Chapter 4-In My Self-Righteous Suicide

Robin was depressed. Boy, was he ever depressed! He sat on his bed, clutching a bottle of California grape wine, belting out Phantom of the Opera songs. "Any-where you go, let me-go too, Rav-en, that's all I ask of you-!" Robin sang in a drunken stupor. Stranglely, he was sober enough to hear Beast Boy and Cyborg come in and steal his wine.

"Hey!" Robin yelled, swiping at the bottle, but missing.

"Dude, get a hold of yourself! She's gone forever, get over it dammit!" Beast Boy scolded.

"Besides, you're needed, leader," Cyborg added, sounding concerned.

"Uh, a villain strikes the city?" Robin guessed, clueless as to what was going on.

"It's Starfire," Beast Boy said in a saddened tone.

The boys rushed upstairs to Starfire's room. Robin gasped as he saw her lying down on her bed, struggling for breath, with bloody tissues in her mouth. On her nightstand was a pile of bloody tissues, and a butter knife covered in blood.

"She did this to herself, you know," Cyborg murmured to Robin, "using the butter knife to cut open her tongue so she could drown in her own blood." Robin's mouth dropped open. Starfire attempting suicide? Oh, the thought was inconcieveable. Beast Boy took the saturated tissues out of her mouth and placed in new ones.

"We don't know why she did it, maybe you can find out," he remarked.

Later on, Robin pulled up a chair and sat next to Starfire's bed. "So, why did you do that? Are you depressed?" he asked. She shook her head no, on account that's all she could do. "Well the only other explanation I can think of is that you did it for my attention. Did you?"

Tears began to well up in her eyes as she nodded her head.

"Look, I'm sorry about what I said to you, about Raven. Do you think maybe she can come back for a little while to heal you? She can do it the fastest, you know," Robin said. Starfire turned her head away but realized what she said was true. He held her hand, and she barely smiled.

While all of this was going on, Raven was leaving her favorite Gothic cafe, which she went to for dinner. As she passed an alleyway, an odd noise occured. Getting ready to defend herself, Raven took a few steps toward the alley. Then something jumped out at her. "AHHH!" she screamed as she fell to the ground. She dropped her rose and her communicator, breaking it. Raven got up to see it was only a black cat that jumped at her. Breathing a sigh of relief, she began to pick up the pieces of her communicator. "Shit," she thought, trying to put them together.

Unexpectedly, though, someone clasped a hand over her mouth and dragged her kicking and screaming into the alleyway.