"Beep... beep... beep... beep..."
Only on a deeply subconscious and visceral level am I aware of my surroundings, much in the same way a sleeping person can sense changes in their environment. The only constant is the slow, rhythmic electronic beat of the dozens of machines around me. A snake's nest of sanitized rubber tubes extend out of my mouth, even more from the holes in my chest. A dozen small, flexible lifelines are all that separate me from the cold embrace of death, each one extending out of a large plexiglass tube of thick liquid that I'm suspended in, The liquid is warm, comforting. I hear the rhythmic pump of my own electronic heartbeat, feel the heat of the liquid surrounding me, the umbilical cords giving me life, and for the longest time I dream that I'm hidden in a womb, safe, comforted.
"Beep.. beep.. beep.. beep.."
Inwardly, I subconsciously smile at my own comfort and happiness. I feel very little in that state, but all those feelings are... something. My mind cannot call forth the words for this feeling, it's too transcendent. All I can know is that I love every second of it. I can't imagine life without this feeling. The subconscious fugue of my mind basks in this feeling as it slowly heals, regaining more of itself. The growing consciousness giggles at it's own expanding abilities.
"Beep. beep. beep. beep."
Very suddenly, black tendrils of memory slink of the abyss of my brain, latching onto the slowly healing consciousness. Images explode into the small mind of this being, horrible images of violence and anger, men and women slaughtered, children left crying over long dead corpses, soldiers staring at their slowly cooling entrails on the dirt.
"Beepbeepbeepbeep."
My mind recoils in horror, not because of the images, but because I'm the one performing these grisly acts. The sensation of blades cutting into flesh, how little resistance is felt when a man is ripped in half. Even as the wondrous feeling that my mind was bathing in is torn away, the mind which now knows of itself as Reaver realises what that feeling was, innocence.
"Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeee."
The rhythmic heartbeat is stopped, replaced by a long drone and a wave of what I recognise as pain. A subsonic scream echos in my skull, shattering the black tethers of memory, but they're insidiously still there, their poison infecting my thoughts. I curl up into a mental ball and hide in a corner of my thoughts. In a bright flash and a sudden crackle of energy, everything is as it was. A budding mind in a shattered brain, a feeling of transcendent serendipity coursing through it's being.
Several hours later, the previous events would occur again, exactly as they had several hours previous.
--------------------
"His heart stopped again."
From behind a glass case, much like he's staring into an aquarium with the world's ugliest fish inside, is Cyborg. He's busily watching over a complex board of controls and diodes, all monitoring my every bodily function. He hazards a glance up at my body to see that not much has changed since the last time he looked. My body is still floating in the middle of a long plastic tube that's filled with a clear blue gel, except for the area around me that's stained a reddish hue.
Cyborg nods at the devices and swivels in his chair, turning towards Robin who is intently looking over a long printout."Two lacerations on the under forearm, first degree burns on ninety percent of his skin, cauterization of eighty percent of his blood, burns in all arteries and veins, second degree burns on the heart, lungs, liver, spleen, intestines, stomach, brain, bladder, and kidneys, massive muscular trauma, severe nerve damage, and massive dehydration." Robin let out what was left of his breath
"And that's not all man, the blood trapped in his arteries is acting like forty years of eating nothing but cheese covered butter, it's like he has the hoover dam in his his chest. All of his limbs are getting no blood flow, and if it wasn't for the bio-med gel he's suspended in they'd go gangrenous. His body is rejecting almost all of the medecines I'm pumping into him and his brain is still a half deflated husk. If it were anyone else I'd just pull the plug."
"What about his own healing ability?"
"The fact that he's surviving his bi-hourly heart attacks I'm chalking up to that. Most of the actual healing is being done by his regeneration, but you know how slow his subconscious control is. For every thing he fixes something else breaks. It's gettin' us nowhere."
"Where are Starfire and BeastBoy?"
"Still asleep, they're gonna tear me a new one when they find out that this happened and I didn't wake them, but right now they'd just get in the way. There'll be plenty of time for them to freak out tomorrow... if he's still alive tomorrow that is."
Robin planted his forehead into the palm of his hand and sighed. "How did this happen?"
"You tell me dawg, first I heard of it was Raven squaking over her communicator like BeastBoy when he's at the zoo. Next thing I know I'm dumping Reaver into a tank of bio-med gel after I got down gawking at how messed up he was."
"So Raven might know?"
"Ask her." He nods at the half forgotten dark girl in the corner, curled up on the chair wrapped in her cloak protectively. She looks, inexplicably frail. Robin turns at her, and for a moment she meets his gaze before shying away from him.
Robin steadily walks over to her and very plainly says "What happened?"
"..." She looks down and away.
"Raven, I asked you a question. What happened?"
"I..." She glances up at his expressionless face for an instant before continuing. "I made a mistake."
"What kind of mistake?"
"He... asked me to help him complete a spell, to make a casting circle. Something went wrong and..." She trailed off "...It's all my fault."
"Why is that?"
"The blood in the circle, some of it was mine, and when it mixed... something went wrong."
"Something in the department of all of his blood heating up to a few hundred degrees."
Raven squirmed in her seat.
Robin sighed "Can you help him?"
"..."
"Raven, you understand Reaver's powers more than anyone else here, your spells may be the only thing that can possibly help him!"
"..."
"If you don't help him, Reaver is going to die. Not 'might die' or 'probably will die', Reaver will die, floating in that tube like an unfed goldfish. Do you really want that?"
Raven just stared at him pensively.
"He'd do it for you."
Raven looked down, and then slid her feet to the floor. Very slowly and nervously, she shuffles over to the viewing window.
Very little has changed with me in the previous minute and a half except for the fact that a small blockage in my feeding tube has left my body kind of hungry. I'm not aware of this however, because of the whole death's door thing. Cyborg turns to her "Any input would be gold right now Raven."
"His... his body isn't in any real danger."
"Pfft, I beg to differ. I've seen corpses in better shape than he is right now."
"No, it's not that. He could heal himself, if he was still all there. The pain of what he experienced destroyed his mind, but I can sense his thoughts slowly returning. His mind is coming back to the way it was, but every few hours it... resets."
"Resets? How?"
"It's hard to explain, it's like he's on the brink of healing his mind, but whenever he reaches this one point in his recovery, his mind backlashes and, fries itself back down to almost nothing.
Cyborg raises his fleshy eyebrow "So, his heart isn't stopping because it's too hard for it to pump, it's stopping because every few hours his brain loses the ability to make it pump."
"I think so."
Cyborg leans back in his swivel chair. "Oh, then that changes everything."
Robin leans in and with excitement edgeing his voice says "It does? How?"
"Yeah, instead of thinking that there might be something I can do to help him, now I know that there is absolutely nothing I can do to help him!"
Robin gives him a disappointed stare.
"Don't look at me like that Robin! You know as well as I do that I can't do a damn thing to repair his brain! He's a vegetable, his brain is nothing more than a useless lump of fried shit three feet above his ass! I can't help him! DAMMIT!" Cyborg stands up with a balled fist and plunges it into the wall, making a eight inch crater in the steel.
Robin patiently waits out the temper tantrum before continuing. "What about nano repair, rebuilding his brain on a cellular level?"
Cyborg excavates his arm from the wall "I already thought of that, I'd need a full mapping of his entire nervous system to upload into the bots for it to do any good."
"Can that bio-med gel regenerate brain tissue?"
"No, the gel just creates brand new blank cells, which is fine for skin and muscles, but it would leave his mind with no memory or ingrained thought process. We'd be lucky if he had the mind of an infant."
Robin sits and leans his head into his hands "There has to be another option."
"I dunno man, maybe the JLU would have something for us, but I highly doubt it. Up until now, I was counting on Reaver to heal his brain himself, but if Raven is right, then our gun toting freakshow is a goner."
Robin sighs "Raven is there any chance at all that you're wrong, any chance at all?" There's no response "Raven?"
The Boy Wonder turns about to find the dark sorceress is gone.
--------------------
Raven is in her room, robe dropped on the floor, frantically tearing through stacks of books, haphazardly searching for something. "Where is it? Come on where did I put it?"
She kicks aside a stack of tomes older than herself and looks behind them. "Where? No, come on. Where could it be?" She starts to scan bindings on her bookshelf, passing by dozens of books.
Finally Raven settles her gaze on one book in particular. It has green binding and is actually quite thin. Frantically she tears it open.
The pages are blank, cut in the center of the book is a section that has been carved away painstakingly. In the recess of the book is a small steel key. Raven snatches the item and lets the book drop to the floor as she quickly walks over to a door into another section of her room.
Raven quickly types a code into the door, and gets an affirming beep in response as the door slides open. She flicks a lightswitch as she walks into the room.
The room is lined with large metal bins, all of which had enormous heavy padlocks securing them. This was one the rooms that Raven rarely had cause to enter, for it's only purpose was to hold books and items that were very, very dangerous, too much so for them to be stored in the Titan's evidence room. Tomes that detailed paths to damnation and power, spells of disastrous power, items that carried with them malignant intelligences, anything that was powerful, magical, and in the Titan's possession was in this room, kept safe via adamantine reinforcements, Cyborg's most advance security systems, and the strongest wards Raven could muster.
The blue headed girl took a deep breath as she approached one of the containers and very slowly unlocked the heavy padlock holding it shut, letting the device clatter to the floor. Unlocked, the bin automatically slid open with a hiss of hydraulics. Raven lifted the heavy object from within and pushed the bin shut, half-running out of the room.
She sets the large, white book on a reading stand and takes a step back. Of it's own accord the book flips open rapidly with a ruffle of pages before settling on a half torn page that depicts nothing more than a pair of striking, slightly slanted eyes. From nowhere, a calm voice says "Ah, Raven, to what do I owe the pleasure?"
"Malchior, I need your help."
