cyborg's face. "And I'm here now, at the end, to tell you that you can run and hide all you want, but I'll always find you."

Teeth clenched, eyes blazing blue, Cyborg snarled his next words.

"Yeah?" he asked. "Did you find this?"

All at once, Cyborg's shoulders slid open, the blue facing replaced by dozens of small protrusions that popped up from within his chest and arms, and before the double could react, a hail of micro-missiles flew up and out, vaulting into the air for half a second before coming around and landing amidst the army of flame demons that was restraining him, ripping their ranks apart like wheat before a scythe. And as the demons' tendrils were severed or fell slack, Cyborg leaped up from the ground, intending to either blast his counterpart with his sonic cannon, or, failing that, knock his head off with a blow of his fist.

And he might even have succeeded, had he not been intercepted in mid-air.

The only warning he got was a flash of soft pink light before there was a tremendous explosion that blew him out of the air like a duck struck by a shotgun, aborting his attack and blowing him down the street like a piece of debris. Alarms and red sirens flashed within his head as he bounced and scraped to a final halt, the acrid smell of electrical smoke wafting in his nostrils. He lay like a boned fish on the asphalt for a moment before rolling over onto his back, and it wasn't until he reached back with one hand to push himself up to a sitting position that he realized that he no longer had an arm.

"Just the way it happens, man," said the double, strolling towards him with a cock-eyed grin on his preternaturally pale features. "You back the wrong horse, you lose your money. And the one you backed ain't even in the race."

His arm had been blown apart, truncated savagely an inch or two below the shoulder where it ended in a mangled stump of wires and twisted metal. Bits and pieces of it lay scattered around him, his hand and forearm a dozen feet away in the gutter. He put it out of his mind, using his other hand to struggle back to his feet, yet before he could complete the movement, his double was upon him, grabbing him by the throat with one hand and lifting him bodily into the air.

"You see," said the double, "God ain't involved in this little situation. So screamin' to him for help ain't gonna be much use. Only thing might have saved you is wising up."

"Like you?" coughed Cyborg back, trying to grab at the double's arm with his own remaining one.

"No," said that double. "Like her." He didn't gesture, but Cyborg saw anyway.

Up the street, behind the double, back where there had been nobody a moment before, now there stood a small figure cloaked in black and with red and pink energies dancing from her fingers. She was standing still, watching in silence, making no move to assist either one of the Cyborgs before her, but the hollow look on her face was enough to instantly explain to Cyborg what the source of the pink flash from a moment ago had been.

"Jinx..." he said, but not in disbelief or even in anger, a soft, worn note of understanding fused with disappointment. His eyes flickered back to the double. "You didn't - "

"We didn't have to," he said smugly. "We had what she wanted. The foundation of all good relationships." A smile, almost benevolent, crossed the double's face. "And all she has to do in return, is rip you to pieces."

In a single, fluid action, the double pivoted around, throwing Cyborg back down into the street some twenty yards away, letting him slide to a stop a dozen paces from where Jinx stood. Behind him, the reconstituted army of flame demons closed in a broad circle around the two of them. Yet they made no move to close in, and neither did the double, advancing through the crowd of demons to stand at the very edge of the ersatz circle.

Jinx did not move nor make an effort to stop Cyborg, as he slowly recovered his footing. She seemed to be looking right through him, at the demons perhaps, or the double, or someone else for all he could tell. No sign of bravado, no quip, no witty one-liner to announce her superiority. He might as well have not been there, for as much reaction as she gave.

"You wanna help your little friends?" came the mocking voice of the double from behind Cyborg. "Well then, why don't we see which one of you wants it more?"

A moment to steady himself, and then Cyborg looked back to Jinx, whose eyes slowly began to focus on him, even as the energy in her hand coalesced into a glyph of razor-sharp energy.

"Jinx?" he asked simply, unsure even of what he was going to ask her.

"I'm sorry, Cyborg," she said in a voice as dead as their surroundings, even as the hexes began to swirl around her wrists. "I'm... I'm sorry..."

Standing beaten and dismembered in the center of the ring of fire, his own evil twin watching and leering, as Jinx raised her hands and summoned the fel forces that she used for weapons, Cyborg could only lower his head.

"Yeah," he said. "Me too."

O-O-O

"Do you remember that place in Bakersfield?"

It was quiet here. Quiet in the ways that mattered. Quiet in that there was just enough background hum to drown out any tiny noises, but not enough to rise above the level of conscious thought. The air was cooler here than it was outside, not unpleasantly so, but conditioned and cleaned. No taste of sulfur or fly ash, no trace pollutants to sting the eyes. A small respite, an oasis in the midst of the desert. Maybe that was why it had been built. Not for grand purposes, not for complex chess-games or battlefield contingencies. Not for armchair fantasies of replenishment and counteroffensive. Maybe it had been built just so, at the end of all things, someone could go there, and sit for a time, and talk to the phantasms of their own mind.

Maybe.

Perched on the armrest of one of the chairs, Devastator smiled gently. "I remember that you didn't care for it," he said. "It took them two days to find you after you bolted. I'm not sure where you thought you were going."

David sat on the floor where he had fallen, back against the side of a couch, legs pulled up to his chest, arms resting on top of his knees. He did not look up at Devastator, seeming instead to stare off at some invisible thing beyond.

"I just... didn't want to stay," he said, shaking his head. "But I can't remember why anymore."

Devastator folded his hands in front of him. "Well you weren't more than five or six," he said. "Maybe it was Marcus."

"No," said David. "Marcus didn't get really bad until later." He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "He was never really that bad anyway."

"I don't remember you being that philosophical about him at the time."

"It's been a while," said David. He shook his head. "I know better now. There's worse things around than Marcus."

Devastator regarded David with equanimity, but David did not lift his head.

"Well," said Devastator, "Bakersfield's near the I-5 corridor..."

A slight tremor, almost imperceptible, was the only reaction. David seemed to think it over for a good ten seconds before answering in a tone scarcely above a whisper. "Yeah," he said. "Maybe."

Devastator waited, but David said nothing further, eyes lowered at the ground. At last, he broke the silence with a question of his own.

"Do you remember anything from that night?"

The question seemed to get David's attention for the first time since he had collapsed. He raised his head to the red-clad simulacrum sitting opposite, staring at him as though trying to discern a reason for the question. Slowly, he shook his head. "No," he said. "Why?"

Now it was Devastator's turn to take a deep breath. "You always said you didn't remember anything, but I can't read minds, even yours. I wasn't really sure."

"Why did you need to be sure?" asked David.

"I didn't need to be," said Devastator. "I..." he trailed off, seeking for the right words, or perhaps the right language to say what he meant. "I always hoped that you didn't remember. I figured it would make it easier somehow."

In another time, another place, David might have taken umbrage at the notion. As it was, he simply lowered his eyes a fraction. "Maybe it did," he said.

There was something in the way he said the words, simple though they were, that seemed to hint at something else altogether.

"Were you... with me? When the accident happened?" said David all of a sudden.

Devastator, or rather the image he was projecting, blinked. "What do you mean?"

David closed his eyes, breathing deep, "I don't remember a time before you," he said. "I don't know when you... picked me." He opened his eyes again, this time looking up at Devastator. "Did you pick me after it happened, or before?"

Devastator sighed slowly. "Before," he said at last. "But not long before. I was there when the - "

David didn't reply in words, but his reaction was clear enough. No sooner had Devastator spoken, than he lowered his head, a wince of pain spreading across his face too rapid to conceal. His breath caught, and when he released it, it was plainly an effort to do so. Devastator waited for an explanation, another question, anything, but David did not respond, until finally he took the initiative.

"David?"

Still David did not answer, indeed he didn't even raise his head, one hand draped over his face. He did not even seem to notice that Devastator had said anything.

"David?" repeated Devastator. "David, is - " He stopped, started over. "What's wrong?"

Slowly, David lifted his eyes, burning red against ash-grey skin. Yet the skin around his eyes was dark, and wet streaks ran down his face. His eyes invisible behind the flaming redness that infused them. He gave no sobs, made no sound, spoke no words, but simply looked up at Devastator, the red light giving his stare an unearthly and direct look, like probing searchlights penetrating to the truth. Devastator, energy being, immortal though he was, could not help but shudder.

"... David?"

"That man out there?" asked David, voice kept steady by what was visibly an act of will. "The one with the cane and the glasses and the big coat. Was he telling the truth?"

Devastator caught his simulated breath. "David, you don't understand how these - "

"If you're not gonna give me a straight answer, then what are you doing here?" asked David sharply, not averting his eyes for an instant, difficult though it was to tell. "He said that he was me, only the way I was... 'supposed' to be. I don't know if I know what that means, but I know you can tell me if he was telling the truth. So tell me, was that guy actually me?"

"You don't need me to tell you that," said Devastator evenly, not yielding an inch. "You've already decided he was telling the truth."

"No," said David, "I guessed. Because that's what I can do. You know."

"What makes you think I know?"

"Because you're an energy being. You're on some kind of other plane. 'I exist outside time and space', that's what you told Raven, isn't it?"

Devastator did not answer.

"That's how you pick people, isn't it? You can see into the past and the future and find out what they're supposed to become, and find the person you want from there, right?"

"That's not how it works," said Devastator.

"But it's close enough, isn't it?" said David. "Close enough for you to answer me. However it actually works, magic or physics or whatever, you know, don't you?"

There were several seconds of complete silence.

"Yes," said Devastator. "He's you."

No reaction. No wince, no hesitation, no signs of surprise. Just a small, almost imperceptible tremor, one David nearly managed to mask completely. Not a shock, a confirmation. Slowly, with infinite care, David permitting himself to lower his head.

The movement broke the silence, at least as far as Devastator was concerned. "David, please," said Devastator. "You don't understand." David said nothing, but raised his eyes anew, which Devastator took as permission to continue. "That man, he's... a... a possible version of you. That's all. He's - "

"He's what I would have been if I hadn't met the Titans."

Devastator hesitated. "Maybe."

"Bullshit," said David. "You know it's more than 'possible'. Warp came back in time and changed things so that I would meet the Titans. And if he hadn't done that, that's who I'd be, isn't it?" He let the question sit, as Devastator stood watching him with his own face, unable to reply. "Isn't it?" he repeated, louder this time.

"Yes," said Devastator at last. "It is."

Again, David closed his eyes, shaking his head from side to side, his hands cupped into fists as he lightly pounded one of them against the side of the sofa he was sitting against. Devastator hesitated once more, before trying again. "David," he said, trying to sound understanding, "I know this was a shock. But you can't - "

Of all things, David started to laugh.

It wasn't a good laugh, it was an incredulous, almost bitter laugh. And he raised his head again and stared at Devastator in something approximating disbelief.

"You think I'm surprised?" he asked, blinking up at the weaponized incarnation of Destruction. He shook his head in what looked like disbelief. "Is that what you think? You think I'm sitting here trying to convince myself it isn't true? I've known this would be the way it would up the whole time."

"What are you talking about?" asked Devastator.

"Why do you think I never used you?" asked David. "Why do you think I spent so much time pretending I couldn't do anything? Even when Marcus or someone else decided to be an idiot, I never, ever used you for anything big, except that one time with the bicycle. What did you think I did that for? Because I was afraid of what other people would think? Is that what you thought it was? How many of your hosts don't even try to figure out how their powers work?"

"You were afraid," said Devastator. "It's only natural to be afraid of powers like the ones I gave you."

"I wasn't afraid of the powers," said David, leaning forward, "I was afraid of what I would do with them. Casual destruction, reflexive violence, I knew where all that went. I'm not an idiot, I can add two and two together. You have a bad day, someone makes you angry, and boom! That's why I tried to leave the Tower." He shook his head again, lowering it slowly until his forehead was resting on his knees. "You think I'm surprised by all this?" he repeated. "I knew this was what I would become from day one. And I let myself be convinced by the others that it wasn't true, because they said it wasn't, and I wanted to believe them. I wanted to be wrong." He took a deep breath and let it out. "But I wasn't wrong."

"Yes you were."

His head shot up again. "I murdered all of the Titans," he said, spitting the words out like a bitter liquid. "I murdered hundreds of people getting to them. I - "

"Stop it," said Devastator, cutting David off angrily. "Just stop it. You didn't murder the Titans, or all those people, he did. For whatever reason, he chose to do those things, not you."

"We're the same person!" exclaimed David.

"So?" asked Devastator. "You don't know the circumstances that - "

"The circumstances?" shouted David. "He killed six hundred people just because they were in his way! He admitted it to me, I watched him do it!"

"Fine," said Devastator, "but you watched him do it. Even if that is what you're supposed to become, it's thirty years in the future, in a totally different world. You don't know what happened, or why he decided to do all that, and neither do I. And if that doesn't mean anything to you, then it damn-well should!"

David said nothing, and Devastator stood up from where he was perched, stepping towards David until he was within arm's reach, as David's eyes darted downwards.

"You're right, you're not an idiot," said Devastator. "So quit acting like one and think. If I turned up two years ago in whichever center you were in then and told you that you would blow up Jump City's main gas line and nearly knock Titans' Tower into the water, you'd have set the building on fire just to get away from me. Well now you've done those things. Did you do them out of spite? Or anger? Did you do them because you're some madman who wanted to destroy the world? Or did you do them because you had a good reason to?"

David shook his head in something approximating disbelief. "Are you trying to say I had good reason to kill the Titans?"

"I'm saying that you have no idea why he did what he did, or what led to it, or anything else. And even if he didn't have good reason to do it, he's the one who did it, not you. You weren't there, you didn't do whatever led up to it. It had nothing to do with you, and you know it! Whatever that version of you did in some other time and place isn't your fault." "You never murdered anyone."

Slowly, David raised his eyes, turning the burning red lights on Devastator's face, his hands, his entire body trembling like he was suffering a palsy. Whatever effect Devastator had hoped for his words, had plainly not transpired. He opened and closed his mouth several times, as through trying to kick start the words to his lips, and finally managed to spit out three soft words, barely whispers.

"Yes I did."

Devastator's expression froze. He blinked, twice, standing at such proximity that David could see the wheels figuratively turning in whatever passed for a mind within the energy being.

"What are you - "

"You know what I'm talking about," said David. "You were there."

A chill settled over Devastator's eyes, one unmistakable to anyone as familiar with his features as David was, by necessity. He took a short, involuntary breath, no less informative for being entirely feigned. "David..." he said.

David didn't give him a chance. "Do you remember that place in San Francisco?"

"Which one?"

"The one I stayed in four years ago? The one that kid from the system wrote me from?" David's jaw tensed up, threatened to lock. "The one with the records building that had a broken basement window?"

"The one you broke?"

"That one. You remember it?"

"I remember it," said Devastator, his voice preternaturally even, yet tense at the same time. "What about it? Did you kill someone there without me knowing about it?"

"No," said David, "I broke into the sealed files, remember?"

"You weren't the only one."

"I was the only one who could break the lock on the filing cabinet by thinking about it."

"Probably," said Devastator, curtly. "What is this about?"

David refused to be hurried. "Do you remember what I found in there."

"Your file."

"Inside the file, don't play stupid."

"You're talking about the accident report?" asked Devastator.

"Yeah," said David.

"What about it?"

"Do you remember what it said?"

"It said that you were in a car accident, that your parents died, and that you survived," said Devastator. "Which is exactly what happened. I was there, remember?"

"I know that," said David. "Do you happen to remember what else it said?"

Devastator hesitated. "What do you mean?"

"What did it say happened, precisely?"

"I have no idea what it said precisely," said Devastator, "it was four years ago."

"Well I do," responded David. "I remember it really well. It said that our car swerved into the oncoming lane, and was hit head-on by a semi truck coming in the opposite direction."

"And?"

"And that's what it says!"

"I know that's what it says, I was there when the accident happened. Why does this even even - "

"Because it doesn't mention the divider."

Devastator blinked, several times. He had heard David perfectly, but what he had just said made no sense as Devastator understood it.

"The what?"

"The center divider," repeated David, eyes stern and cold, perceptible even through the fog of red haze. "When they built the interstate, they realized that people might lose their way in the dark or the fog or something, and drift into oncoming traffic. So they built a divider, between the lanes of traffic, right down the center of the highway."

Slowly, without any command of Devastator's, his projection's face began to fall as he realized where David was going. "David..."

"I've seen it," said David, ignoring Devastator, his voice held rigidly under controlccc as he continued. "So have you, but you probably didn't notice it. I did. I noticed it every time they bussed us back and forth on that road. It's built along the entire highway from Grapevine to Kettleman. Not one break in it in eighty miles. Not one." He paused, his head shaking back and forth, spreading his hands wide, as though in search of an answer. "So tell me," he asked, "if you were there when the accident happened, how did our car manage to swerve into the oncoming lane with a six foot concrete wall between it and us?"

Devastator looked as though someone had seized his heart with a grip of ice. "I..." he stammered, his voice practically a whisper. "I don't... there's a thousand things that could have happened. Maybe you went through the divider..."

"The divider's made of ferroconcrete," snapped David, voice thin and worn, tears coming to his eyes. "Concrete re-enforced with steel! Impervious to anything short of a cruise missile! I know what ferrocrete of that grade can take, Cyborg made me study it for weeks! You could drive a dump truck full of Nitro-Glycerin into a divider like that at two hundred miles an hour and not break through! There is no way we went through that divider in a four-seat car!"

"Then maybe you went over it. Swerved into it and ran up the side. I don't know, David, you were asleep when it happened. I can only see through you. Why does this matter now?"

David ignored the question. "There was a medical report in the file too," he said, his voice becoming more and more rigid, almost fearful, though it was unclear what he was afraid of. "It talked about what happened to me."

"You nearly died," said Devastator. "You shouldn't have needed a medical report to tell you that."

"That's not what I mean. The accident report said that they found me bleeding."

"Of course you were bleeding," snapped Devastator, "you were in a car wreck with a semi-truck! The flying glass alone - "

"It wasn't from the glass."

"What do you - "

"Subject is a child of approximately two years," said David, plainly quoting from memory, "minor lacerations and abrasions are evident due to impact. Copious bleeding evident from subject's eyes, ears, and nose appear to be caused by ruptured blood vessels." He pronounced the last words like proclamations of doom. "Medical examination revealed extreme stress and internal bleeding throughout the subject's entire cardiovascular system." He paused, taking a ragged breath. "Cause of effects unknown. Presumed related to accident."

Devastator stood motionless, no sound escaping his lips, staring at David, who stared right back.

"When I read that," said David, "I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know if it meant anything. But then I started having those headaches, during training. The blood pressure spikes, the migraines. Terra getting me to overload. And then there was that thing on the island. When I tried to kill Slade." He let the notion sit for a moment. "Every time I pushed too far with you, past where I normally went, it was the same."

Neither one said a word for a time that could have been minutes, seconds, or hours. When Devastator finally broke the silence, his voice had died to an ember of its former self, quiet, restrained, and deflated.

"I didn't think you would remember all that," he said.

"You didn't think I'd remember a report about what happened that night?"

Devastator didn't answer for a little while. "Maybe I hoped you wouldn't," he finally said.

"You thought it would be easier?" asked David.

"I thought it would be better for you if you just..." he let himself trail off. "I hoped you'd be able to let it go."

There was a moment's silence.

"The bleeding," said Devastator at last. "The circulatory damage. You do know that could have been caused just by raw concussion? A wreck at that speed with that much mass... it's a miracle you didn't suffer worse. It could just have been the crash."

"But it wasn't the crash," said David, his eyes locked on Devastator's. "Was it?"

Devastator performed an excellent impression of someone drawing a breath slowly and holding it in. "No," he said, at last. "It wasn't."

David's eyes closed of their own accord, silent tears squeezing themselves out from between his eyelids. He managed, at cost incalculable, to prevent himself from moving at all otherwise. Moments later, he felt a tingling sensation, faint and yet plain and easy to detect, centered on his shoulder and running down his arm, a sensation vaguely warm and electrical, and he opened his eyes once more to see that the copy of himself that had been Devastator had vanished. In its place stood an enormous man, tall and broad, with a mass of red hair that ran riot in every direction, and an enormous, curled beard, also red. Significantly taller than David, he stood above him with his hand extended out, laid on David's shoulder. David felt no weight, no physical presence, nothing but the electrical sensation, and the man's expression was soft, concern seasoned with what might have been guilt.

"It was me," said Devastator, his voice still David's, but stronger now, commanding, a voice tinged with authority and reverence, not to be gainsaid or spoken against. A voice of someone who was speaking ex cathedra. "You want the truth? You want an explanation? You know it was me. That's why you asked in the first place. You've always known that, haven't you?"

"I didn't know," said David, quietly now, no signs of anger in his voice. "But... I could feel it..."

"Then you felt right," said Devastator, staring directly at David, whose eyes remained averted, staring down at the ground between them. "I blew the car off the road," said Devastator. "I touched off the right front axle and flipped the whole car over the divider into the oncoming lane. It went straight into the truck."

He might as well have said nothing, for David did not lift his eyes, nor give any indication that he had heard what Devastator had said.

"David, are you listening?" demanded Devastator, moving as though attempting to shake him by the shoulder, though his massive arms passed right through David like holograms. "Did you hear what I just said? You were right, it was me. I did it! I killed your parents. It was my doing and nobody - "

Slowly, David lifted his head to meet Devastator, and the face he lifted was wet, the eyes puffed and swollen. His mouth trembled, but he did not weep, nor accuse, nor give any other indication of anger. He only locked his eyes with those of the energy being before him, and slowly shook his head.

"It wasn't you," David said slowly. "You don't have a will. You can't do anything by yourself. It couldn't have been you."

The expression on Devastator's face slowly froze, something akin to a shattering disappointment crystallizing within his eyes. It was a look that, without so much as a word, spoke more volumes to David than anything that had yet been said. And in that precise instant, David knew the truth.

"That's why you need a host," he said.

Slowly, carefully, Devastator's began to melt, his entire form dissolving before David's eyes. Shrinking back into another form, the energy being became a young woman, adorned in white, a circlet of diamond on her brow. A moment later, and the woman had grown once more into a towering warrior in plate armor black as night, a sword in one hand dripping blood the color of wine. Again and again he shifted, forms human and alien, too many to comprehend, too rapidly for David's eyes to focus upon. A blur of images, hundreds and thousands of images, enough to overwhelm his eyes with a riot of color and shape, until he could take it no longer, and closed them, moments before everything gave out, and he fell.

He landed on the ground as he felt something wrap itself around him, not a physical object but an energy, like a static charge, running over him in waves. Warm and electrical, both familiar and unfamiliar, it washed over him like an ocean tide, and as it did so he felt the tears running down his face once more, this time unstoppable. He dug his fingers into the carpet, eyes squeezed shut, his body automatically contracting into a fetal position as his defenses broke down. Alone in the darkness he cried, for all that had been lost, by Trigon's actions or his own.

It no longer mattered which.

O-O-O

The voice was lilting and lyrical and just off-key enough to send chills racing down Starfire's spine, though that might have been the aching pangs from somewhere deep inside every time she recognized its timbre.

"Run, run, as fast as you can," came the voice from somewhere nearby, lost in the labyrinthine passages of Warp's fortress. It rolled round corners and cornices, losing and fragmenting itself until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. And no sooner had it stopped, than a similar voice, deeper of timbre and pitch but no less twisted, echoed a soft reply.

"You can't catch me. I'm the Gingerbread man..."

It was the same voice, dialed downwards, and the combination of the two was enough to make her sick to all seven stomachs.

She raced down the corridor, her thoughts too jumbled and heart too petrified to even attempt flight. She could hear footsteps, disjointed, metallic footsteps, on the stones somewhere nearby, behind her, in front of her, in hallways running parallel to this one, she couldn't tell. Apprehensively, she glanced backwards and forwards, seeking for her pursuers, yet every time she did so, there was nothing there.

Until, that is, someone swung a metal staff at her head.

It came out of nowhere, she would swear to that on her life. In the space of one blink there was someone in front of her with a staff swinging at eyelevel, meant to burst her head like a melon. By the barest of margins, she contrived to duck under the swing which smashed against the wall in a cascade of sparks. She jumped back, only to have her assailant leap forward and strike again, but this time she was ready, and raising one arm, she took the blow on the bracer around her forearm.

One problem with emotion-based powers was that they had a tendency to desert one at the worst possible moments. Particularly ones based on boundless confidence.

The blow was like a hammer, sending a wave of force coursing through her entire body. It lifted her off her feet and threw her against the wall as though gravity had just shifted beneath her, slamming her against the wall hard enough to smash the facing of the smoothed stone blocks.

In a heartbeat, her assailant spun the staff around and jabbed with it, aiming the end at the bridge of her nose. Once more she ducked, letting it smash against the broken stone, and reaching up, she grabbed the staff and wrenched it out of his hands, stepping back with it and tossing it behind her, only to watch as the other reached behind his back and drew forth a small cylinder, which telescoped out into a fresh staff.

Before Starfire could react to this new development, something hit her in the back of the head like a falling building, and the next thing she knew, she was lying on her stomach on the floor, with something that felt very much like the end of a pole being driven into her back. Someone bent over her as she lay on the ground, and she heard a soft click and saw a glint of light on metal as whoever it was reached around her throat with a sharp, pointed object no larger than a knife.

Certain things tended to galvanize one's attention.

She tensed up and shoved hard against the stones, her innate Tamaranean strength giving her a burst of power that sent her practically flying upwards, knocking the person off of her as she leaped up and landed on her feet. In front of her, she saw the twisted, broken version of Nightwing still holding his staff, leering at her from beneath his hawk-like mask. And behind her, Robin's simulacrum was already recovering from having been shaken off, another staff held in his hands as he began to advance once more.

"What have you done with him?" asked Starfire aloud, speaking to neither one of the simulacra. She was confident that the person whom she was addressing would hear her.

Her confidence was well-placed. "I've done nothing to either of them," came Warp's voice from some dark corner of the mad labyrinth, "save what they both claimed to do. I've restored the balance in the interests of justice."

"Justice is not served by this mockery!" shouted Starfire, backing towards the wall, watching both of the evil clones as they circled around her. "You do not even know the meaning of the term! Why are you doing this?"

"I understand the term in detail, Starfire," said Warp, icily. "It is not simply a convenient shield for you to hide your actions behind. Justice applies blindly, even to those whom you spared no thought for. Justice is indifferent to your biases, preoccupations and concerns. It is cold. It is heartless. And it is without remorse."

There was a flash of light, and suddenly Warp was before her, between Nightwing and Robin, the Book of Azar in his hand, held lightly at his side despite its size and weight, his finger extended towards her.

"I find it deeply ironic, Starfire, that I should have to be the one to tell you that."

Starfire bit back the vile curses that were forming on her tongue in Tamaranean, English, and every other language that came to mind. "What have you done with Robin?" she managed to ask.

"I have turned him to my purposes," said Warp, gesturing to the simulacra on either side of him. "Purposes to which, I imagine, he would not object, were he able to make his wishes known."

"You lived with him for years!" shouted Starfire. "How can you even say such a - "

"Don't presume to judge me, princess. Robin dedicated his life towards the principles of justice, long before he ever met you. It was burnt into the very fibre of his being. I have made of him an instrument of justice and retribution."

"Revenge for your obsessions is not justice!"

"Oh but it is!" exclaimed Warp. "Justice is balance! Justice is a settling of accounts! Justice is reciprocity, a crime committed, a crime exacted! That is justice! You heroes twist the term so that you might use it to justify your every action, so that nothing you do is ever wrong!" Warp smiled cruelly and spread his arms wide. "Well it is long-since time you were brought to account."

"You are insane!"

"Perhaps," said Warp, his smile not shrinking an inch as he gestured around him in turn. "But I'm also the one with the book, the allies, and the rarest of all gifts, just cause."

"And I am to believe that Trigon, Lord of Evil, now the patron of just causes?" shouted Starfire back. "Is it from your fine sense of justice that you have aligned yourself with him and exterminated the denizens of this world?"

"Not all of us are blessed with the gift of Tamaranean physiology, Starfire," said Warp. "Some of us require other means to enact our revenge. Trigon was a means to an end. To this end." He smiled anew, a patronizing smile, like that of a teacher amused by the antics of a truant student. "Dismiss me as a madman if you must," he said, "but justice does not require that you admit your crimes, only that you pay for them."

White fury stabbed through Starfire as she clenched her fists and leaned forward, like a racehorse straining to burst from the starting gate. "Were I you, Warp," she said, "I would not speak of payment for crimes."

"And were I you, Starfire," said Warp, "I would not take my eyes off of my two associates here."

There was a flash of blinding light as bright as a supernova, instantly washing out Starfire's vision completely, and a heartbeat later, something hit Starfire in the chest like a wrecking ball. She was hurled back, smashing into and through the stone blocks behind her. She landed on more stone, the thunderous sounds of the collapsing walls ringing her in, her eyes still washed out by the flash bomb. Blinking to try and clear her vision, she heard the sounds of metal-shod footsteps approaching from indeterminable directions.

Before the light returned to her eyes, something grabbed her by the throat and lifted her up, something with a grip of cold iron and the strength of a thousand Tamaranean warriors. She gasped, choking, grabbing at the unyielding wrists of whatever had seized her and uselessly tugging at them as she was lifted off her feet by the inexorable force. Her eyes cleared grudgingly, and she saw Warp standing before her, the book in his hand sheathed in black, his free hand extended towards her and projecting a river of dark energy that had wrapped itself around her throat like an iron vice.

"What's the matter, Princess?" snarled Warp as he held Starfire aloft. "Can't think of anything to say?"

With a broad, violent stroke, Warp swept his arm to the side, hurling Starfire into a column of volcanic glass, which shattered into a million pieces as she flew through it. She landed on the coarse ground and rolled to a stop as Warp followed at a stroll.

"What is it you sought to find here, Princess?" asked Warp as he advanced, tendrils of darkness snaking from his hand as Robin and Nightwing flanked him on either side. "Redemption? Salvation? Rescue? Were you seeking to save Robin at any cost? Some selfless act of heroism to restore him to your very arms? That is why you came, is it not?"

Starfire struggled to her feet as the broken glass rolled off her, taking two steps towards Warp as she raised her hand and closed it into a fist. Yet before she could fire a starbolt, Warp's tendrils wrapped themselves around her like the lash of a whip, and bound her in place in bonds of adamant, lifting her into the air as she fought to break free.

"Foolish child," said Warp with a smirk, "there is no redemption here. No salvation, no rescue. This place is Hell. I happen to be an expert in Hell. And I can assure you that in Hell there is only pain."

Warp glanced momentarily to Robin, who obediently stepped forward, his staff at the ready. With a flick of his finger, Warp sliced off the tip of the staff into a point so sharp as to be invisible, moments before the entire staff began to glow in black energy, a darkness so profound it seemed to sap the heat from the terrace.

"You abandoned me in Hell," said Warp as Robin approached Starfire, "and left me to live or die, at the whims of your so-called friends." He lowered his hand, bringing Starfire down nearer to the ground, though not near enough that she could find purchase against any surface. Starfire's thrashings became more and more frantic as Robin closed in, yet Warp's hand did not quiver, nor did his bonds of darkness so much as tremble. Robin approached to within striking distance, raised the staff above his head, and turned back to look at Warp.

Warp did not look to Robin, but maintained his gaze on Starfire, seeming to relish the look in her eyes as his features twisted into a cruel smirk.

"Consider us even," he said, and released the bonds.

Less than a tenth of a second later, Robin drove the fel-charged staff's point straight into Starfire's chest.

"Robi - unh..."

There was no scream. No cry. No wail of a stricken bird or creature. No histrionic shrieks to give pleasure to the most twisted of ears. There was only a wet slicing sound, a soft gasp, choked off abruptly, and the minute sounds of a throat closed to air and sound that still struggled to release both. Starfire hung, just for a moment, where she had been floating, and then slowly, with all the grace of a falling leaf, fell the several inches that still separated her from the terrace floor, one hand lightly grasping the staff that Robin had just driven into her, the other, almost unconsciously, wrapping itself around Robin's shoulders.

"Robin..." she whispered.

Robin twisted the spear, and shoved it forward.

Now there was a cry, stifled by iron command, but audible all the same, that leaked out involuntarily as she knotted her fingers in Robin's cape and held the makeshift spear with a hand that had lost all strength. Again Robin shoved, driving the spearpoint further in, making no effort to break away, driving in the spear until it could be lodged nowhere but in Starfire's heart.

Blood soaked into the front of Starfire's shirt, ran down the staff onto Robin's glove, yet Starfire did not collapse, holding onto Robin tightly, as though they were not in Hell but back at the Tower, as though there were no spear, no Warp, no Trigon, no plots of evil, nothing else in the world. She held him as though she feared he would vanish.

"Robin..." she whispered again, tears rolling down her face, her voice so weak as to barely be comprehensible several paces away.

Yet Warp heard her. "Robin is dead," he said. "He will never return. And neither, Princess, shall you."

Starfire shuddered, seeming all of a sudden to wilt, her grip on Robin beginning to slacken as she slowly closed her eyes. Her mouth moved, but her lungs had lost their strength, and what words she whispered, Warp could not hear. With a gleeful smile, he stepped forward.

"I'm sorry, Princess," he said, patronizingly, "what was that?"

"I am sorry," whispered Starfire without opening her eyes, as the blood trickling down the spear slowed, and her voice seemed to drift off. "I am so sorry..."

O-O-O

"I mostly remember how dark it was."

David did not raise his head, unsure if he could conjure up the necessary force to do so and unwilling to try. He left his eyes shut, unwilling to see the red glow that reflected off everything when they were open. He preferred to remain blind for the time being, as from somewhere overhead, Devastator spoke.

"There were lights along the road, but the fog was in, and the windows were tinted. No lights on in the car. No sound but the engine and the radio."

"They didn't say anything?" asked David, hearing his voice as though it were disembodied, coming from someone else. Every word was like a dagger through his heart.

"It was a long trip," said Devastator. "From Jump City all the way north over the mountains into the central valley. It had to be ten or eleven at night. They were tired. You were tired."

"What happened?" asked David, forcing out the words as barely a whisper. His fingers dug into the leather of the chairback behind him, as if in anticipation of a physical blow. Every fibre of his being wanted to run away, clamp his hands over his ears, do anything besides sit here. But there was nothing else to do, and he did not allow himself to tell Devastator to be quiet.

It took more to stop himself than he thought he had left in him.

"I don't know what happened... exactly," said Devastator, in a voice that sounded rather like prevarication.

If Devastator thought he was softening the blow, David disabused him. "Just... tell me already," he exclaimed before he could stop himself, voice pained. "You were there. I don't remember any of it. What happened?"

A pregnant pause, discernible even with his eyes closed. He could picture Devastator hesitating somewhere over him, before finally speaking.

"It was the front, right wheel," said Devastator. "A single, clean burst, inside the wheelshaft. Stainless steel with a low chromium count, the easiest thing in the world. It snapped the transaxle like a twig. The entire wheel assembly collapsed in a quarter second."

David felt something knotting itself around his lungs, squeezing the air out through clenched teeth, and he squeezed his eyes together, if only to spare himself the sight of his own face reciting the words he knew to come.

"Your father was driving," said Devastator. That one word hit like a wrecking ball, and David had to fight to avoid doubling over as Devastator continued. "The car jolted to the right. He swung it the other way, tried to compensate, but there was too much speed." Another pause, David could practically see Devastator trying to find a way to ease this. He decided on clinical, technical description. "The car was front wheel drive. The blast knocked out the drive train, and cut the brake lines. No way to stop, no way to control it. It hit the divider at a sharp angle and went over it like a ramp. Landed on its roof in the opposing lane. It was still sliding when the truck hit."

He tried to focus on the clinical details, tried to depersonalize what he was being told, if only for a few more seconds. "The truck driver didn't say anything about that," said David, his voice sounding more desperate than he intended. "Why didn't the reports - ?"

"The driver never saw anything," said Devastator, anticipating the question. "The fog was in too thick. To him, the car just appeared out of nowhere, no time to react. And when he hit it... well you saw the photos. It was completely pulverized. Nobody noticed a broken axle in the middle of all that."

I single breath, taken in slowly between clenched teeth, and David forced his eyes open. Devastator stood before him, once more disguised as David himself, watching him in the way that one might watch a disturbed stranger on the bus, a wary look mixed with concern, the look of someone who feared what the person he was watching might do.

"It was me, wasn't it? I blew up the axle."

A hesitation. "I blew it up," said Devastator at last, trying too hard to sound convincing.

A spike of red-hot anger shot through David like an industrial laser, and before he knew what he was doing, he leaped to his feet, overturning the chair behind him. "I was your host!" he exploded, screaming at Devastator at the top of his lungs. "I was the one in control!"

"You weren't in control of a damned thing!" retorted Devastator. "You weren't even two!"

"Then how did it happen?" shouted David. "Ten thousand hosts and a million years of trying, and this one time you managed to act by yourself? You can't stop Trigon from stealing you, you can't stop Raven from digging into my head, but you managed to blow up part of my parents' car for no reason at all without me telling you too?"

There was a fractional flinch in Devastator's features, one that might not have been perceptible even at this distance had Devastator's face been anything except his own. But as it was, it gave David notice of what Devastator was going to say.

He pre-empted it.

"It was me," said David, stepping forward to within inches of Devastator, staring his simulacrum straight in the eye. "Wasn't it?"

David wasn't sure, given what he was looking at, but at that instant, he could swear that he saw something break inside Devastator's gaze.

"You gave the order," he said, his tone stilted and quiet. "I blew up the axle. That's how it works."

David felt the world fading around him. He managed to retain enough lucidity to ask the only pertinent question.

"Why?" he asked.

There was a flicker of what might have been pain, a slight tremor, like an interruption in the feed of a hologram. But in the end, Devastator could only shake his head.

"I don't know," he whispered.

Now it was David's turn to flicker with pain, to shake with the first subtle tremors of what might be an eruption or a final, total collapse, he didn't know which. He wanted to scream and throw Devastator through a wall. He wanted to explode. But more than anything, he wanted an answer at last. Yet one look was enough to know that this time, if never before, Devastator was telling the absolute truth.

"You... don't know?" he asked, half in disbelief, half in supplication.

Devastator caught the prayer in the question, but had no answer to give. "I can't read your mind," he whispered anew, and the words sounded like an admission of failure. "I know what you did. But I can't tell why you did it."

Slowly, by inches and centimeters, David lowered his head. He closed his eyes, stepped forward, into and through Devastator, feeling the electrical tingling roll over him and disappear once more as he walked past the projection of the most powerful weapon in the universe. He did not turn back, took his steps like a shambling drunk, barely able to keep his balance as his head and balance swam through the air above him, a thousand impulses battling one another to explode out of the drained husk of his body.

From behind, he heard Devastator as if through a wall, muted and soft, with only portions of his words sinking in, as Devastator tried, in vain, to assuage him even now.

"David, you were two years old, if that," said Devastator. "You couldn't possibly have known what you were doing. You'd been bottled up in a car for hours. Maybe you were tired. Maybe you were cranky. Maybe you just wanted the car to stop. Maybe you were exploring what you could do with me and just popped the axle by accident. It wasn't your fau- "

David screamed.

It was a paltry scream, nothing wild or loud or full-throated. Not some virile scream of rage against the Gods or at the tragedies of fate. It was half-choked, wracked with pain, torn unwillingly from a throat that could simply no longer contain it. A scream of agony and anguish and frustration all rolled into one, and as he did so, he half-stepped, half-lurched forward, and slammed his fist as hard as he physically could directly into one of the glass display cases wherein the Titans' equipment and uniforms were being displayed.

David was not large, not even for his age, but his fist hit the glass case with absolutely none of the customary hesitation that any thinking person would exhibit before slamming his hand into an unyielding object. Indeed, had the case been real glass, he might well have broken it despite his size, but the cases were laminated plexiglass, bulletproof and impervious to anything he could conceivably do to them. Not that this stopped him in the least. So much force did he throw into the blow that he lost his balance and fell against the case, pounding his fist against it over and over and over again as rapidly as he could, until his knuckles split and bled and he smeared the blood all over the case. Still he continued, hitting again and again, his blows losing power as they gained in speed, until finally the carpet tore beneath the case's feet. With a loud rip, the case toppled, slamming into the one next to it and tipping it over as well like a domino. Within seconds, all three cases on the near side of the room had collapsed onto their sides, spilling their contents onto the floor. David himself was carried forward by his last strike, and fell as well, landing atop one of the cases hard. Shatterproof though the case might have been, his full weight crushed one side like an egg and left him laying half-propped up amidst shattered plexiglass and the instruments of his vanished friends.

He lay on the floor on his side, feeling like he was going to be sick, drawing and exhaling breath through his nostrils and mouth in short gasps. Devastator could have still been talking, could have vanished, he wouldn't know. Whatever he thought he had previously gone through, the trials and torments and black days of defeat or self-doubt, it was nothing to compare to lying on the floor of a replica of his former home, surrounded by the possessions of his dead friends, while the presence that had been ripped out of him by force calmly explained to him the circumstances whereby he had murdered his own parents.

He did not weep. He did not cry or scream anew or curse aloud. He was too far gone for any of those things. He lay there in a stupor, insensible to passage of time or presence of anyone else. It felt like a million years, though likely it was less than a minute, before something managed to pierce the veil.

It was something elemental. Something deep within. Something to hold onto in the midst of a raging tempest within his head. No sappy emotional foothold, for those had all been stripped away, not a happy thought or pleasant memory or some other Hallmark Moment to be reached for in the darkness. It was a cold, simple question, one riding in the back of his mind, one that had always ridden there, safely un-askable. It brought no warmth or compassion to him, no hope, no pleasure. It was merely the absence of gut-spilling pain, transitory though it promised to be. A question he had always wondered, but never asked, for there was nobody to ask it to, and real fear of the answer.

"Why?"

Devastator, standing above and in front of him, was shaken out of whatever counsel he was holding by the sheer unexpectedness of the question. "Why... what?" he asked back, gingerly.

David raised his head, slowly, and the glow of red light from his eyes drowned out any sense that could have been made from his ashen face or broken demeanor. His voice was choked with disgust and reproach, at himself, at Devastator, it was impossible to tell. But there was no mistaking his words, for he turned them over with iron deliberation, as though he were speaking aloud a question long-prepared, long-dwelt upon, never vocalized.

"Why did you pick me?"

Devastator went quiet.

"Why me?" he asked again, his voice like a burnt cinder. "Why the hell would you pick me? You could have picked anyone, anyone in the world, anyone in the universe. Why me?" As though asking the question had released some pressure valve, his voice built in tone and energy, his brain so out of sorts that he repeated himself without realizing it. "You could have had anybody. You could have had Superman! Why me?"

"I didn't come all the way to Earth to bond with a Kryptonian," said Devastator.

"Then anybody else!" shouted David, though it came out more like a plaintive cry. "There were six billion of us! You could have had anybody! Kings! Presidents! Policemen, if that's what you wanted! People who knew how to protect other people, people who wanted to! Anybody you wanted across the entire world, and you pick me?"

"That's right," said Devastator, his voice as even and still as a pond on a windless day.

David's head shook slowly of its own accord. "Why?" he asked, blinking in pure incomprehension. "Why would you do that? Why not a real hero? Why not Robin for God's sake, he didn't have any powers! Any of them! Anyone else! If you wanted a superhero, you could have - "

"I didn't want a superhero," said Devastator.

The words died on David's lips, plunging the room into silence once again. Devastator ventured nothing further, watching the young teen on the floor with something approximating equanimity. Frozen in place, scarcely daring to breathe, David needed several moments before his brain finally drew the final, inevitable conclusion.

"No," he said. "You wanted a supervillain."

Slowly, Devastator lowered his head, eyes dropping by fractions until they finally slid shut. He said nothing.

"You weren't looking for a hero," said David, his voice flat, monotone, more a recitation than an accusation. "You wanted somebody who'd use you to do what I did. Somebody who'd spread destruction. Somebody who'd kill six hundred people just to get at the Titans, and then kill them on top of the bodies." David paused, but Devastator did not react. "You wanted me to do all this, didn't you?" he asked at last. "It's what you picked me for. It's what you wanted."

Still Devastator did not reply, nor raise his head, but to David's ears, his silence spoke more than any words could have.

For three, endless seconds, David stood before the Devastator in silence, until what little fire this last accusation had conjured up had died. And in the ashes left behind, he could only shake his own head.

"Congratulations," he said hoarsely, "you got what you wanted." And then he turned and walked away.

But he had gotten no more than five paces before Devastator broke his silence.

"You're really full of shit, you know that?"

Had Devastator pulled out a gun and shot David in the back, he could scarcely have engendered a stronger reaction. David stopped as though he had collided with an invisible wall. It took him several full seconds to turn around, blinking as though he had been struck in the face, so unexpected was this remark. "What..." he stammered, "what did you just say?"

"You heard me," said Devastator darkly, raising his eyes in a scowl. "I wanted a supervillain, did I? You figure that one out by yourself?"

"Did you?" asked David, teeth clenched and fists balled.

"I've got a better question for you," said Devastator, leaning forward with a glare on his face. "Does it matter why I picked you?"

"Answer me!" snapped David

"Why?" spat Devastator back. "You already decided what the answer was!"

"I don't know what - "

"Of course not, you guessed again, didn't you? That's what this all comes down to. You haven't got any answers so you decided what you would make them into. That you were chosen to be a murderer, right? That's what you want me to say."

"So why don't you just say it?" hissed David

"Because what matters isn't why I picked you," replied Devastator. "What matters is why you think I picked you."

David blinked in shock. "I don't believe this," he said. "I'm not gonna sit here and listen to a bunch of positive thinking - "

"I didn't pick you because I wanted a supervillain, David," said Devastator forcefully. "If I had, I would have picked a psychopath or a serial killer and saved myself the trouble. But it doesn't matter why I picked you. I'm not the one who makes the decisions about how I get used. You do. And all that matters for that is why you think I picked you."

"What are you even talking about?" asked David. The question sounded almost plaintive.

Devastator leaned back against the wall, crossing his arms over his chest. "I've had thousands of hosts," he said. "Over more years than I can count. Heroes, villains, depraved monsters, I've had all kinds. I've looked for all kinds. I've picked people because I knew they would become killers. And others because I knew they would save their worlds. It's the only choice I ever get to make."

"Which one was I?" asked David.

"Neither," said Devastator. "And you'd know that already if you hadn't tied yourself up in knots.

David said nothing.

Devastator stood up from the wall stepping towards David, his eyes piercing and expression stony. "I'm the Lord of Destruction," he said. "The most powerful weapon ever devised. I have no soul, no conscience, and no will. I'm a facsimile of a living being, granted semi-sentience so as to permit me to wage war against a God. I make no choices, nor will I ever make any, save for the choice of my host. Inasmuch as I've armed madmen and murderers with the tools to kill, I am guilty of terrible crimes, and inasmuch as I've armed heroes and champions with the tools to stop them, I am responsible for preventing others. Through me, billions of innocents have lost their lives, and billions more have had them saved."

"Why are you telling me all this?" asked David.

"Because I know all about evil, and good, and the things that lie between them," said Devastator. "Because I've lived long enough to know what a hero is. A hero is a closed circuit. A hero is driven. Compelled. Commanded. Maybe by their family or their people, maybe just by themselves. And if that's what I wanted this time 'round, I could have picked one. Robin, Cyborg, any of your friends. But with powers, without them, a hero finds a way to do what he has to, because he doesn't have a choice. He drives himself, if nobody else will." Devastator shook his head. "Maybe that's admirable. But all I get to do is pick one person, and then sit back and watch. That's my entire existence. And for me, picking a hero is like reading a book that you already know the ending to. After the first couple thousand times, you just can't talk yourself into it anymore."

David said nothing as Devastator approached, watching the projection like he was in some sort of dream or daze.

"I used to pick only heroes," said Devastator. "I thought it ennobled me. Gave me a purpose beyond fighting Trigon. So I went looking for born champions. Reformers. Revolutionaries overthrowing the evil empire. Thinking that I was making the universe a better place used to help me through the centuries of watching my hosts do anything they wanted except what I wanted them to do, or watching insensate as they failed or even succeeded and lived happily ever after. After a while it just didn't matter to me who lived or died, or who my hosts stopped or how many lives they saved. And when I finally realized that no matter how carefully I picked, I would never get a surrogate for my own will, and that living vicariously will never be the same as living, I switched tracks and went after villains. I thought if nothing else, they would surprise me."

Devastator was now barely two paces away, and he shook his head. "But they didn't," he said. "My hosts spilled more blood across the universe than even Trigon could dream of. Some of them were brought down by heroes, or by outraged victims, or ran themselves off of cliffs in their own madness. Maniacs, stone killers, mad scientists, monsters conjured up from some dark pit, conquerors with delusions of grandeur, after centuries upon centuries, they all ran together. I tried alternating, picking at random, it didn't matter. All I was doing was putting a weapon in the hands of someone who already knew what he wanted to do with it, and watching him go."

Devastator was right in front of him now, close enough that David could see the shimmer behind the eyes of the simulacrum that the semi-living weapon had manifested within, a barest hint of the staggering power that lay within, trapped and rendered impotent, circumscribed within rules woven and the fabric of the universe.

"And then one day," said Devastator. "My most recent host died. Old age. Queen of her planet. And I had to choose someone else. And I realized that I didn't want a born superhero, and I didn't want a black-hearted killer. I'd seen every permutation of those things conceivable a thousand times over. I wanted someone else."

"Who?"

"I wasn't sure at first. I searched for... decades. Silently. Longer than I'd ever spent searching before. Planet to planet, galaxy to galaxy. I didn't know what I was looking for, just that I wasn't finding it. I could have taken any one of a hundred thousand candidates, but I didn't. I knew how their stories would end already. I just couldn't convince myself that there was any point in picking them."

"And then, one day, I came across a backwater planet near the edge of a spiral galaxy, and found something I'd never seen before."

"What did you find?" asked David.

Devastator hesitated before answering, looking David over for a moment, before, of all things, he smiled.

"A catalyst," he said.

David blinked. "A... what?"

"A catalyst," repeated Devastator. "A trigger. A little spark plug in an engine the size of a planet. I found you, David. That's what you are. You're a lit match. You're an ignition switch. You're a pivot, a hinge, a fulcrum around which massive bodies turn." Devastator reached out a hand, laying it on David's shoulder gently, sending the warm, electrical sensation running up his arm. "And you've never let yourself realize it."

"What are you talking about?" asked David, not even noticing that his voice had reduced to a whisper.

"You think I picked you because of some... destiny? To do good, to do evil, some pre-ordained thing? It wasn't like that at all. You don't have a destiny, David. No ancient prophecies, no angelic writ, you never did. Most people don't have a destiny. They live their lives by the choices they make, forced or otherwise, and try to do right by themselves, and when enough of them gather together, you average it all out and call it reality. The people who stand above that, the ones who really shape the world around them, they have destinies. Raven, Robin, Trigon, all had destinies, either because of some literal prophecy, or because they just drove themselves into it. Mass murderers, paragons of justice, revolutionaries. They're born to be what they are, they don't know how to be anything else. They rise and stand the universe on its head, because that's what they have to do. All of them, all that I've seen, all had ordained ends, ones they only needed to reach out and grasp, even if they didn't know it themselves. All of them..." Devastator shook his head and smiled again. "... all except you."

David's tongue fell still, and he could only stare up into Devastator's eyes.

"It's like you said," said Devastator. "I exist beyond time and space. I look through the possibilities of the future, and I see what people can become. I look into their souls, their essences. I see what's trying to come out, what they can't hide, it's as clear to me as daylight is to you. But when I looked into you, all I could see were fragmentary possibilities. Hundreds, thousands, an infinite number. Some seemed to have nothing to do with you. Some followed logic so torturous I couldn't understand it. No matter how hard I looked, no matter what perspective I applied, I simply couldn't tell anything. Not even a trendline in some general direction, it was total chaos. A billion other threads were strangling yours in every direction, but instead of choking them off, they deflected like bullets off a steel plating, or were shredded by contact and vanished into nothing. Everywhere you went, the world just warped around you, whether you meant it to or not. You weren't just without destiny, you shattered destinies. Yours, other people's, for better, for worse, there was no trend. You're a catalyst, David. You trigger change. You are change."

Devastator leaned in close, staring into David's eyes, speaking low but with electrical intensity.

"None of this was supposed to happen," he said. "You know that. This was all supposed to be different. Robin was supposed to be alive, Raven was supposed to stop Trigon, I wasn't even supposed to be involved, and neither were you. Neither was Terra. Neither was the Hive. And I know you didn't mean to change any of that. You didn't even know about most of it. You didn't set out to kill Robin because you were meant to or drove yourself to, not even in Warp's time. It wasn't your doing that changed things, it wasn't anyone's doing, not even Warp's. It was..." Devastator groped for words. "It was a cascading series of events, like ripples in a pond, pulling apart what was supposed to happen and re-assembling it differently. It was threads of possibility rubbing against one another until one of them snapped. So many, so varied, that nobody could have picked them out ahead of time.

"So you wanna know why, in some possible future, you turned into that guy out there? I can't answer you. I have no idea. You'd have to go ask him what happened. But thirty years from now, if none of Warp's changes had occurred, you would have become one of the most powerful supervillains in the history of the world. You destroyed the Titans by yourself. You did what Slade and Brother Blood and the Hive and even Trigon himself failed to do. And yet Warp changes one thing around you, one simple, little thing, and now you're sitting here, in a bunker, amidst the ruin of the world, and trying to ask me where everything went wrong, because you're afraid that you somehow assisted Warp in doing the very thing that, in another world, you made it your life's mission to accomplish."

Devastator took a deep breath. "That, David, is why I picked you."

Quiet descended. Devastator had nothing more to say, and David could not properly remember how. Slowly, he stepped back, catching himself against one of the couches, sliding down it until he was sitting on the floor, facing the pile of devices and debris in the center of the room from the fallen display cases. He stared at them, indeed he seemed to stare through them, in abject silence. What he was looking at specifically could not be discerned, not by Devastator nor anyone else who cared to look, for the red glow washed out all chance of following his gaze, but he seemed only to be staring, mutely, into empty space.

At last, Devastator broke the silence. "David," he said, voice softened now, sounding almost pained. "I... really never meant for any of this to happen to you. The attacks, the demons, Trigon, I didn't know all this would happen. I couldn't know. And I wish I had some way to make it right..." he trailed off for a moment before raising his eyes once again. But all things being equal? If I had the choice to do it all over again, not knowing about Trigon, not knowing about Warp? I'd pick you again in an instant. I'd pick you over every living thing on this planet, over every person I encountered in fifty years of searching. I'd pick you over Robin, over Superman, over every one of this planet's heroes. Over all their dedicated villains too. Because alone amongst all the people I've ever met, David, I had no idea what you would do, or what would happen in your wake. And I just wanted to find out."

David took no notice of Devastator, did not even seem to have heard him at all. But carefully, he leaned forward, reaching with his fingertips for a small piece of black fabric half-buried by the avalanche of equipment. He took it, tugged, and pulled it out, revealing a small, adhesive eyemask, bordered in black and covered with monofiliment so fine as to be transparent at close range, but that from any distance at all appeared as white as driven snow.

Carefully, David turned the small mask over in his hands, running it through his fingers, over and over, staring at or through it like a statue. Slowly, he lifted his head once more to Devastator, who crouched on the other side of the pile of debris, saying nothing. For one beat, one second, one moment, Devastator stared fully into the red orbs that had replaced David's eyes. Perhaps he saw something concrete. Perhaps nothing at all but threads and possibilities wandering through amorphous shadows. But whether by one means or another, one glance was all it took to send a very human chill running up Devastator's non-existent, intangible spine.

"... David?"

Slowly, the mask slipped through David's fingers, falling back to the floor beside its fellows, but rather than pick it up again, David lowered his head to the pile once more, running it over with his eyes like red searchlights seeking to illuminate some dark corner. His fingers darted through the piles of loose equipment before they settled upon a small, metal cylinder no larger than a game controller, which clicked gently in his hands as he lifted it, the delicate mechanisms within softly sliding against one another.

"David?" repeated Devastator, "what are you - "

The search was in earnest now, David's eyes flicking faster and faster over the pile of extraneous objects as he selected them one by one, and set them aside. Most were steel, or at least metal, some etched finely with the Titans' symbol of a T inscribed within a circle, others with another letter entirely. Ranging in size from a loaf of bread to a cellular phone, each object was fixed with a tiny carabiner no bigger than a keyring, carved from solid titanium, designed to be easily locked or unlocked with a snap of the fingers, yet simultaneously proof against hurricane winds or solid state explosives. Some two dozen objects did David set aside, before slowly gathering them up and standing.

"What are you doing?" asked Devastator, curtly now, as one who feared to hear the answer that he was already expecting.

"I'm going," said David quietly, without lifting his eyes.

Devastator seemed to hesitate. "Going? Going where?"

"There's someone I have to talk to," said David, as he began attaching the carabiners to his belt. He neither spared Devastator a glance nor dared look up from what he was doing, and the tremor in his hands as he attached the objects was visibly being kept to a low level by act of will alone.

"Who?" asked Devastator, his voice betraying his foreknowledge of what the answer was.

David did not answer directly. "It's like you said," he said, softly. "If I wanted to know what happened, I have to go ask..."

"David, you can't... you can't go out there."

"Why not?" he asked, not looking up.

"Every demon, spirit, and creature in Trigon's employment will be looking for you by now!" insisted Devastator.

"Maybe," said David, "but they're not gonna stop me, are they? They all want me to do this."

"That doesn't make it any less suicidal, David. Please, I know Trigon. Anything he intends for you to go through is just a torturous prelude to your death. You can't leave."

The last caribiner clicked into place, and David finally looked up at Devastator, standing up straight, as his red-suited double did the same. "Stop me then," he said, and with that, he walked straight into and through Devastator and out the other side, leaving Devastator's image to flicker and swirl like disturbed smoke, before re-coalescing and turning around.

"David!" shouted Devastator, as David neared the door, "wait!"

David stopped, paused at the threshold, and turned around, saying nothing. Devastator did not wait for him to speak, but approached carefully, a serious look on his face.

"We can get you off this planet," said Devastator softly, almost conspiratorially. "Trigon will be too busy playing with whatever toys he has left here to stop you if we move now."

David blinked in what looked like incomprehension. "How?"

"The T-ship," said Devastator urgently. "There's access tunnels that lead to it, we saw them once in a plan Cyborg showed us. I doubt you remember, but I do. If you have to go out, I can come with you, show you how to get there, and how to fly the thing. With the T-ship you can go anywhere in the universe, Tamaran, Clementia, Naltor... I've been to a hundred million inhabited worlds. I can point you to where they are, the paradise worlds, the ones with people that would welcome you with open arms." Devastator paused, trying to gauge if the words were having any effect at all. "I've done a great deal of harm in selecting you as my host," he said. "To you, and to everyone else, but at the very least I can do this much. Let me take you to the T-ship, David. You don't have to die here."

David took a shallow, ragged breath, and slowly exhaled it, before asking a single question.

"Why do you keep calling me that?"

Devastator froze. "Calling you... what?" he managed to whisper.

"My name isn't David," said the boy at the door. "Is it?"

In that precise instant, Devastator knew that he had lost.

"No," said the weaponized embodiment of Destruction, his voice hollow and empty. "David was your father."

No reaction, no flinch or change of expression or anything else. David simply took a slightly deeper breath, and closed his eyes.

"David Foster's already dead," he said quietly, before carefully lifting his eyes once more, to look down into Devastator's. "And the only place I'm going now, is to have a talk with the person who killed him and the rest of my family."

Devastator seemed to deflate, lowering his head, shaking it slowly. "David..." he said, trailing off into nothing.

"That's all there is to do," said David, "Because otherwise, what was the point of any of it?" And with that, he turned, keyed the door controls and disappeared through the sliding doors, leaving behind an empty room.

O-O-O

The firelight cast deep ochre shadows on the walls of ice, illuminating translucent shapes that merged and twisted around one another with each pulse of the campfire's flames. There was very little sound in here, save for the crackling of the fire, and the soft hiss as meltwater bubbled on its periphery, neither of which were enough to cover the melodic groaning of the millions of tons of surrounding ice.

Not the place Beast Boy would have picked, had he his choice of locations to try and hole up in, but given everything recently, he counted his blessings that he had found this much.

Raven was crouched next to the fire, huddling as close to it as she dared. Every sound the surrounding ice made, every creak and pop and low, atonal moan seemed to shoot through her as though she were part of the ice as well. Her cloak wrapped around her tightly like a mummy's shroud, she shivered still, but not from cold, staring into the fire with the intensity of a madman or fanatic, as though to raise her head and look away from the light would be to acknowledge the monsters that lurked in the shadows.

Among them, thought Beast Boy with a frown, himself.

When he had turned, back on the ice floe, back with his evil twin and Terra, and found Raven missing, he had instantly assumed the worst, or rather had commenced trying to think up what the worst might be so that he could start properly assuming it. She had perhaps been summoned by the evil twins (the term would do for now), or catapulted to some other dimension, or eaten by a ravening ice beast or fallen into the crevasse without his noticing and would never be seen again. Several moments of abject panic had seen him forgetting totally about Trigon, evil twins, even about the image of Terra and the man with the fiery cane. Blasting into the air like a rocket, he had flown in random, panicked circles, trying to call for Raven even though he no longer possessed vocal chords. God only knew what he might have done had his enhanced raptor's vision not happened to notice the small footprints in the freshly fallen snow, leading away from the crevasse and off into the darkness.

The footprints had led surprisingly far given that the person leaving them was both a child and still suffering from hypothermia. But he had placed every ounce of speed into the fastest form he could devise and followed them, covering half a mile in twenty seconds before coming to a series of iceblocks, thrust up by some incalculable force, each the size of an office building. The tracks led into the broken ground around the towering blocks, wound its way around and through them, until they arrived at an unbroken wall of ice that loomed up out of the snow-choked air, light blue and shimmering and absolutely vertical, rearing up into the sky until it vanished into the lofty mists. And there, at the base of the wall, the tracks had led to a small cleft in the unbroken ice, and vanished therein.

He found her a couple dozen feet inside, where the cleft widened into a cavern under the ice, huddled in a corner, wrapped in her cloak, her eyes clenched shut against the diffuse light that wafted through the ice. Inside the ice, objects were entombed, objects of all types, from cars and vehicles to trees and bushes. Shivering erratically, from cold or fright, he could not tell, Raven had shied away at his very approach. At a loss, he had, largely to give himself something to do, turned into a giant vole and dug into the ice around them, unearthing an entire tree as well as several pieces of another, stripping the ice off of them, and building a small campfire in the middle of the cavern, elevating it above the ice below by means of a small platform of stones.

That was hours ago.

Since getting the fire started, he had withdrawn into the shadows, taking care to remain within Raven's sight, yet not so close as to present a threat. She had paid his fire no mind at first, but finally the warmth it offered had overcome whatever reticence she was operating under, and she had crept towards it carefully, and now sat huddled before it, as close as she dared. The firelight illuminated her face and hair and eyes, throwing them into relief as she stared intently into the flames. Yet for all the changes she had undergone, Beast Boy would never have mistaken the little girl before him for anyone but Raven, not even at a glance. He knew it was her, and furthermore, he knew that she wasn't staring into the fire so much as avoiding looking at anything else.

And the only other thing in the cavern was Beast Boy himself.

For over an hour, he'd been trying to think of what to say or do. Not that there was any lack of ideas, there wasn't, but everything he had thought of, he had rejected as the wrong thing to say. None of his usual fallbacks, the stale jokes or the obvious questions, the strategies he normally used to get Raven to open up, seemed appropriate here. They were designed for Raven as he had always known her, the unassailable tower of strength, power, and depth of mind. They were wedges, used to pry open the defenses of one not overly blessed with reserves of patience, to set her off her equilibrium, in the hope, vain though it might have been, that she might melt the ice walls around her just a bit, even if it was only to drench him in freezing water.

But right here, right now, the last thing he wanted to do was pry open what little defense Raven had left. And that left him with nothing.

The fire was going strong now, strong enough that he could feel its heat with some intensity, though he was still sitting back against the wall some twenty feet away. Comprised of nothing but damp wood and kindling, it nevertheless roared like a furnace, burning much hotter than it should have been able to, some new quirk of this horrible place, no doubt. Kneeling as she was on the very edge of the fire, the heat around Raven had to be positively scorching, indeed the very ice beneath her had gradually melted into a shallow basin of water that now hissed and bubbled about her waist as the nearby fire boiled it into steam. Yet though the water she knelt in was literally boiling, and the flames danced barely six inches from her face and hair, she made no effort to move away, nor was she scalded or burnt, edging ever closer to the searing flames as she gave nervous glances in his direction or those of the shadows on the wall.

An idle thought occurred to Beast Boy all of a sudden that perhaps this was not all that surprising, given that Raven, as it turned out, was a demon.

He turned the idea over in his mind once or twice. She had told him, told them all, that Trigon was her father, and since then she had referred to herself bitterly as a demon more than once. He'd never paid it much mind, she had been calling herself all manner of other terrible things most of the time as well, and whatever Trigon actually was, Beast Boy had spared little-to-no thought for his biological nature. Yet watching Raven here, barely inches removed from plunging directly into the fire, the boiling water sending steam wafting up around her, it made the matter simultaneously more real and more... practical, than he had ever considered it. Raven hadn't called herself a demon to be theatrical. She had called herself that because that's what she was. A supernatural creature of flame and hellfire, daughter of devils, a demon.

Another idle thought occurred. Maybe this was why she always wore a leotard?

"Rae?"

The word slipped out before he could corral it, Beast Boy's mouth running away with itself the instant his mind wandered elsewhere, as usual. In fairness, it was hardly the most earth-shattering thing for him to say, but given that neither of them had said a word in over an hour, it came as quite a shock, both to him and to Raven.

Raven's eyes shot up with a start, the firelight reflecting off of them like polished stones of amber or amethyst by turns. Wild and fierce was the look she gave him, as though she had forgotten that he was capable of speech, and the revelation that he was had shaken her to the core. For a second, she seemed to withdraw from the sight of him, but thought better of it after a moment, crouching back down into the cauldron of boiling water that she had been sitting in, keeping the fire between her and him.

"Who... who are you?" she asked, her voice quivering but still clear, a voice that was recognizably Raven's, but younger, softer, more hesitant. Raven's voice with the armor removed. Something he'd never heard before. Something he hadn't believed existed.

The question caught him off guard. "I... um..." he sputtered, "It's... me. Beast Boy. Remember?" He ventured a small movement forward, leaning into the firelight and gesturing towards himself. The little girl before him was so obviously Raven that he had never imagined that she might not -

Raven gasped and recoiled, scrambling up and out of the shallow basin she had been crouched in, her reaction as stark as though he had just morphed into a tiger and lunged at her with fangs and claws bared. Boiling water sloshed over the ice as she scrambled up and out, and she slipped, and fell headlong onto the ice with a wet smack.

"Raven!" exclaimed Beast Boy before he could stop himself, and he lurched forward, torn between racing to her aid and terrifying her further. But when she did not immediately scramble to her feet, the fear overcame his sense, and he morphed into a grasshopper, leaped the entire distance between himself and her in one bound, and shifted back into his human form as he landed.

Eyes unfocused, blinking, Raven lay on the ice for a moment like a boned fish, yet slowly the glaze over her eyes faded, and she began to focus on the things around her once again. Beast Boy froze as Raven's eyes fell on him once again, widening and filling with apprehension, but she did not jerk away again, and he ventured a small gesture.

"It's okay," he said, trying to sound as re-assuring as he could. He considered shifting into another form, something small and fluffy, to try and put her a bit more at ease, but discarded the thought almost immediately. Somehow, he couldn't imagine Raven, even little-girl-Raven, being that interested in fluffy animals. And besides, how re-assuring would a green rabbit really be?

"It's okay," he repeated, slowly extending his gloved hand to her. "I won't hurt you. It's me. Beast Boy. The shapeshifter. You remember me, don't you?"

Raven gave no sign, but did not shy away either, looking him over as though searching for something indicative. He smiled, trying to conjure up the grin he used whenever he was trying to convince Raven to do something that he knew she wanted to do but didn't want to admit wanting to do. The fact that that grin had never really worked was not something he was prepared to consider right now.

Raven lifted her head, propping herself up on her elbows, looking up at him looking the way some kids often looked at him, the ones that were scared half to death but trying desperately not to let it show. "I..." she said, unevenly, "I'm lost."

Her tone was not a complaint, but a simple statement of fact, and that threw him for a loop. "Oh," he said finally. "Well... that's okay. I'm lost too, I guess." He racked his brain, trying to think of what to say, and finally settled on the first thing that came to mind. "Maybe... we can help find each other?" he asked hopefully, extending his hand once more. It sounded stupid even to him, but before he could back down and venture something else, Raven's expression seemed to change from fear to... well a little less fear maybe, and she sat up slowly, watching him with something that might have just been expectation.

What she was expecting, he couldn't tell, but having gotten this far, he had to try something. "It'll be okay," he said. "I'm Beast Boy. I'm a... I'm a friend. I'm here to help you." He smiled again, this time a softer grin, trying with all his might to put her at ease. And though he had intended to leave it at that, from somewhere inside him, additional words came up unbidden.

"And... I was hoping maybe you could help me too?"

That seemed to do it. Though her look was still fearful, her movements still hesitant, Raven gently lifted one hand, and placed it in Beast Boy's. Even through the thick glove, he could feel the heat of Raven's hand, of the still-steaming water that dripped off it. Yet she continued to shiver, looking up at him as though waiting to see if he was going to tear her arm off or spirit her away to parts unknown.

He closed his hand around hers, gently, barely daring to put any pressure on her fingers, yet she did not pull away or try to run again. Once more he smiled, and opening his hand again, he reached over and gently took her by the shoulders, standing her up carefully, letting her find her footing on the slippery ice. Here, even a few extra paces away from the fire, the heat was much less, and the water still dripping off of Raven had already ceased to steam and was beginning to run cold once again.

As the wind blowing in from the narrow entrance to the cavern picked up all of a sudden, Raven shuddered more strongly, her teeth chattering loudly enough for Beast Boy to hear. Gratefully leaving aside the issue of amnesia or demonic heritages for the moment, Beast Boy glanced round for anything that he might use to dry her off, but there was nothing visible even in the ice, and her cloak, the only other item that came to mind, was as soaked as she was. Thinking of anything he could, he unfastened the cloak from around her shoulders, wrung it out as best he could, and then unfurled it. Retrieving an unused stick from the side of the room, he reached up and jammed it into a crack in the ceiling directly above the campfire, and then hung the still-damp cloak from it, letting it drip into the fire as it would.

As to Raven herself, there didn't appear to be a lot that he could do at this point. Beast Boy was no lover of cold, but in his opinion, where they were standing, the fire was uncomfortably hot. Raven's opinion appeared to differ. Dressed only in her leotard, she shivered still despite the heat, and this time he was at least somewhat confident it wasn't because of him. It was something of a relief. All things being equal, he preferred it when he was afraid of Raven.

Crouching back down on the opposite side of the fire, as close as he could stand to the roaring flames, Beast Boy watched as Raven crawled closer still to the bonfire, settling once more in the meltwater basin she had been crouched in earlier. The water began boiling furiously the instant she touched it, but she seemed to pay it no mind, though it should, by rights, have steamed her to death like a lobster. As it showed no sign of doing so, however, Beast Boy was prepared to let small miracles lie.

The cauldron was already several inches deeper, as the boiling water melted the ice around it, heating it to a boil to melt more ice in turn. She watched him carefully, water bubbling around her chest, as though expecting him to say or do something, though what it was she expected, he had no idea. He couldn't risk moving her out of the cave until her cloak had dried, if even then. For several moments, neither one of them moved or spoke, until Beast Boy could stand the silence no longer, and decided to venture a question.

"So... do you remember anything?"

Raven merely shook her head, her broad, violet eyes neither blinking nor deviating from him for an instant. She said nothing.

"You don't remember the Tower? The others? Cyborg? Starfire? Robin? David?" He said the names slowly, hoping they would jar something. "Me? Beast Boy?" He looked for any sign of recognition, but she merely shook her head again, this time with eyes shut, squeezed so tightly as to cause her whole body to quiver, as though in frustration with her own inability to recall.

"No!" he said quickly. "No, it's okay. It's all right. I just..." he trailed off, not sure what he wanted to say. "It'll be okay," he settled for at last.

Slowly, Raven opened her eyes once again, the boiling water sending steam wafting up around her face. Tears were in her eyes, though she did not cry.

"I'm not the person you came here to find," she said.

Beast Boy blinked dumbly for a second. "Of course you are," he said, smiling. "You just... don't remember is all. That's no big deal."

Raven shook her head violently. "He took it all away," she said in a brittle voice. "I wanted to keep it but I couldn't. He took everything away." She shivered, curling up on herself, tucking her knees up against her chest. "Everything."

"Raven, it's okay," said Beast Boy, who frankly didn't know what else he could say at this point. "Once we're out of - "

"It's not okay!" she shouted all of a sudden, tiny fists slamming down into the boiling water. "I can't help you! He took everything. I tried to stop him but he was too strong and now it's all gone! All of it. Everything I could do, everything I was, everyone I knew, it's all gone. Forever." Her head fell, as though her shouts had taken everything she had left. "You came down here for nothing," she finally said.

"That's not true," he said. "I came down here for you."

He didn't really think about what he was saying. It came it of its own accord, spilling out with such ease that he didn't realize what he was saying until he said it. Raven didn't react immediately, but when he neither qualified nor retracted what he had said, she slowly raised her eyes to him.

"Why?"

The sound of the boiling water and groaning ice slowly faded. Despite a sense of hearing a hundred times more sensitive than any normal human's, all of a sudden, Beast Boy couldn't hear anything but the sound of his own heartbeat.

"Because I had to."

Raven didn't answer, didn't move, didn't even blink. They watched one another for several hour-long seconds before Beast Boy opened his mouth and simply started talking.

"I... knew somebody once," he said. "She was called Raven. I never knew her real name, but that was what she called herself. She was from someplace far, far away, but she came here by herself, because she wanted to help people. She was brave and powerful, and she fought with all sorts of monsters and criminals, super-villains, because it was the right thing to do, even though it was dangerous. She saved thousands of people, protected the city, and all without anyone ever asking her to."

Raven's stare was too direct, and Beast Boy closed his eyes, trembling as he mechanically kept going, like a hiker trudging onwards against bitter winds.

"But... even though she was such a hero, she always thought that nobody would want anything to do with her. Because she looked different than other people, and acted different, and because as long as she could remember, people had told her that she was going to do something horrible. Something worse than anything the people she fought had ever done. And so even though she didn't want to do anything that bad, and tried to stop it, she was sure that, one day, she would turn out to be the worst person in the world."

"When I met her, she said that we didn't want to have anything to do with her. Even after she joined our team and lived in our tower, she always thought that if we knew what was going to happen we'd..." he shook his head, "... we'd never speak to her again or something. So she never talked to any of us unless she had to, and she never wanted us to do anything special for her or treat her like a friend. And whenever I tried, she would tell me to go away."

That was perhaps putting it mildly, but this was not the moment to go into details.

"But even though she didn't want us to do anything with her, and tried to push us all away, she was still one of the best people I ever met. She was tough and brave, and really smart, and really, really powerful... but I liked her because she was kind, and caring, and because all she wanted to do was to help her friends, even if she tried to hide it most of the time. Most of the time, she would try to make me leave her alone, but I never would, even when she got mad. But whenever I really needed it, whenever something really terrible happened, she would make sure I was okay, even if it meant doing all the things she said she hated doing."

Not the most eloquent of speeches perhaps, but that would not have been his style, after all, and Raven, or whatever it was that she wanted to call herself now, did not interrupt. He kept his eyes shut, mostly because he could feel tears welling up in them, but his voice didn't waver as he continued.

"I don't think she ever really knew what we all thought of her, or what I thought of her. But even though I knew all these heroes, my friends, my family, all the other heroes we met, Raven was the best person I ever knew. Most people... they act nice and caring when everything's going fine, and then when things get really bad, they get scared or angry or just selfish, and they turn all cold. Raven acted cold when things were fine, but when they got bad, whenever someone needed her help the most, then stopped caring what everyone else would think, and let her real self come out. And it's not like she became someone else or turned into a helpless flower or anything. She was still strong and brave and smart and everything, but... she would make everything feel better, just by being there."

He heard soft movement, and when he opened his eyes, Raven had lowered her head again, shutting her eyes as the slowly-deepening water continued to boil furiously around her. For a moment, he wondered if she had fallen asleep or lost interest, but when he did not continue, she raised her eyes sharply, and he saw they were filled with tears, which ran down her face and dripped into the cauldron around her.

"But... something bad did happen, didn't it?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said. "It did. Even though she tried to stop it. Even though we all did. It still happened just the way she had been told. And when it happened, she disappeared. They said she was dead, or if not dead, then gone somewhere where I'd never find her again. But I came to find her anyway."

Raven sighed sadly, sniffing and trying vainly to wipe the tears from her face. "She's not here," she said.

"Yes she is," said Beast Boy. "I can tell. And I know you don't think so, and that's okay. And I know that Trigon or whoever took everything away from you, and that's okay too. That's not why I came. I didn't want your help because you could fight Trigon or fix Robin or turn everything back the way it was. I mean if you could, then that's great, but that's not why I came. I was just hoping maybe you could help me."

"I can't," she said softly.

Beast Boy shook his head. "You already did," he explained. "I told you before, Raven would always make me feel better, just by being there, remember?"

Carefully, Beast Boy stood up, moving around the campfire slowly, and crouching down as near as he could to Raven, at the very edge of the bubbling pool. She watched him like a hawk, not with trepidation but something else, the deepening water now beginning to splash over her shoulders.

"Raven always was afraid that she would turn into a portal" he said, haltingly, his tongue stumbling as he tried to find the words to say what he meant, "or something else, like a weapon or a tool that her father would use to do something terrible. And I guess... I guess that happened. But I don't want a tool or a portal or a weapon or something else that Raven could have done. I just want Raven back. I want you back. And I don't care if it doesn't mean anything. I just..." he lost his place, fumbled about with his mind, and seized on the first thing that came to mind. "I don't need Raven to do anything for me. I just... need her back."

Silence fell, not long but deep, as Raven looked up at Beast Boy from her bubbling pit. He said nothing, though a thousand things were competing with one another to explode from his head, all refused access to his tongue by irrevocable edict of his conscious mind. Raven stared silently at him, her violet eyes burning holes through his head. A second passed, then another, then a third, each one weighty like the passing of decades. And then, after an eternity that lasted only four or five seconds, Raven simply melted.

All at once, the tears that had been leaking from the sides of her eyes began to run in a flood, and she squeezed her eyes shut in a vain attempt to stem them. She fell forward against the side of the pit, catching it with both arms, and her small body shook violently as uncontrollable sobs tore their way out. Acting without thought, he reached down to help her, but she did not take his hand, instead scrambling awkwardly out of the cauldron of boiling water up onto the ice next to it. With difficulty she stood, shaking this time not in cold or fear but in nervous breakdown. And as the last invisible defenses she had shattered into a million pieces, Raven fell forward, and collapsed into Beast Boy's arms.

It hurt.

There was nothing spiritual or mental about the pain. Raven was covered in boiling water, and merely touching her, even through fireproof gloves or a mylar uniform, was like grasping a hot iron, sending spikes of searing pain up his nerves to his addled brain. Yet if the lightest touch was agony, the immense, tight embrace that he threw around her, clutching Raven to him like a part of himself that had been amputated and then discovered again, somehow that felt like incarnated joy. She might have lit him on fire and burned him to ash for all he cared, he wanted nothing save this, and this more than anything he had ever desired in life.

How long they stood there, Raven held tightly against Beast Boy, neither one could have determined. Long enough that the fire burned out and the cauldron of water chilled and refroze, long enough that Raven's skin and clothing slowly cooled until the pain of embracing her faded away. She cried at first, cried like the child she was now, unreservedly, unashamedly, with none of the futile attempts to stem the tears and reforge her mask of stoicism that she customarily used. No matter how tightly he squeezed her, she clung to him tighter still, crying until the ice beneath them was pockmarked with frozen tears, knotting her fingers into his uniform and holding onto him like a drowning swimmer clinging to a life preserver. Tighter and tighter he held her, until finally he shifted forms into that of a Burmese Python, and gathering her in his coils, he embraced Raven as tightly as he dared, until only the fear that she might suffocate bade him stop.

To judge from her reaction, it was still not enough.

Yet even Raven's tears abated at last, and the sobs subsided slowly. Bit by bit, her grip relaxed, though his did not, until finally he dared to open his eyes, and found her laying against him, her eyes shut, her face streaked with red, holding onto him even in what he could have taken to be unconsciousness or sleep, though he knew it was neither. And though it probably should have been no surprise at all, given that she was currently wrapped up tightly by a two hundred pound constrictor snake, for the first time since Beast Boy had found her, Raven was not shivering.

They might have stayed like this forever, Beast Boy actually considered it and Raven seemed as eager to release him as she was to race outside and leap back into the chasm they had left, but eventually, Beast Boy reluctantly shifted back to his human form, doing so slowly enough to avoid dropping Raven suddenly. Having done so, he stood up, carrying her in both arms, and held her awkwardly with one as he reached up and retrieved her cloak from where he had hung it. She was more or less dried already, he wrapped her tightly in it regardless, fastening it to her shoulder clasps.

"There," he said with a smile, setting her down on her feet and crouching down to look her in the eye. "All set."

And that's when something impaled him.

There was no pain, just a sudden, tremendous shock, and the sound of ripping fabric, and he looked down, and saw a long, white, helixical horn sticking out of his stomach. It gleamed, white against the ghostly light, like a jewel or carving of ivory, and somehow he had plenty of time to look it over, to admire the gentle curve of the spiral along its surface, to turn over what it was, a walrus tusk perhaps, or a narwhal horn, before it withdrew as suddenly as it had appeared, and all his strength deserted him at once, and he fell.

Raven jumped back as Beast Boy fell forward, face first onto the ice, her eyes wide with as much shock, if not more, than Beast Boy had had. Stepping back, wrapping her cloak around herself half-consciously, she raised her eyes and gasped as her breath was choked off by her constricting throat.

Behind Beast Boy, stood Beast Boy.

The other Beast Boy grey, grey and white all over with eyes of blood red and a grin that could have sent far greater nerves than Raven's fleeing into the night. Lightly he moved, lithe and quiet, with all the assurance of balance of a cat, stepping over Beast Boy's fallen form, and kicking aside his weak attempt to grab at the double's foot. He paid Beast Boy no further mind, ignoring the slowly spreading puddle of dark red blood that began to emerge from beneath the fallen changeling, as he closed in on Raven, who had backed into a corner of the ice cave.

"N... no..." said Beast Boy weakly. It was only the proximity that let anyone hear him at all.

The double did not turn back, only grinned at Raven, revealing razor sharp fangs.

"Well..." said the double to Raven, his form already rippling, "whadaya say we find out what you taste like?"

O-O-O

'Ultima Ratio Regum.'

The silver handle of the cane was hooked under Terra's cheek as she lay flat on her stomach on the ground. It felt warm to the touch, but not hot, the flames that softly emanated from it refusing to burn her skin. From where she lay, she could see the words engraved on the handle in flowery cursive font, wrapped around it like ivy.

"I have to say, Terra," came the voice from above. "This isn't quite what I expected."

Deep beneath the asphalt, she felt the earth waiting, quivering in anticipation of her commands, and with a thought, she thrust it upwards, letting a geyser of loose dirt erupt from the ground, carrying chunks of bedrock the size of motorcycles. The vaulting hail of stone and earth threw her up into the air, but she reformed the dirt into a slide of sorts, breaking her fall and depositing her back on her feet. But no sooner had it done so, than half a dozen rocks exploded in and around the slide, and blew her back onto the ground, as the remaining dirt flew high up into the air, raining down like a soft hail.

Coughing, wafting the dust out of her face with a wave of her hand, Terra clawed her way back to her feet and turned towards where she knew her opponent had to be. He was standing at ease, amidst the falling bits of debris, one hand resting on the handle of his fiery cane, the vague hints of a smile appearing below his mirrored, expressionless sunglasses. Rocks and clods of earth fell all around him, yet any that threatened to land on or near him popped out of existence in a puff of dust some dozen yards overhead, as if he were surrounded by some invisible field of protection. The falling debris continued to pop and burst even as he slowly began to approach.

Searching for an advantage, Terra fell back at the same pace. Yet rather than attack directly, Devastator simply smiled and hefted the cane, turning the carved handle over in his gloved fingers, running them over the words she had seen before.

"It's Latin," he said, without being prompted. "It means 'The Last Argument of Kings'. Louis the Fourteenth used to have it engraved on all of the cannons in his army, as a reminder."

"A reminder of what?" asked Terra, still retreating slowly down the broken street.

"A reminder of the final recourse to which Kings can appeal, should they not get what they want. The ultimate trump card to every other form of compulsion, legal, moral, or spiritual. In the end, if all other arguments fail, kings can resort to naked, violent force, to compel their wishes."

"So what, you're some kind of king?" asked Terra, trying to sound more confident than she was.

Devastator only laughed. "No," he said with a flourish of the cane. "I'm not a king." He stepped towards her and lifted the cane like a wizard's wand, aiming down it towards the yellow-shrouded teenager. "I'm a cannon."

The entire street exploded.

Like a tidal wave of raw violence, a section of the street from sidewalk to sidewalk simply detonated, hurling burnt-out cars into the air like matchsticks and sending the remains of streetlights and telephone poles careening away like disintegrating sculptures of sand. Instantly, all view of Devastator was lost behind a wall of black smoke and fine debris, which hung in the air for moments before some invisible force directed it towards Terra. Section after section exploded, hurling buried wires and pipes into the air, a wave front of raw devastation and force that scoured the very asphalt off the ground moments before the bedrock it covered joined the explosions.

Terra did the only thing she could. Crouching down, she called to the earth around her, and pulled it inwards, packing it around herself as tightly as her geokinesis would permit, forming a sphere around her of packed earth and rock denser than granite, stronger than face-hardened steel. The blast washed over her like a tidal wave, clawing at the shield of stone, cracking it like a walnut, but she managed, barely, to hold it together for the second or two it took to subside.

As soon as the thunder and shocks dissipated, she hurled out her arms and the shield exploded into a thousand pieces, flung in every direction like bullets. Some were, of necessity, hurled back at the agent of these explosions, but she neither assumed they would score, nor expected them to. Without even pausing to gauge the damage, she reached down and pulled a three ton rock out of the ground the size of a moving van. Normally she would have let it float for a moment, taken a half-second to refocus her will, but she knew now from experience what a disaster that instant's hesitation could be. In one, fell swoop, she threw the rock at Devastator, tearing it into three pieces as it flew and letting them corkscrew towards him, in the hopes that he would not have time to destroy or deflect all three.

But he did. He did without even breaking stride, raising his cane and blowing all three rocks to pieces the size of marbles that bounced and scattered down the ruins of the street. Without missing a pace, he turned his cane to his side and blew a manhole cover into the air, sending it flipping end over end like an outsized coin, moments before sweeping his hand forward, causing a series of perfectly metered explosions to hurl the cover straight at Terra like a spinning saw blade. Acting on pure instinct, Terra dove to the ground, ducking beneath the flying cover, but it did her no good. The entire thing exploded like a bomb some ten feet away from her, sending her flying down the street and into the side of a parked car hard enough to stave it in.

"Such a waste."

Her head spinning, her ears ringing with the collision, Terra managed somehow to grab onto the side of the car she had been thrown against, and haul herself to her feet. She fought for breath, letting the shattered glass from the car's window roll off of her, blinking the blood out of her eyes, before half-turning back to Devastator, who stood two dozen paces away, shaking his head.

"I saw your campaign against the Titans," he said. "Warp showed me Slade's footage. It was textbook perfect. Every element, planning, logistics, research, tactics, everything was perfect. You made my efforts against them look like a child's temper tantrum, and you did it all when you were what, fifteen?" He scoffed. "Slade can pretend all he likes, but I know that wasn't his plan. I knew Slade. I know what the overcomplicated disasters he calls plans look like. That plan was yours, wasn't it?"

"That's right," said Terra, spitting blood onto the ground, trying to think of options.

Devastator shook his head. "When I think of what you could have been..." he said. "You could have been a master. A grandmaster. Bigger than Slade, bigger than me. But you pissed it all away. In my time, in your own, you threw it aside, either out of fear, which at least I can understand, or now, out of this quixotic pursuit of..." he threw his hands up violently, "of I don't even know what! Forgiveness? Redemption? What exactly are you looking for here? Why would you even consider standing and fighting someone you don't stand a chance of beating?"

"You talk too much," spat Terra, trying to force her balance to recover.

"And you think too little," retorted Devastator instantly. "I prefer my vice."

"And how much thinking were you doing when you decided to work for Trigon?" demanded Terra.

"A shade more than you did when you decided to work against him!" blasted back Devastator. "What was your master plan, exactly? Thaw out David and hope for the best? Or did you even take the time between about-face turns to conceive of one? If you had only killed David back when you had the chance, back when Cinderblock near beat him to death. If you hadn't hesitated instead of finishing the damn job that time in the park, then none of this would have happened, and you know it! It's a bit late now to turn around and claim that you didn't want him to win all along, when you weren't willing to do what was necessary to see it stopped back when it might have mattered!"

Terra tried to reply, but the words dissolved on her tongue like sugar cubes. Devastator spat, actually spat on the ground next to him in something that looked like disgust, and began to approach.

"You haven't got the first idea what you're doing here," he said contemptuously, swishing his cane through the smoky air as though trying to strip leaves off an invisible hedge. "Just some half-assed sense of expiation and guilt. You don't care about David. You don't care about the Titans. And while you might care that Trigon has conquered the world, you certainly didn't lift a finger to stop it. So don't sit there and pretend to me that this is some noble stand against the darkness. Because, young lady, this, right here, is nothing but euthanasia."

With an angry cry, Terra spun around, hurling her fist at Devastator and commanding the rocks around her subconsciously to follow her command. A stone the size of a car engine shot at Devastator's head at her command with speed so blinding that she was unable to see it herself. So fast, so spur-of-the-moment was the shot, that even Devastator could not deflect it in time. His instincts alone saved him from being struck dead on the spot, as he lunged to one side, and the rock flew by, merely grazing the side of his face, leaving a small scratch behind on his left cheek.

Surprised by her own initiative, Terra did not have the wherewithal to follow up, and Devastator stood back up straight, for once silenced. He brought his free hand to his face, running his fingers along the scratch she had given him, feeling the blood and bringing it around to his eyes. It was several seconds before he looked back up at Terra, his expression completely changed. Of all things, he seemed almost amused.

"Well," he said, "touched a nerve, did I?"

Terra let out a shout, and brought her hand around once more, commanding another rock to do as the first had, but this time, Devastator was ready for it, and swung his cane and he blotted the stone out of the air with almost contemptuous ease, before lifting the cane to the heavens. Terra had not a moment to react before the ground beneath her feet exploded like a volcano, hurling her and the car next to her into the air. The car wound up smashing into the roof of a nearby building, collapsing through it into the interior. Terra fetched up on the pavement some thirty feet behind where she had started, laying prone and motionless like a boned fish.

Slowly, Devastator began to walk towards her.

"Tell me," he asked lightly as he approached, "do you know happened to you in Warp's little alternate future?" Terra, laying flat on her back, could barely convince her lungs to work, much less talk. She lifted her head gingerly, watching as Devastator approached, slowly but inexorably. She said nothing, she couldn't say anything, but he seemed to take her silence for an answer in and of itself.

"I have no idea," said Devastator with a smile. "Nobody does."

Coughing, tasting blood on her tongue and lips, Terra struggled to get back up once again, but her limbs refused to obey her, and she could only watch as Devastator closed in.

"I was hired once, to try and find you. A research firm wanted your DNA, no doubt for some deranged plan to take over the world" He shrugged. "Their reasons didn't interest me. I searched for the better part of two years. Followed every lead I could find. There wasn't so much a trail as... dots to be connected. Incidents and appearances, verified or speculative, all over the world. Landslides, earthquakes, the occasional pitched battle with someone. You know the sort well enough, I imagine."

Weakly, Terra raised her hand, conjuring a rock up from the ground and lobbing it at Devastator, but it had neither force nor accuracy, and Devastator deflected it not with an explosion, but with his cane itself, knocking it lightly aside like a tennis player as he continued forward.

"I never found a living trace," he said, smiling. "The trail was too cold, and nothing had been seen in years. After two years of searching, I finally had to admit defeat. Some of the researchers speculated that you had somehow found a way to finally control your abilities, and settled down somewhere quiet, but... I think we both know that's highly unlikely, isn't it?"

He was right in front of her now, standing above her and looking down, his cane held in both hands, red flames licking at his fingers as he inspected her the way a teacher might have done a particularly disappointing student.

"My theory," said Devastator, turning the cane over in his hands, "is much simpler. I believe that at some point... you simply died. An accident, an unremarked battle, perhaps a disease, who knows?" His hand slid up to the cane's handle. "Whatever the cause, you clearly... just died. Alone. Friendless. And forgotten."

He twisted the handle and pulled, drawing the sword out from within the cane. In one swift stroke, he swept the thin tip of the blade down and planted it on Terra's throat, directly under her chin, forcing her to lift her head, to look him in the eye. He stared down at her, at the fear in her eyes, and smirked.

"I guess some things don't change," said Devastator.

Without conscious command, Terra closed her eyes, and waited for the sharp prick that would augur the end.

But it never came. The light pressure of the swordpoint remained as constant as ever, and after a second, she re-opened her eyes. Devastator still stood above her, the sword held as evenly as a surgeon's scalpel. His blind eyes, peeking over his sunglasses, were as blank as billiard balls, yet she could see them moving, darting from side to side as though in quest of something. Slowly, he lifted his head, turning it slowly as he furrowed his brow, the fingers of his free hand working slowly as he seemed to search for something. And then all of a sudden, as quick as lightning, Devastator pulled his sword back, and swung it around as fast as possible to his left, the razor-sharp ribbon of steel making a sharp 'whooshing' sound as it cut through the air.

An instant later, there was an explosion in mid-air.

The explosion seemed to emerge out of nothingness. Terra's eyes could catch nothing beyond an instant's glimpse of something moving so fast as to be a blur before the fireball blossomed out of nowhere. It was a paltry explosion by the standards of what had come before, but before it had even ended Terra saw something drop out of the air near its epicenter. A small cord, made of spooled steel fibre, which terminated abruptly, whatever it had been attached to having just been peremptorily detonated. The cord landed limply on the ground, and Terra's eyes automatically followed it, running along the shattered street, up the broken curb, and finally to -

"What the - "

At the edge of the street stood a small figure dressed all in grey. Skin, clothing, hair, even the belt around his waist was some shade of ashen grey, save only for his eyes, which glowered like smouldering coals. He stood at the side of the street, in front of a gutted and ruined building, one arm raised towards Devastator. In his hand was held not a proper weapon but a grappling gun, over-sized and attached via spool to the end of the cord.

For several long seconds, neither the grey figure, nor the man in the street moved a muscle, staring at one another with eyes either milk-white or cherry-red, that revealed nothing of the thoughts of their bearers. Yet in expression they could not be different. Devastator stood in open surprise, mouth slightly agape, the sword in his hand held limply at his side, as though he were looking at something that his brain was unable to properly process. He seemed to have forgotten that Terra was there at all. His counterpart on the other hand might as well have been a statue, staring unblinkingly at Devastator with the gun extended rigidly, though with the grappling hook destroyed, and the cord laying on the ground, there was nothing further he could do with it.

It was Devastator who finally found the wherewithal to speak.

"What in God's name are you doing here?" he asked, and his voice was as surprised as his expression.

David did not speak immediately. Slowly, he lowered the grappling gun, letting it fall from his hand and clatter to the ground. When he finally replied, he did not answer the question.

"Leave her alone," he said.

Devastator's puzzlement, if anything, seemed to increase. "Why?" he asked, but without swagger. It might well have been Terra's imagination, but for the first time tonight, he looked like someone not in control of the situation, as though David's re-appearance had broken some unwritten code somewhere. "She tried to kill you," he said, "both of us. Why should I leave her alone?"

"Because I said so," said David, and Terra recognized the tone. It was the same one he had used on that night in the catacombs beneath the library, when he had refused to go with her to meet Slade. It wasn't bombastic, but it was the tone of someone whose mind was absolutely made up.

Devastator did not seem impressed. "You tried to kill her yourself once," he said.

"And now I'm telling you to leave her alone," said David without missing a beat or raising his voice a single decibel. "Or I'll kill you right where you're standing."

Slowly, an incredulous smile began to spread across Devastator's face. "Really?" he asked, not sounding in intimidated in the least. "And how, pray tell, will you do that?"

David didn't say a word. Instead, in one, single motion, he reached to his side and pulled a small object off of his belt, which snapped open in his hand into a razor-sharp blade shaped like a crescent. Without a moment's hesitation, without even changing expression, he reared back, stepped forward, and threw it as hard as he could at Devastator's head.

The result probably not the effect he was hoping for.

Devastator watched impassively as the birdarang bounced a couple of times before rolling to a halt some six feet away from him. He smiled again, this time in the manner of an adult amused by the antics of a child, and casually stepped forward, stooped, and picked up the titanium throwing knife, turning it over in his free hand before looking back up at David.

"You know," he said, as casually as if he were discussing the weather, "I'm told there's a trick to using these."

David reached for another birdarang.

There was a series of loud 'pops', and David was blown back off his feet onto the ground, as every one of the birdarangs around his waist burst into slivers of metal. The explosions were tiny, no flames, no flashes, barely enough to break the birdarangs apart, but it left David laying flat on his back, cradling his hand.

"What exactly did you think you were going to accomplish by coming back here?" asked Devastator, walking towards David carefully, his flaming sword held casually at his side. "Kill me? Save her?" he asked, sweeping the sword back towards Terra. "What's she to you?"

"She tried to help me," said David, getting back to his feet.

"She tried to murder you," replied the older man. "You and all your so-called friends."

"So did you," spat David back venomously.

Devastator stopped, his expression changing to one of smugness. "And?" he asked. "At least I never pretended otherwise."

"This isn't about her," said David. "It's about you." He paused, just for a split second, before correcting himself. "It's about us."

"Really?" asked Devastator. "And what about us do you wish to discuss, David?"

David did not hesitate. "You killed them."

"I've killed a lot of people," replied Devastator. "Who are you talking about."

"You know who I'm talking about!"

Devastator smiled. "Yes, I suppose I do. Why? Do you have a problem with that?"

"Yes," said David.

"So what do you purpose to do about it?"

David's red eyes were as level as he replied with a voice made of ice. "I'm gonna wipe you all over this street."

Devastator was not intimidated. He shook his head as if in amazement. "With what?" he asked. "A handful of trinkets you don't even know how to use? Match sticks and stones against Devastator? I must have hit you harder than I thought. What exactly do you - "

"Shut! Up!" shouted David, kicking aside a piece of rubble for emphasis. "Close your mouth and stop talking! I don't want to hear any more of your bullshit!"

"I'm not here to do what you want," scoffed Devastator. "I don't dance to your tune."

"No, you dance to Trigon's, or to whoever put you up to killing them in the first place."

"Put me up to it?" retorted Devastator, and now his voice was angry too. "Your 'friends' put me up to it, every day of their lives!"

"That's a lie! They wouldn't - "

"Don't tell me about things I know better than you, boy!" shouted Devastator. You have no idea what they would and wouldn't do!"

"I lived with them!" yelled David.

"For a year," retorted Devastator. "I've lived in their shadows for over twenty. Ducking for cover, hiding from every bird call, spending a quarter of my life waiting for some damn bone to knit back together because they thought it would be funny to listen to the sounds it made when it broke. You think you're the only one shocked to find out what his alter ego's been up to while he was away?"

"They took me in!" snapped David, teeth clenched, eyes wet with tears that he refused to allow out. "They gave me everything! Everything I have! And you killed them like animals!"

"They were animals" said Devastator, his voice pitiless and cold, yet brimming with rage. "And I killed them because they needed to die every day they drew breath. I killed them for what they did to me, and to every other person who crossed their path!"

Devastator's voice became louder and louder, the flames at his hand burning higher with every breathless word. "Sanctimonious, self-righteous hypocrites who would stand by and let six million people die at their own pace rather than dirty their hands by acting to stop it. And they had the temerity to turn around and accuse me of malfeasance because I saw fit to use what was given to me in a way they didn't approve of! To come after me all across the planet, to intercede on behalf of the scum I was burning off the face of the Earth, to stand up and judge me because they were so much holier than I was!"

"You were murdering people!" shouted David

"I was murdering people who needed murdering!" thundered Devastator. "I was doing what they wouldn't dare to face, because they couldn't stomach it. I was the one who refused to look away when a job got dirty or when the hard calls needed to be made, and they turned on me for it like vultures! And you stand there and defend them, why? What did they ever do for you, except let you wear one of their ridiculous outfits and chase after shoplifters alongside them? All your protestations of self-reliance, and the instant they give you a roof and a bowl of soup, you turn into their little lickspittle."

David's burning eyes narrowed. "They were my friends," he said, his voice choked and bitter. "I doubt you understand what that even means."

"I understand it well enough," said Devastator. "They taught you to think like they do, share the same bias, the same hypocrisy. Until you'd believe them over your own self."

"I don't believe anything anymore," said David quietly, though with no less emotion for the lack of volume. "But I know them. And I know you."

Devastator frowned. "Oh you know me, do you?"

"Yes," said David without a trace of doubt or hesitation. "You're what I always knew was going to happen." He stared at his older counterpart with an unwavering gaze so direct, that even the unflappable Devastator seemed to flinch. "You're me without brakes. Without anyone to stop you. You're what I always knew that I was going to become. All the years I knew I had these powers, you're the reason I was afraid of them."

"You were afraid of them because you didn't have the spine to act," snarled Devastator.

"I was afraid of them because I knew what I would use them for if nobody stopped me," responded David. "I was afraid of them, because I was afraid of you. That's why I never used them. That's why I never told anyone about them. Because I was afraid that I would turn into you."

"You were afraid of your own shadow," said Devastator. "You became me in sound mind, once you finally stopped this childish obsession with an absolutist morality and predestined stock roles. Not everything is a matter of black and white."

"Murdering the Titans," said David, "was."

"Then I'll ask you again, boy, what do you purpose to do about it?"

There was only a fractional hesitation, but a moment later, David reached behind himself, and from his back pocket, drew a small, metal cylinder, the size of a telephone receiver. He brought it around to his front, holding it in his right hand, and then, still staring straight into Devastator's lifeless eyes, he pressed an invisible button somewhere on its surface. There was a series of soft clicks, the sound of oiled metal sliding over metal, and then all of a sudden the cylinder telescoped outwards into a four-foot steel pole, featureless and colorless, save for an etched monogram on either end, an elaborate "R", the meaning of which needed no explanation.

There was, perhaps, a certain mindset whereby David's action could have been seen as laughable, even hilarious, for a staff made of stainless steel, in the hands of someone who had no idea how to make proper use of it, was not precisely the weapon calculated to offer the greatest threat to the wielder of Devastator. Yet Devastator watched as David drew the staff, saying nothing, and only when it was fully extended did he lift his eyes to meet his younger counterpart's.

"Do you even know how to use that?" he asked.

David didn't hesitate or flinch. "Not a clue," he said.

"And what's to stop me from snapping it like a twig, or turning it into a pipe bomb?"

"Nothing at all."

"So then let me get this straight," said Devastator. "Because your choices led directly to the annihilation of Earth and the reign of Trigon, you're going to stand there, cognizant of the fact that I have the most powerful weapon in human history at my absolute disposal, and, with a metal stick you don't even know how to use, attempt to beat me senseless for the crime of having killed people you never met that happen to share the same names as your so-called friends?"

David didn't even have the courtesy to look embarrassed. "That's right," he said.

Several seconds passed in silence.

"You know, I think I did hit you harder than I thought," said Devastator, but his voice was stilled, and his heart wasn't in it. Indeed of all the things thrown at him, by Terra, or David or anyone else so far, this last confirmation seemed to have struck the hardest. His sword hung limp at his side, as he stared at David not in disgust, not in amusement, not in the terse, tried patience of an adult addressing a child, but in what looked like total bafflement, as though for the first time, he was witnessing something truly outside his understanding.

"You did," said David, and he took a step towards Devastator, to no reaction from the other. "But that's not why I'm here." Of all things, David smiled, bitter though it was. "Do you want to know why?"

"Enlighten me," said Devastator, mirthlessly.

David drew a small, round object off his belt with his free hand and held it out towards Devastator. Terra recognized it instantly as one of the Titans' communicators.

"Look inside this," he said. "And you'll see,"

Devastator's puzzlement deepened. "See what?"

"The circuitry," said David. "What's it made out of?"

Devastator fell quiet for a moment, before his eyes darted to the communicator with a grumble for effect. It took but a moment for him to find the answer, and when he did, his eyes slowly moved back to David's. "Gold," he said.

David's face remained impassive. "Do you even know what that is?" he asked.

"An all but useless, hyper-conductive metal that people chase after because it's rare and shiny," said Devastator, now with a pronounced growl to his voice. "What's your point?"

"My point," said David, "is that you don't have any."

Devastator scoffed. "I'm not a teenaged girl, David. Gold isn't exactly my highest priority. And besides, I will have some once I take that off your dead body."

"No," said David, utterly serious. "You won't. And you never will. You threw it all away, burned it out of yourself, because you couldn't find any use for it, because it couldn't hold an edge or stop a bullet or do something practical for you, could it? So you don't have any, and you think that makes you tough or pragmatic or whatever. So now all you are is ice and smoke, plated over with a sheet of iron so that no-one will see just what you're actually made of."

Devastator's face slowly lost its smugness, its self-assured superiority, and his lifeless eyes ceased to roll as he stared at David like he was watching something with which he was wholly unfamiliar. His mouth worked several times before he could coax the words to life.

"Is that all you have for me?" he asked, but his voice was hollow and stilled, and carried none of the self-assurance of just minutes before. "Petty symbolism?"

"That's what we are," said David, raising his arms and sweeping them around the area. "That's all we are." He gestured to himself. "The color fade, the eyes, what do you think this is?"

"Trigon's idea of a theatrical joke," replied Devastator.

"Maybe," said David. "But he's not wrong. Not this time. We're the same person, but I'm not the real one, am I? I'm the deviation. I'm the one who went off the rails." He pointed the staff at Devastator. "You said it yourself. You're me, the way I was supposed to be. You're the original. I'm the alternate."

Another step closer, and another, until David was standing within three or four feet of Devastator, and Devastator had only to reach out with his sword, to strike David's head off. And yet Devastator did not so much as lift his arm, and David did not even glance at the sword burning quietly at Devastator's side, his red eyes still locked on Devastator's empty white ones.

"You wanted to know why?" asked David. "Why I turned my back on your path, why I decided to trust them instead, even though I knew what I was supposed to be, even though I knew how it would end?" He held the communicator up to Devastator's face. "Because of this. Because they gave me this."

"A communicator?"

"A communicator," said David, perfectly straight, "and everything inside of it. That's what they gave me. And they didn't have to. There were good, solid reasons why they shouldn't have done that. In fact, if they hadn't done it, then none of this would have happened. And they knew that. And so do I. But they gave it to me anyway. For a long time I couldn't figure out why, and now I know that it just doesn't matter."

All of the ambient noise, for Terra, began to fade into nothingness, and she felt her breath catch as she caught the tone in David's voice. The golden aura around her hands faded as she watched the two David's staring at one another, one preternaturally calm, the other looking much as she must have. David did not glance in her direction, did not seem to notice overtly that she was there, yet to her ears, it was as though he was speaking directly at her.

"I'm not here to punish you," said David, "or get revenge. I'm not gonna fight you for them, because I can't, and you know it. But I'm here, we're all here, because they gave me something I didn't have, and you never found." David reached forward, and placed the communicator in Devastator's free hand, before drawing his own hand back. "I'm your evil twin," said David, as Devastator slowly lifted the communicator, staring down at it as he might a magical talisman, his expression unreadable. "I'm not supposed to exist. But I do exist. And I'm here because, if this is really the end, then I won't let the last piece of me alive on this planet, be someone made of nothing except ice, and iron..." he stepped back from Devastator, and only then did he seem to catch Terra's gaze, if only for an instant, "and smoke."

Very slowly, the man called Devastator lifted his head, his gaze passing from the communicator to the younger version of himself in front of him. His face was rigid and mask-like, his movement precise and carefully controlled, as he lowered his arm to one side. He locked his eyes on David, his fingers gripping the hilt of his sword, and the ridged surface of the communicator.

"You've got me all wrong, David," said Devastator, his voice a flat, hoarse tone that seemed to tremble with the effort he required to keep it still. "There's no smoke here. No iron either. I did away with them a long, long time ago. All I've got for you is ice." He stepped forward, leaning in towards David, his voice beginning to tremble as it shrank to a harsh whisper.

"Ice," he repeated, "and fire."

The ground exploded beneath David's feet, a blast more shocking for the silence that had preceded it, hurling David up and away in a shower of asphalt and gravel. He landed twenty feet down the street, sliding to a stop against the curb, stunned and coughing, the metal staff still clutched in one hand.

Devastator walked towards him with deliberation and poise, neither speeding his step nor lifting his arms, yet there was something wholly different about him, an intangible, ineffable thing, found in his bearing and expression and the mechanical way in which he moved, as if each motion had to be precisely controlled for him to avoid flying apart.

"You want to talk about my shortcomings?" he asked, his voice a deep snark. "Tear me apart and see what makes me tick? It's late in the game to get introspective, David." His teeth clenched, and he hissed the words out like bad-tasting liquids. "Very. Late. Indeed."

David struggled to his feet, before swinging around with the staff in hand, aiming at the side of Devastator's head. With a single slash, one that he managed to make look contemptuous, Devastator blocked the blow, before lashing out and clubbing David in the face with the hilt of his sword, staggering him and sending him stumbling back against a car.

"Maybe you're right," said Devastator. "Maybe you were created to torture me. Maybe this is all just an elaborate put on to get through to the man who dared to wield what Trigon thought was rightly his. Have you considered that? That your bout of enlightenment was nothing more than the afterthought of a demon bent on tormenting me for some perceived slight? Hrm?" Louder and louder got Devastator's voice, as he paced back and forth like a caged animal. "You insignificant afterbirth, what gives you the right to judge me? If I'm so broken, so incomplete, then what's it say about you?"

There was a roar, not of monsters or people but the earth itself, from behind, and Devastator turned to see a barrage of boulders the size of minivans hurtling towards him. Yet he neither wavered nor hesitated, sneering as he turned and raised his sword to the heavens like an angelic warrior. The rocks exploded as one, flying to pieces like massive fragmentation bombs, casting debris and rubble about the ruined street in a cacophony of violence and rage, leaving a cloud of impenetrable smoke behind. With a swipe of his sword, he bisected the cloud itself with two thunderous explosions, revealing Terra standing on the other side, sheathed in her golden glow. She moved, as though to summon more stone, but with a contemptuous overhead slash, Devastator blew a car into the air effortlessly, before propelling it towards her with a series of rocket blasts, forcing her to abort what she was doing and erect a shield of bedrock, against which the car smashed and detonated.

Back swept Devastator to David, who was still picking himself up, and he strode towards him with purpose, the sword tracing fiery figures in the air around him. From within his coat, he drew out the canesword's sheath, and slid the sword back into it bare instants before the reconstituted cane caught 'fire' once more. Yet before David could determine what this augured, Devastator walked up to him, knocked his clumsy swing aside with his cane, seized him by the collar, and smashed him across the temple with the head of the cane.

"You think this is a game?" he asked, voice quavering with emotion. "You think I made my decisions in a vacuum?" Another blow, sending David reeling, propped up only by the iron grip Devastator had on his collar. "You want to know what pain is?" asked Devastator, hitting him again. "What it's like to be helpless and broken and with nobody to come and save you? You want to find out what it's like to be discarded and abandoned? Well let me show you!"

Reeling from the blows, blood tricking down the side of his head, David could not resist or even speak, as Devastator strode off down the street, dragging him by the collar, one hand gripping his throat, the other holding the blood-spattered cane. From behind, he saw Terra lower her shield of rock, and despite her own injuries, half-limp, half-run after them, pulling rocks from the ground as she did so. Yet Devastator sensed her without turning his head, and raised his hand with the cane without bothering to turn back. An entire section of the street between Terra and David exploded like a thermite bomb, sending a wall of flames hundreds of feet into the air, blocking all access.

Ahead, the road dropped away sharply, running down from the shallow ridge they had been ascending, and Devastator reached the edge of the ridge before hurling David to the ground at its very lip. Before David had a chance to get his bearings, Devastator stepped around him and grabbed his head, forcing him to raise it, and to look out upon the scene before him, a ruined cityscape that trailed on into the darkness, seemingly forever, choked by smoke and the red flames of wrath.

But there was something else.

Ahead, far far away, in the distance, there was movement, so far off and with so much dust and smoke between, that David could not tell what was actually there. The figures were tiny, mere ants at this distance, yet they moved, unquestionably, towards and away from one another. For a moment, David thought that they had to be demons, more of Trigon's minions, dancing at some unspoken command, but then, faintly but visibly, one of them emitted a light.

A bright blue light.

David froze.

"That's right," said Devastator, releasing his head and standing back up. "You know what that is, don't you?"

His head still reeling from the blows, David struggled to form coherent words. "C... Cyborg?"

"Of course," sneered Devastator. "Who else would it be?" He pointed to one side with his staff. "And have a look over there."

David followed the gesture, and thought he saw more movement, this time atop what looked like an enormous black edifice, all but invisible through the haze. The moving figures were invisible at this distance, save that every so often, one of them emitted a flash of bright green, seemingly from nowhere, but of a color that had been burned into David's very soul, that he would have recognized anywhere.

"They're alive?" he choked out, staring wide-eyed at the far-off display.

"Of course they're alive," said Devastator. "Trigon doesn't kill outright if he can avoid it. He likes to play with his food. He'll keep them alive until the torture isn't worth it any longer. That's what he does. David's eyes slowly turned back to Devastator, as the demolitionist stared daggers down at him, cane in hand. "But it's not what I do, David."

Something like ice wrapped itself around David's heart. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I'm tired of this waste of time. It's not my style, and it's not my preference, but Trigon wanted you tortured to death for presuming to hold Devastator back from him, and I'm a man who completes the jobs he's given. So what I'm going to do, David," said Devastator, as he gestured in turn at the near-invisible figures, "is go to each and every one of your friends in turn. And I'm going to kill them. All of them. In front of you."

David's voice deserted him, his eyes widening to saucer size. "No," he managed to say.

"Yes," snapped David. "Every one in turn. I'm gonna kill them, the way I killed them once before. They didn't have a prayer of stopping me then, even all together and with thirty years experience under their belts. What chance do you think they'll have now, alone, surrounded, mere children?"

"No," repeated David, "no, no, you can't!"

"Oh yes I can!" roared Devastator. "but that's not the best part! The best part, David, is that they'll know who's doing it. We share more than a name, you and I. You recognized me instantly. So did Terra. They'll do the same. They'll know who I am when I come after them. Only unlike their evil sides, I'll be coming at them in living color! And it's possible that they won't know the difference, but I would bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that they've got just enough left in them to put it all together! And when they do..." he smiled ferociously, raising the hand in which he still held the communicator, "... then they'll know, once and for all, just who it was they gave this to."

"NO!" screamed David, and he leaped up, swinging the staff at Devastator once more, who blocked the swipe with his cane almost laughably easily before smashing the communicator against David's forehead, knocking him back to the ground. An instant later, and Devastator was crouched over him, tossing the crushed communicator aside as he grabbed David by the throat.

"And the whole time," he hissed, as David struggled and squirmed wildly, to no effect, red fog dancing before his eyes as the rest of the world began to fade. "You'll be watching. Free and unhindered, no ropes, no cuffs, no restraints. Free to do as you would, just so that you can experience the wonder of them begging you to save them, to help them, to defeat what they will initially assume is just your weaker, darker self. You'll be there to witness their reactions when they realize that I'm not some figment of Trigon's imagination, not some dark side of you conjured up from his imagination, that I am you! I am everything you ever were, everything you ever might have been, everything you ever could have amounted to! I am you distilled, condensed, reforged, and cut loose from my leash. And I want you to be there, at their last breaths, when they realize what it was that you always were."

The fog descended into totality, and as he felt something explode within him, David threw back his head and screamed.

O-O-O

The most painful thing in the world is a functional sense of scale.

Scale kills more people than cancer. Scale destroys more dreams than all the tyrants, mischances, and disasters of history put together. Scale ruthlessly slaughters entire ideologies, brutalizes and demeans and grinds one into the mud. Not content to slay indiscriminately, scale is unrelenting, assaulting its victims over and over, relentlessly, single-mindedly, a myopic brute satisfied with nothing but the abject surrender of its chosen victims. Scale is the bully whose existence is only validated when his targets are utterly degraded, for whom the pleasure of subjugating others is no pleasure at all, but the only purpose of existence. It strikes in the night, in dark hours, when the clouds have closed and the stars refuse to shine. It cloaks itself in reason, introspection, cold analysis, wheedling its way inside with appeals to superiority and cynical pragmatism, laying the greatest of wonder-workers to waste until all is brought to ruin.

For the universe is unfathomably large, time unspeakably vast, and compared to its immensity, what is man? What are his works? His geniuses and triumphs? Scale reduces all to ash and mockery. What is a symphony, but symbolic instructions for the production of a momentary arrangement of vibrations in the air of a tiny portion of a planet, gone moments later, meaningless to anyone besides a small subset of the living beings on this one, insignificant rock? What is a soaring cathedral, but a minor re-arrangement of stones at the surface of the same? An arbitrary symbol of an invisible delusion produced at the command of petty nothings who flatter themselves with importance. What are these things by comparison to a sun? What are they to a galaxy? To a universe entire? Should they have never existed, would the universe notice the lack? Would God? Flatten a city, burn a continent, destroy a planet or a galaxy, and the universe barely blinks, for such is its scale.

The knowledge of this is a terrible thing. The understanding of the futility of oneself by comparison to the universe is sufficient to drive men mad. This is not mere idle speculation. Men have destroyed themselves in despair of the scale of their universe and their own place within it, disowning all their works, cursing themselves for having had the vanity to imagine that they mattered. The work of a lifetime invalidated in a heartbeat of sudden doubt masquerading as realization. What purpose to labor and create? What purpose to compose, to paint and sculpt, to build or design or dream of anything, what purpose these things, when scale proves them all vanity? What purpose to fight for anything, to rage against the dying of the light, to struggle against odds not merely insurmountable but whimsical and arbitrary, constrained by nothing? What purpose to write deeds? What purpose to compose and struggle, in late hour or dark room, in the service of creating a thing the universe will neither notice nor recognize, a pale imitation of the tales of one's betters, whose very existence cannot be spoken of in polite company, tarred with illegitimacy, mired in legal and moral speculation. An arbitrary act with arbitrary consequences, signifying nothing. A road leading nowhere.

What purpose to write this story, if every sense of scale weighs against it? What purpose to write these words and this sentence, whose language and symbolism are arbitrary, whose pretensions of meaning and importance are laughable? What purpose to create it at all?

What purpose, dear reader, for you to read it?

Scale is a terrible thing, hiding in a million guises, the words of scoffing cynics, the dry figures of a textbook, the sneers of a million 'experts' and doomspeakers who revel in their own superiority of reason or comprehension, seeking to deflect the quiet desperation of their own empty lives onto others. Scale is nihilism writ in physical form, a death to all things, even the intangible concepts of idea and faith and wonder. It is the death of the soul. If embraced, it can even make one complicit in the murder.

And yet, there are two sides to every story, even that of scale.

To peer into the heavens is to be humbled. To measure oneself against eternity is to be found wanting, to conclude the uselessness and vanity of life and action, of creation or struggle. But the very desperation with which scale assaults our sense of worth belies its great weakness: That scale itself is also arbitrary. And if the scale one employs is arbitrary, then cannot one select another?

If there exists a universe wherein our actions are so dwarfed and pathetic to be meaningless, if there exist a million such universes, are there not also ones where this is not so? For there are an infinity of things infinitely greater than ourselves, it is true, but the road runs in both directions, and thus there are an infinity of things infinitely lesser than us as well. If we can define our lives as meaningless when compared with the greater universe, what are they when compared with a lesser one, the universe of our own lives, of those of our loved ones, our pets, our friends? What are we by comparison with insects? With bacteria? With the dust beneath our feet and the air that dances through our hair? What are we, ultimately? The cynic may answer that we are insignificant insects, and by a sufficient sense of scale, so we are. But by another sense, we are towering collections of fifty trillion living cells, each of which lives and dies and labors to ennoble the whole. Within us reside hundreds of billions of living things, of bacteria and viruses, beings smaller to us than we are to the planet entire. Yet they labor endlessly, in their billions and trillions, and change minute elements of us, in their own manner and image. Through us, do their labors sum to perform actions unfathomable to themselves. Through us can they move distances that must seem as remote as interstellar space, ascend to layers of action and creation to which they have no suitable conception. Perhaps through us, they can even make their mark on a universe infinitely greater.

Thoughtless and brainless though they may be, governed by the most pitiable of instincts, as we understand it, one wonders if they ponder, as we do, their place in the universe. Do they think on the vastness of ourselves, and their minute scale by comparison, and know despair?

To them, might we not be Gods?

And if, to them, we are Gods, then how can what we do be anything but of the greatest possible import?

We live, we love, we create, we struggle, we build, we compose, we craft and we seek meaning in it all, and it eludes us, and some of us fall prey to despair. Our fine sense of scale contrives to drag us from our pedestals and beat us into the dirt among the slimy things we imagine so far below. Yet our perpetual defeat, overcoming some, waiting in the wings for all, does nothing but cast relief upon the ultimate truth. What we do is both of no meaning and ultimate importance, simultaneously and at once. In this, as in so many other ways, we are creatures of paradox.

What we call moments of clarity are many things, but often times, if we look back on them, we find that they are nothing but sudden, dramatic adjustments in our conception of scale. A shift in scale can change everything, for "the odds" are a function of the scale whereby we evaluate our ambitions. A negative shift can arrest one in mid-word, tear down all the work of a lifetime, reduce a man to groveling misery within his own head. But a different shift entirely, discarding the old conception and refocusing upon what we consider our essential universe, engendered by anything from external abuse to internal enlightenment, a sudden shift in that direction can do almost anything. It can open a conduit to wonders, transform men into angels or poets or warriors of virtue. It can raise the dead and set the heavens to singing, carve temples to imagined gods from the living stone of mountains. It can raise the dead, protect the living, give those who might have been imagined to have no hope at all against the all-encompassing hatred of an infinite malice, a chance, however faint, to stand in defense of that which is, to us, the most important thing of all.

O-O-O

"I am so sorry..."

The green flash lit up the air like a firework detonating in the midst of all present, as sudden and unexpected as a bolt of lightning on a clear day. Warp jolted, leaping back a pace as he wafted the ozone-tinged smoke from his face, blinking back the flash as he tried to see what had happened. Something warm and wet splashed across his face, and he did not have time to think through what it had to be before his vision cleared, and he saw what was in front of him.

Starfire stood at the edge of the pit, leaning forward, one arm wrapped around Robin tightly, her head resting on his shoulder, eyes squeezed shut. She was holding him in place, perhaps using him as a support to stay on her feet, perhaps vice versa. She stood there, motionless, as did Robin, neither one moving so much as a muscle, locked, for all anyone could tell, in a frozen embrace.

The eight inch hole that had been blasted through Robin's chest glistened in the preternatural twilight.

Warp stood in mute shock, Robin's blood running down his face, coating the floor and the pillars and everything else within twenty feet, staring at the greenish glow from her hand that shown through the hole in Robin's chest. He watched as Starfire stood holding Robin up, her fingers dug into his titanium cape, before slowly opening her eyes, revealing slits of radioactive green that seemed to churn and boil like the fires of some infernal reactor set to motion. In the searing green light, could be glimpsed the roiling, inconceivable rage that bubbled like molten iron beneath the surface of Starfire's motionless form. And in the void left by the shock of what had just happened, Warp felt the first tinges of fear creeping into his conscious awareness.

"Warp," said Starfire, in a whisper so fine it could cut a blade of grass, "you have made a terrible mistake."

The green glow in Robin's chest vanished, as Starfire released Robin, letting him tumble lifelessly to the ground.

"You have made many mistakes, Warp," said Starfire, tears shimmering in her eyes, yet refusing to fall, "so many that they cannot all be catalogued. But of them all, there is one that stands above. You believed that by bringing me here, and presenting me with these puppets of your will in the shape and form of Robin, that you would destroy me. You thought this, because you envisioned me as broken. You pictured that which Robin and I had as a candle, in the darkness, which with the tiniest motion, you could extinguish between your fingers, and thus cast me into nothing."

Starfire took a step forward, and without even glancing towards him, reached out her hand and shot Nightwing between the eyes with a starbolt that could have levelled a building, instantly turning the entire upper half of Nightwing's torso to vapor.

"In this," she said, "you were mistaken."

Warp recoiled, not in horror so much as shock, stepped back despite the book in his hand, despite the shield that even now shifted around him, stepping back through commands unconscious and unsummoned.

"What Robin and I shared," said Starfire, her voice as even as a plane of obsidian glass, not the slightest tremor audible to hint at what might rage beneath, "was beyond your capacity to harm. There is no torment you could devise, no outrage you could contrive, no crime you could fathom in your darkest of nightmares that would serve to tarnish its luster in the slightest degree. Were you capable of understanding this, you would have known that these puppets you summoned had no greater chance of disrupting the memory I hold of Robin, than your curses do of bringing you peace. You have failed, Warp, in every degree, to comprehend what it was that you sought to tear down."

Starfire's hands glowed with emerald light, as she stared at the dark-mantled supervillain, her eyes washing out slowly with the volcanic fires of Tamaran.

"It is said that the greatest weakness of the darkness, is that a single candle suffices to hold it back," said Starfire as she strode towards Warp, outwardly poised and calm, hands sheathed in flame. "What Robin and I shared was not merely a candle," she said, only the tears in her eyes serving to reveal what dwelt within. "What Robin and I shared, Warp, could ignite the stars."

O-O-O

"Yeah," said Cyborg. "Me too."

There was a flash of pink light, the sound of air being sliced apart, and an explosion, and when the smoke cleared, Cyborg stood alone.

All around him, demons lay crushed and thrown about, several hurled though windows, others laid out in stacks on the street. Behind, the evil duplicate of Cyborg stood blinking in confusion, surrounded by fallen demons and broken pieces of sulfur, trying to replay what had just happened so as to figure out what could possibly have happened. Cyborg ignored him, looking instead forward, at the girl dressed in violet and black who lay on her back in the middle of the street, staring up into the air and blinking, as though she could not figure out what had led her to this pass.

"I'm sorry," repeated Cyborg, "that I've gotta do this."

And then he shot her.

Jinx had scarcely had a chance to lift her head when a wave of sonic energy like the finger of god tore the very ground she was laying on apart, ripping it to pieces and sending her careening down the street into and through one of the flame demons that was presently trying to get back up. She hit a car, bounced over it, and fetched up on the broken sidewalk, coughing and bleeding from the head, trying to force her trembling muscles into rising.

"I don't have a choice..." she coughed out, rising to her hands and knees before spinning around in place and hurling a hex at Cyborg like a shiruken. Cyborg made no attempt to dodge, turning into the shot, letting it strike the stump of his mangled arm and detonate there. The explosion kicked up dust and smoke and sent pieces of metal flying in every direction, but the smoke cleared to reveal Cyborg undaunted, his broken arm simply broken further, and he turned back to her, and fired a sonic blast that tore the car between them in half and would have disintegrated her had she not contrived to leap aside.

She landed unsteadily on her feet, further hexes forming in her hands, though she did not form them instantly. "He can bring them all back," she said, her words carrying the fevered intensity of a fanatic who dared not consider the horrible alternatives to their own faith. "He told me he could bring them back. If I do what he says then he'll - "

"He won't do jack," said Cyborg. "You're not stupid enough to believe him. He ain't gonna do a damn thing except laugh."

Jinx' fists and teeth clenched of their own accord. Tears spilled down her face as she half-shouted, half-cried in response. "But I have to... I have to try, don't I?"

"Yeah," said Cyborg without a change of inflection. "You do. And I really wish I could help you, Jinx, but I've gotta try somethin' too. I've gotta keep people like you off BB and Star. And if you think I wouldn't blow your head off a thousand times to give them one more minute for whatever they gotta try, then you'd best think again."

Slowly, Jinx seemed to calm herself down, opening her hands once more to receive the crystalline hexes that she formed within them. She took a deep breath, letting it out slowly, as she faced the unmoving robotic Titan. "You can be as angry with me as you want," she said, firmer now, poised and ready for what might come. "I have to do this."

Cyborg shook his head, contemptuous of the demons rising once more around him, staring down at Jinx like a wizened schoolteacher dismissing the plaintive excuses of a truant student.

"Jinx," said Cyborg. "Whatever you think you know, believe me. You've never seen me get angry..."

O-O-O

"Well," said the double. "Whadaya say we find out what you taste like?"

Raven did not answer. She did not get the chance.

All of a sudden there was a terrible roar.

It was like the roar of an animated jet engine, the roar of an earthquake, the furious, interstellar roar of a supernova exploding into the night sky with all the power of a galaxy within it. A roar so profound that it emanated from nothing and everything at the same time, a roar that shattered the icicles on the ceiling and cracked the ground around them, a roar with physical force, blood-soaked and terrible, as though the air itself had come to life and chosen to assail the living. It was a roar of pure, outraged hate and malice, a roar of violence and anger and primal, inconsolable rage. Beast Boy's double, caught mid-transformation into something else, turned about in shock, to see what could possibly have generated such an offence against hearing.

Perhaps he suspected it was Beast Boy, howling in defiance in a desperate attempt to prevent him from devouring Raven. If so, he was mistaken. What he saw when he turned around was not Beast Boy.

It was not even the Beast.

What he saw when he turned around had no name at all.

For an instant, a fatal instant, the sight of the loathsome thing that loomed behind him seemed to stun the double into inaction, as his eyes froze and his breath caught and his mind tried in vain to wrap itself around the horrible, non-euclidean shape of the terrible form that he beheld. His mouth worked up and down in horror, his limbs all acting of their own accord as his conscious mind seemed to shut down temporarily. And as the cacophony of horrors built and the noxious being lurched and slithered and leaped into the air like a tower of horn and hide, Beast Boy's double had time only to take one step back, and then it was upon him.

There are strange things that dwell within the hearts of men, terrible things, loathsome things. To some such things we give a name and assign a place in the makeup of man, confident in our categorization and diagnoses. It is upon these things that demons feed, praying on our baser natures, seeking to overthrow us and drag us down to Hell.

Yet ultimately, there are places even demons do not walk, for they have no name, and no category, and exist at the whim of impulses that cannot be governed nor pandered to, not by all the Legions of Hell, for they are innate, and eternal, and they do not sleep.

As the howls and the hideous shrieks merged with the unspeakable roars that rent the air and sent waves of ice cascading down across the chamber, alone in her corner, wrapped in the fragile protection of a white cloak, Raven squeezed shut her eyes, held her hands over her ears, and began to scream.

O-O-O

And in the right circumstances, it might even change the world...

O-O-O

There was a deafening explosion.

David could see nothing, could make out nothing, his eyes clouded with rage and desperation and terror so far past mortal as to lack description, but the explosion aborted his scream like nothing else could have, and he felt warmth on his face, on his hands, everywhere, as flames bathed him and debris sailed past, but only for a second. And then suddenly, there were no more hands at his throat, no more blows to his head. Suddenly, without even needing to see, he knew that he was alone.

He realized that his eyes were shut, and opened them.

There was smoke and blood, blood on his sleeve and hand and dripping onto the ground, blood from his own head, which pounded in pain from the beating it had sustained, but he ignored it all, and raising his head, he saw something he did not expect to see.

Across the way sat a burnt out automobile, charred black like the rest of the world, and still emitting a trickle of smoke. And against it lay Devastator, crumpled against the side of the car like a marionette with its strings cut, beneath a man-sized dent that marred the car doors which David was fairly sure had not been there moments ago. The sheer unexpectedness of this sight derailed his train of thought, and he sat there in silence and watched as Devastator slowly rose to his hands and knees, retrieving his cane from where it had landed next to him. Devastator groaned as he blinked and gripped the car for support, looking more shaken than seriously hurt, but plainly as surprised to find himself there as David had been. And then slowly, he turned back to David, a soft smile on his face, chuckling at something, as though this were all some joke.

He took one look at David, and froze solid.

David waited an interminable second for Devastator to finish moving, but he did not, frozen like a statue, with the only motion in his face, as the older man's blind eyes slowly widened, and his mouth dropped open and hung there. Of all the possible reactions that Devastator could have had, that was the one David had been least expecting, and it jolted him, such that he turned his head slightly, and saw Terra out of the corner of his eye. She was standing in the middle of the street, fists sheathed in her yellow energy, having somehow contrived to get past the wall of fire that Devastator had conjured in her path. Yet she too had stopped dead, as motionless as that day in the park when Raven's time stop had frozen her along with the rest of the world, her eyes wide in astonishment, mouthing words that she could not find the wherewithal to speak. Like Devastator, she was staring right at him in some cross between astonishment, horror, and awe, and David had no idea why.

That was when he noticed that his fingers were still warm.

Slowly, David lowered his eyes, but he had not gotten far before he too, froze solid, blinking in disbelief at what he saw before him. Robin's bo staff of stainless steel, now truncated at one end by some unknown means, the staff he had taken from the survival bunker, was held tightly his hand.

And it was sheathed in fire.

---

Author's Note: Thank you for reading, you who have managed to get this far, and it is my hope that you have enjoyed what you have read. Please, if you have a moment to spare, leave me a comment below, but either way, I hope to see you again soon with the next installment of this humble tale.