Gah. Here. Take your damn chapter two, and have a teaser for 'One Day Raven Woke Up Gay (also known as Smiling on the Outside, Crying on the Inside)'. And no, she doesn't really wake up a lesbian. Though 'twould be amusing...

And to those of you who don't particularly like Batman-in-TT-animated, you might as well get the hell out, because this is about two months with Batman (and if not with Batman, in Gotham). It is also about two months of Cy and BB at BB's house.

Note to reviewers: please, if you know anything about BB's more recent past, let me know if I'm wrong about his parents and his house, and I'll see what I can do.

=====

Return to Home

Chapter Two

1

November 20th, 1:00 AM

"Does Batman always surprise his team-mates?" Starfire asked Robin, who did not look startled. She envied his knowledge of his mentor; her heart had begun to pound heavily and she'd called starbolts forth. The glow receded from her hands and her eyes stopped glowing.

"Whenever he can," Robin told her.

"I see. So what shall we 'tackle'?" The Tamaranian princess asked.

"If you want to take the north I'll take the south." Batman's voice was quiet, intimidating. "Call if you need back-up."

"Perhaps I could patrol the north alone, and you could patrol the south together?" They'll thank me for this, she thought smugly.

"Not a good idea," Robin told her at the same time Batman hissed, "Absolutely not!"

"You don't understand, do you?" Robin asked her. "You still don't understand just how dangerous Gotham is, do you?"

Starfire held her ground. "I have seen nothing I could not handle on my own." She looked steadily at Batman. "Besides, Robin and I are approximately the same age, and he handled himself very well. If he can do so, how could I not?"

"Star, I've been working this city for eight years. I have an eight-year reputation of being a member of the Bat-family. You don't have that."

"I do not see how that renders us unequal."

"Because the criminals in Gotham will hesitate for a few precious seconds when they see Batman or me. They won't do that for you— and without it, they'll eat you alive!"

"They have not yet eaten me."

Batman suddenly moved. He stood towering over her and glared down. "I. Said. No."

She turned to Robin for aid, but he spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "I'm not going to argue on your behalf. Even if I wanted to, it wouldn't help. The first rule of working with Batman is Batman is the boss."

She sighed. "Let us go, then, Robin."

"Wait."

They stopped.

"Starfire, come with me. Robin... fly solo."

The Boy Wonder cracked a grin. "Thanks."

"I trust you to call for back-up if you need it."

-

"So it is an issue of trust, then?" Starfire demanded as she followed Batman. He and Robin were treating her like a child! They acted as though she could not take care of herself, completely disregarding the fact that she had survived many horrors on her journey to earth!

"No. It's an issue of skill. Robin has been a protector of Gotham for eight years. That's six years longer than you've been a Titan."

"No, it is only four years longer than I have been a Titan. He formed the Titans two years ago, and therefore has not protected Gotham in two years."

He gave her a sharp look. "Enough. Catwoman may be nearby, and I'd rather you didn't broadcast our location." He passed a critical eye over her clothing and muttered, "Any more than you already have."

Batman, she decided, was nowhere near as nice as Robin. How could Robin have become so nice, if Batman had raised him, and Batman was so... not-nice?

-

They captured two groups of thugs, but saw no sign of Catwoman. Starfire wondered how Batman had come by that information, but Robin's voice over the communicator interrupted her musing.

"Killer Croc sighted in North Gotham. I don't think I'll be able to take him down on my own, and he has hostages."

"Where are you in North Gotham?" Batman demanded.

In reply, Robin said something about a corner and two street names she couldn't catch.

"ETA of five minutes," Batman told him. "Don't engage until we get there."

"Too late," the Boy Wonder cheerfully quipped.

2

November 17, 4:41 PM

Cyborg followed behind Beast Boy as the green-skinned teen trudged slowly along a gravel path.

"Uh, exactly why is your HQ in a forest about twenty miles from the nearest town? What do you protect from here?" Cyborg asked, staring at the huge trees all around him.

He felt like everything around him held its breath as though something spectacular were about to happen.

"This is where I used to live," Beast Boy told him. "It's not that I protect anything in the forest... I just..." He sighed. "I needed to come here."

"Uh, weren't we supposed to be setting up at your home base?"

"This is going to be our home base."

"But what are we going to protect? The trees?"

"You'll see."

They continued along the path. Cyborg noticed that the forest began to thin after another hour of walking. After another half hour, the forest became little more than enough scattered trees to constitute sparse woodlands.

Soon enough, the end of the path came into view (just barely) and the forest had vanished.

"Five years have passed; five summers, with the length / Of five long winters! and again I hear," Beast Boy murmured the words so quietly that Cyborg had to strain his ears to make out the words, "These waters rolling from their mountain springs / With a soft inland murmur— Once again / Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs."

"What's that you're saying?"

"The first five lines of Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, by William Wordsworth."

"Uh..."

The teen continued on, absently explaining, "Dad used to make me memorize classical English poetry. I used to have the first three stanzas down pat, but I forgot them. I can barely get through the first."

"I didn't know that. Did you like it?"

"Wordsworth was okay. The Lucy Poems were mushy, but Tintern Abbey wasn't too bad. Just long. It's, like, four pages long."

The sight of what stood at the end of the path chased Cyborg's response from his head.

At the end of the path stood a great black gate, made of heavy iron, and hung on a brick gatepost that appeared hewn from a veritable wall of kudzu. The tops of the bars that made up the gate had nasty looking spikes on them, and someone had chained the gate shut.

"Is this your house?"

"It was," Beast Boy told him. "But nobody lives here any more, and I doubt that anybody but me even knows it exists." He retrieved a key from one of his jeans' pockets and examined the padlock on the chain. "Nothing but rust has messed with it. I figure my house is about as safe a place as any around here."

"Where are we?" Cyborg joked, "Gotham?"

Beast Boy smiled at him. "Hate to ruin your joke, but... No. We're about fifteen miles north-west of Bludhaven."

"You're kidding me, right?"

The padlock clicked open and the chains fell to the ground.

Beast Boy shoved the gates inwards, and motioned for Cyborg to follow. When Cyborg had, Beast Boy turned and locked the gates again.

"What do you think?" The teen asked.

"Guess not."

Beast Boy strolled up the path and across a huge courtyard, towards an ancient, run-down mansion. Ivy appeared to have taken control of the pillars out front and some parts of the roof had crumbled away. The third-floor balcony lacked a rail on one side.

"It's been four years," Beast Boy told him.

"But the Titans have only been around for two years!"

"I left two years before that." He shot Cyborg a look that clearly said, 'Whatever happened to basic math?'

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"Man, that's a lot of decay for just four years..."

"A lot can happen. This area has probably had some heavy rainfall, plus we aren't more than fifteen miles from the sea. We get a lot of squalls, and a lot of snow." The green-skinned teen paused. "And then you have to take the mansion's age into account. It's at least a hundred years old; I'm pretty sure my family was around when Bludhaven was first turning into something more than a collection of whalers' huts."

"Why doesn't anybody live here anymore?"

"They're all dead."

"Oh."

"We were on a trip, when I came down with... something. To this day, I don't know what it was. The only cure was to inject me with the DNA of various animals. That's why I have green skin and can turn into different animals." Beast Boy went quiet for a little while. "I guess they didn't catch it before it spread to my little sister. Or maybe she got it too, and they didn't know... But it spread from her, to my Mom, to Dad, and then from the family to the butler and all the other servants. The whole house died of it."

He opened the mansion door, and laughing bitterly, called, "Hey everybody, I'm home!"

His voice echoed through the empty, decaying hall, and Cyborg shivered.

"Quit it, man. That's creepy."

"Sorry. Coming back here makes me remember watching them all die. They didn't realize that it was the same disease until it was too late. Half the servants were dead, the other half were dying... the animals had caught it, too. In a month, everything here died."

Beast Boy led him soundlessly through the corridors until they arrived in another wing of the house. Here, the floorboards had rotted in some places, and the rugs had so much mildew in them that they made a weird farting noise when he stepped on them.

"We had a Roman bath in this wing... the bedrooms are in the wing two wings above it."

They finally arrived in the wing with the bedrooms, after climbing up what felt like six thousand stairs.

"They built the house at least a hundred years ago, probably closer to two or three hundred years ago, and we've been adding on to it ever since. The sections of the house are stacked on top of each other, because nobody ever wanted to tear anything down." Beast Boy told him, hardly out of breath.

Cyborg wished he could say the same for himself.

"Man... Who would have thought you were a rich kid?"

Beast Boy shrugged.

3

November 20

Jump City

If the silences in places had unique tones and rings, like bells, then the silence of Titan Tower would sound like Big Ben: a hearty, murky, deep tolling that instantly made it the center of attention. If only for a moment.

The 'normal' residents of Jump City would occasionally look up at the almost-empty Tower and remark at how strange it was, to view what had once been the dwelling of their super-heroes. As the citizens of Jump City recovered from the Masquerade, they had turned to the Titans more than they ever had before. The church groups got over their dislike of Raven very, very quickly, and the police soon stopped holding grudges against the Titans.

Raven stared down at the city with which Robin had entrusted her and wondered if it would last. The wind ruffled her cloak as she put one foot atop the ledge on the Tower's roof. She launched herself off, plummeting to the ground and landing gracefully.

She began to move towards the docks with a tiny smile on her face as she remembered the fun times when they had turned Titan Tower into Haunted Tower. Her smile vanished as quickly as it had come— the City Council of Jump City had, of course, made Titan Island off limits again.

It was for the best. Allowing civilians on the Island without a lot of supervision and careful planning wasn't a good idea. They could hurt themselves, interfere with something, or activate a security measure.

She arrived at her destination, blinking at the brightness of the sudden light of The Pizza Place, as locals called it. The official name was Mr. Pizza's Pizzeria, but everybody just called it The Pizza Place. Her boots made no sound against the floor as she strode to the Titans' usual table and picked up the menu.

Picking up the menu was pointless; she already knew what she wanted. She would have the exact same type of pizza that the Titans always had, in a medium, and a glass of iced tea (her dirty little secret love).

She looked anyway, but saw nothing else that interested her. So she ordered what she'd planned to.

The taste of the pizza reminded her of all the times they'd come here, and for a terrible moment, she missed them. She missed them so much it hurt.

Calm down, Raven. They've only been gone for three days.

She managed to make the emotion go away in time to keep from destroying anything and then sighed as her cloak clasp began to glow.

"Excuse me, waiter?" She asked. "Could you please put this in a box and put it in your fridge? I'll be back for it."

"Sure," the waiter told her. "No problem."

"Thanks."