Disclaimer: I still don't own Teen Titans.
Author's Note: I'm back, and with the final chapter of this particular story. Sorry it took so long, but I've been under a lot of stress with other tasks, so I haven't had much time to just sit and write. I finally worked out the kinks, so here you are.
Ch. 6: Past SinsCyborg's glazed human eye stared blankly ahead, looking out into the distance, and yet, somehow, avoiding it, looking somewhere far beyond it. Wires dangled out of the shattered, useless cybernetic eye on the left side of his skull. His only remaining hand, the left one, clutched the steering wheel in a vice-grip so tight that it threatened to crush it like an aluminum can, and he jerked it so violently as he navigated the cavernous concrete tunnels of the Jump City sewer system that it threatened to snap off. The walls were barely a blur to his contemplating eye, and the columns of water gushed well past the tinted windows; his heavy metallic foot only drove the pedal further to the floor.
Life, awareness suddenly crept into those eyes, and they inched toward the dashboard, glancing at the tracking device that was now magnetically attached to it. Just as he clearly remembered, the blip was at the same familiar coordinates it had been resting at for some time.
Cyborg took a moment to reflect on that: "some time". How long had it been since he left his comrades to fend for themselves at the warehouse? Minutes? No, he knew it had been longer than just minutes. Yet it didn't feel as though an hour had yet passed. The gears in his electronic brain groaned from the strain of the situation, and he tried to shale the thoughts, the guilt, from his head.
Yet he did have to admit one thing to himself. "Star's right," sighed, staring electronic eye to eye with the hideous, unwelcome truth. "I'm turnin' into a regular Robin."
It wasn't as if he hadn't been this determined, this obsessed before; the memory of Brother Blood was still fresh, the wounds still open. Yet this time, he had done something that not even Robin had done in his moments of blindness: he had truly cut his teammates loose, abandoned them. Their necks had been resting in the guillotine, and he had left them there, knowing very well that their chances of survival without him were quite slim.
Why? Why had he done the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the unacceptable? Had these newcomers come too soon after Brother Blood? Were they the salt that pored into the bleeding gashes left in the wake of Blood's attack?
Was he having a nervous breakdown?
Cyborg's blip was now nearly touching his quarry's, and he released the gas, slamming his foot down on the brakes. The tires coughed up foul-smelling smoke as they desperately tried to stay together. It took a short moment, as well as a few yards, for the T-Car to finally come to a halt, the neon-blue metal still cooling even as Cyborg's incredibly large form emerged. His organic eye narrowed, revenge once more dominating all other thoughts, the desire ten times greater with the new location: Silas Stone's home.
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Cyborg's suspicions and fears were confirmed immediately after he ascended from the underground: the door leading into his father's abode had been wrenched free of its hinges, leaving only splintered wood and scattered screws behind. Drawing short, nervous breaths, the Titan passed through the unguarded doorway. The house was poorly lit, and without the night vision feature of his cyber-optics, he was nearly blind. Fortunately, the light in the nearby "study" emitted a soft glow, acting as his lighthouse, and he drifted toward it.
The almost perfect condition of the room, save or the usual clutter upon his father's desk, surprised Cyborg, and he released his trapped breath, relieved to see his father seated behind it, just as he had found him last.
"Run," Silas urged before his son had the chance to inhale again. "Go now, while you still have the chance!"
The warning came too late, however, for before the hero was even able to protest the command, to reassure his panicked father, a steel chord was constricting him, pinning his left arm to his hip. He tried to free himself, but it was a futile battle, as the strange binding began to somehow feed off of his power cell, weakening him each time he struggled, and wrapping tighter with each drink. Realizing the momentary hopelessness of his dilemma, Cyborg fell to one knee, panting, trying to alleviate the imagined nausea enough to come up with a decent plan.
The sound of somebody clapping two very organic hands, its frequency amplified by the churning in his stomach, was the first sound Cyborg was able to discern from the ring in his ear. Then came a voice, raspy with age, and carrying a heavy Oriental accent.
"Well, look who it is. And you said he wouldn't come, Silas. No, he's too smart, right? Well, I hope you're disappointed."
As his blind spots faded, Cyborg made sure to glare the sharpest daggers, all dripping poison, straight through Professor Chang's thick black goggles, into the beady eyes that hid beneath.
"He's got guts coming here, I'll give him that," another familiar voice chimed in, one that nearly tempted Cy to once again struggle against his bonds, despite the grueling agony that coursed through every wire. "This Tinman may not have brains, but he's sure got some heart in there."
"For God's sake, Chang, leave him alone," cried Silas. "He's done nothing at all to you."
"Hold your tongue, Stone!" Chang spat through his crooked, yellow teeth, never taking his attention from the teen superhero. "You know very well that this isn't about him at all."
"Then what is it about?" Cyborg stammered, gritting his teeth against the pain and fatigue. "What do you want with me?"
Chang cackled gleefully, taking labored gasps at necessary intervals, burying his face in his withered, bony hands and nearly doubling over as the tremors of his own laughter rattled his brittle bones.
"What's wrong, old man?" Cyborg pressed, stumbling over each syllable. "Having a heart attack?"
Chang, neither amused nor insulted by the comment, simply offered a smirk that seemed awkward on such a shriveled countenance. "Why, my boy," the Professor cooed in a soothing, grandfatherly tone, "didn't your father ever tell you? Oh dear Silas, you really must talk with your son more often."
Silas Stone grimaced at that scalding hot insult, as if the professor had plunged his grimy, thin claws into his chest, gripping his heart and twisting relentlessly. Yet said nothing; he simply sat, a passive, almost comatose expression in his wizened gray eyes. His arms hung limp with fatigue, dangling just beneath the small desk.
"Cat got your tongue?" Chang asked, radiating malice that infected Silas' soul, pushing his shoulders further down, forcing his head to bow.
"Just leave him out of it," the inventor pleaded, his voice barely a whisper, a combination of the guilt that stained his conscience and the recently broken silence of three years too many of hermetic solitude.
"Not a chance," Professor Chang hissed, his childish humor evaporating. "After all, I've lost too much over this bouncing baby brat of yours."
"So this is about the Titans kicking your butt, eh old timer?" Cyborg rasped as he continued to struggle.
"My boy," the professor chuckled, the childish grin creeping back into his thin, cracked lips, "if this was about the Titans, don't you think they would all be here? Of course, your blasted father had to drag them into it…"
"My God, Chang," Silas shot, his weak voice suddenly empowered, "you wanted me to betray my son! Did you expect me to just hand him over to you?"
"Well yes, that was the plan," Chang replied, his stained teeth clenched together in a drooping scowl. "I thought you were an intelligent man, my old friend. I thought you'd realize that your brat was all that you had left to lose. I guess I was as much of a fool as you are."
"A lot of good calling the Titans did anyway," Stone grumbled, retreating back within himself.
"Did you say 'old friend'?" Cyborg asked, his voice still weakening with each breath he took, each inch he shifted. "How do you two know each other so well?"
"Why don't you answer the boy, Dr. Stone?" Chang asked, chuckling like the madman he was. "He is entitled to know why he'll be leaving us."
Silas Stone exhaled heavily, removing his thick spectacles to rub the guilt, the pain, out of his tired, bloodshot, gray eyes. As he slowly, tremblingly replace them, letting them rest farther down upon his laboring nose, he ran a rough hand through the thinning white hair atop his dangling head, then through the stubble of fuzz that sprouted from his powerful chin. He sighed again, a quivering sound that seemed to linger in the supercharged air, like a story long untold, a secret too long kept that longed to roam free from the cage that imprisoned it, a cage it often thrashed at, yet never seemed to break. Finally, the man aged beyond his years began his tale.
"Well, son, it was several years ago," he explained, pausing as his sharp memory whisked him away to that time that seemed so long ago. "Professor Chang was working alongside me in STAR Labs. Don't try to verify it, though; any evidence of his employment has long since been terminated. Anyway, he worked in a different department, the robotics, so I really didn't know him that well; I focused on my own projects, and I left him to his business. I did hear whispers, though, that he was making money on the side, pushing off some equipment and company secrets to shady characters. I tried not to think about it too much. I just focused on my research. It wasn't my business. Then the accident took place."
The elder Stone immediately halted, his next sentence screeching to a stanstill in his throat, building into a strangling lump. He coughed it away, closing his eyes to hide the moisture building in their wise, gray recesses. With some hesitation, and an impatient urging from Professor Chang, he continued.
"After that, I didn't know what to do. STAR Labs demanded that I take responsibility for the accident and reimburse them. Even though they were the ones who rushed me to present the blasted untested thing, I paid them to avoid a big court fiasco. Of course, it wasn't really enough, so they took the rest out of my final paycheck and called it even. I was jobless, my wife was dead, and I had a son in the hospital without a penny in my pocket and no time on my hands. You were going to die, Vic. I couldn't let that happen. So…"
"He came to me," Chang chimed in, completing the sentence Stone had found too bitter to finish himself. "I was only glad to help him out. After all, I'm just an old softy."
"You're an old somethin', alright," grunted Cyborg, despite the electrocuting pain of the wire and the weight of the dark revelation. Still, he drew some satisfaction from the fact that his comment caused Chang's half-robot underling to stifle a giggle. Chang was not so pleased with the joke.
"I couldn't just give him the stuff; it was high class, experimental, military grade," Chang said, hiding his rage with the grace of a thespian. "'Lotta cha-ching, you know? And like he said, he had absolutely nothing. So I made him a deal; I'd give him the stuff, and he'd pay me back bit by bit as he earned money. Only one problem: he didn't deliver."
"Just give me more time," Silas pleaded, his face half buried in his hands. "I've had difficulty getting work; the scientific community considers me a liability, and what odd jobs I can get only bring in enough cash to pay the bills. I know I can sell this new idea, but I need…"
"I've given you three years," roared Chang, with the ferocity of a spirit much younger than his own. "You have no more chances. This is why I like working with the bad boys, with Slade and HIVE; I get a profit. I'm taking my technology back, Stone, and what happens to your boy is a matter beneath my con…"
Suddenly, Chang's vision became fuzzy; colors melted away, blended, faded into nothingness. The sound of his own, voice became a distant whisper to his ears, and his limbs did not seem to want to respond to his commands, which were beginning to grow faint, less frequent. Finally, his legs liquefied, and he collapsed under the weight of his bulging bodysuit, striking the carpet with a muffled thud.
Silas Stone's trembling hand released the needle, and it joined Chang's sleeping form on the floor. For a moment, he himself felt disoriented, the burst of adrenaline fleeing his aching body. In one second, the stunned Green cyborg that served the Professor was upon him, and with one swipe of the beast's single remaining robotic arm, Silas was painfully hurled across the room, sailing back over his disorganized desk and striking the ancient bookshelf behind it. There was a sickening snap, and with limbs that moved like tattered rags, the unmoving doctor slid to the floor, followed by a shower of books, and he remained still, silent there, looking quite dead.
In that moment, Cyborg's human eye, gray, he realized for the first time, just like his father's, opened wide, in shock, in horror, in unmasked fear. It didn't matter now to Cyborg that his father had turned him into some sideshow freak, that he had, however reluctantly, conspired to destroy him, that he had let Mom die. In that single, horrific moment, one that overshadowed even the tragic accident three years ago, Silas Stone had tried to help his son, just as he had tried to do three years prior when he made a deal with Satan and threw away his own life, his success and reputation. Cyborg could think of only one fitting thing to say.
"No!"
Though agonizing pain continued to saw through his electronic insides, Cyborg struggled against the leech that was drinking at his very essence, and though his battery had been severely drained, a small tear appeared in the metallic binding. It was invisible at first, nearly microscopic, but gradually it grew. Finally, after grueling seconds, the cursed vampire snapped, fluttering to the ground like a harmless feather. Despite his weakened state, the one armed Titanium Titan wasted no time in charging toward the maniacal machine.
Unfortunately, in the passion of the moment, Cyborg, slightly delirious from the ordeal, let a barely audible war cry escape his lips, despite his efforts to mute it. In one fluid motion, Green spun around, extending sis bulky synthetic arm. Cy, already too close, only managed to slow his advance to a clumsy stumble. The armor of Cyborg's broad, durable chest shattered easily, and the fiend's hand plowed through layers of circuitry, peeling away at the electronics that gave the Titan life, and finally bursting through his back. Cyborg shuddered, imagining the uncomfortable coolness of the doppelganger's unfeeling fist in what would have been his flesh.
"Face it, kid," hissed the villain, leaning close to his counterpart's organic ear. "You're too weak to beat me. That puny little double-A of yours is probably dry."
"I got enough juice left for one last attack," Victor Stone retorted, "and you just walked right into it!"
Before the hero had even completed the statement, the blue light of his armor brightened, nearly scorching the binocular eyes of his opponent, who attempted to draw back, but was defeated by Cy's massive hand, which all but swallowed his thinner wrist. A single trip of neon blue danced up Green's arm, then another, and another, this one following much faster. Soon, the searing bolts overtook the evil cyborg's arm, snaking to his metallic giraffe-like neck, and scratching at the edges of the metallic dome that formed his skull. An inhuman wail exploded from seep within the core of his being, shaking the very foundation of the Stone house. His lens-like eyes extended to their extremities with a mechanical whine and simply popped, sending glass and a twisted mesh of plastic and titanium sprinkling to the ground. The lifeless shell, stunned but not permanently killed, toppled over like a neglected action figure, dragging with it the similarly still form of the boy who had been Victor Stone and grown up into the world famous Teen Titan known as Cyborg. The teen hero's bright blue glow had leaked out of his hollow frame, and his dead organic eye drifted closed as his final systems crashed.
Cyborg knew no more.
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It took some time for Cyborg's human eye to finally flutter open, and when then eyelid finally slid up, the half-robot's vision was immediately assaulted by pure, unbroken white. His first thought was that he must be in Heaven, or Nirvana, or whatever the final destination was. Within seconds, these thoughts were pushed back by more logical, computerized ones as his internal CPU slowly hummed to life; it took it only seconds to deduce that he was, in fact, still alive, and it dutifully relayed the message to the tissue half of his brain.
"So if I'm not dead," the Titan pondered aloud, hardly realizing he was doing it, "if I'm not dead, where the heck am I?"
"STAR Labs," a monotone, almost tired voice sighed from his left. "The medical bay, to be exact. Well, the robot medical bay."
He slowly raised himself with both hands, feeling the power of his rejuvenated power cell coursing through every wire in his system. He smiled as he regarded the speaker with, he noted, both flesh and glass eyes; it was Raven, a thin but sincere smile on her lips as she glanced up at him from her inches thick novel, her large, violet eyes tired, yet somehow warm, understanding, as oppose to their usual frigidness.
"Hey, Rae," he greeted, a much wider smile spreading across a good portion of his freshly energized face. "So, how long you been here?"
"A while," she replied, her voice carrying little emphasis, but sounding kind at the same time. "You've been out for three days. You needed some extensive repairs. Since I was wounded, I've been officially off duty. I thought you could use some company, and I had nothing better to do, so I came here. Sorry I'm the only one you're waking up to, but everyone else went chasing Red X."
"You got hurt?" he asked, ignoring her comment about the others.
"Yeah. When you went AWOL," she said, a touch of iciness temporarily flowing out of her voice.
"Oh, yeah. Sorry about that," he said, and meant from the bottom of his ticking tin heart. "I was a pretty big jerk to you, too."
"Yeah," she replied, this time in her usual drone, "but don't feel too bad. Beast Boy's a jerk all the time, and he isn't dead yet."
Cyborg had a good mental snicker at that one, but stopped himself for Raven's sake; he knew she didn't "do" funny, and would likely be embarrassed if she realized she had inadvertently made a joke. Instead, he asked, "So how'd I get here?"
"Robin and Speedy chased you down to your dad's house. You were a real mess. They loaded you and your dad back into the T-Car, took him to the hospital, and brought you here."
"Oh yeah," Cy exclaimed, the memories of what felt like the previous night rushing back to him. "Dad was injured. Is he all right? Where is he?"
To the teen hero's horror, Raven's book slowly creaked shut, the ancient pages coughing out a thin layer of dust, and her eyes climbed to meet his. What he saw in those deep eyes frightened him, overwhelmed him, infected him; Raven's eyes, normally blank, emotionless slates, reflected a speck of concern.
"Cyborg," she said, the comforting tone of her voice only serving to further unnerve the person she was addressing, "understand that he was severely injured. That blow damaged his spine. I tried to heal it the best I could, but the wound had been there for too long by the time I got to it..."
"Raven, what happened? Where is my father?"
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The wheels silently glided smoothly across the waxed tile floor, neither making a sound nor jerking at all. Abruptly, he stopped the forward motion, this time rotating them in reverse, finding the movement equally graceful. He tested both a few more times, changing between them as quickly as he could, practicing his turns, both in motion and idle. He found every possible scenario pleasantly simple to navigate.
Doctor Silas Stone broke into a grin. This wheelchair business was a piece of cake, and would only get easier with time.
"Hey, old man," a soft, timid, yet vaguely familiar voice came, causing Stone's grin to widen.
"Well, come in son," he said courteously, swinging the wheelchair 180 degrees and looking up to meet his towering boy's gaze. "Nice to see you finally woke up."
"Nice to see you're still alive," Cyborg replied, his voice on the verge of sobs, carrying a burden heavier than his father had been. "Dad… I'm sorry."
"Why?" Silas inquired, the smile still touching his lips. "'Cause I'm still alive? Vic, don't mourn me. I think I've mourned myself enough for one lifetime."
"But… you're legs…" the younger Stone stammered, unable to comprehend his father's words.
"Hey, these don't matter," Silas reassured his son, slapping his numb limbs. "What matters is what's ticking in my chest and what's turning in my head. I don't need my legs to live. Got that? Heck, I'm walking taller now than I have in the past three years. In my life, maybe."
Cyborg tried to protest, tried to blame himself for his father's predicament, but the argument crumbled, and the son just exhaled a sigh of relief. There was no predicament, no dilemma. Though he had been crippled, Silas Stone, the man who Cy had hated with the deepest fiery passion for a reason he could not remember, was smiling. And though the older man was a mile below him, Victor Stone, Cyborg, his son, was looking up at him. The boy could think of only one appropriate thing to say.
"Thanks, Dad. For everything I never thanked you for."
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"I was not expecting the large one to be with her…
"…This could complicate matters…
"…How strange a lady Fate sometimes is…
"…Still, the mission will proceed as planned…
"…The girl conceived of tainted blood and born in sacred shrine will free you…
"…And then, my master…
"…the Antithesis of all things pure shall be unleashed!"
End.
Author's Note: That is just one person speaking at the end. I broke up the paragraphs because it looks cooler. It's a nice little segue into my next planned fic (if I ever get to it). Anyone who is familiar with the Titans' comic past should be able to easily see what's coming, but I assure you, my version will be pretty different.
And thus, I leave you. I am satisfied with this last chapter, and I hope all seven of my fans will be, too. Just drop a review, and I'll be even happier, whether you liked it or not. I was going to have an extra scene with the character Sarah Simms, but I'll give you three guesses as to why I cut it.
To all of my reviewers, I bid you a fond, and hopefully not permanent, farewell.