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Chapter Seven

1
November 24th
Gotham City, 2:03 AM

Starfire stood as close to the place where the jet would land as she safely could.

Robin stood with her, nearly touching her.

Such a large amount of such potent happiness filled her that she had trouble keeping both of her feet on the ground. The instant she moved her attention to other things, she would find that one foot or another had lifted into the air.

"Is this not a time of great joy?" She queried.

Batman looked over at them. He stared at her for what she decided was the longest second of her life, then looked back at the sky.

"Not really," Robin murmured in her ear.

The thought of those luscious lips so close to her ear brought her straight back to the ground. Some joys exceeded even the sky.

"Why not? Does seeing Friend Raven again not gladden your heart?"

"Oh, I'll be happy to see her again... But her needing to be here isn't a good thing."

"I take your meaning. You speak of the people who have caused conflagrations in warehouses."

"Yeah. The cultists. They're going to come to Gotham today, and it's not going to be pretty."

The thought of such people attacking Robin's home sent her straight back to the ground. She could imagine what he must be feeling. Surely his breath now caught in his throat the way her own did when she thought of other races assailing Tamaran.

Minutes slid by like hours, like days.

Like centuries.

And then, the humming. The humming sounded really, Starfire reflected, less like "hmmmm" and more like "grimmmmm."

In the sky, a dark jet appeared from the west. With agonizing slowness, the jet maneuvered itself into a landing position, and then landed.

It handled, from what she understood, rather like a helicopter.

And then the hatch lifted up. Somebody kicked out a staircase. A cloaked figure rushed down the steps, moving so quickly as to almost be tumbling headlong.

Starfire rushed forward. "Friend Raven!"

The cloaked figure straightened, clearly startled.

Starfire's arms closed around the figure's shoulders. The figure had the appropriate stature, and felt light and brittle as a bundle of twigs in her arms.

"Starfire!" Raven choked.

"It is wonderful to have you here!"

"... You're glad to see me?"

"Oh, but of course, Friend Raven! You are my friend!"

Friend Raven rewarded her with a tiny smile. "Speaking of friends, look who I brought you."

From somewhere within that cloak, Raven produced a certain adorable off-white body. When the off-white little body caught sight (or perhaps scent; she had never determined his primary sense) of her, he released an overjoyed squeal.

Starfire released the same overjoyed little squeal, snatching Silkie and spinning around with him in her arms.

"My lovely little grothnos! My chahimkar-eyed little glorhart! How lovely and joyous it is to have you with me!"

Those wide, chahimkar eyes were round and trembling. Silkie squealed and squeaked in his private language.

Starfire pretended to understand every word, squealing and cooing back at him.


They all sat at the conference table in the Batcave. Robin had never seen it before, but Batman had pressed a button on his utility belt, and part of the rock flooring revolved to reveal a conference table.

Of course, because this was a gathering in the Batcave, and contained two of Robin's friends, Batman apparently felt the need to test Raven. Testing consisted of a stare down.

Batman stared at Starfire first. She didn't last five minutes in the stare down of the year. After a few seconds of Batman's long, intense glare, Starfire crumbled and looked to Robin.

Raven, on the other hand, did much better. He couldn't help but feel pride. He had trained Raven. Sure, she came complete with powers. But she hadn't come complete with martial arts skills, or the ability to fall. And she certainly hadn't come complete with detective skills, as useful as the Titans had found her empathy.

Raven stood up under Batman's glare. She didn't crumble the way Starfire had. Instead, she locked eyes with him, her chin upraised.

"What really brings you to Gotham?" Batman asked.

"My job. By this afternoon, you're going to have a group of Basque-speaking terrorists on the loose in Gotham. They've cut their teeth in Jump City, under the Titans' and the Mayor's collective nose."

"The Teen Titans is a group of teenaged meta-humans, led by a sidekick. I am Batman."

Is that sort of like, I AM HE-MAN?

Robin wasn't sure how he felt about such obvious arrogance. On the one hand, Batman had earned that arrogance through eleven years of being himself— that was to say, practically perfect.

On the other hand, it didn't exactly endear him to Raven.

But did how Raven felt about Batman matter, so long as she cracked her case?

And Batman really wasn't so bad, anyway.

"Tell me more about your terrorists."

Raven sighed. "I don't really know much about them. They aren't really Basque. But they refuse to speak English in public. I'm not sure why. I also don't know why they blow things up."

"What do you know of their religion?"

"Nothing. They don't evangelize, and they don't advertise where they hold their religious services."

"So the only thing we actually know about them is that they speak Basque and play with explosives."

"In short, yes. But doesn't their ability to stay off the radar worry you?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Because your explanation is too complicated."

"Please explain."

"You say they have committed crimes, but have been skilled enough to keep those crimes hidden. There is a different explanation."

Raven quirked an eyebrow. "That explanation being?"

"That there are no crimes but the one in which you caught them."

Robin shook his head. "If you thought that, then why did you volunteer the Bat-Jet to bring her here?"

But Batman remained silent.

"Perhaps he has another theory," Starfire offered.

Batman smirked. Though he said nothing, Robin could read Batman's change in attitude towards Starfire.

Robin sat back and smirked also.

"I'm guessing she's right."

Hearing Raven's dry tone made him realize how much he'd missed it.

"Please, Mr. Batman, will you not share your theory with us?"

"Instead of being skilled, what if they were just cunning?" Batman took a sip of water from a glass that Robin knew for a fact hadn't been there moments ago.

Hmm. Alfred was getting faster in his old age, instead of slower. Food for thought.

Food for as much thought as the way Batman was toying with him. And Robin didn't need to see the look on Batman's face to know that Batman knew something he didn't.

But why would he play coy? What lesson could the Titans learn from Batman toying with them?

He pondered asking his mentor to get to the point, but stopped short before doing so. What had gotten into him? He should have known better than to even think about speaking so disrespectfully to Batman in front of others.

Batman tapped a few keys on the conference table. Several pictures appeared on the Cray's vast monitor. The pictures looked rather like the code that formed the Titans' monitoring programs in Jump City.

But he didn't recognize the numbers scrolling across the screen. "Is that... Jump City?"

"I don't know. Is it?" Batman pressed another key on the table, and images of a slum district replaced the numbers.

"I have never seen that place before. That is not Jump City. It cannot be."

Batman looked sharply at Starfire. The scowl said more than enough. Starfire looked at the screen and swallowed.

"This is a part of Jump City known as Hell's Kitchen. The place is almost as bad as any of Gotham's slums."

Raven didn't even remove her eyes from the screen to phrase her question. "Why are you showing us this?"

"Because you've never seen it before. Hell's Kitchen was the one place in Jump City that the Titans' monitors never touched."

And in his mind, all the pieces of a certain bomb-shaped jigsaw puzzle fell into place. "It's there that the terrorists started, isn't it?"

Batman tapped a few more keys on the table. The images changed, the nesting of the pictures vanished. The view of one camera replaced the other six. It showed twelve people, three with bags slung on their shoulders, entering a ghetto apartment building.

Batman moved the tape forward ten minutes. The twelve returned, three of them without bags. Forward another three minutes.

The apartment building exploded.

Robin felt his jaw drop. "When was this? How could we have not known about this?"

"That was the afternoon of October the 27th. Why you didn't know about this is understandable, of course. The police were too busy ensuring that middle class infants and children survived the undead escapades to care about some apartment building in Hell's Kitchen."

"How could this have not registered on the police scanner? How could..."

2
November 24th
Bludhaven, 9:30 AM

The alarm clock went off. Why he still insisted on setting an alarm, he didn't know. But he did. He'd positioned it across the room, so that he would have to either sleep through it (unlikely, because it had woken him up), get up and turn it off (equally unlikely, because he didn't feel like it), or just lie in bed and ignore it (the least likely of all, because he had absolutely no ability to ignore annoying things).

Groaning, he forced himself to roll out of bed, stand up, and turn off the alarm.

From the other room, Cyborg shouted, "Thank you! Watching local news!"

"You're welcome." Beast Boy called back, forcing interest. "Learning anything?"

"Only that Summer Gleeson is the hottest thing since the sun!"

"Oh. Yeah, she is the hottest thing since hot."

He changed his underwear and clothing and wandered into the living room.

The state of the union? Cyborg was indeed watching local news. He hadn't been completely right about Summer Gleeson, though. Summer Gleeson was hot, but she wasn't the hottest thing since the sun. Maybe since global warming, but not since the actual sun.


9:42 AM

Cyborg turned on the television. This was his first chance to watch the boob tube all week. He'd been too busy trying to make this place livable, and then he'd been napping. After his naps, he went back to work trying to clean and disinfect the place. The roach hotels required replacement daily, and it didn't look like he'd made half a dent in the population yet.

The television screen showed Tim Drake. On the bottom of the screen were the words, HAVE YOU SEEN THIS BOY?

He held up his robotic arm, tapped the screen at certain points. Within moments, Robin's face appeared on the screen.

"Kind of busy," Robin said.

"What's this about?"

"What's what about?"

"This entire 'Tim is on Have you seen this boy adsand we're not helping you find him' thing?"

"Uh?"

"Why didn't you ask us for help?"

"Well... I thought Bludhaven would be enough to deal with, you know? I thought you guys would be too busy. And with Beast Boy... You know."

Cyborg snuck a look over at Beast Boy, who stood staring at the locked, dead-bolted and safety-chained door.

"You guys aren't busy?" Robin asked.

But Cyborg didn't answer. What did you say? Pretty soon he's gonna be wriggling around on the floor and shoving stuff in his mouth and drooling and crap?

"Cyborg? You on? You on? Do you hear me?"

"Sorry, Robin. Yeah, I hear you, I just..."

"What?"

"I think Beast Boy has some unaddressed issues."

To say the least.

"Unaddressed issues? Get out." Robin grinned. "He's going crazy, remember?"

"I think he's going a little crazier than we thought."

A little crazier than we thought. Yeah, right. More like a lot crazier than we thought: Psycho crazy. Murder-suicide-meteor-slave crazy. Padded room crazy.

"Crazier than we thought."

"Yeah."

"Like how much?"

"Like, well, he's definitely hallucinating. He started talking nonsense yesterday, and it's only been getting worse. This morning, he told me I was welcome when I never even said thank you. He asked me what I was learning, and I was like 'from what', but he completely ignored me and then said that yeah, he thought Summer Gleeson was the hottest thing ever, too."

Cyborg paused, finally unleashing the biggest question on his mind. "Who is Summer Gleeson?"


His sister was standing by the door. Well, at least she had come inside out of the rain, but he wasn't entirely sure he liked her just standing in front of the door, soaking wet and staring at him.

"Well, say something," he prompted. "Don't just stand there."

—Where did mom and dad go? Garfield, why can't I find mom and dad? They aren't in their lab, and they aren't in their room or the dining room or...

Don't worry about it, babe. I got it covered.

Susanna had been the last to die. After their parents had collapsed in the attic, looking at baby pictures and all the servants had collapsed in the servants' hallways where Susanna would never have thought to look...

It had been him and Susanna. Just the two of them.

And then there had been one, when Susie's face had gone slack as he tucked her into bed and gave her the shot. Her yellowed skin had seemed so rigid, so tight, and then so loose, and hours later it had become tight again.

And he had held her and cried, and sung to her dead body the way he'd sung to her unmoving baby body when she'd first come home from the hospital.

I had a dream the other night,
When everything was still;
I thought I saw Susanna dear,
A-coming down the hill.
The buckwheat cake was in her mouth,
The tear was in her eye,
Said I, I'm coming from the south,
Susanna don't you cry.

He hummed the words, now, for the little girl in the white and pink dress who went drip-drip on the floor right in front of their door and stared at him with the saddest, greenest eyes he could ever remember seeing.

She looked sadder now than Raven ever had. Oh! Susanna had been their song. They had always sung it together when he tucked her in, when she took a bath, on car trips.

They had been singing it together before either of them had the foggiest clue what a banjo was.


"Oh god," Cyborg moaned. "He's humming Oh! Susanna."

"Do you have an issue with that?"

"No, not really... I just, I just didn't expect him to know it existed."

"Why not?"

"He's from New Jersey, okay?"

"Ah. I get it. So am I."

"Yeah, but you've traveled all over the country."

"My family's from Romania. I seriously doubt anyone in my family knows that song."

"Oh, that's right, isn't it?"

Robin didn't say anything in response to that. Cyborg supposed that you really didn't have to say anything to that.

3
November 24th
Gotham, 9:48 AM

Dick snapped the T-Communicator shut and went back into the dining room. At the dining table sat Jack Drake, his wife Janet, and the other two members of his team.

"I'm sorry to step out on you like that," he said. "I needed to take that call. May I ask why you're here?"

Jack Drake looked over to his wife. On the table, their hands found each other, clasped together.

Janet leaned forward, said in a trembling voice, "I know that you and my son were good friends. I... You... Do you have any idea where he might have gone?"

Dick looked at the pair. Janet had red rimmed, bloodshot eyes, while Jack didn't seem to be suffering any ill effects.

So, not the picture perfect family at all. Well, he might be able to use that.

"Mrs. Drake—"

"Janet, please. I'm too young to be just Mrs. Drake."

"Janet, I didn't even know Tim was missing until I saw it on the news. He hasn't contacted me, and I can't think of any place he might have gone."

"He's run away before, you know," Jack said.

"Yes, I know. I met him in Jump City."

Janet leaned forward again, her expression pleading. "Are you sure you can't think of a single place?"

"Maybe Jump City again? Maybe the places that he went when he went missing the first time?" Dick shook his head, feigned a sigh. You had to play moments like this very carefully. "I just can't imagine him off and running away again. It seems so unlike him."

"What do you know about my son?" Jack snarled. "You haven't even known him for a month!"

Dick resisted the urge to say, I know more than you do about him, and I've known him for longer than you have, because you never knew him at all.

Instead, Dick spread his hands. "Mr. Drake, you have a point. I'm just a friend of his he met a little under a month ago. You're his parents. You would know better than I do. All I know is that this doesn't seem like the guy I brought back here."

Irony was such a bitch, wasn't it? And so was verbally bitch slapping people without them even knowing it.

"Mrs. Drake, I am genuinely sorry to hear of your loss. I assure you, Dick, Raven and I will do everything we can to help you find him," Starfire said. She tugged on the purple sweater she wore.

"Thank you, Kory. That's very nice of you, but I'm sure it won't be necessary. I'm sure he'll come home soon," Janet said.

Neither Raven nor Dick said anything. There just wasn't anything to say to wishful thinking like that.

Starfire didn't use words. Instead, she leaned over the table and clasped Janet Drake's other hand in both of her own. She smiled a warm, reassuring smile and said, "I am sure you have the rightness."

Jack and Janet left shortly after, claiming that they had an interview on GCTV.

"That was pointless," Raven said. "I need to get back to work on our lovely little cult."

"Go ahead. I'm going to search the stoplight cameras in the city for NGI-925."

"You can do that?"

"Yeah. Well, Batman can. The Cray takes every license plate number and logs it."

"That's kind of disturbing."

Starfire pulled Silkie out of the basket in which she had somehow managed to hide it. She hugged the thing tightly and fed it the plate of cookies Jack and Janet hadn't eaten.

"I would like to have a look at this Jell-O," Starfire said when she had finished staring at Silkie. "Gelatinous food that may not be destructed... This sounds interesting."

Dick grinned. "You know what? I'd like to have a look, too."


7:43 PM

"Squishy! So squishy! This stuff is awesome!" Robin muttered.

Robin stared at the Jell-O. He prodded it with a gloved finger.

The Jell-O wiggled.

"Awesome!"

"It has much of the squishy-ness," Starfire observed. "But is it truly indestructible?"

"Want to find out?" Robin asked. "Hey, Raven, do you mind if we field test this thing?"

Raven turned away from the Cray. "What happened to searching for NGI-925?"

"You have the Cray. I'd need the Cray."

"Do whatever you want to it. I've already subjected it to a host of tests, including the microwave, the pool, a Jacuzzi, throwing it off the roof of the Tower..."

"...Yeah, yeah, got your drift."

Robin hefted a butcher knife he'd managed to steal from the Alfred's kitchen. "But can it withstand A BUTCHER KNIFE?"

He plunged the knife into the Jell-O and pulled.

The Jell-O made wiggly sounds. The thickness of the substance actually resisted the knife. It felt as though he were moving his hand against a water current.

The instant the knife left the Jell-O, bits of red gelatin went plop-plop-plop down the blade and rejoined the main. The mass of Jell-O wiggled for a bit.

When the wiggling stopped, the Jell-O looked exactly as it had before he'd tried to cut it.

"Well hello, Jell-O," he mumbled. "Holy indestructible gelatins, Batman!"

Starfire flung a starbolt at it.

"That won't work either," Raven called. "The only thing that made a dent in it that lasted for five minutes was when I dug some out with a spoon and put it in another Tupperware container five feet away."

"How did that resolve itself?"

"See for yourself."

Robin repeated the incident. He watched, amazed, as the spoonful of Jell-O began to ram the lid of the container.

Within two minutes, it had rammed the lid straight off the container and had oozed its way out. Like a line of ducklings, droplets of Jell-O oozed towards the mass.

"Amazing!"

"You are fond of that word, are you not, Friend Robin?"

But Robin had caught the bits of Jell-O and stuffed them back in the Tupperware. This time, he duct taped the lid to the container and moved back one foot.

"Starfire, write this down: at two meters from Specimen A, Specimen B continued to attempt to rejoin Specimen A."

Another fifty centimeters back. "No change at two hundred fifty centimeters from Specimen A."

"Move back another fifty centimeters."

"Three hundred cm, no change."

"More, then. Surely they cannot sense each other from very far."

"Three hundred fifty cm, no change."

"Perhaps more. Not so much, though."

"Three hundred seventy-five cm, Specimen B appears to be slowing down."

"We have it. So, try it at four hundred centimeters, Friend Robin!"

"Four hundred cm, Specimen B has stopped moving entirely."

"Twelve feet, huh?" Raven looked over her shoulder, "So if you want to do more tests on that lump, they all have to be from at least twelve feet away."

Robin stared at the little lump of now-normal Jell-O. "I wonder what would happen if a human digested it?"


8:00 PM

Robin knelt facedown over a bucket. He wiped his mouth with a glove. His mouth felt disgusting, his throat hurt, and his stomach was going to hate him for days.

"Worst idea I've ever had," Robin moaned. "Starfire, if you're really my friend, you will never, ever under any circumstances let me do that again."

"Do you feel any better?" She asked through the bathroom door.

"No, not really."

"I notice that you now have room to speak before needing to expel disgusting liquid from your mouth."

"That's called vomiting, Starfire."

"Oh. But look on the well-lit side! You can speak now! Earlier, you could only moan and make scary noises."

And puke, he grumbled silently. Speaking of puking.

He pulled his hand away from his mouth and tilted his face over the bucket again.

Little red gelatinous droplets were crawling out of his vomit. He snatched them up and stuffed them in an empty Coke bottle. Something red crawled out of his mouth. He picked that one up and put it in the Coke bottle, too.

"I wonder what it was that set off such a reaction. Friend Raven says that Silkie did not react in such a manner. He merely squealed as if he were in pain— in pain, my poor little grothnos in pain! —and spat the Jell-O out."

"Must be something in human saliva, or maybe human stomach acids."

At length, he cleared all the Jell-O (and everything else he'd eaten in the past twelve hours) from his stomach. All the slithery Jell-O fragments found their way into the Coke bottle, and then found their way into a second Tupperware dish.

"I wonder if it will react any differently than Specimen C," he murmured.

"Hey, I found NGI-925 for you," Raven called as soon he stepped out of the bathroom. "Last seen on Devin Road, in the right-turn lane."

Robin grinned. "Right off Devin Road leads only to one place. The Wayne Memorial Cemetery."

Raven looked at the watch built into the T-Communicator. "I have to leave for the airport. If I can engage them now, I can probably catch them."

"Yes, Friend Raven, I was wondering why you did not leave earlier this afternoon to go to the port of the skies."

"Somebody closed down the Saint Louis airport during their layover there. I couldn't fly in to pick them up, and they couldn't leave." Raven checked the clock again. "I have to go now."

Robin looked back to Starfire after she had left. "Want to see what this thing reacts to?"

"I am not ingesting the Jell-O of Evil, Robin. You cannot make me."

Robin grinned.


Five Minutes Later

Starfire tilted her head over a bucket and pinched her nose as she vomited for the first time in her life.

"Starfire, I need to head to the Cemetery, alright? Finding Tim like this would be anti-climactic, but that's the way I'd prefer it."

"That is fine, Robin," she called as soon as she finished her second bout of the vomiting. "When you come back, we need to Talk."

She supposed that the sound of tires squealing as Robin raced his motorcycle from the Batcave made as good an answer as any other course of action.


Words and music to Oh! Susanna by Stephen Foster. Used without permission.

Honestly speaking, I've been sitting on this chapter for two days. And I kept my promise, didn't I? It's 9:00 on Saturday, where I'm sitting.

By the way, EVERYBODY SHOULD GO SEE Batman Begins. The movie is FREAKING AWESOME, and this is coming from a girl who has been a Batman fan since she was three years old and is very familiar with the comics. I've seen it twice.