2.
When Robin returned, the group was mostly asleep, only Raven and Starfire remained, staring blankly at the television. They both heard the door open, and both noticed the rather depressed, deeply concerned expression Robin wore as he entered the room.
"Something wrong?" Raven said, in a monotonous voice, devoid of any distinct emotion. Her eyes expressed genuine concern, however. Robin, right then decided to sit on the news he had, until the morning. Starfire didn't say anything, but all her feelings were written on her face. Robin could tell that she would be coming to him for some kind of explanation, and let a tired sigh escape his lips.
"No. I'm just tired."
He walked across the room, never lifting his head to look at anything in particular, "Goodnight." That was all he said, and nothing more. He walked by them both and went to his room.
Raven turned back to the television. She didn't know why she was even there, she wasn't watching what was on. To be honest, she wasn't even sure why she hadn't gone to bed yet, it felt like someone was sticking pins into the backs of her eyes, and her arms felt like they weighed twice as much as they should have.
"I think I'm going to bed as well," She said with a yawn, grabbing a couple handfuls of her cloak to keep it off the floor. She had the hood down, hanging around her shoulders. "Goodnight, Starfire." Starfire, still thinking of what could have been wrong with Robin, stirred back to reality. She immediately turned to face Raven, with a huge, Starfire only smile on her face. "Yes, goodnight Raven!" She said, almost overenthusiastically (and probably just a little too loudly). Raven quietly walked to her room. Starfire knew she wouldn't be seeing Raven until morning, sometimes even the early afternoon. Raven never left her room after she went into it, and hated to be disturbed, just ask Beast Boy.
Starfire sat back onto the couch and switched off the TV, she wasn't watching it either. The only reason she was staying up that night at all, was because she wanted to make sure Robin made it home alright. She saw the look on his face as he left earlier, it was that one he always wore when he didn't want to talk about anything. And the way he looked when he came back, like someone he'd been very close to had just died. There was something bothering him, something big. Starfire couldn't stand it any longer, and though it would probably mean being yelled at unfairly by her friend, she decided to get up and go to Robin's room, to see if she could find out what, exactly was wrong.
She leaned in closely to Robin's door, and tapped it lightly. "Robin, are you asleep?" She whispered, this time keeping her voice in close check, trying not to wake him if he was asleep. The door slid open, so fast that Starfire nearly lost her balance from leaning against it. Robin stood there, now absolutely emotionless, and stared down at her as she regained her composure. As soon as she managed to stand, he turned on his heel and went back to his desk, the only piece of furniture visible in his room under the single light hanging from the ceiling. She stood, confused, and feeling oddly vulnerable, at the threshold of his room.
"Come in." He said without looking up. There was something on his desk which was attracting the majority of his attention, and Starfire hoped she was not going to be disturbing him from something important, though she couldn't help feeling a twang of jealousy. She walked slowly, across a room plastered with clippings from local newspapers, most dealing with a most evil man. 'Titans Thwart Slade!' read one, 'Slade escapes from police clutches' read another, 'Slade still on the loose!'. The last one she glanced at before turning all her attention to Robin was perhaps, she thought, the most controversial. It depicted a burnt and partially melted mask, which Starfire knew was now in a box somewhere in the basement, and above it ran, 'Slade Dead!' Starfire thought then, as she'd thought many times before, how odd earth was. She would never be able to celebrate the death of anyone, even someone as vile as Slade.
She reached Robin's side and looked at what so consumed him. It was another newspaper clipping. The picture and the banner headline made Starfire gasp. The picture showed Terra, their former ally, destroying a car with a massive chunk of rock, and above it was printed, 'Teen Titan turns on City!'
"Starfire...?" Robin said, without looking up, it was phrased as a question. He stared intently at the picture, that unflattering picture of Terra, the rage in those eyes, the anger. The sight made Starfire want to cry, but she tried to hold it back, tried to stay strong. But despite her best efforts, her lower lip quivered slightly, and a tear threatened to escape the corner of her eye. As she quietly sniffed it away, Robin continued.
"...Do you ever think about her?" He picked the article halfway off the desk by its top-right corner. Starfire was still looking at the picture, and quietly wiped away another tear before answering.
"I try not to."
As soon as she'd said it, she wished she hadn't. It sounded evil, what she'd said, but it was said with the most innocent of intentions. She didn't think of Terra because of a number of things, but above all else, because of the overwhelming pity she felt for her. Terra had made some horrible mistakes in her life, and nearly destroyed many things in the process. Still, what had happened...no one deserved that. "But yes, I do."
"She nearly killed you...nearly killed us all..." Robin was talking to himself more than anything else, expressing random thoughts.
"Is that what is bothering you so?" Starfire now looked at Robin, and lightly touched his shoulder. Robin raised his arm, and Starfire thought briefly that he meant to cover her hand with his, but he instead started to massage his temples, an expression closely resembling pain etched onto his face.
"Sometimes, everything bothers me." There was exhausted frustration in his words. Starfire lifted her hand off his shoulder like it had suddenly become burning hot, and shortly thereafter Robin stood, leaving the newspaper clipping on the desk in front of him. Eventually, he even stopped looking at it, and turned to face Starfire.
"Don't go anywhere tomorrow, I need to speak to everyone." He disappeared into the dark, leaving Starfire in the lone beam of light. She looked at him until he was nothing more than a nondescript shape in the darkness.
"Ok...goodnight then..." She said, not wanting to leave but getting the definite impression her presence was no longer wanted. Robin made no reply, but she thought she saw him wave his arm. She would never be sure of it though.
She walked slowly down the hall towards her own room, arms crossed lightly in front of her. The image of Terra, at the height of her betrayal, was still eating at her. The way she had acted when they'd first met, all smiles and jokes and happiness, it was infectious in a way that Starfire found refreshing. Those few days when she was with them were amongst the happiest in recent memory, but of course they didn't last. Those smiles and jokes had turned to poison so quickly, almost overnight. The resulting fight had nearly cost them all their lives, and nearly levelled the entire city. That was the day, Starfire thought, that they'd taken that picture of her wreaking havoc on the city, with the angry fire in her eyes. That picture, she realized, frightened her. And Robin, looking so intently at it, like Starfire had never seen him look at anything before. Well, nothing since Slade died. Since Slade had ceased to be in the news, and ceased to darken their view screen with his presence, Robin's mood had gotten much better, he even came close to enjoying himself a few times. But now, he seemed to be preoccupied again. And with Terra no less. Starfire felt a twang of something, what was it? Jealousy?
She put it out of her mind, and went into her room, mentally preparing herself to hear whatever it was that was on Robin's mind in the morning. Whatever it was, it looked like it was causing him pain in some way, it was causing him to suffer, and so was causing Starfire to suffer.
Terra was, once again, causing them to suffer.
4.
Beast Boy was the first to awaken that morning, which made sense, he was the first one to go to sleep. It had been a slow day before that, and slow days were great for putting him to sleep at night, and sometimes the rest of the entire next day, and most of that week. Today, that was not so, however, he found himself getting out of bed shortly after the sun had risen, definitely uncharacteristic, but a good excuse to get some serious TV watching under his belt before noon. He sleepily walked down the hall, raising his hands over his head in an exaggerated stretch before crashing onto the couch with a thud. He grabbed the television remote and flipped the television on, then raised his feet to the vacant space beside him and crossed them at the ankle, and locked his fingers behind his head. Ahhhh, relax mode.
The TV was on a channel showing sports highlights from the previous day, which was fine with Beast Boy, because before the show was thirty seconds old, he was asleep again.
Cyborg awoke to the sound, muffled as it was, of someone snoring close by. He knew that snore, only one person in the tower snored like that; Beast Boy had fallen asleep in front of the TV again. HAH! He'd let his guard down for something nasty, and Cyborg felt compelled to be the one to deliver such a nasty thing. He looked quickly around his room, looking for the one thing, that one holy relic that would be the sword with which he could strike; a box of dirty socks. He didn't wear them, they never really fit his feet (and, to be frank, he thought him with socks on would be a pretty silly thing to see), but he always stowed a few of the smellier specimens from laundry day away for just such an occasion. He found the box tucked under his dresser, and set about rolling them up into one, large, particularly pungent, sock ball. This was the killer diller, the big one, Beast Boy may never be the same after this, a maniacal smile spread across Cyborg's lips, how long would it Take BB to wash the smell out of his hair? The thought nearly made him laugh out loud. He started to slink, silently into the next room.
It was indeed Beast Boy, and he was so asleep, with just a little bit of drool leaking from the corner of his gaping mouth. His snoring was so loud...yet strangely infectious, like some manner of mind control. Cyborg ignored it and stalked his prey, trying to assume the best angle for sock-stink-ball deployment. He held the thing in both hands – and at arms length – and took up position on the other side of the table in front of the couch Beast Boy was currently sawing wood upon. He cocked his arms and made to hurl the ball directly at Beast Boy's head.
"Hey Beast Boy, wakey wakey!" Beast Boy eyes creaked open to the sight of Cyborg about to hurl a large wad of dirty clothes directly at his head. Instantly he was awake and sat bolt upright on the couch, causing Cyborg to drastically alter his aim. He threw the ball and missed Beast Boy's head by the narrowest of margins, and, perhaps worse than that...
"Raven, look out!"
Raven turned the corner into the room just in time to receive the ball of laundry square in the face, knocking her onto her back. She sat for a moment, face up on the floor, covered in perfectly rotten smelling socks, wondering what had just transpired. She knew she'd been hit with something, and it was quickly dawning on her just how badly smelling the thing was. It was the stink of boiled cabbage, mixed with month old fish, she quickly realized she was covered in dirty socks, and felt a rise of anger within her. With definite vexation, if rigidly controlled vexation, she brushed the socks off of her, picking a particularly stinking one out of her hair.
"...yuck."
She tossed the sock aside, trying very hard to contain the anger within her. After a moment of silent meditation, she stood and gathered the ball back together with a wave of her hand.
"You're going to regret that," she said, wearing a maniacal smile of her own. Just as she was about to send it hurtling through space (with quite a good deal of force) in the general direction of Cyborg, Robin rounded the corner, in a decidedly darkened, contemplative state. Starfire followed soon after, not following Robin, but close enough behind him to look like she was avoiding him. She hoped Robin would have some manner of explanation for the unfair way he treated her the night before.
"Everybody sit down, I need to talk to you." Robin spoke in the dignified tone of a leader, but still managed to keep a depressed, deeply serious facade. He remained standing, while the rest of the group sat on the couch in front of him, all of them looking a cross between tired, confused, and just a little uncomfortable. Robin, apparently in deep thought, turned his back on them, pinching his chin between his thumb and index finger. After a time, Beast Boy spoke.
"Uhh, so what's up?"
Robin didn't turn around right away, but when he did, everybody saw what he had in his hand. It was the hair, removed from its glass tube, but still wrapped in the red string. He tossed it down lightly on the table between him and the group. They stared at it for a moment, and no one said anything. Beast Boy suspected, but dared not say what he thought it was. He didn't have to suspect for long, for Robin soon said exactly what Beast Boy was thinking.
"It's Terra's." There was a communal gasp and Beast Boy shot out of his seat.
"But how!" He looked at Robin with an urgent intensity, there was hope in that look as well. He stooped and picked up the hair, instantly recognizing the feel, the look, the smell. Even as a dead lock, cut off and reanimated God knows how, it shone in the light, like spun gold, just as he remembered it. A weight in his stomach lurched, as all the emotions he'd suppressed came rushing back. There was love there, he knew, he remembered. He'd had feelings for girls before, and admittedly, since, but with Terra those feelings seemed more real somehow. He didn't know her long enough to know if what he felt was love, but he suspected it might be, almost hoped it was. He'd long thought what he'd feel if he saw her again, real instead of the tragic statue she'd left behind.
He realized he had a white knuckle grip on the hair, and that everyone was looking at him with mild understanding, and sympathy pain. He ignored them and persisted at probing Robin with his eyes.
"After about a month of her being stuck like that, I carved off a piece of her hair," Robin said, addressing the group, but speaking to Beast Boy, in the same downtrodden tone. "I sent it to a...friend to look at it. He found a cure." Starfire, as Robin was speaking, was developing a large smile, again, as only Starfire could smile.
"Then we can save Terra?" She phrased it more as a statement, but Robin treated it as a question.
"Yes. The question is, do we want to?" Beast Boy looked shocked, almost hurt at the implication, as did Starfire. Cyborg and Raven both looked taken aback, but it seemed not to shock them as much as it did the other two.
"But why wouldn't we?" Beast Boy asked, yelled really. It took a lot to get Beast Boy to raise his voice, indeed, do anything that was near serious. It was clear he held this subject in the most highest, if sensitive, of regards. He stared holes into Robin, his eyes shimmered and burned. Raven spoke:
"What reason would we have to keep her there?" Her voice was ever rational, and her demeanor was calm as usual.
"Because when she was free, look what she did," Robin, for the first time rose his voice, only slightly at first, but increasingly as he went on. "She sold her soul to Slade, scared everyone out of the city, and nearly killed all of us. And to make it worse, she did it all on her own, no one forced her into anything. The situation she's in now," Robin pointed in the imagined direction of Terra's cave, "that's her fault. Everything is her fault!" Beast Boy started to round the table, and stood a foot away from Robin before he spoke again.
"You weren't there at the end, I was!" Beast Boy drove his finger into his own chest. The rest of the group watched in stunned silence as the two argued. "I was there to hear her last words, she was sorry! In the end, she just wanted to stop fighting, just wanted to put things right! Just wanted-" he searched for the right word, "-peace!"
"Some speech about being sorry for all that she did doesn't make it any better. What's the guarantee that she won't go berserk again? Try to kill us all, again?" Robin tried to speak as rationally as he could, without being drawn into a shouting match. His words silenced Beast Boy, but Starfire spoke from behind him, after a moment's pause.
"Robin," she said in an alarmingly cool, calming tone of voice, "has she not suffered enough?" Beast Boy didn't say anything, but looked like he agreed, and redoubled his efforts at staring Robin down.
"Yeah," Cyborg offered, "maybe being down there all this time has changed her." He said it, but didn't sound like he really believed it. All the while Raven looked down somewhere underneath the table which the lock of hair sat on, in silent contemplation. Robin gave her a chance to put her say in, but she said nothing, so he continued.
"I've been thinking of all these things, and I've made a choice."
"You're going to set her free, ri-
"Beast Boy!" Robin held his hand out, palm first, toward his green friend. Beast Boy stopped talking.
"I've decided that this decision is too big for one person. We need to come to a decision as a group, but not for us. We need to consider the world, the people out there, those that we protect. What's best for them. Titan's, tomorrow, we'll have a vote. Think about what letting her free would mean, think of all of it. Tomorrow, the five of us will decide, do we let her out, or not?" Robin planted his hands on the table between them all, and looked at them all. They all looked like they wanted to say something, but couldn't get the words from their brain to their mouths. After a moment, the group started to dissolve, Robin leaving first, and the rest leaving in due course. All the while, each one of them looked like they really wanted to say something, but just couldn't manage it. After they got to their rooms, they all told what they had to say to the walls, which all seemed unsympathetic to the situation.
