The Albino Telepath Saga

by DBAinsw

Discontinued: I keep this long, long story around as an example of what NOT to do. Once this was my superfantasy played out in a forum others might read it in. Now I see it as typing practice with an embarrasing garystu focus.

19. GW5: Dawn

Intro: Let me start by apologizing for my extended absence. I believe that by the time I post this, it will have been right around two months since last anyone heard from me on this site. The only reason I have to offer is the quite simple but completely serious affliction known only as MMORPG. World of Warcraft snuck into my computer over the holidays and sucked out my soul in the way those games have a tendency to manage, and I have been having a hell of a time getting this one out, even though I had it 70 finished before I got the game. Never in my life have I encountered a more devious thief of human creativity and motivation, and once again I apologize for the extensive nature of my delay in posting this. Though for obvious reasons they won't know about it, I particularly apologize to anyone who gave up on reading the story because of my extensive absence. Without further delay, the most recent chapter of The Albino Telepath Saga.

Chapter 19- Dawn

Former Site of Green Construction

"Are you sure we can't do anything else to help out Miss Raven?" asked one of the many rescue workers that had been attending to them quite politely since Raven had slipped the two of them from their peaceful refuge and back into the chaotic mess of the disaster site.

"Actually," she said tiredly as she tried not to long too obviously for the exquisite looking accommodations of the cots spread between the first-aid tents, "there might be something you can do…"

"NO!" it was Skye who put his foot down without question, beaming the flat rejection into her mind through the small link he could maintain as long as she didn't get too far away. He could only even manage that much since she'd engaged it initially with a thought into that gem on his right hand again. It was actually about this deplorable state of his power that the present standoff existed.

"Skye, you said yourself that we've no chance of finding her unless you get some power back," Raven plied her argument into him yet again, having found his core metaphysical hang up at last. Who would have thought a guy that could walk his way through demons and robots without batting an eyelash would have such a simple phobia?

"I'm not going to do it Raven, not while even the slightest chance of anything else working exists!" His vehemence was blunted by the weakness of his mental tone, and it was kind of hard to take him seriously when the medics were patching the hole in his limp body, but she got the message rather quickly. It was time to do to him what he'd done to her. Advancing over to the gurney he sat on while they finished wrapping that awful wound (which had closed and stopped bleeding, but which was purpling all up and down his pale abdomen), she touched the gem on his right hand.

(Shift to thought speed)

"Skye, I didn't crawl back from the brink of unconsciousness just so we could loose Terra because your afraid to borrow a little life energy!" There, she'd cast her lot, and now it was time to see how it would fall out. He was speechless for a moment, and she could feel his mind skipping through volumes of shock at what she'd just said to him.

"Don't—Don't talk to me like you know what it is to steal someone's life!" he snapped, as viciously as any condemnation she'd ever made. It was the most fiercely he'd ever spoken to her, and the boiling anger behind the words was worse for her connection to his mind. She actually cringed away as the heat of it hit her psyche and breathed life into that portion of her soul.

"It… it seems we've found your temper Mr. Skye," she said calmly as she got her feelings back under control. The words were without any emotion at all, but as his anger faded like it was prone to he was filled with such contrition that you'd have thought she'd hit him.

"Raven… I…." His mind stumbled through the phrasings of an apology, but she accepted it with a mental shrug before he really embarrassed himself.

"You're absolutely right Skye, I have no idea what it is that you're so afraid of. Explain it to me, please. These men are more than willing to give of themselves after what we've done for their friends and family, so it's not as though you're robbing them of something. Tell me what it is that gets you like this." Her words held the utmost of neutrality, and as he himself returned to a neutral state after his remorse had drained, he could find no reason to object.

"Alright, if you must know…" and his mental tone paused and stretched with clear reluctance, "I'm… not afraid of doing it per say—at least—I've done it before when there was no other choice."

"Like now," she supplied.

"Right… but what truly frightens me is… I'm afraid… I might like it."

"………What?" she managed eventually. This hadn't been anywhere on her radar.

"It's impossible to explain to those who have never experienced it… those who haven't had the full first-hand rush of it… exactly what it feels like to take someone else's life into one's own spirit." His mental voice had some truly uncomfortable undertones to it, almost sensual at first taste, and Raven was now seriously regretting pushing him on this point.

"I've never had sex, I've never taken drugs, and I've never entered a completely unrestricted full-communion of minds, but I've experience each of these while plying through the memories of various aliens I've had the unpleasant task of interrogating, so I know what they feel like in a manner of speaking. Draining life energy is soooo much better."

"By Azar…" Raven couldn't help but mutter in shock as she began to get an oh-so slight phantom of what he was talking about through the link. An absolute feeling of well-being and completeness was what he implied, the kind of sensation that elevated the mind above mere pleasure and suspended it up where no other stimulation could possibly reach. The potential for addiction was… it was terrifying.

"I know you've met others. Other psychic vampires… the feral, mindless soul-suckers that drop out of the astral plane to prey on the mundane every now and then. Do you happen to know how such creatures come to exist?" his mental voice no longer held any trace of embarrassment, fear, or desire. It didn't hold a trace of humanity either.

"I…" she didn't know what was going on all of a sudden. Her attempt to excite him to action had suddenly become some kind of big trial, and while he wasn't exactly falling apart on her, she didn't see this working out at all the way she wanted it to.

"Beings are born all over the cosmos with power like mine all the time," he began in that dead mental tone. "Every one of them feels the same thing I do when sucking out another being's life force, and almost without exception, they become addicted. When you remove someone's life force against their will, when you steal it, it wastes your soul. You can get away with it now and then, but when you do it for kicks, there's just no avoiding it. Your soul degenerates until it leaves your body and you become a creature, little better than an animal as you roam the universe searching for living things to reduce for your own base pleasures. I… I couldn't handle something like that."

"Skye…" she was just on a roll for inspirational lines right now.

"It's not even fear," he flattened her weak intervention, "Emotions like that have no real sway over me. It's the idea that gets me, the thought of everything I've worked for in my life: my sisters, my war against the IDP, my work against mental and neurological illness, everything going down the drain as I get sidetracked by the ephemeral promises of sensory gratification. That after all the strife in my life my only legacy would be a short existence as a ravenous soul-eating monster. It hurts… it hurts in a way I can't drain to numbness." Raven let his emotionless tirade run through her mind for a long moment before she said anything. It occurred to her then that they really were quite the sad little pair.

"What? Is that all?" she asked, her neutral tone colored with the contempt she usually reserved for Beast Boy. "Did you forget who you're talking to here? If you can honestly say that you stared into the face of my nasty side and still don't understand that I know exactly what you feel like, you're stupider than I could have ever feared." She could feel his mind churning as that hit it, but she didn't give him a chance to recover before her inspiration finally arrived.

"Skye, I'm going to do something here I wouldn't do for just anyone," and her mental voice took off without her even thinking about it. "Seeing as how we're friends and all… I propose we make a pact. You've already made the first gesture, and that's the only reason I'm even entertaining the briefest concept of this little venture." She couldn't really believe what she heard herself saying, and it would appear that he couldn't either.

"Errr…" his mind grasped hopelessly for what she was getting at, so she decided to pitch her proposition to him somewhat more plainly.

"Listen, you and I could help one another. Each of us has… issues with control. If we were to, say… keep an eye on each other… it might let us both rest easier when unfortunate circumstance brings these issues into conflict with what we want in life. Do you understand?" She was shocked by how roundabout she was being with this, but it just didn't seem right to come out and say that they were each plagued by very real inner demons that they might ally for the containment of.

"Raven, would you really do that for me?" he asked, his voice completely grave, and she instantly knew what the real question was. He'd actually asked her, 'could you really bring yourself to finalize me if the demon can't be stopped?'

"Yes," she answered, not really letting the concept percolate lest she find a real answer that didn't agree with her. "Now will you please come on here?"

"Well… I don't…" he hesitated further, obviously still more than a little hung up about how completely such an act went against his principles, such as they were.

"Recall please that this is an emergency!" she snapped irritably into his mind when that hesitation cropped up again. "Like I said—hell, like YOU said—Terra's life is in the balance here. I have volunteers, and we need you working, so can we move this along, please?"

Insensitive, but effective.

"Okay," he finally acceded, heaving an enormous mental sigh in anticipation of what was coming. "Have them touch the left gem."

(Realtime)

When she raised herself from the link, it was to notice that the medics had finished with the bandage and replaced his blood-soaked, holed-through tank top over their work. His equally bloody button-down lay to the side somewhere, and lying there, eyes closed, completely limp, pale as death, he looked like he wouldn't survive the night. He'd assured her that he'd recover fully with time, but it was a little hard to believe just looking at him.

"You guys," she indicated to the workers who'd been asking to help out earlier. They walked over, to the best of their knowledge only an instant after she had, the telepathic conversation occupying all of a second or two of actual time. "If you really want to help out the Teen Titans, it's going to have to be in a rather odd, mystical way. If you have a problem with that, you should leave now."

"Uh… No offense Miss Raven, but magic is against my religion," copped out one that had been looking leery of his friend's offers all along. Raven dissuaded them from pressuring into helping out anyway, and he left, leaving four.

"As you can see, my friend here is in a little bit of trouble." She began her explanation, only to be cut off right away by an enthusiastic volunteer in his early twenties.

"A little? Man, I saw that guy get gutted by that nasty spider-robot-thing! If you think he's only in a little trouble, you may want to look again kid!"

"I assure you, sir," and she put a threat into the words that cowed the schmo immediately, more for calling her 'kid' than for any other reason, "he'll be fine. He's a Titan just in from out of town, and you'd be doing us all a big favor if you helped us out with this."

The common inquiry was simply, 'what did they have to do?'

"If you could just come around to the other side of the gurney and touch that red gem on his left hand, we'll take care of the rest." She omitted a great deal, but what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. They filed around the prone psychic, gathered on his left side, and with various trepidatious looks, crowded around to place a finger on the large gem.

"Now, you may feel a slight pinch," Raven relayed Skye's mental warning, and each of them had just enough time to blanch before Skye stuck it to them.

There were no fancy lights or spiritual explosions this time, not with the gentle, willing transaction that took place. There was the slightest rushing of wind over the smoking rubble and sporadic fires, rustling the busy first-aid encampment's tents and setting the odd shiver down the occasional spine, but that was more likely a coincidence than a side effect of the action. Each of the men jerked away from Skye in the same sudden movement, emitting various yips and gasps of surprise as the sting they'd received drove them back. They took a moment out to collapse or keel over in various states of advanced fatigue while something else began to happen to Skye.

Somewhere in there he'd sheered the connection they'd been talking with, and now she was completely shut out of his mind as he was afflicted by whatever it was he'd been talking about before. Muscles tightened across his body as his face left its limp set to cringe through an incomprehensible tortured expression. For the first time since he'd lost it on the rocks, he moved, his arm flashing up from his side to cover his eyes as whatever he was feeling began to really flare up. Without warning, he sat up with a start, his whole body seeming wracked with pain as he jerked a few times at random intervals. Finally, however, his motions came to a stop and he sat perfectly still on the bed with his blood-caked gauntlet pressed over his face. He never made a sound.

"How do you feel—" Raven started, incredibly glad to see him up again despite the creepy way he'd handled the recovery, only to be cut off when he held up his free hand for silence. She was more than a little irked, and she took up a very dissatisfied expression in protest of his interruption.

Skye ignored her coolly, rolling slowly off the gurney with an awful groaning sound, getting his feet back under himself. He continued to basically ignore her as he went about quite a little bit of business.

First, he met the arrival of that cat of his, which darted through the air in a swirl of motion and formed back into solid state next to him on the gurney. It dropped something small and black, and Raven realized that it was Skye's sunglasses, which he promptly replaced over his eyes, his whole face softening as he opened them again after all that time looking like a sleepwalker. He then hopped down to the ground and ran his hands over his filthy tank top. When he finished, the gaping hole showing off his bloody bandage was gone, completely repaired. She was still getting over this when he grabbed the hem of his shirt and shook it fiercely around his body, throwing off the bloodstain in a flapping of red flakes, leaving his undershirt pretty well pristine.

Grabbing his button down, he repeated the process, removing the holes and beating it into the air to get the blood out, then putting that on with a quick slipping motion that belied his awful injuries. He finished with a flourish, grabbing his gun belt and slinging it around his waist under his open button down, then buckling it with the same motion. As Raven began to become less fascinated and much more impatient, he slipped his sidearm neatly from its holster, spun it gracefully in his right hand a few times, then popped open the back to look at a half-full dial Raven could only assume was the ammunition readout. He spun it through another long series of loops, flipped it to his left hand and spun it through another series, the slung it out into the air in front of him, grabbed it by the middle just above the barrel with his left again, then slipped it easily back into the low, slanted holster on his left hip.

"Are you quite done now?" she asked sarcastically as she marveled at how much better he looked for his efforts. She was sure she looked like a refugee from a POW work camp, what with the layers of stone dust, Skye's blood, and a smattering of sweat, motor oil, and general grime that would make a mechanic blanch. She would have given everything she owned to get at a warm bath right about now, but this desire was complicated by the fact that she would give her immortal soul too if she could just lie down and sleep for a few years. The burning embarrassment at how she must look next to him at this point actually woke her up a little bit.

"Thanks for waiting Raven, I just had to get things together for a moment," were the first audible words he'd said since his body'd crapped out on him. "It's hard to concentrate at first when I get… you know… high on life." He said it with just a shade of embarrassment, and Raven cringed as she shook her head in disappointment.

"I'll bet that one's a real hit with the other psychic vampires," she muttered disgustedly as he grinned at her reaction. Despite the undercurrent of urgency, the moment called for banter, and so banter it was. Little things like that keep people sane when working under sanity-breaking stress.

"Actually, they tend to become hostile when I try it," and he spoke while holding a hand to his head, and Raven could sense him using his power in a big way.

"I can't imagine why," she responded calmly as she internally marveled at the way his consciousness expanded. She'd had a taste of his power, but on her own her mind could only handle a pale shadow of what he was capable of perceiving, and now she was getting a mindfull of what he was truly able to do. With a slightly bored expression on his face, his senses washed over and past her, driving out in every direction until, as far as she could tell through the mild link he'd casually granted her, they encompassed the entire city. He had a spirit view of everything within a twenty-five radius, and he was running through all that vast information, sifting for what he wanted to find.

"Are you really better?" she asked as she waited for him to finish. It seemed too good to be true that draining a pinch-worth of energy from four guys could really put him into his city-scanning prime of mental power after the beating he'd taken, and she was relatively sure that his bandage had grown freshly bloody while he was cleaning his cloths. However, it was curiosity more than concern that motivated her query, it being hard to argue with the fact that he was up and about and throwing his mental weight around.

"In a manner of speaking, you could say that, potentially, I might be considered…" he carried on for a moment with the front of his mind as the search continued in the back, then he gave up and admitted, "…no. I'm absolutely not really better." He ran through what seemed like some really densely populated areas that absorbed all of his attention, then was able to spare some concentration and continued to explain.

"I feel like ten million galactic exchange credits—but it's illusionary, a side effect of drawing on someone else's life force to supplement my own. I'm still wounded and causing myself serious harm by moving around like this, but I don't feel anything but good. My powers haven't actually regenerated, but as long as that extra life energy lasts, I can run through power like water and not feel any drain. Everything ailing me will come back to claim their due twenty times over when this high wears off, which is one of many reasons I hate using this ability. …Get it?"

His question was empty sarcasm that Raven didn't bother dignifying with a response. He was clearly distracted by his task, and so she didn't let his return to those obnoxious mannerisms bother her too much. As a matter of fact, she was forced to put all of her effort into just standing as a wave of fatigue threatened to send her to the ground, and she forgot quite completely about Skye for the long moments they stood across from each other. As she began to get spots of visual blackout here and there she staggered back until she was leaning against an odd piece of wreckage, breathing deeply until she got some sense of equilibrium back. It was actually Skye that brought her out of her half-dozing nightmare of fatigue then.

"I've found our target," he commented without feeling, and her head snapped up from where she'd had it lolling forward as she gasped for air. She could never remember having been this tired… ever.

"Are you ready to go then?" she asked simply, determined to keep up her end of this duo after what she'd forced Skye to do. He'd faced his demon over the life of a woman he didn't know because she'd asked him to, so it would hardly do for her to pass out now. Apparently, she didn't cover her fatigue as well as she thought.

"Are you ready to go?" he asked her right back, no doubt picking up on all kinds of signs she'd never have thought to cover with that super-exact clairvoyant vision of his. Or, rather, he could have simply seen the way her hands trembled and she swayed on her feet in exhaustion. Damn.

"No, I'm ready to sleep for a week, take a bath, then sleep for another week. Why—is that one of my options?" Getting smart with him was once again a defense mechanism against the impulse to burst out crying with extreme exhaustion. Bad jokes definitely way better than unstoppable tears.

"I'll tell you what, get us to our first destination and we'll see what we can do," he responded cryptically, giving her a warm smile for her blind stab at humor. She nodded at him, doubtful that he could do anything to make a real dent in her exhaustion, but willing to let him try anyway. He'd surprised her a couple of times now.

Taking a moment aside then, he went back to the guys he'd zapped for energy, thanking them warmly as they sat or lay around completely drained. After giving them explicit instructions on how to take care of themselves to ensure they got back to full health, he turned away from their almost amusingly stunned and uncomprehending faces to return to the rather urgent task at hand.

"Two to beam out?" she asked, letting humor slip back into her tone now that they'd overcome all that crap and had an actual chance at saving Terra. He grinned back at her tiredly neutral face and pointed down significantly with a gentle shake of his head.

"Three," he commented simply, and Raven looked down just in time for Ben to show up in that weird swirling black mist of his and solidify at her feet.

"Meow?" he commented, when she gave first him, then Skye a long dirty look. She surrendered to the oddness without audible argument, though she projected enough sourness at Skye that he was sure to know her opinion of all this. He sent back the most weirdly reassuring sensation, and she held onto it as best she could as she wrapped the three of them in her power and hurtled them through space. The black energy raven flew once again.

An Empty Street Near Green's Demolished Secondary Base

"Are you sure you're going to be alright?" Robin asked Starfire as he lay her down away from the spreading fires that were now cutting off any pursuit of Slade they might have attempted. As he let her off his shoulder and helped her lean back against a brick building, hidden from the main road by the shadows of the small alley he'd helped her stumble down, he exchanged meaningful stares with her.

"This wound is but a tiny burn Robin," she tried to assure him as she held up the area in question for examination. He couldn't get much of a look at it in the shadows, and as his nose was assaulted by the smell of burnt meat, he was suddenly glad of this fact. The beam had struck just above the armguard, turning a spot on the back of her wrist into a scorched smoking pit of cauterized flesh. Robin's mind reeled through the implications for yet another time as he looked back into her eyes. She'd taken a shot that would have crippled him.

"Starfire…" he struggled for the words that would express what he felt, "you… you shouldn't have done that." His voice was as uncertain as it was uneven, trembling with the mixed emotions he felt.

"Nonsense Robin," she chided him with a tired smile, "I have survived far worse than this small injury." She gave him a much more serious look, and he kind of knew what she was about to say. "Besides, it would have done far worse to you, and I could not allow that."

"But Star I… I'm supposed to be the one protecting you," he complained, knowing how foolish it sounded even as he couldn't help but express the sting to his pride. To be saved by his girlfriend… and it wasn't even the first time. It had never seemed at all embarrassing when she backed him up in the past, when he'd convinced himself that they were only friends, but now it should be different, right?

"Robin," and she gave him the most exquisite look as he kneeled across from where she sat, "I am certain I have already explained this to you. I love you. You love me. That means that we should protect one another. You have saved me more times than I can account for, and I will also be there for you when you need me. As before, I do not understand your protest."

"No… Star, you're right," he acceded as the sting in his chest was washed away by the look she had granted him, and he slipped in and forward until he kneeled next to her, pulling her into a passionate embrace. "We'll get through everything together."

They were like that for what seemed like a long time, Starfire's completely drained form gently wrapped around Robin's powerfully reassuring presence. The moment stretched out through the early morning hour like a waking dream, and for a while at least, Robin was able to forget everything that had gone so disastrously wrong for them. Alas, the world is not so kind as to let such a perfect moment go unblemished, and Robin was shaken from his reverie of warm comfort by the cool touch of tears on his neck. Starfire was silently weeping into his shoulder.

"We… we lost Terra again…" she whispered into his ear, and he felt his own heart crack and crumble under the weight of this knowledge. He'd been numb to it, isolated from the ache by a kind of shock at the terrifying change in Slade and his utter defeat by the revitalized villain. "You… you must go and get her back Robin!" Starfire whispered harshly now as her exhausted body managed to grip him slightly tighter. "I am too weak to follow, but you can still—"

"No Star," he cut her off with a gentle tone as he slid down until he sat next to her, breaking their embrace slightly now that the world had come back to him. She began to protest when he continued, "Terra will be okay for now, since Slade thinks he's won. You need me more than she does right now."

"But Robin, we cannot leave our friend in his hands!" she protested more strongly, giving him a terrible look of mixed compassion and fear at what he was saying, "I am fine—you must go after them!"

"You're not fine," Robin told her, because he knew it to be true, "You're freezing, I can see you shivering even now. And besides, I have no intention of leaving her to Slade. Now please… come here?" His voice became particularly gentle and pleading, and so Starfire let the tension run out of her body as she scooted herself closer to him. With a sighing exhalation, she placed her complete trust in him as he straightened himself against the brick wall, then lifted her up and sat her between his legs with her back to his chest. She gasped slightly as he closed in around her, wrapping her legs up against her chest with his left arm as he pulled his own legs up next to hers. Finally, he pulled something out of his utility belt, a kind of square piece of shiny foil that he unfolded until it was an enormous piece of shiny foil, then wrapped it over the both of them.

His chin rested on her neck as her uncontrollable shivering began to slow.The thermal spandex that he wore over his armor was soaked through with sweat, but his body still felt delightful against her clammy skin as it radiated an intense heat all along her back, legs, and arms. As he began to rock her gently where she lay back against him, she could feel herself warming, the foil catching all the warmth and helping to cocoon her in the embrace of her beloved. Her breathing evened out as a flush spread through her whole body at the delightful sensation.

"Why are you so cold?" Robin asked quietly into her ear, and she recognized the question as an attempt to distract her from the sting of him applying burn ointment to her wrist under the blanket. She hissed at the sting anyway, then got some breath back as he finished bandaging her wound.

"I… I think I used too much of my power. It takes much of my body's energy to create starbolts, and now… I may have managed the doing over of it. I can no longer warm myself from the inside."

"It's okay now, I've got you," he assured her quietly as they embraced in the dark alley. "I can see why you might be this way though. I've never seen you do anything like that. I didn't realize you had so much power."

"Truthfully Robin," and her voice was growing drowsy now that she floated in this warm caress, "I did not realize I had so much power myself. I have never had even remotely that power before, but tonight, when I thought about what would happen to you and Terra… should I fail against that fire-maker… it just… came out. I… I do not know how I—"

"Shhh," Robin shushed her gently, coaxing her away from the distress that line of thought was bringing her and returning her to the gentle drowse she'd been approaching before. Her long hair brushed against his face as she leaned her head back next to his, and her breathing leveled out the rest of the way, becoming slow and sure as she dropped off into sleep. He smiled warmly as he continued to rock her gently for a while. Inwardly he marveled at the duality she represented, power enough to dominate a battlefield wrapped up in one of the sweetest and kindest women he'd ever encountered. Either would have captured his heart, but both in one had completely ensorcelled his emotions. When he was sure she wouldn't be disturbed by the motion, he pulled out his communicator.

"I may not have gotten him, but if Slade thinks he's seen the last of the Titans, he's got another thing coming," Robin muttered to himself as he got his arm out from under the blanket and flipped open his communicator. As soon as he was sure he wasn't being jammed anymore, he triggered an auto call to the fire department for a full response to the growing inferno just down the street. With everyone evacuated to their homes or shelters, the completely dead and empty office buildings and storefronts would have had to rely on their internal alarms to draw the fire department's attention, and there was no telling what Slade's comm.-jammer might have done to those. With that out of the way, however, he was free to get back to the task of commanding his team.

A quick check turned up the locator signals on Beast Boy and Cyborg, showing them to be on the other side of town at the pier, exactly where he'd told them to go. They might be able to manage it, or so he thought as he churned over what direction Slade was likely to have escaped in. That was something to check in on anyway, but the one he was really interested in talking to, Raven, was nowhere to be seen on the city-wide range his satellite uplink was scanning. He cursed quietly as he went into the logs and found the last known signal, then cursed again when this turned out to be the disaster site. He'd expected her to be back to the tower long ago, it had been hours now since they'd split up, after all. He'd been counting on it, in fact, and now he didn't even know where she was. His frustration mixed with concern, and he whished passionately that someone had remembered to give Skye a communicator/locator, knowing that to find one psychic would be to find the other. Just when he was about to give up on that plan and call the guys to start searching from their end of town, her signal popped back up again out of nothing. It was… two blocks from here?

"No way," he voiced his confusion as he put a signal through to her comm. unit. It rang quite a few times before there was an answer.

"Robin?" she asked instantly the moment the connection opened, before the picture had even come online, and Robin was thoroughly creeped out right away.

"Dang Raven, yeah, it's me, but how—"

"Skye called it," she explained hastily, as though those words would cover the exceedingly uncommon thing she'd just done.

"Yeah, okay," he decided to let that one go for the sake of expediency, "listen, there's been trouble. I need you to get back to the tower as fast as you can and fire up the city-wide search equipment. We're looking for—"

"Slade," she finished for him, and he was shocked to silence as she continued, "Because there was trouble with getting Terra back, right?" There was only fatigue and more fatigue in her voice as she told him exactly what he was about to tell her, and in fewer words. In his mind, Robin stumbled through any number of possible questions, then settled on one.

"How did you—" was as far as he got before she cut in again.

"Skye called that too. He's been a busy esper tonight." The exhaustion was really apparent in her voice now, and Robin wondered that she was even talking to him right now considering the way her face sagged with sleepiness.

"So wait now… Skye's awake?" Robin was doing his best to catch up. He'd thought a lot had happened down here, but apparently he didn't know the half of it if Raven and Skye had been running around too.

"Oh lord Robin," and there was a hint of maudlin agony in her tone as she grimaced in fatigue, "there is no way in hell I can even begin to tell you what's happened to me since we split up. I don't know if I even know all that's happened to me myself, much less if I could list it out to someone else! So please, just let it wait for tomorrow."

"Yeah, I suppose it has been that kind of night. Anyway, I guess my next question is, what exactly are you two doing? I thought you'd be back in the tower to provide support, since each of you was distinctly down for the count when we left you at that field hospital." He was getting a better grip on the situation now, allowing his curiosity to lie silent while he tried once more to organize a search for Slade.

"Believe it or not, we're already hot on Slade's trail… or so Skye tells me. He picked up on the danger to Terra with his powers, and now he's using his ESP to track Slade down. Apparently the one eyed monster has some pretty fancy anti-psi equipment, but Skye's an old hand at sniffing out crooks, and should have the guy's location in no time—his words, not mine."

Robin was elated by the news, never having even remotely considered their newest ally capable of something like that. He'd been prepared to search every square inch of the city, have the team sleep in shifts, mobilize all the regular police support available, and maybe even call in Justice League support if it came right down to it, anything and everything to get at Slade and his hostage/weapon. He knew Slade would have all kind of protections against tracking devices and following spies, peeping satellites and even, apparently, snooping espers, and so he'd secretly despaired of actually managing to sniff out the scum. If Skye had some way of finding him out…

"Where is Skye?" he asked her excitedly as real hope once more bloomed in his heart and mind. "Is he there? Can you put him on?"

"I'd love to put him on, but I'm afraid his body is a little… vacant… right now. He slipped OOB for the second stage of his search, and there's really no way I can—"

"Oh-Oh-Bee?" Robin interrupted suddenly, and Raven rubbed sleepiness from her eyes as she realized the boy wonder wasn't necessarily up on all the psi lingo.

"Out of Body—it means his spirit is out traveling around the place without his body weighing it down. It's kind of like astral projection, only he stays in this plane of existence… and you have no idea what I'm talking about." This last was in response to the bewilder look she'd earned from him. "Bottom line is, he's not available for comment right now."

"So then how have you been talking to him?" Robin queried, seeing the hole in that argument right away and wondering if he was being snubbed in some weird telepathic ruse.

"Telepathy," she said matter-of-factly as she continued to rub her temples. He was struck by the sudden realization that she had switched to using both hands to massage her head, leaving nothing to support the communicator, and nearly choked on his own tongue before he remembered her powers. He must have been more tired than he realized. "Hold on…" she continued as her head perked up and she glanced slightly to the side, "he says he wants to talk with you."

"How—"

"Just think about him," Raven explained before he could even ask, "if you concentrate on what he looks like, his name, that kind of thing, he should be able to pick up on your mind and get in contact with you. Now if you'll excuse me, I have what's shaping up to be just a wonderful migraine," and she cut the signal without further word.

Robin was momentarily furious with her, having thought he'd gotten past that kind of treatment from her some time past. It wasn't like her to just cut him off in mid conversation like that, and it wasn't until he remembered what their specific circumstances were that he found it in himself to forgive her. They were hot on Terra's trail, and he'd been distracting her from gathering her dwindling strength.

Dispelling that wasted anger with a sigh, he decided to give this whole 'telepathy' thing a shot. Gathering his concentration, he did his best to recall what Skye looked like, imagining the well built frame, with his slight height advantage and heavy muscling, the whole thing coming to mind clearly as he remembered their scuffle in the living room. He remembered the guy's voice as it rambled from snooty commentating to excessive lecturing to dead-serious business, and the picture was really shaping up. Finally, he thought about the guy's name, Skye, Skye, a rather unimaginative moniker, but no worse than a hundred other super hero names he'd heard.

"I rather like my name," said a voice in his head, and his body gave an involuntary jerk of surprise that caused Starfire to rouse slightly before slipping back to sleep on his chest.

"Skye?" he whispered harshly into the dark alley so as not to wake his beautiful companion.

"No need to waist your breath Robin, I'm not anywhere near you right now. Just think what you want me to hear, please."

"Is this okay?" he thought nervously, completely unsure if he was doing it right. He hadn't expected this to work, and now that it was, well… it was going to take him some time to adjust.

"That's fine, and I commend you on your expert signaling. I was able to find your mind with little trouble. … I'm sorry, is this bothering you?" Skye asked the last with a genuine concern that Robin couldn't hear so much as he could feel, and that he could tell this freaked him out further.

"It's… I just…" Robin's mind was muddled, but Skye somehow picked up on what his problem was right away.

"I see. Many people are disturbed by their first real telepathic experience. However, you've already had a few with me, so I don't see why this one should be any different?" As Robin began to calm down, he noticed the difference in the Skye he was talking to vs. the one he had met earlier. As he answered the question, he couldn't help but marvel at how polite and withdrawn the guy had become, and he realized that this was only one of many faces Skye had shown so far.

"I'm better now, really. I did get a taste of this before, but you were, y'know, in the room with me, like, right there. This long distance stuff is just a little more… out there." He thought with much more clarity now that he had himself under control. As he continued to observe this weird presence in his mind, he noticed even more, specifically that Skye seemed… not all there, or something.

"Okay, sure, whatever," Skye dismissed him rather shortly, as though distracted by something else, then continued, "I understand you had something you wanted to speak to me about?"

"Umm… right. I need to know that you can really catch Slade," he thought when he remembered his previous excitement at Skye's potential.

"Close your eyes and I'll give you a show, then you can decide for yourself." Skye made the statement with that same distraction, not at all arrogantly, but more as though he couldn't spare the concentration of a more complicated assurance. Noting this, Robin closed his eyes as requested.

There was a moment of darkness where he saw only the inside of his eyelids, but Skye did not keep him waiting long. With a burst of light, an image came into focus, and suddenly Robin was flying ten feet off the ground at break-neck speeds through the dark, empty city streets. He experienced terrible vertigo for a moment as he adjusted to the startling view, his mind's perception unwilling to believe his body's assurances that they were sitting still. He adjusted quickly however, and curiosity began to rise in his mind as he got a better look at what was happening.

"This is a very dumbed-down version of what I'm seeing right now. I trailed a tracer I stuck on Slade's earlier means of conveyance to an alley near that battlefield you just escaped from. From there I managed to pick up a new trail, and I'm following it now. If I seem a bit distracted, it's because the countermeasures he's using are… difficult to deal with." Skye explained with a businesslike, detached efficiency as the view twined around corners, through alleys, into warehouses and back into the streets, seemingly at random.

"My god, who would have thought he could cover so much ground? It's only been about twenty minutes since he was standing right next to me." Robin was understandably shocked as the view sped around at incredible speeds, the image swishing through one place after another as it buzzed through the city.

"This view doesn't trace his exact trail, it picks up on the disturbance in the transdimensional ether caused by the resonance of his artificial mind shields. That probably doesn't mean anything to you, so suffice to say that it's really, really, hard to track but will eventually lead me right to him." Once again, Skye was more distracted than arrogant about the whole thing, and if it was really as hard as he claimed, Robin could understand why. That settled in his mind, he opened his eyes again, and the image vanished, his stomach turning as he seemed to come to a sudden halt in the alley.

"Okay, you've convinced me. I just have to warn you to be careful. Slade's changed, he's equipped himself with firearms and he definitely knows how to use them. When you face him, he's likely to try and use Terra as a hostage against you, so be certain to disable her somehow beforehand. I'm counting on you guys, and if you need help, I can send Beast Boy and Cyborg as backup." Robin was solemn as he tried to think of anything else he should warn this guy about. He was hung up momentarily by the question of just how much Skye already knew, like he'd know it would be Robin calling or like he'd known Terra was in trouble, but he got over this quickly too. Not, however, before Skye could shock the pants off him with his next statement.

"Robin, I think you've got the wrong idea about what I'm about to do here. As far as I'm concerned, this is a rescue mission only. Considering the kind of shape Raven and I are in after this endless nightmare, I also consider it a mission against all odds and beyond any reasonable hope of success."

"What are you saying?" Robin thought, suddenly horrified by the idea that his faith had been misplaced and that they didn't have the opportunity he'd imagined.

"I'm saying I intend to do the one thing anyone who needs victory against all odds should always do when the chips are down. … I'm going to cheat." With this final statement, Skye's presence faded from his mind, leaving behind a hint of humor under a towering stack of calm self confidence, the lingering feelings messing with Robin's head a little as he came fully back to the here and now.

He pulled his arms back under the blanket, wrapped them around his sleeping beauty, and placed all worry from his mind as best he could. This was going to come down to just those two, and if Skye was going to cheat, then the only thing that could be of even slight concern is whether or not they were good enough to not get caught with the trump up their sleeve.

This was his final thought on the subject before the fire trucks and medical workers arrived in their loud, flashy manner, waking Starfire from her repose with a grumbling murmur.

"Robin?" she asked weakly, even frailer sounding than before.

"It's okay Star, our ride just arrived. I've arranged for Terra to be taken care of," a white lie, but one she wasn't likely to remember, "so you can go back to sleep."

"Wake me… when she gets back…" she requested as Robin pulled himself out from under her.

"No problem," he said as he wrapped the thermal foil the rest of the way around her and hefted her into his arms. God willing, they'd all be awake and waiting for those two to return victoriously. As for himself, he found his feelings were not nearly so conflicted and desperate as they'd been with Slade around, and he was more than willing to leave it in the competent hands of his friends. He had only to feel the way Starfire began to shiver again without him under the blanket with her to know exactly where he was needed most.

(Raven)

There comes some point where overall fatigue surpasses any descriptive adjective and becomes a force unto itself. Raven had reached this point some time ago, and was now wallowing in the experience of this force, one she could have lived her entire life quite happily without encountering. The call from Robin had been a not so welcome interruption in her continuing effort to keep her eyes open as she sat miserably on the shaped stone platform Slade had abandoned in the alley. Of particularly unpleasant note from the whole episode was the way the clock in her communicator reminded her of what ungodly hour it was that she was still awake, even after the hell she'd weathered tonight. Of course, with this thought came the self-admonishment, for she'd seen hell, several of them, and this wasn't so bad in comparison.

"Skye? Progress Report?" she requested both mentally and out loud without conviction as a way to momentarily break the monotonous haze of muddled thoughts and slippages into unconsciousness that her world had become. Though she knew it to be quite the useless gesture, she also turned to address the question to the empty shell sitting and leaning back against a nearby building.

"Close. I'm very close, so you should get ready. We won't have much time to make our move once I get a fix on them." His mental tone was distracted, and considering the obscene amount of information his brain was processing as it plied the ether, she was impressed he could spare enough concentration for that much.

"Yes, of course." Without meaning to, she'd transmitted a big taste of what was percolating beneath her surface thoughts, a clear effect of her fatigue. Skye noticed instantly, and she could feel his progress slow as he drew much more concentration away and toward her. She began to curse in a deep part of her mind as she realized she'd done exactly what she'd been trying to avoid: distract him from his rescue efforts.

"Raven!" he snapped irritably into her mind, more disappointed than anything else. The feeling had time to fade away before he continued, leaving his tone completely empty. "Listen, I get that you want to rescue Terra, so you've been suffering in silence despite the extent of your fatigue, but really, why didn't you say something? Do you really think we can pull this stunt off if you're dead on your feet?"

"Can you honestly do anything about it? The way I see it, I have my choice between this, or the migraine that forced wake-up you use brings along for the ride. I chose what I'd rather have." If her cold voice could be said to have any emotion at all, it would have been petulance. She was incredibly annoyed that he seemed to be paying more concern to her than Terra.

"Please, I know better than to try that ability on someone in less than an emergency situation. I had something completely different in mind, and I would have already implemented it if I'd know you were this far gone." There wasn't a person alive who would have attributed even the barest aspect of emotion to Skye's tone, and Raven was forced to wonder if he was intentionally icing his soul or if this was another side effect of the lifedrain.

"Okay, do whatever you want. As long as we get my friend back, I don't care," Raven dismissed responsibility, too tired to be as stubborn as she secretly wanted to be. She didn't take it at all well that this guy was getting bossy all of a sudden, but she couldn't be sure if this was an effect of her fatigue, or if she was genuinely pissed off about something. Then again, her general resistance had been worn down so far, she couldn't even bring herself to really worry about this. The miasmic fog of exhaustion was rising like a choking blanket over her reasoning faculties, and for the time being she submitted to the one who seemed to know what was going on.

"It's simple really," Skye wasted no time as his attention shifted back to his search, "just think of whatever it is that you would normally do to wake up, whatever your favorite way of starting the morning is, for example, and then tell him."

Raven nearly asked what he meant, but his attention was gone again before she could manage, as she was left staring at Skye's empty body, speechless, clueless, and fucking seriously tired. She almost asked out loud who the hell 'him' was supposed to be, when a sudden presence at her side announced itself with a warm rubbing sensation and a gentle mewing. Her mind stuttered on tired legs… that couldn't be it. She thought about it for another long moment, then smiled in almost manic amusement, because of COURSE that was it. It was just one of those nights.

"Okay buddy," she said out loud to the almost mystically black form of the feline next to her, "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. What do I have to loose, really?" The cat simply stared at her expectantly, as if telling her that it was her time that was being wasted, not his own. She shook her head in further disbelieving amusement.

"Alright, Benvolio. What I could really use to wake me up right now would be a mug of tea. Not just any tea now, but a special blend I've been experimenting with for a while now. Can you take alchemical dictations?" Raven was so struck by the hilarity of this situation that she didn't even flinch when the cat nodded at her gravely, as though her question was perfectly natural, hell, as though it understood her words.

She was, of course, lying through her teeth in an uncontrollably wild attempt to let out the stress that had managed to mount ever higher behind her façade of calm indifference, but one couldn't be entirely she was even aware of this herself as she began to whimsically read out the formula for a ultra-gourmet tea blend she'd found in an old book once upon a time. It was as though someone else was talking out of her mouth for this moment in time, and later, she would find this memory exceptionally disturbing.

It was amazing how her mind cleared as she thought of the ingredients, having gone over them longingly a hundred times in the past as she wondered what such a brew would taste like. Extensive research had shown that three of the leaf species she needed were extinct, and that the rest would cost, for enough to make a single pot, more than she was given in expenses allowance for a year of serving as a Teen Titan. None the less, she detailed the formula, including the extinct species, as well as the preparation process all the way down to how long the leaves stayed in the brew and the specific type of spring water she preferred for her tea. As she brought her description to a close, she couldn't help but feel a little ashamed for being such a bitch about this, but she was just too damn tired to take any of this seriously anymore.

For his part, the cat listened intently to her explanation of what she desired, continuing to stare at her piercingly until long after she'd finished. The stare wore on, and she actually began to come back to herself and feel real guilt for the way she was acting. There was the inexplicable urge to apologize and give the cat an actually possible item to fetch, or whatever it was supposed to do for her, when it broke the stare and dissolved into a cloud of shadow that evaporated into thin air. She yelped slightly at its sudden disappearance, and then felt a sting of remorse through the numbing veil of her exhaustion. She'd driven the poor animal away with her baseless whimsy.

She was just beginning to muddle her way through planning an explanation to Skye as to why his cat had skipped out on her after he'd graciously arranged for it to give its mysterious aid, when the animal in question returned. She yelped again as it manifested more like a whirlwind of shadow this time, its unnaturally pitch black coloration standing out even against the dark background of the unlit alleyway. As an unearthly aroma reached her nose, her brain was pierced with a spike of clarity she'd not felt in what seemed like hours, and she realized it had not returned empty… pawed… or whatever. She fell to her knees then in an almost frantic rush to see, smell, and taste what the cat had dragged in.

Sitting in a nondescript tan ceramic mug next to the regally posed feline was a fluid of nondescript brown coloration. The smell that came wafting from the hot liquid was anything but nondescript, generating in her mind memories of every visit she'd ever made to a tea store, a magic shop, or any of the many other places she'd enjoyed being. In fact, the wafting fumes from this potion stimulated her mind to such a bubbling happiness that a tear ran down her cheek and stress cracks began to reach down the sides of the buildings to either side as spider web fine networks of black energy spread lighting-quick across them. Damn, just the smell.

As she lifted the mug into her hands, she could feel the warmth of the brew spread through them. Holding the cup to her face, she took a deep breath straight from the surface, and it was like she'd gotten a full night's sleep in one exquisite inhalation. Unable to hold out any longer, she took a greedy, testing sip from the edge, her curiosity overcome by her common sense at the last instant to keep her from gulping it down.

Bliss. Liquid bliss. That first exquisite taste hit her tongue like a livewire, and she was forced to hang on for the ride as its powerful effect had its way with her nervous system. She was inundated by the sensation spreading out from her tongue and sizzling along her synapses, settling a calm euphoria over her brain even as it lanced flash fires of delightful tingling along her nerves to every part of her body. As she knelt on the cold alley pavement, tears flowed freely down her face while chips from the walls and ground began to shoot out in randomly interspersed barrages, not unlike the leaping of popping popcorn. It was as these miniscule projectiles began to ricochet off of anything and everything around her that she finally jerked her mind off the high and began to squeeze everything back under control.

With expert breathing techniques and a few long-practiced mental warding spells, she nailed down the emotional outburst with little more than a shake of her head and a sharp wincing as she leaned over hard forward and pounded her fist on the pavement. Gritting her teeth with the effort, she slowly ground the rest of the explosive sensations away, willing them to be silent with every fiber of her self control. For good measure, she finished it all off by using an ancient meditation technique to accelerate her metabolism, holding the effect for several long moments until every last vestige of the feelings had been burnt away to nothing. She was left a shivering mess, huddled under her regally spread cloak as she struggled for air on her hands and knees.

Almost grudgingly, she looked up at the mug where it sat completely intact on the ground, that terrifying liquid steaming in its unthreatening way, concealing its terrible power even as the nose-numbingly delightful scent blared out its siren's call. She felt the immediate and almost undeniable desire to take another taste, to simply lie down on the ground and let that burning euphoria run its full course through her brain, and she reacted in the only way she could. With a growl of anger, she snapped the mug up by its handle and flung it down the alley, a trail of showering tea almost invisible in the night before it shattered twenty feet down the way. She was left breathing in short gasps as the stinging desire for more began to burn at the back of her throat and force small muscle spasms all over her body.

"Meaow?" said Ben inquisitively, striding forward to sit just in front of her and look up the few inches into her eyes where she was still keeled over. The look could only be described as smug.

"You…" Raven muttered darkly, then relinquished that building anger with a sigh and continued in neutral/sad whispering, "Don't you know better than to grant someone their wildest and most whimsical desire? People are never careful what the wish for…" and she trailed out into silence as the grip of that fluid began to tighten on her throat. She was literally sweating through her costume with the desire to taste it once more. She clenched her eyes in pain as she began to wonder if one of those extinct tea species had been related to poppies (plant antecedent of opium, cocaine, etc), the instant, ironclad addiction being more than enough to convince her of this.

"Purrrr," the cat began to vibrate with that incredible sound they're capable of. Raven's eyes were drawn to him with that sound, and she glanced up just in time to see it vibrate from its unnatural, painfully black solid form into a cloud of black fog once more. Before she could do anything, the fog flew straight at her and enveloped her face in inky darkness. She was no stranger to the dark, but this sudden blackout compounded with her exhaustion and the pain from that drug to bring on a panic. She reached up to claw the cloud off her face, but couldn't get a grip, feeling only a cool mist and her own skin. She was about to blast it with her power when the attack came to an end. The mist was gone, and she knew exactly where.

She could feel that same sensation again, like something furry was rubbing against her from the inside, possible one of the most surreal and uncomfortable things she'd ever experienced. It began to move quickly from her head down her body to her toes, then faded completely. In a moment, the cat welled back up again out of nothing, forming into solidity once more. Raven felt completely better.

"Okay," Raven finally said, after almost a minute of pulling herself together, getting up off the ground, and wiping the stupefied look off her face, "and that, Ben, officially makes you the coolest entity I've ever met."

The cat preened at the compliment, then became a pool of shadow, twirled up to her feet, spiraled up her legs and body, then reformed on her shoulder. He rubbed his body against the side of her face affectionately, effortlessly keeping his balance. Raven was pleasantly surprised, not only by the comforting presence of the increasingly friendly feline, but by its mystical ability to keep the perch without digging in claws or imposing more than a negligible weight on her shoulder.

"Honestly, how did a guy like Skye come across a being like you?" she wondered out loud as she took stock of what that little episode had cost her. The drink had worked, kind of, because whatever else, she was no longer tired. With the cat's help, the addiction was also broken, though she couldn't imagine how it had managed that. She didn't know how it had produced the impossible beverage either, but she didn't let either lacking bother her. If she could just get a minute to collect herself…

"Raven, I've got them, its time to go."

Wouldn't you know it?

En Route

"I've tracked them to a nondescript warehouse in the industrial sector," Skye briefed Raven telepathically from the dubious comfort of her pocket dimension as they hurtled through the sky. "The building doesn't seem to be much of a base, more like a temporary safe house, it would seem they're just stopping there for medical purposes. We needed to get there as quickly as possible, so I held off on a closer examination."

"Okay," Raven was rather indifferent in her response, eager to get this whole operation over with and, as before, more than willing to let Skye do all the worrying. She was still rather fried by this night from hell, and now that the end was in sight, she was basically running on autopilot as Skye led her around by the psychic hand. A small part of herself wondered how in the name of all sane and good things she'd gone from hating his guts to trusting him with her life and the life of her helpless friend Terra, but that voice was drowned by the undeniable comfort of the assuring force with which he directed her toward Slade. She was definitely in a passenger seat state of mind right now.

"Skye, we'll be there in about three minutes," she updated him distractedly, more than positive he could tell exactly how long it would take them to get there. "I was just wondering… a few quick questions?" She couldn't place where this urge to speak with him came from, but she couldn't deny it either. It was like some part of her couldn't believe that tonight had happened, and that she was now seeking confirmation of some kind.

"It's better to live unrestrained by questions never voiced," he answered obliquely, sounding just as distracted as her. Between the two of them, there might have been about half a mind participating in this conversation. "That said, there are things that just can't be answered in a few minutes. So shoot."

"How did your cat do that?" was her instantaneous response. She had her list ready, at that was at the top.

"Short answer: he manipulates matter at the molecular level," he responded promptly and simply, and Raven did not fail to notice that he hadn't actually told her anything at all. "Long answer would take a few hours. Next."

"How did you do that with your cloths earlier? That's been bothering the hell out of me." She decided that prying for detailed answers was less important than distracting herself from the flight of butterflies in her intestines, which she finally realized was why she'd started this conversation in the first place.

"Synthar smart fibers. Self repairing, self cleaning, color changing, self resizing… in other words the only set of cloths you'll ever need. By stimulating the memory fiber with that rubbing motion, I bound it back together. By giving it a good snap or three, I separated all of the already loosened impurities in the fibers, including blood, grime, oil, stone dust, sweat, you know—everything. If I wanted, I could manipulate its microchip command interface and change what I'm wearing into virtually any other style imaginable."

"Sounds like you'd really never need more than one," Raven commented idly as she imagined what it must be like to go through life with all the cloths you'll ever need on you at once. She actually began to envy him a little as she recalled how much she loathed laundering all those bodysuits and capes in her closet.

"Which is fortunate considering how much a single set costs. Next question?"

"Oh, umm, why did you send Ben searching for those sunglasses of yours? It seems more than a little…" Raven trailed off as she realized how offensive what she was going to say really sounded, but there was no way a sensitive could hide that kind of thing from another sensitive.

"Anal? Yes, I can see how it could come across that way, but I and these shades have simply been through too much together for me to give them up after a little spill off the side of an office building. I've had these through thick and through thin, ever since I purchased them from that experimental industrial materials company for that exorbitant prototype price tag. Did you know that these things are made of a dimensionally stabilized super polymer that can resist heat, pressure, and kinetic force far in excess of that which things like battleship armor can? Would be doing myself quite a disservice leaving them behind.

Raven was intrigued by this, quite effectively dispelling her doubt with wonder at this guy's unending supply of fascinating dialogue. She fell to silence and became so absorbed in her own thoughts that she was actually startled a minute later when he called her down to a slanting metal rooftop of some kind of factory in the industrial district.

Factory Rooftop

"There are eight security cameras that cover a complete field of view around the building, pressure sensors on the roof, and motion and heat sensors in every room. There are also laser tripwire grids in full array to catch any and all approach to the area and alert the systems." Skye spoke slowly as his OOB spirit passed with wraithly impudence through Slade's formidable security system.

"Damn," muttered Raven darkly where she crouched by his once again vacant body a few buildings over. "Sounds like Slade wants to know everything, all the way down to if a fly breaks wind anywhere near his building."

The industrial sector, like most of Jump, somehow managed to stay shiny and new, so it was little trouble to hide on the chilly metallic roof, though she couldn't see how Skye had managed to concentrate enough go OOB while lying flat out on the ice sheet this thing became at night. All around were the reaching ultra-filtered smokestacks and towering spherical chemical containers that dominated this part of the city, and she strained her eyes to glare through the moonlit night at the building they had to get her friend out of.

"Anyway," she continued when he didn't respond to her dry attempt at humor, "I'm open to suggestions on how to get in." the place was a fortress of security, and it was only an emergency base. It led her to once more question how they had ever beaten him back. Oh yeah… Terra betrayed him didn't she?

"Ahhh…" Skye gasped unintelligibly in either pain or pleasure as his spirit returned to his body, the limp form jerking upward somewhat as it was reoccupied. "Like I told Robin," he answered her question as he pulled himself off the cold metal roof, his voice sounding far weaker than she would have preferred, "I plan to cheat… vigorously."

"Okay Mr. Dirty Play, lay it on me… what's your plan?" She had had enough ambiguous reassurance. Now was time to see if he could actually put up.

"I call it 'Grand Theft Hostage.' We're rather simply going to sneak in, snatch the girl's empty husk, and split out of there without Slade becoming any the wiser. The cheating part is just beautiful though, and here it is," he mumbled out calmly but tiredly as he reached down at his gun belt. Fiddling for a moment, he brought out a nondescript looking box and set it on his thy as he leaned back along the roof's mild incline, holding himself up on one propped elbow. "This is what you might call 'a completely unfair technological advantage.'"

"Okay, I'll bite," she muttered without enthusiasm, disgusted that he was bothering with showmanship at this ungodly hour of the morning, "What is it?" In truth, she wasn't all that annoyed, everyone dealt with the mind-breaking strain in his or her own way after all.

"This is an IDP micro infiltration computer. In moments, his security system will be mine to toy with as I please. It's almost sad how utterly little chance he has against this tactic… but only almost. I mean, even the most cutting edge stuff in the greater galaxy is generations behind this little baby. Watch and see, and get ready to spirit us in there." Skye spoke with the oddest hint of humor, even as it became very much apparent that he was having trouble moving and talking, and probably also breathing.

Raven leaned the rest of the way forward and prepared herself, too tired to be skeptical, saving all her energy for what, if there was any god anywhere, would be the last big push of the night. She was more than a little disappointed then by the next thing Skye said.

"Hmmmm," he hummed out in very mild frustration, "just as I suspected."

"What is it now?" Raven snapped out, and the roof beneath her got a new set of intricately interwoven scorings as her power reacted to the burst of emotion. She couldn't stand the delay any longer, the stresses of the night building to this one ungodly crescendo within her. It was as though she could already feel Terra safely in her arms as she whisked what was left of the broken girl away from the living nightmare she had herself condemned her to. The deepest root of her anxiety came to light in her mind at that same instance, and as Skye explained himself, she felt the anger leave her with the realization.

"As I thought, he has no hard line into the building, just in case someone was to try exactly what I'm doing right now. If he thinks I'm going to let a little thing like a lack of wires stop me…" Skye continued, but Raven's mind was elsewhere. There was a rushing emptiness between her ears, an utter numbness that had been threatening for some time, but which had only just now come out.

This night had been a travesty against her comfort zone, a continual series of blows against what she'd always considered her limits and boundaries, as well as a terror of near death experiences and an almost nonstop combat, injuries, and patchwork fixes on said injuries. Her body and mind were in a shambles, and it was a wonder that she was standing much less managing to keep any kind of control on her powers. She was operating now on borrowed time, a tolerance borne of the dreamlike quality this ordeal had assumed greasing her through unbearable encounter after unbearable encounter, but it couldn't last, and it was this knowledge too that combined to weigh her down. Eventually, all this was going to come up and smack her with a delayed-action breakdown of epic proportions, and all she could really think about was the guy chattering away in his half dead voice and why it was she'd been so utterly uncomfortable recently, even through the hazy gauze that shielded her from freaking about everything else that had happened.

It was simple really, she thought to herself as she watched him produce a small object and hand it to his feline companion, who vanished into nothingness as quickly as he'd appeared. The question that had been nagging at her, the real one she'd not had the guts to ask him, and for which reason she'd plied him with nothing questions to which she'd received nothing answers, was simply: why? This guy didn't know Terra, had never met her, and had only second and third had concepts of what she was like through his ESP. He had nothing to do with her loss, had nothing to do with the Titan's gloriously horrifying failure to protect her, and had absolutely no reason to destroy himself in the pursuit of her salvation. Why? Why was he doing this for Terra, and for the Titans?

Her meandering contemplations were yanked back down to the present when a heavy gloved hand tapped her on the knee. The cold steel touch snapped her back into herself, and she glanced with a start at Skye, as though he'd just jumped out and shouted 'BOO'. The look that he fixed on her was incomprehensible behind his recovered sunglasses, but the feeling he transmitted was clear as day. He felt her distress, her confusion, and her pain, and he urged her to hold it all off just a little longer. She understood immediately, so, reaching down to the last dregs of her strength, she bolted up all that crap behind a cast iron door within her mind, and then nodded when she was fee and clear again. Time enough to fall apart when Terra's body was back in their hands.

"His system is mine, lets get this done," he responded to her nod, his voice gone completely to business as he dragged himself slowly the rest of the way to his feet. Raven wasted no time, immediately taking to the air, looking back to solidify a disk of air with her power, which he was already stepping onto as though he'd expected it to be there when he stuck out his foot. She conveyed them both over to the nondescript warehouse's rooftop, looking in vain for the security features Skye had disabled, but unable to catch even a glimpse of Slade's now defunct defenses. She would never have spotted them by herself.

"The rest of this operation is silent," Skye 'pathed to her emotionlessly, and this time she knew it was because he'd iced his soul. The frost of utter neutrality coming off his mind was half shocking and half alluring, once again drawing a mild envy from a woman who had worked hard her whole life at doing something that was completely natural and accursed by this man. "To ensure success, we've can't afford to make any noise whatsoever. I don't even want to hear roof dust grinding beneath your boots."

His utterly callous instructions surprised Raven once more, but she took it in stride as she set him ever so gently on the flat, featureless rooftop. She kept herself floating to be absolutely sure not to screw up their last shot at this, then kept place just behind him as he took a few perfectly silent steps in a seemingly random direction. When he bent down and placed his hands on the roof, she knew he had something, and so she took up position above and behind him as she waited for further instruction.

"They're below us," he said simply, linking her through to the image he had with disturbingly easy and familiar mental tinkering. "There are… three humanoids, one of which matches the spiritual signature of the woman we're after."

As he continued to explain, she noticed what he was describing, a rough outline of the enormous and virtually featureless room below them coming into focus behind her eyelids. There were indeed three glowing figures occupying the room, their respective auras badly dimmed by the artificial mind shields they wore, but still distinguishable to Skye's sensitive perceptions. She noticed the iridescent yellow of Terra off to one side right away. A furious reddish-brown several yards away would have to be Slade, the mere sight of the stained and tarnished nastiness that was his soul filling her with a slight dread, and currently he seemed to be working intently on something with his back to the rest of the room. The third however… that one she didn't have a clue how to interpret. The mere existence of her inquiry was communicated instantly to Skye through the link, which she'd unknowingly let grow quite wide, its power difficult to judge with the utter lack of emotion off of Skye to gauge it by.

"The third figure… hmmm. That one obviously isn't human, probably one or another of the vegoid species by the particular shade of the outer aura," he answered her unspoken question in that classic lecturing tone, his lack of anything like urgency or nervousness beginning to grate against Raven's ability to control her own pent up baggage from the night. "Ahh… I know who that is, actually. It's another of the ones I was after… but of all the beings to find on a night like this… and Slade's 'prisoner'… humph, the arrogant bastard."

"Mind telling me what's going on… like WHY WE ARENT SAVING TERRA YET?" Raven's power began to bake around her body as the rush was once again threatening to break down her walls and overcome her, but a cool rush of power from Skye quelled it with ease. That bastard just—

"Did you just-?" she snapped into his mind incredulously, then, "If you expect me to stand by and let you do that to me—"

"The only thing I expect is for you to execute your half of this rescue. Our window of opportunity is closing rapidly. Slade is currently suturing his own arm wound, and once he's completed this undeniably painful task, any chance of secreting away your valued friend will evaporate. Act now Raven. Rescue her."

The calculating ice in his mental tone washed away the phantom of outrage she'd managed to drum up, and she allowed herself mild, neutral grumbling about what an asshole he was without any feelings at all as she wasted absolutely no time lighting gently on the roof and kneeling down to press her power into the surface. This was a situation where, even if Skye's power hadn't just sucked her dry, she'd have had to concede her anger to how utterly right he was.

Inside the fantastically vast and nearly vacant warehouse, a tendril of shadow indistinguishable from the reaching blackness of the poorly lit interior crawled down steel support beams and dripped down to one of the lonesome lamps that glared like huge eyes at the room below. From the lamp, a tiny strand of dark reached down like a single thread of spider's silk, floating gently downward until it landed on the nondescript chair in which the blond woman sprawled out and dozed lifelessly, limp as a rag doll. As she worked at the unfamiliar effort of coordinating her extraction through the lens of Skye's ESP, a thought occurred to her, and she transmitted a question as she finished getting a grip on Terra's chair.

"Skye, the other one, you're after her, right?" she asked him, her tone as distant due to her efforts as his had been earlier. "Shouldn't I grab that one too?"

"Oh no Raven, this is actually working out better than I could have hoped," Skye responded, just a hint of feeling creeping into his voice, as though he couldn't help but feel amused by what he was thinking, or more likely, like he couldn't maintain his power strongly enough to drown that out any more. "Those two were meant for one another—I mean the more I consider the situation, the more advantageous it seems. That one, I've encountered her before, and her cunning is nothing short of legendary, though her actual abilities are above and beyond even what the stories suggest. Even now she weaves an entangling web around Slade, baiting him into one of her famous traps with the expertly acted possum role she's playing right now. With luck, those two will take each other out of the picture long enough for us to deal with the others. Leave them to one another… it would be giving Slade exactly what he deserves. Now grab the girl so we can run, it'll only take him another twelve seconds to tie off those sutures."

Raven didn't need to be told twice, and with a rush of her power, the chair, woman and all, was sucked into a pool of shadow on the floor, vanishing silently into the darkness.

(Slade)

As Slade finished drawing out the last pull of surgical thread through the once gaping wound in his arm, he tied off the slack with long-practiced motions and snipped of the trailing edge with the clamp he'd been using to handle the micro needle. He was no stranger to the stinging pain of performing surgical procedures on himself without the benefit of anesthesia, but it still took intense concentration to get the job done correctly though the ache. So, as he replaced his forearm guard with a new one from his stockpiles, he was finally able to turn his mind to other matters.

The girl was quickly outgrowing her usefulness. Now that she was no longer a surprise to any of his enemies, now that she was badly injured and almost totally used up, and now that he realized just how little he felt like having the little waif around, he was running out of reasons to keep her. He'd been disappointed by the deterioration in her combat ability during his not so tender ministrations, though he'd expected some attrition to her powers, he'd been unwilling to consider their intent in the light of how pleased he was by his plans to make her useful again. Certainly he could build her muscle and endurance back up with little trouble, but he'd been landed with a much more amusing target of his efforts unexpectedly, the prospects for what he'd be able to do with the alien far more intriguing than building up his old toy. Truthfully, he'd probably just donate her to Blood's tender mercies until it was time for her farewell performance for the Titans. Yes, that was most likely the best use of her empty shell at this point, and would provide the final ultimate insult to both the little whore who'd backstabbed him and all of her pathetic friends. He'd have to make sure and get plenty of photos to flood the internet and maximize the effect of the closing move of his queen piece.

This was his last thought before he stood and turned back to the room in general. There was a long pause. With a flying leap, he was back at his work table in an instant, jamming his hand down on a large protruding button there. When nothing happened, i.e. the security system didn't lockdown the building, he went from sputtering surprise to blind fury in record time. As the red haze overtook his vision and he began a mad dash for the roof access stairs, he pressed a button on his belt, triggering his robots to full alert status, a process he'd made sure was completely independent of his security system. He was at the stairway inside of ten seconds, and was taking them in threes as he raced toward the obvious point of access for this theft, blood pounding through his body as he lost himself to a killing lust. No one stole from him.

(Skye)

"Raven, our chances of escaping with our lives decrease sharply with every second's delay," he felt compelled to remind her as he ticked off the seconds on his internal clock. Everything was always more clear when he'd iced his soul, and the prosecution of this operation was no different, the window he estimated for a success here swinging shut as every instant washed by. It was so clear that they should already be gone that it was hard for him to comprehend, in this state of mind, why she was hesitating.

"Terra… Terra what did he do to you?" she mumbled out loud, violating another one of his essential directives. The moment she'd lifted the broken shell of a person off the rickety old chair, she'd gone to pieces, falling apart in a way that he was hesitant to forcibly curtail. While he knew exactly the course of action that would carry them all to safety in the most expedient manner possible, the small part of his humanity he hadn't had enough power to suck away to nothingness screamed out that there were certain things he couldn't disregard with any hope of ever being forgiven. Thus he was stuck in a most uncharacteristic moment of indecision, suspended between the knowledge that their lives were slipping away like grains of sand in an hourglass and a dull certainty that there was no way for him to motivate Raven without pushing her past her breaking point and eradicating any hope of her trusting him ever again. He'd been lucky so far, but without her and her friends on his side, the universe was doomed.

"Raven… we need to go. I begging you, though I can't express the depth of my urgency right now," and he couldn't, his voice, speaking out loud himself now, as emotionless as a poorly synthesized robotic drone, "I'm begging you to please get us out of here. We need to save your friend, and the chances of that happening become relatively miniscule if we're still here six seconds from now. Five… four… three…" Skye pulled out his sidearm at three seconds and prepared for what he felt coming.

There was no change in Raven, neither mental nor outwardly, and Skye knew better than to expect much considering what he sensed from her. Right now, for whatever reason, she was a guilt taco with pain filling, and there was nothing he could do short of raping her emotions that would snap her out of it right now. Considering this, he steeled himself against the flaring of his danger sense as two dozen spiritless metallic constructs registered on the peripherals of his clairvoyance at the same time.

Closing from every direction at once, they leapt up the sides of the building and launched themselves over the threshold of the roof and high into the air, acquiring their targets below with audible beeping sounds and the illumination of glowing eyes. Skye whipped out his pistol and opened fire without mercy, lancing out with pinpoint accuracy to fry five of them like giant metal skeet before they could reach the highest point of their converging leaps. As they trained their own weapons at the three below, his deadly streaks of solid, hot light continued to lick upward like pillars of purging fire, each one annihilating the central control unit of another robot in a shower of exploded metal and fried circuitry. At the last possible instant, Skye kicked Raven and Terra to the side with a powerful leg sweep that slid them over the rough rooftop and under an overhanging ventilation duct, then leapt to the side himself as a dozen laser pistols turned their previous position into a flaming, melted hole in the roof.

The lasers started to track him, following after him at full burn and creating an expanding melted line in the building's flat roof, so he continued to evade with wide sweeping rolls that would keep the two women safe while still allowing him a moment or two to strike out at the descending robots. As both the destroyed junk heaps and the still functioning automatic soldiers began to slam into the roof with clanging thumps, Skye took cover behind the building' roof access stairwell outlet just in time to avoid being filleted by a new battery of lasers that still managed to dig deep gouges into the boxlike structure that housed the stairs. He was about to leap on top of the tiny building to continue his rather hopeless counterattack when ever remaining robot on the roof suddenly slowed to quietude, and he was coldly perplexed as he was able to sense their weapons loosing charge as they stood down. His answer came quickly as he sensed a blazing emotional beacon tearing up from just beneath him on the stairwell, the advanced mind shield he was using completely failing to hide the intense fury Slade projected as he reached the top of the building. Skye crouched away from the side of the little structure the doorway was on as it was kicked open with undue force by the furious villain that had just arrived to completely annihilate any feasible chance of them getting out of this.

Slade took the last few steps onto the roof with a slow caution that belied the fury boiling under his synthetic mind shield, and Skye's powers searched furiously through the infinite realms of the possible for any way they could come out of this relatively intact. As he worked through the options at his disposal with a methodical exactness unhindered by the hopelessness he wasn't currently capable of feeling, Slade's emotional state and demeanor took a surprising turn where he stood on the opposite side of the stairway access hut. He'd seen Terra and Raven.

Nothing in the near future suggested an immediate danger to them, so Skye hunkered down to sense carefully through the situation and wait for the right moment to act. As of yet, Slade was clueless to his very existence, and that was his greatest advantage at this point. However, this advantage would serve him poorly in the face of his two dependent handicap, inferiority of pure numbers, and the fact that his laser pistol was down to its last charge (which would do little against the ceramate plate and fractal polymer armor the man sported so sinisterly). Honestly, unless something happened from the mysteriously altered resource Raven currently represented, he didn't foresee any good end to this.

This was his last thought on the matter before Slade began to talk.

(Raven) moments ago

The instant Raven recombined Terra's particles into this phase of existence, expelling the chair and its occupant from the subdimensional pocket she'd slid them through, something went wrong in her head. All the pent up confusion, anger, fear, and pain died an instantaneous and pitiful death the very moment she got a close look at what was left of Terra. The bulwarks she'd thrown up against it all dissolved, the buffering Skye had added with his draining evaporated, and her mind was left defenseless against the onslaught of the knowledge lying before her. Somehow, through all the warnings Skye had granted and all the knowledge she herself had gained through earlier encounters, she'd still managed to block out just what Terra had become, to isolate herself from realizing this, what was hitting her right now. Terra was gone.

She couldn't rightly conceive of what lie she'd unconsciously comforted herself with up until she was faced with the utter reality of Terra's state, but it was nothing compared to what had actually afflicted the girl. What she knew to be a friend, the essence of mind and spirit that formed the entity Terra, was simply nonexistent in the shell of flesh she'd previously associated it with. To a sensitive like her, such a discrepancy came as a shock, the absence of the soul she knew in the physical body it was supposed to occupy hitting her right in the brain, especially bad because she had somehow managed to avoid expecting it and had never encountered anything remotely like it before. As the first touch to the shell's skin gave her access past the mind shield, she had no choice but to face the truth.

What was left in the place of reasoning faculties and urgent objectives was an echoing void of silence interrupted by an endlessly recursive loop of thought that drowned out all of her awareness and left her alone with nothing but crushing, suffocating guilt. She felt entirely responsible for allowing things to reach such a state, the mindless lump of flesh before her a symbol of her own inability to hold trust or protect loyalty. She heard nothing, saw nothing, and knew nothing but her own failure, the buzzing of the outside world gone to static around her. Even when she was knocked aside, she stirred but a moment before that blank face caught her mind again in the cycle of blinding, deafening guilt.

That was, until a certain voice ripped her out of her reverie by association with pure emotional explosion.

(Slade)

As he reached the top floor, kicked off the door, and strode purposefully the rest of the way out onto the roof, Slade felt his rage crystallize. Like coagulating blood, it solidified into a towering precipice of cold, dead nothingness that fueled the homicidal hunger in his soul. As he took in the situation on the roof, secure in the knowledge that his robots had pinned down the thieves, he caught site of the two young women and immediately focused all his attention right there. From the look of the shattered wreckage of more than half his robots, it would seem that the dark one had put up quite a fight before taking cover, but now she cowered over the remains of her pathetic friend. As the certainty of his ongoing victory combined with yet another prize to this night's collection, his mood improved substantially. He even began to feel loquacious all of a sudden as the true enormity of his own greatness occurred to him once more.

"Ah, so the young Miss Raven decided to join us again?" Slade asked the air around him rhetorically, and the girl shook with a jerk of surprise at the sound of his voice, as though she'd been oblivious to his arrival. Strange, considering all the damage she'd just done, to see her so pathetically subdued over the blank, but he let this concern pass from his mind as he wound up into full villainous tirade.

"I see you've had a chance to get reacquainted with your old dear friend, the late Miss Terra. I had a feeling you didn't fully comprehend how eloquently I'd handled her punishment before you attacked me earlier, so I suppose I'm glad that you've gotten the chance now." His voice was light and taunting, the edge of danger there as always, the unspoken threats and jeers transmitting perfectly through his tone and inflection.

"How… how could you do something so horrible to… to my friend?" Raven asked in a dead voice, not even bothering to look up at him. Her face was shaded by that hood, so he couldn't read her face either, but his imagination danced with the countenance of utterly defeated agony he expected there. She was partially psychic after all, she could truly appreciate what he'd done to the little traitor.

"Raven, dearest little Raven, you need to understand that I will do whatever I please to whomever I please. Not only is it within my power to do this to you, but I fully intend to afflict each and every one of your pathetic friends with a fate as equally justly deserved as the end of that little traitorous wench you now hold. You have all defied me beyond allowance, and you will all pay dearly for it. Now… come along quietly and accept your fate. If you make this easy on both of us, I may consider destroying you quickly so you need not see me torture your little friends later on." All through his monologue, Slade floated along the intoxicating brilliance of his success tonight, waxing through the many victories in his own mind as he spouted his, admittedly, overdramatic speech.

As he continued to observe the prey that had so haplessly wandered into his clutches once again (ignoring for mental convenience the way she'd initially circumvented his security), he noticed a subtle change in her after his words, a glowing at the edges of her form that didn't conform to anything he'd seen before. White fire began to dance languidly across her cloak and down her arms, surrounding her in a bubble of iridescent flames that seemed to invest her with their purifying light. Slade felt himself break out in an inexplicable sweat as her dark cloak began to light with a burning white light, roasting out until she was clothed head to toe in a pristinely unblemished alabaster.

"Slade, I will see to it that you never hurt one of my friends ever again," spoke an unearthly voice from the general vicinity of Raven and Terra, and Slade was immediately on full guard, hands poised to draw weapons as he continued to watch this transformation in silence. Every nerve on his body danced with the feeling of impending danger, combat reflexes trained since his first trip through boot camp coiling for immediate use as soon as he knew the nature of this threat.

The feeling of danger magnified intensely when she slowly rose to her feet, turning her pure white cloak aside to show two glowing white starbursts of flaming energy in a pit of black under her hood. Wasting no further time, Slade burst into action.

"Robots, subdue her!" he shouted to his minions, and they dutifully raised their weapons to fire on her from every direction. Before they even had a chance to strike at her, each spontaneously burst into an inferno of heatless white flame, the pure brilliance of the explosions rending the robotic antagonists into so much broken and scorched scrap metal in mere seconds. Raven never moved, her dazzling form continuing to bare slowly in on Slade. He hadn't expected much, not against this foe, but Slade never ceased to be amazed at how completely ineffective those weapons were in these situations. It was why he invested in more specialized fare to handle specific circumstances like this.

"Do you honestly seek to impress me with these antics of yours little girl?" he asked, careful not to let his fear seep into his tone as he stared down the ethereally glowing woman. "I can barely imagine what hate boils in your soul, what vicious intentions you have lined up in your pathetic attempts to punish me, but not even you can stand against me!" The questions and boasting were mostly meant to taunt and distract as he prepared to quickdraw his scrambler, but to his surprise, she responded.

"Slade," she addressed him in that unearthly voice, unexpectedly devoid of any discernable bloodlust or fury, "you seem to misunderstand what is about to happen to you. I have come to understand something," she commented calmly as she finished closing on him and stopped at about six feet away, "and with this understanding, I finally comprehend you too. I do not hate you, in fact, I feel nothing toward you at all, and if anything this makes it all the easier to do what I am about to do. You will die Slade, and with your death will end any threat to my friends. You are nothing Slade, a stain on the world and a danger to those I whish to protect, one I should have erased from existence ages ago. Prepare to die."

To Slade, the threats weren't so much frightening as they were infuriating, that anyone should talk down to him simply boggled his mind, chipping away at the feeling of invincibility he'd been riding upon in an unexpectedly severe manner. The wench thought him nothing, a piece of scum and a threat to her friends and nothing more, and for these insults… she would die right now. Without delaying another instant, Slade drew and fired his scrambler.

The invisible wave of amplified anti-psi energy rippled out in an instantaneous blast that would have scrambled Raven's neural pathways beyond any hope of repair, had it struck her at all. Instead, Slade found the space in front of him unexpectedly empty, the brightly glowing girl reappearing two feet to the left the next instant, lashing out with an energy blast that blew his weapon to bits and singed his armored glove so badly that he clutched it to his chest and dropped to a knee in pain.
"I'm not going to fall for the same trick twice Slade, I'm not the rage driven animal I was before, after all." The woman stated as she raised her hands to strike a final blow. The utter emptiness in her every body motion and word spoke of how little it meant to her to finalize him, and the sociopath in him admired that. However, his cunning side was alive with how close his own death was, and how elegantly his last ditch gambit was about to pay out.

In a motion that couldn't have been more than an instant ahead of his own eradication, Slade pulled his backup scrambler from a holster at the small of his back and pumped off a round dead on into the unprepared mystic. After the blinding flash had pierced his one eye, his vision cleared to grant him a view to a no longer glowing, dark blue cloak with its crippled occupant kneeling on the rooftop before him. It was true… he was invincible.

"Why Raven, I suppose I should let you in on an old adage from my military days," he almost bellowed in his ecstatic desire to gloat over this crowning victory of the night. "It's been a while, but I think it went something like, why buy one when you can get two for twice the price? Rather stilted to be sure, but it does say something about the value of redundancy," he rambled on, almost dripping with the arrogance of his success, slowly advancing on Raven as he drew his custom magnum and twirled it leisurely much as Skye had done with his blaster earlier.

As he got within a single step of her and pointed his gun at her skull, fully ready to eliminate the ridiculous threat this one presented, she lifted her head to stare up at him. Her eye sighted up along the barrel of his magnum empty with some unknowable thoughts behind them. Slade fancied that they were thoughts of hate for him, despite what she'd said under the influence of that white light, or perhaps merely an attempt to resist the urge to beg for her life, but either way, it wouldn't matter in a second. As his finger tightened on the trigger, the woman's eyes flickered from his one shadowed orb and over slightly to the side, and instantly Slade knew what was about to happen. He had just enough time to pull the gun away from Raven's face before the blow landed.

A dull thud accompanied by a hot numbness spreading out like quicksilver from the base of his skull announced that he'd been quite smartly pistol-whipped. It was hardly his first experience with this kind of blow, but this one had another quality to it that he was unfamiliar with, and as his body seized in response to this additional, extraneous force, he was forced to consider that this was why the armor plate on the back of his neck had not prevented his increasing paralysis. Though the world was becoming quite faint, Slade refused to give up, willing himself to remain conscious even as he fell to his knees, his eye focusing on the kneeling woman as he attempted to raise his weapon and finish her off with his remaining lucidity.

The second blow pretty well ended that plan, another blast of hot numbness piercing his armor and weighing his body down until he was holding himself up on his hands and knees, his unbreakable willpower the only thing keeping him from the darkness of unconsciousness. As he was left with nothing but a few disjointed thoughts, he recognized a severe lack of all the emotions that he expected he would have been experiencing—no rage, frustration, or hate of any kind coursing though his mind, as though something was preventing him from feeling these things he thrived on. Instead, he felt a mild curiosity. Who could have executed this delightfully despicable sneak attack? Robin would never stoop to such a tactic, not against him, and none of the others could have snuck up behind him if their lives, or anyone else's life, depended on it. Whoever it was, Slade thought detachedly, that person had better hope he never got up from this.

That was basically his last thought before the third blow landed, and darkness consumed him.

(Skye)

The third blow from the butt of his pistol was the one to drop Slade fully to the ground. In an emotionless, detached way, Skye was impressed that the man had resisted even one strike, considering the fact that he'd encased his fist and pistol in ribbons of glowing silver thought energy and basically jammed the whole affair into his spinal column with well in excess of enough force to kill a man without a mind shield on. He dropped the matter as his ESP picked up on the near future and the fact that being on this roof at that time would be a bad idea, moving on to organizing their escape. Heh, they whoop the bad guy and still have to escape afterward… he had to hand it to this Slade guy for planning ahead.

"Raven?" he questioned coolly, still in the emotion-killing grip of his own dire power as he let the silvery ribbons fade from his right fist and holstered his pistol. Without waiting for her response, he began to hastily go through the numerous pockets and pouches on the huge villain's belt, immediately finding a number of small electronic devices and setting his infiltration computer to the task of figuring out what was what.

"I'm okay, I think, though it was getting pretty close there. I'm… I'm not sure what just happened to me." Raven sounded shaken, to say the least, though Skye doubted he would ever know how much of that spectacular spiritual explosion had been her and how much had been… other things. Loss of autonomous command was always a danger when you used partitioning to keep control over yourself, and while this one was not a demonic manifestation, it had been painfully clear to him that the glowing white avatar was not regular Raven either, and so he had to question exactly what happened himself. Later, though.

"Can you walk? I only ask because we need to get the hell out of here as quickly as possible, and I can't carry you." Skye was now working on Slade's prone form again, going through the multitude of weapons and explosives strapped to his body. Discarding each blaster weapon in turn with an expression of disdain, he finally came to the revolver still holstered on the man's hip, standing to rake the firearm with his senses in clear admiration. Without hesitation, he grabbed its twin and a long chain of ammunition and slipped those into his gun belt on either side.

"I'll be fine," she answered hastily, as though afraid it wasn't true, "that shot didn't hurt nearly as much as the last one." Her voice was disoriented and disjointed, as though she really wasn't all there, and Skye pledged he take a moment to make sure she was really okay as soon as they were out of danger.

"I'm not surprised," Skye replied, going back to the pile of electronics and picking out the device his computer was telling him was the one he wanted. The stuck the little device to the back of his infiltration computer and pointed it at the corner of the roof. There was a loud mechanical droning as panels slid aside and the rooftop hanger began to crawl into place. "I doubt a class two mental strike could have penetrated the energy patters you were putting out a minute ago. But that's really not important now, let's get out of here."

This was the last thing he said before the hanger finished opening and the hover platform came into full view. It was a nondescript disk about 1ft tall and 4ft in diameter, with a waist-height guard rail around it broken by a gap through which one could board and a simple control mechanism opposite the gap. The thing would be a tight squeeze for the three of them, but desperate times and all that.

"Come on, on we go," commented Skye simply as he kneeled down to wrap up his work on Slade. With a quick motion, he pulled a marking stick from his gun belt, a kind of pencil-shaped metal rod with a glowing tip, and began to write on Slade's armored back. Quickly tracing out, in a very simple, neat, almost mechanically sterile script, 'ha, ha, next time watch your back. If you want your weapons, you'll have to pry them from my dead hands, which I'd earnestly like to see you try, you inhuman creature you' he proceeded to his last item of business, Raven looking on in uncomprehending daze. He supposed it was a little early in the morning for psychological warfare, but he felt the need to get into his opponents' heads whenever possible. It was a psychic thing.

"Raven, I know your drained, hell, I'm dead on my feet, but we'll have a lot more to worry about than fatigue if were still here in three minutes, so could we please get a move on here?" Skye asked, emotion finally beginning to creep back into his tone, even if it was forced sarcasm born of the ghost of concern worming into his mind. For his final act on Slade, he used his marking stick to thread the trigger guard on the villain's backup scrambler hefting the compact weapon with a look of extreme disgust. Even from inches away, he could feel the horrifying nature of the weapon, the anti-psi energy rippling out of the process brain matter that powered the tool beginning to turn his badly mauled intestines. Careful not to touch it lest the insulation on his gloves proved insufficient, he spun the gun around on his marking stick before flinging it high into the air. With a flourishing twirl, he slid the pen back into his belt, then drew his blaster with similar flare, spinning it up and into his grip to expend the last shot in its battery on the malignant weapon Slade had dared to pull on his friend. Spinning it neatly for a few seconds, he holstered his blaster again.

"There, now lets scram," he said to Raven, who still hadn't moved, as he walked over to Terra's body and moved to heft it onto the hover platform. He felt a ripple in the stream of the future a moment before he felt the psychic dissonance of Raven's disagreement.

(Raven)

"Hold on… what the hell do you think your doing?" she heard herself ask, and it was in her own powerful, dark voice at last, rather than that week, shell-shocked simpering she'd managed to choke out immediately after that… odd psychic experience of a few minutes past. There were so many things that she couldn't explain, that she couldn't get a hold on, that she'd been completely blank for a dangerously long period, but now she had finally come back to one of the important things. The fate of Slade.

"I think I'm getting us out of here. We've got about ninety eight seconds before Slade's reinforcements arrive, and I for one am not in any shape to challenge them when they get here." Skye's voice was not contemptuous, it wasn't even really that annoyed. He stated his argument with purely matter of fact and businesslike tone, sharpened only by his haste as he rolled Terra's body up onto his shoulder. Raven felt for her powers, found nothing, and decided that he had a pretty pursuavsvie argument. At this point she didn't even question how he knew Slade had help coming, and yet she didn't give it up right away.

"We can't just leave him here," she said decisively, the edge on her tone suggesting several of the things she'd love to try while he was helpless on the ground. "he's far too much of a threat to leave… alive… free… we've got to at least take him with us! We can toss him in jail or something." It was clear that they had to take some kind of action on this, if nothing else was certain in the muddled, incredibly tired, totally mixed up mess of her mind, then this certainly was.

"I tried to make that cheap shot a final one, you saw me do it three times after all. This bastard is just too tough for that, and don't even ask me to execute him while he's helpless, I just don't do that kind of thing." As he spoke, he made an attempt at lifting Terra's feather-light weight, failed, and leaned over her in advanced exhaustion as he continued talking. "Usually its against my nature to kill people, but I have pretty high standards for what a person is, and that creature over there doesn't qualify, so I didn't bat an eye over trying to finish what you started, too bad it didn't work out. Now please, he has nothing to look forward to but a nice long playdate with that vegoid downstairs, and I can assure you that what she has planned for him is more than likely quite a bit worse than just dieing, besides keeping him out of our hair for an indefinite period—So PLESE can we get out of here?"

"I… can't we… fight of his robots? You've seen how pathetic they are," she persisted, somehow unable to comprehend how such a golden opportunity could get away from her. So close, so easily they could assure that Slade would never hurt another person ever again.

"Raven, I'm out of firepower. My blaster's empty and Slade's toys are booby trapped—until I can disarm them, I can't use them either. You're so drained you can't even listen to reason, and I don't even want to know how much more borrowed time I have left. If we aren't out of here in the next…" he paused, looked slightly upward for a moment from where he crouched next to Terra, then cringed, "twenty eight seconds—I die, you die, and your friend here dies too, not to mention the majority of all people in the universe. You haven't forgotten about the universe being at stake now have you?"

Raven grimace as his tone grew sharper, finally letting the message work its way into her skull. There were much more important things to worry about than Slade, and she was just going to have to accept that. They'd won, but Slade still had the final laugh because despite whatever this mystery being Skye was talking about might or might not do, he would still be at large. It stung her, but she stood and staggered over to the hover disk, looking back to see Skye make one more attempt at lifting Terra. This time he succeeded, hefted her up with a groan of effort, and settled her over his shoulder in a fireman's carry. She felt a shock of surprise as she noticed the blood leaking from his nose and mouth, and the red stain spreading across his abdomen once more, and she realized how very close they were cutting it with this.

In little enough time, they were all on the hover disk, in the air, and on their way out. Behind them, Terra could see the roof filling up with dozens more of Slade's robotic soldiers, even as the structure itself grew small in the distance amid the ghostly gleam of uncannily clean industrial cityscape. She looked down at the control panel with Skye's magically super-powerful infiltration computer and wondered that something so completely unfair could even exist, before recalling that Skye was used to dealing with much more sophisticated technology than all of this. Her mind rambled through even more inane thoughts as she felt herself begin to unravel after the night's incredible strains.

To her side was Terra, stood up between her and Skye as each held one of her arms over their necks, very careful to keep her between them on the far too cramped platform lest they burn one another. Skye had been silent since they finally got away, breathing heavily as he supported most of his weight and Terra's weight on one arm propped against the guard rail. As she watched, he keeled over slightly and coughed, expelling a small gout of dark liquid from his mouth as tiny rivulets of blood continued to trail down his nose and over his lip. The red stains stood out dully against his alabaster skin in the moonlight, and Raven could only begin to imagine how much pain he must be in. Then she recalled what it felt like getting hit with a scrambler for the first time, and she realized that she had a very good idea of what he might feel like. This lead her to the question of why it hadn't hurt as much the second time, which lead to the question of what exactly had come over her on the rooftop, which in turn called the safety and sanctity of her own mind into question considering the company she'd been keeping… well, the list went on and on, and she would have become quite prohibitively enveloped in these terrors had Skye not chosen this moment to bellow in anguishing agony and fall to his knees next to her. She stumbled as Terra's weight came to rest solely on her shoulder and gasped out a query as to what the hell was wrong with Skye.

"Raven… I'm… in worse shape than I thought. I'm not going to make it back to the tower unless I do something about the bleeding. It's important that you listen closely, and that you don't panic… two things I wouldn't worry about with you if we hadn't just had the night we've had."

"Skye… okay," she agreed, listening carefully as he continued, fighting down the shock that threatened to numb her mind as the only person that had been keeping her together began to disintegrate far too close to her.

"Great, thanks. I'm going to give myself a shot of regenerative supplement. It will pretty well assure that by sometime later this morning, I'm going to fell alright again, but in the meantime it will render me quite impenetrably unconscious. Before I do that, I'm going to do a little work on Terra. The list of sneaking things you can do to someone's mind with telepathic surgery is too long to mention, so it will have to suffice to say that I'm rather certain Slade had enough of these things done to justify worrying about it. Basically, I'm about to put a few countermeasures into place to make sure he doesn't get his way, but I need you to make sure someone keeps an eye on her. Do you understand? Don't leave her alone, or there's no telling what she might do, even after my precautions."

"I understand, now stop running that big mouth of yours and get to work. I don't care to take the burden of catching these aliens off of your shoulders if you up and die on us." Raven felt her response was appropriately callous, and Skye said nothing in response, but instead reached up and gripped the back of Terra's head in his right hand. Her long blond hair, disheveled as it was, became crumpled under his palm as the gem on his hand began to glow with a sickly light. The indescribable brightness of his spirit had faded with his life's own road to departure, and the ribbons that spun out and seeped into Terra's head were dull and lethargic, though they still held power enough to do the job he set them to.

Suddenly he changed position, rolling over on the floor of the vehicle and pulling Terra down on top of him, effectively pushing Raven off the floor and forcing her to hop up onto the railing. It was fortunate that the thing, despite its brisk progress through the air, was impressively stable, for she feared for her ability to stay on as it was considering how tired she happened to be. Skye continued to press ribbons of light into Terra's skull, his enormous hand cradling it against his chest in a tableau that would have looked affectionate had it not been for the deathly still in Terra and the still-spreading blood all over Skye. Despite these qualifiers, Raven felt an inexcusable and inexplicable flare of jealousy as she watched the way he gently worked upon Terra's mind, turning away to stare forward rather than watch the show.

Ahead of them, she could see the bay on the horizon and the Tower raising out of it in that majestic way it managed. It was growing closer at a deceptive rate, and she estimated that they would be there within a half hour. A quiet sighing at her side announced Skye finishing his work and she turned around to see him leaning Terra's limp form against the opposite side's guard rail, her head coming to rest just under where Raven sat. Next her eyes caught a slight glow on the horizon, and as she raided her head to meet the dawn, her breath was stolen away.

Raven's early riser habits had treated her to many a sunrise in her day, but what she saw creeping over the cityscape of Jump was somehow more beautiful than any she'd seen before. Perhaps it was the constant brushes with death, or more likely the extreme disorientation and confusion in her emotions and reasoning abilities, but she couldn't help but feel incredibly better as the cacophony of purples, oranges, and reds made their way through the sparse haze and over the towers of the city. Suddenly, all of her fears about Skye's motives and her own loss of control, all of her concerns about what lines had been crossed and which of her principals had been violated, every worry that plagued her heart, it all faded away in the face of the purifying dawn.

"What's happening?" asked Skye as he pulled a case out of is belt and popped it open, revealing rows of long, thin hypodermic needles filled with an odd green fluid.

"What do you mean?" Raven asked detachedly, still absorbed in the glory of this new dawn.

"I mean your mood just improved so much I could have felt it over here with less ESP than your friend Beast Boy has. So what just happened?" He checked the needle's flow, then poised it over his stomach as he waited for her answer. She couldn't understand why he didn't know exactly what had happened, until she stopped to consider his advanced state of exhaustion. Unlike him, she didn't loose 90 of her sensory perception when her powers stopped working.

"It's the sunrise… just the sunrise," she informed him, and in response he pulled the needle away from his stomach and chuckled slightly, grimacing in pain at the sensation. At her confused look, he told her, "If you ever need a reason why you have an advantage over me, just remember one simple fact. I have never witnessed a sunrise with my own senses, at best gaining a pale shadow of such an experience through the minds of others. Do you really need anything more than that?"

With that final cryptic remark, Skye plunged the needle into his iron hard, if badly punctured, abs, injecting the whole thing in one quick press that left him gasping in pain as he yanked it free again. In an instant, he was gone, in his own way even more still than the mindless husk of Terra next to him. Raven was then effectively alone on the platform.

As she tried to take the night in review, she felt the sting of all that had happened and gave up right away. She just felt too happy to be alive to go over all that depressing crap. After she got some sleep (for she could conceive of nothing she wanted more right now other than her bed, outranking even a long shower on her list of priorites) then she could run through the terrible list of problems and fears this night and her new friend had dragged into the center of her life. For now, she had a call to make.

Robin was almost frantic on the other end of the communicator, everyone gathered around him in the common room, looks ranging from mind-numbing exhaustion on Starfire to face-twitching anxiety on Beast Boy arrayed across her friends faces. She quelled much of that with a simple statement.

"We got her back."

Preview:

This is basically hot of the presses, so please forgive spelling errors and the like, I only proofread it twice and a few things were bound to slip through. Also, because I wrote this in two parts an huge amount of time apart, there are bound to be a few inconsistencies. If you noticed such a problem that really bothered you, drop me a line

That said, a few things have to come to question now. This whole story was meant to be a warm up, a way for me to sharpen my skills a little before starting college, and also as a kind of pastime during my empty hours. Nowadays, empty hours are a little hard to come by, and my plot, while far from pettering out, is hard to keep going. Basically, I'm very tempted to go maybe three or so more chapters with this and put it on indefinite hiatus as I move on to different plots. I'm very likely to use the same charactes, maybe even starting a sequel to this with my newfound writing ability. (If you look back at the early chapters, I think you'll see that I've made significant progress with my style, enough that it may well be a general boon if I just write a whole story with that same enhanced ability) Readers, if you're out there, include in any reviews you may decide to write your opinion on this.

Next Chapter—Putting It Together. Terra is busted, and Skye's the guy to fix that. It wont be fast and it wont be easy, but he's gonna get right on it. On the other hand, he's personally shattered every personal barrier Raven ever constructed for herself, and that'll have to be settled as well. If you recall, he also busted a few facades he'd put up that would make it appear that he'd deceived the Titans about who exactly he was. In all, there's going to be a lot of patching going on.