Teen Titans
Fragile Dreams
A/N So I got it up a day late. I'm a terrible person… sue me. Titans v.s. Terra, take two. ACTION!
Disclaimer - Think about it. If I owned Teen Titans, I wouldn't need to be rewriting the show, now would I?
Fragile Dreams Chapter 20 - Aftershock, Part 2
I am still a Titan!
No we are not.
Yes I am! I was a protector of this city!
Was. Now we are its conqueror.
…
Titans are not traitors.
I am not a traitor!
They were our friends! They took us in when we had no place to go!
They abandoned me!
We made them!
I made them?
We are no longer a Titan!
…
The Titans are dead!
And yet I still live?
We are not a Titan!
…
But we want to be.
Inside her own mind, Terra was slowly going insane. Her head was a hotbed of conflicting emotions, thoughts, and beliefs as she rode a platform of stone through the empty city, gray with fogs, patrolled only by Slade's robotic army. She wasn't sure whom she was anymore… too much conflict to define herself. Feelings of rage and love, fear and friendship warred against one another inside her fragile frame, empowered by an almost tangible feeling weighing her down. 'Guilt,' she thought to herself in disgust as she reached a street with a view of Titan Tower, cutting through the incredibly dense fog coating the street. 'The feeling is guilt.'
That seemed outrageous on the surface, but as she looked out onto the remains of Titan Tower from Slade's army's attack on it three days ago, she could no longer deny it to be true. Why did she feel guilty? Two days ago, it had all seemed so clear, so obvious to her. The Titans were her enemies, not her friends. They needed to be destroyed for the good of her master and, more importantly, for her own revenge against her abandoners. Now, however, she felt that this was less than true.
"I guess that's it," she said to herself, staring out across the narrow gap of water. "They're really gone."
As if the thought was a queue, all hell broke loose around her.
Robots detonated by the dozens as projectiles and energy shot from the dense fog. One bot just below her detonated spectacularly, throwing Terra from her floating platform and sending her to the ground. "Terra," Slade's voice came through on her comlink, "Report! What's happening?"
Terra pushed herself slowly to her feet. "I don't know... I can't see anyth..." Terra cut of as she saw a silhouette in the fog, cloak billowing behind her. Raven. "No! You're dead!"
"Apprentice, attack!"
Terra roared in rage as her hands and eyes lit up, channeling the Earth's power around her. Before she managed to lash out at the silhouette, however, she was blasted off her feet by a vibrating blue ray. Cyborg. Terra rose up to her feet and tore a platform of earth free from the pavement below her, but it exploded beneath her feet. Robin.
Terra landed face first in a heap, lying on the pavement. When she heard a snarl, she sprang up, backing away from the green tiger that was stalking towards her. "Beast Boy, stop it. Let's talk about this."
"There's nothing left to talk about." Cyborg's voice came from behind her.
Terra saw another silhouette land behind him. "You attempted to exterminate us..." Starfire accused.
Raven's voice came from behind Beast Boy, causing her to spin around rapidly. "Did you think we wouldn't take it personally?"
"Terra, FIGHT!"
Terra roared and ripped a platform free from the ground. Before she got even a full meter from the ground a star bolt turned stone to shrapnel, and Terra was falling. Two more stone tried to catch her and lift her up, but Raven's soul self caught her in mid-flight. Terra broke free, but the constant wave of projectiles from the other Titans kept her on the defensive. Terra just couldn't get her feet above the ground... every time she tried to get airborne one of the Titans would ground her.
'I can't win.'
The thought was simple, but devastating to the blonde teen. She was going to lose. Terra pulled up a wall between her and the Titans and started to run away as fast as she could. "Slade, help! I can't do this alone!"
"Terra, my dear... you are never alone."
As she felt the wall crumble behind her, Slade, Plasmus, and Overload came from the shadows. As she stared on in horrified awe, the three merged. Plasmus's resilient slime covered Cinderblock's granite form, and began sparkling with electricity. As Terra again ran away, she heard Slade bots open fire behind her.
Raven turn quickly around. They were outnumbered badly, even worse than they had been at the tower. This time, however... they were ready. Robin spoke, and the empath listened with half an ear as she gathered her focus around her. "Cyborg, take BB and Star. You hold off the bots, me and Raven will handle this new monster."
"Will do."
Robin shouted the order for them to attack, and Raven didn't hesitate. "Azarath Metrion Zinthos!" Two cars, parked directly along the side of the road, flew towards the hybrid's face, their gas tanks detonating on impact and blossoming into brilliant balls of fire. Unfortunately, it came from out of the acrid cloud without an injury, roaring at her and Robin.
"You know," she said as she gathered energy in her hands, "I'm really getting sick of the three of you."
Beast Boy helped pull Cyborg up from where he had fallen, by the wall. "Where's Terra?"
Cyborg looked at him with shock. "What, an army of Robots isn't enough for you?"
"I don't care about them. It's Terra I want." Beast Boy morphed into a wolf and stalked away, sniffing the ground. He snarled and raninto an alley and out of sight.
Terra rushed into Slade stronghold, breathing hard with the exhaustion of her flight from the Titans. "Slade... I made it. I'm alive." As she walked towards her master, he remained facing towards the wall computer screen, his back to her. "Slade?"
Slade spun around, slapping the blonde shaman to the ground. Terra stared up at him in shocked disbelief, and he looked down at his charge condescendingly. "That was nothing compared to what I'm going to do to you." He kicked the fallen shaman and she rolled to a stop painfully several seconds later. "I told you to fight and you ran, apprentice. This is not acceptable."
Painfully, Terra pushed herself up. "You can't... treat... me like this!"
Slade actually laughed a deep, sinister sound full of evil. He finally drifted off, and cocked his head to the side, like a hawk, in extreme amusement. "Can't I?" He chuckled briefly at his own irony. "Who else would have you? Where else would you go?"
"ANYWHERE!" Terra shouted at him. "I want out! I'm sick of fighting, and I'm sick of You!" Terra grabbed the collar of her cybernetic armor and pulled with all her strength, but it refused to move. 'The damn thing's stuck?' Terra continued trying to pull her armor off, growing more and more desperate with every failed attempt. Something in her started to hurt as her attempts to remove her master's armor continued, but Terra paid the discomfort to mind. Slade started laughing again, the cold sound freezing her blood.
As Slade's laughter died down again, he began walking towards the struggling teen, still down on her knees. "I'm afraid you'll find that quite impossible. The cybernetic interface will have fused with your skin by now, apprentice. It's a part of you." Slade stopped walking, standing right before his apprentice. He crouched down, putting his masked face directly before her fair-haired continence. "And so am I."
If Terra had thought Slade's laughter had chilled her blood, his words instantly froze it. She stopped struggling against her suit, trembling with hock and disgust. "No..."
"Oh yes, Terra. It's far too late to turn back now."
"But it's not too late for me to go." Terra forced herself to her feet, prepared for Slade to try and knock her down again. He didn't even twitch. In a way, Slade simply staring at her with such visible amusement was more unnerving than any action he could take against her. She started walking towards the exit.
Terra suddenly dropped to the ground, writhing in the purest pain she had ever felt. Electricity arced through her lithe body in pulsing waves of agony. Over the sound of her own screams, she could just hear Slade mocking her. "Oh, I'm afraid it is." He gestured for her to come to him, and to her shock her body obeyed, getting up from the ground and walking towards him. When she reached him, the pain mercifully stopped. Slade lightly placed two fingers beneath her chin, gently forcing her to look up at him.
"You promised to fight beside me forever, Terra. And that's a promise I intend to make you keep."
'What have I done?'
A camera clicked in the darkness, but it wasn't alone. A snap, a cackle of electricity, a sizzle of overheated circuitry... and the clicking stopped.
Beast Boy unmorphed, immediately transforming again into a bat and letting go an ultrasonic whistle. The tunnel opened up ahead, and turned into a vast cavern. He couldn't see anyone inside it, but the increasing security told him he had to be getting close. He flew onward.
Unlike what most people think, bats aren't blind: they can see just as well as humans can. When Beast Boy saw light ahead, he knew what he was flying into. When he saw a blonde girl sprawled out on the floor, he also knew exactly what he was seeing. She was crying.
Beast Boy unmorphed. "Terra?"
Terra jumped up, gazing at him with unfocused, somewhat maddened blue eyes. Beast Boy jumped backwards, but her eyes never started to glow. Instead, tears continued to drip from them. "Kill me!"
Beast Boy wasn't sure what he had expected, but that wasn't it. "What?"
Terra didn't back down, her eyes never blinking. "Kill me! That's what you came for, isn't it?"
"Terra... I didn-" Beast Boy had no time to react as Terra eyes suddenly lit up with an unnatural golden light, and a rock bashed into his back.
"I'm sorry about my apprentice." Slade's voice called out from the shadows. The masked villain stepped into the light. "As usual, she can't seem to control herself."
Another volley of stones went flying for Beast Boy, but this time he was ready. Flawlessly, he dodged them all. Terra's eyes "What have you done to her?"
Slade laughed, and Terra seemed to cringe at the dark sound. "Nothing she didn't want me to." Slade reached out his hand towards Beast Boy and, almost lazily, pointed. Terra's eyes lit up.
Raven smiled grimly as the Titans formed up in a tight circle in the middle of an army of bots. The odds looked impossible as the bots grimly marched forward, but Rae knew otherwise... Robin had come prepared for this.
"Raven, NOW!" Robin shouted as his tightly wound muscles unraveled like a spring, flinging a spherical black object into the air above them. Raven surrounded them with her soul self just as it detonated. In a blinding flash, the world seemed to simply disappear for the shielded Titans. When the light faded and Rae dropped the shield, all the bots were strewn about the ground inactive. Raven smiled... Robin was a genius.
When any type of nuclear reaction takes place, multiple products are produced. One of them is called EMP, or an Electro-Magnetic Pulse. This pulse is a wave of electric energy capable of sizzling the circuitry of any electronics it touches... including the robots. Such a pulse is what that bomb had contained. They wouldn't be getting up.
Suddenly, Raven heard a roar and turned to look down the street. Plascinderload was stumbling down the street, still up but obviously injured. The EMP damage to Overload was obviously affecting it. Raven snarled. "Azarath Metrion Zinthos!"
Raven's powers tore the pavement up from under the monstrous hybrid, like pulling on a carpet. It stumbled and went down, and the Titans were all over it in seconds. Cyborg, perched on the chest of the monster, fired three blasts down into its face before it reared up and slapped him away. When it tried to hit Cyborg, Robin moved. The team leader rolled under their massive opponent and attached some kind of charge to the base of the neck. As he rolled away it detonated brightly, spewing dark smoke across the blasted streets.
It crashed back to the pavement and didn't move.
Robin looked around. "Where's Beast Boy?"
Cyborg glanced at his wrist. "Two miles west of southwest, and... 200 meters under the surface?"
"Terra," Raven growled through clenched teeth. She thought her eyes might have pulsed red for a second.
"Slade," Robin practically spat out, much the same as Raven had. He looked down at the fallen fusion. "We'll worry about this thing later. Right now, Beast Boy needs help. Raven?"
She nodded. Blackness surrounded the Titans, and when it faded they were gone.
Just inches away from Slade, Beast Boy felt the ground buck beneath his feet. He wasn't going to make it. Abandoning his Rhino form, Beast Boy took to the air just as the ground tried to swallow him up... but he was already gone. Off to the side, Terra wept, her eyes glowing. "I'm so sorry, Beast Boy..."
Beast Boy unmorphed, safely away from flying rocks. "Then stop letting him control you!"
"I don't have any choice!"
"Yes You Do!" he shouted, practically shaking with frustration. "You chose to become Slade's apprentice, you chose to betray us, you now you're choosing to give him control!"
"Aragggh!" Terra screamed as golden energy practically erupted from her pores, immersing Beast Boy in a deadly hail of stone.
Terra lowered her hands, and the rock dust in the air settled. Beast Boy was on the ground, bleeding, trapped halfway under a slab of stone. He groaned... still alive then. She felt her arms moving against her will again, and her own hijacked powers swirled around the slim shaman. She cried as Slade forced her to lift another rock over him...
"Strike!"
Still Terra hesitated, resisting the command with everything she had.
"STRIKE, Apprentice!" Slade commanding tone attacked her will at its foundation, demanding obedience. She could literally feel her resolve being crushed under Slade's willpower and technology.
"Terra, STOP!" Robin rushed into the room, followed by Starfire and Cyborg. They quickly surrounded her. "Don't do it!"
From directly behind her, Terra heard Raven's voice whispering into her ear. "It'll be the last thing you ever do."
Beast Boy stared up at her as she was just shuddering with the strain. She was fighting against Slade's technology with everything she had, and they seemed perfectly matched. For long seconds, nobody moved. Then, without warning, it was over.
"BASTARD!" Slade cart wheeled to the left as the stone slab she had been about to crush the fallen Titan with almost vivisected him. "You MONSTER!"
"Why you little-" Slade started, still dodging sharp shards of stone. He cut off in a rush of exhaled breath as he dodged into the path of one such stone. His armor saved him, but took the air from his lungs.
"What? Traitor? Is THAT what you were going to say?" Beast Boy looked on in shock as Terra continued to pummel Slade with the earth. A particularly heavy fragment hit his mask, and he fell backwards, over the cliff edge.
Raven stared on in stunned silence as Terra walked towards the edge of the spire platform Slade had fallen off of. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Robin free Beast Boy from his prison of stone. Her attention, however, was firmly fixed on the traitor on top of the platform.
With a suddenness that shocked even her, Slade came flying over the edge, knocking Terra sprawling with a kick to her head. The empath stared on in silence as the master villain slowly, purposefully, started to walk towards the fallen shaman. "We should help her..." Beast Boy started, but Raven cut him off with a wave.
"No," Raven said in a forceful tone that invited no argument. "This is her fight."
Slade reached Terra, and leaned down and picked the girl up by the cuff of her armor. Suddenly, Terra's eyes popped open, glowing like a pair of suns in the darkness of the cavern. Her hair started to blow wildly, as if blown in the wind, but no breeze touched the Titans. The former Titan looked right at Slade and yelled "I AM NOT YOUR DOLL!" The entire spire they stood on started to glow a molten red.
Before the captivated eyes of the Titans, the platform exploded in a brilliant display of stone shrapnel. Terra and Slade vanished from sight in the cloud of debris. When the dust finally settled, Terra was alone, floating on one of the remaining blocks of stone still hovering. She stood tall, hands and eyes still glowing as she looked down at the Titans. Slade was nowhere to be seen. With a gasp clearly audible in the silence, Terra's entire glow faded, and the exhausted shaman sank to her knees.
Then the ground began to shake.
Cyborg glanced at his wrist pad, and his human eye widened in fear. "Oh, no..." He turned to his teammates, and Beast Boy thought he looked more nervous than he'd ever seen him. "Terra's power just triggered the fault line under the city. She just turned the entire city into an active volcano... way too big to stop!"
As Cyborg spoke, magma began to flow through cracks in the cavern, and flares began to shoot out of the floor. One such flare shot up right behind them, and Raven threw a shield over it, suppressing it. "We have to get out of here," the empath said, glancing back to the entrance. "Bludhaven's done for." Robin nodded, and the team started to run for the exit.
Beast Boy, however, ran towards the platform Terra was now floating on. He grabbed the woman he loved by the shoulders and pulled her to her feet. The blonde still wouldn't meet his eyes, though. Her long, blonde hair drifted over her cybernetic armor and covered her right eye completely as she stared at the ground. BB shuddered slightly... the parallel with Slade was all too visible. He shook it off... recriminations could wait. "C'mon Terra... we got to go."
Terra's mind raced as Beast Boy pulled her up. He was trying to save her! Through the incredible pain her explosion of power had caused, she smiled. Bludhaven might be finished, obliterated by her hand, but at least she and Beast Boy would survive...
Terra froze at that thought: The sheer selfishness of it gave her pause. 'Can I really just shrug off the loss of an entire city, just because my love and I will outlive it?' The prices of her actions are even higher than ever this time.
Thought flashed through her head unbidden. Running away from her family because it was easier than admitting they were such failures. Living in the desert because it was easier than learning the control necessary to live a normal life. Making a home for herself at the Titan's Tower for the first time, giving her a place to stay. Betraying the Titans and seeking out Slade to gain the control she'd always wanted. Reaching out to and using Beast Boy to find security. Reaching out to and using Raven to finally feel she had a friend. Taking Beast Boy away from the Tower to try and avoid her betrayal, doing only what was best for her and saving the one who made her feel best. Her attacks on the Titans, wiping them out as revenge for their rejection of her... a rejection that she had forced. In horror, she realized that even her final rejection of Slade as her master was the easy route, in response to his treatment of her.
She had never made an unselfish choice in her life. Was she really prepared to sacrifice an entire city for her flaws?
Terra finally looked up at Beast Boy, her blue eyes meeting his green ones. "No. I have to stay."
"What? Why?"
She looked off into the distance, down at the rapidly pooling magma on the floor of the deep cavern. "I'm the only one who can stop it."
Beast Boy looked crushed by her decision. "Terra... no..." he started, tears beginning to build up. "It's too late."
Terra smiled and brushed her hair away from her eyes. Suddenly, she no longer felt like Slade's apprentice: She felt like Terra again. "Like hell it is." Terra grabbed him, pulling him tightly against her. "Listen. I've lost count of how many times I've told you I love you, but I never really knew what that meant until now. I love you, Garfield Logan. I always will love you."
"Terra... I lo..."
She pulled him tighter to her. "Tara."
"Huh?"
"Call me Tara. Tara Markov... I always wanted you to be the first person to know it." With that, Tara kissed him, and they stood there for several eternal seconds, locked in embrace while the planet's lifeblood flowed around them.
Terra released Garfield, and he stepped back. Terra tore the platform they were on in two, sending her love back to his friends standing by the entrance tunnel. "I love you... Tara." Garfield whispered as he started to drift away, and she choked back tears as she whispered back.
"I love you too... Gar..." Then he was with his friends, and running to safety.
Tara Markov was alone.
Standing on a lonely spire, surrounded my flowing magma in the trembling cavern, Tara stood her ground as her entire body began to glow with a golden light. Tara smiled. She was in her element, and no one: not Slade, not anyone; could stop her now. She could feel the tremendous power of the Earth flowing all around her as she felt her glow intensify. Magma started flowing into the cavern at an accelerating rate. The elemental power of the entire planet swirled around Tara as she basked in its glow, forming a burning column from her to the ceiling. Slowly, the shaman pushed her arms outward from her body, keeping her hands open, using her body as a focal point for the Earth's incredible might. Her long hair swirled in the whirlwind of air the column of pure golden energy was creating.
Tara opened her eyes, staring out into the beautiful desolation of the cavern by the molten stone, watching the devastatingly beautiful work of the Earth renewing itself. 'I'm sorry… but I can't let you renew yourself here.' Her eyes blazed like two burning novas in the dim light of the magma, shining out even through the golden haze of the column of light she had immersed herself in. Tara clenched her fists, and the nexus of the gathering energy shifted into them. The strain was like nothing she had ever felt before, as her body became nothing more than a conduit for the Earth's vast elemental energy. She put her hands together on top of her upper chest, desperately attempting to hold onto the gathering power.
'Slade thought he had taught me the limits of my power. He didn't have a clue,' Tara realized. During the worst of the accidental disasters her powers had caused, she hadn't channeled a tenth of this energy. The pull of it was literally beginning to rip her fragile body apart. 'Not yet…' she thought to herself as stone fell from the cave top in massive chunks, splashing into the quickly rising magma below her. The earth's trembles increased in both power and frequency, but still Terra remained still, accumulating energy. 'Not yet…'
Finally, the magma reached level mere inches from the top of her spire. 'NOW!' Tara flung her hands out to the side of her body, opening her fists and releasing all the pent up energy inside her. The shaman screamed in the purest agony she could imagine, as her body became the living circuitry for untold amounts of the planet's power, golden rays of force lancing out from her in all directions. For a brief instant, Tara could see the entire room lit up like day as she burned like a brilliant sun trapped beneath the Earth. Then everything faded to gold, and Tara Markov could see nothing at all.
Beast Boy was half running, half being dragged up the tunnel as it shook around the rapidly retreating Titans, desperate to put as much distance between them and the dangerous tectonic activity behind them as possible. Suddenly, all the Titans heard a screech to make their blood run cold – a scream of pain… no, the wail of a damned, tortured soul. The scream echoed down the narrow tunnel, losing none of its intensity as the sound passed the Titans and continued up to the surface face above. "TARA!" Beast Boy screamed, but she couldn't hear him. A golden glow became visible at the far rear of the tunnel, and before any of the Titans could react a wave of golden energy washed over them much the same way Tara's wail of agony did, blowing their capes, clothing, and hair about in a rush of wind powerful enough to knock them from their feet. Then the ground settled, and the rumbling stopped.
In the cavern where Terra had sacrificed herself for Bludhaven, only a statue of stone stood in memorial to the redemption of the former Titan. 'This figure is all that is left of her now.' Garfield thought as he knelt before it. 'Tara always did have a great sense of humor… she would appreciate the irony more than I can. The Mistress of the Earth, imprisoned forever in a cage of stone.' Slowly, he started to speak. "Tara… I know you're still in there, somewhere. I don't know if you can hear me, but if you can, just know I'll never forget you."
Garfield slowly lowered a plaque to the base of where his love stood in her petrified stance, forever staring up as though the stars she loved so much were visible through the stone. 'Who knows… to her, perhaps they are.' Setting the plaque in place, he looked up at the memorial to his fallen shaman. "You taught me so much. I'll never have a chance to fully repay you, but I can try. Your final act was to preserve this city… I'll spend forever insuring that it wasn't a wasted gesture. Bludhaven will remain." Slowly, Gar got up and turned towards the exit.
"It's time to grow up. Beast Boy died when you did, hon." Despite himself, Garfield smiled. "Changeling was born in your memory." A tear, that he'd tried so hard to repress, slipped down his face. He wiped it away gently, putting it in his mouth the taste the bitter saltiness. "I love you Tara. If you can hear me, I want you to know that."
He walked away, leaving both the plaque and his heart behind him.
Tara Markov
1988 - 2005
A Teen Titan
End Chapter 20
A/N End of Terra Arc.
Definition - Tragic Hero
A hero who meets all of the following characteristics:
1) The hero begins at a high social level or level of renown.
2) The hero has a tragic flaw
3) The hero falls from her position because of her tragic flaw.
4) The hero realizes her tragic flaw.
So, Terra saves herself from Slade and sacrifices her life for redemption... but not before doing her damnedest to destroy the trust holding the team together. They need to fix this problem, and fast.
"I am not your doll" is a line spoken by a character named Rei Ayanami in the best anime ever, named Evangelion. It also gets my vote for "best line completely ruined by an American dub."
Next Time on Teen Titans - Fragile Dreams:
Robin starts obsessing over Slade
Raven has to regain the willingness to trust
Robin needs help... can the empath he loves save him from himself? Will she finally be able to?