A/N - Just as a side note, if anyone objects to the minor jumps in time throughout the rest of the fic, I'll say now that they're there because this entire thing was originally written as one long narrative, but eventually grew too big to digest that way, so I chopped it up into chapters. Just so y'all know.

2. Not Quite a Star Trek Debate

The word wasn't 'whoomph'. The experience was 'whoomph'.

Terra stumbled backwards, resisting the pull of the small, multicoloured hole in the air. Staring at it was like staring at a Picasso in a blender, with added Essence of Hurricane dragging her towards it. She could feel her feet making grooves in the soft ground where the concrete had all been torn up by battle.

The carcass of the Misshapen she'd been fighting lifted off the ground and flew towards the hole with the speed of a bowling ball dropped from a great height. The hole was about ten inches in diameter, if that, and ragged around the edges. Impossibly, the body folded in on itself, compacting and twisting into a shape with a diameter much smaller than ten inches. It disappeared through without so much as a crunch, and nothing whatsoever like the implosion of air that had announced the appearance of the phenomenon.

Terra thought of black holes. Except this one was not black, and she was not in the depths of space. She was on the banks of Jump River, having destroyed a nest of Misshapens under the bridge. She was also trying very hard to understand how this could be happening, while at the same time using her geokinesis to not follow the carcass.

A barricade of earth sprang up around her, made uneven by instinct. It took only two minutes for it to be sucked into the colourful void.

Terra might have cried out, except she was rather certain her voice would vanish in there as well. So when the lasso of dark energy wrapped around her midriff, she made no sound, and was equally silent when it yanked her away into a portal.

Raven was on the other side, along with Cyborg and Beast Boy. Raven's hands were encased with the same energy that held Terra, but it quickly evaporated. Terra found herself dumped unceremoniously on the floor. They were in a clapped out old building that used to hold patent attorney offices until the roof caved in. What it lacked in ceiling it made up for in wall-to-wall carpeting. Plush carpeting, which meant her landing was softer than usual.

She gripped her stomach and waited for it to settle down. "I hate teleporting."

"Well if you hadn't gone off alone like that, I wouldn't have had to pluck you from the drooling jaws of death, would I?" Raven said in a tone as wet as a desert.

Cyborg was more sympathetic, as he and Beast Boy helped Terra up. "Why'd you try to fly solo, girl? Raven had to cast a psychic net just to find you, and you know how great that makes her feel."

"Sorry, Ray." Terra coughed and gingerly felt her ribs. "Found a nest. I think it was the one that's been targeting Sector Twelve recently."

Beast Boy screwed up his face. "Um, I forget. Is Sector Twelve the one that stops at Matheson Avenue, or Maple Grove?"

Cyborg shook his head. "Neither. Wychberry Street."

"Aw, man. I hate these dumb sectors. Can't we just say 'to hell' with Robin's system and go by names again?"

Cyborg rolled his good eye. Raven blanked everyone, assuming a lotus position on a busted reception desk. Terra wanted to smile, because Beast Boy had this way of making you want to smile all the time, but her chest honestly hurt too much to get beyond a grimace.

"You get 'em?" Cyborg asked her, breaking the moment.

She nodded. "Wiped them out. And almost got wiped out myself by that … thing. What the hell was that, anyway?"

"A chaos vent."

"A who's-in-the-what-now?"

Raven fixed her with a bleak stare. It wasn't much of a stretch from her usual expression, but it still made frost crawl up Terra's spine. While she wasn't exactly an expert on all the Titans, she knew next to nothing about Raven. The others trusted her with their lives, which, by default and her status as newbie, meant she had to as well, but there was still something about Raven that gave her the willies. She was too intense, too severe, too … cold. And creepy. Yes, she definitely looked like 'creepy' had been coined for her personal use. Everything about her seemed geared towards shutting out the rest of the world. Why she was putting herself out saving it was anybody's guess.

"A chaos vent," Raven said slowly, in the same voice teachers reserved for especially dense children. "A temporary, non-linear singularity similar to a temporal anomaly."

Terra waved away the hands trying to help her. "I think I speak for everyone when I say huh?"

"They're like mini black holes," said Cyborg.

"Yeah. Okay, understood that. But aren't black holes a 'space, the final frontier' deal? What the heck are they doing here? And shouldn't we be more worried about that one by the river inhaling all existence?"

"Negative. Like Raven said, they're temporary. And they're only like black holes, in that they have this nasty habit of, uh, inhaling anything around them that ain't tied down. They don't suck up light, though, so they ain't as bad as the real deal. But what goes in, it don't come out again, and we don't have much clue where any of it goes. We really don't know all that much about 'em. They started popping up right after … y'know."

In true Harry Potter tradition, people had started refusing to mention the day civilisation ended by name. Cyborg was no exception. Terra really couldn't see much point to it. What was was, and choosing not to say it out loud wouldn't change that. But then, she couldn't see much point to many things. Like why they didn't go hook up with wherever the Justice League was and try to take back their world in a more-than-piecemeal fashion. Or why nobody had ever seen one of the infamous aliens.

"They usually disappear again after a few minutes," Cyborg went on, "taking with 'em whatever they're able to suck up."

"Kinda like a giant vacuum cleaner," Beast Boy added, and mimed hoovering the debris around them.

Terra blinked. "You're taking these things remarkably well. Aren't you even curious as to what they are, where they came from?"

Beast Boy stopped. "What do you think Robin's doing when he locks himself away for hours?"

"He said he thinks they might be portals, like Raven's," Cyborg said. "But without going into one it's all guesswork. And you can imagine how eager people are to go jumping into oblivion in the name of science."

"I see. And the reason I wasn't notified about these 'chaos vents' before is…?"

He rubbed at the back of his neck. "We haven't had a flare-up since before you got here. Which makes it about three-ish months. We were kinda hoping they'd stopped of their own accord." He looked through the shattered revolving glass doors. "We got enough to stress over without stuff like this."

Terra felt something pinch in the pit of her stomach. "Yeah, well, looks like you were wrong. They're very much still around."

"Not that one." Raven opened her eyes. A thin curl of obsidian wafted away from her face. It was an incredibly eerie sight. "It just vanished."

"What do you mean, van -" Terra straightened and winced. A low hiss worked its way between her clenched lips.

Cyborg was instantly all business, scientific theory forgotten in the face of medical fact. "Let me see." He moved towards her with palms open, body-speak for 'no arguments, please'.

Terra backed off a step. "I don't need to be taped up," she started, until her back pressed against something solid overlaid with something soft and ticklish. A pair of huge paws encircled her shoulders. "Aw, man. Beast Boy, you really gotta do that to a girl?"

The lime green panda gave a very un-panda-like grin.

Terra launched herself at the Misshapen, throwing a front snap kick to the chest. She could hear the air whoosh out as it fell backward. Good. No breath for warning signals, or screaming. She hated it when they screamed.

She landed with both knees on top of it. Robin's not-really-training was paying off. A rib cracked – not one of hers. She refused to take pleasure in the sound, instead pooling yellow power in her hands and letting it drip through her fingers.

The Misshapen thrashed wildly. Terra hung on. The bank vault she'd tracked it to was great for sheltering in, but thick enough that it took some exertion to get earth through it. Those who'd supervised its construction really wanted their moolah to be safe. She located some nearby rocks and dragged them towards her, throwing them against the other side of the vault's walls with as much force as the soil density would allow.

The Misshapen's eyes flashed. You didn't have to be completely human to be afraid. She thought she could almost smell the fear oozing off it. It was bitter, and tasted bad on the very back of her tongue. For a second she thought she was going to throw up. Yet she couldn't look away. You looked away, you let your guard down. You let your guard down, you were dead inside three seconds – four, tops. So she had to stare at it, looking for signs it was going to get loose, until the walls gave way and soil poured into the room. Only then did she step off, and even then she still had to use her geokinesis to make sure the soil covered it, and feel for when it stopped twitching.

When she was certain it was dead, she set about shoving soil back through the gap, making sure to take the body with it. She didn't want to look at the rictus its face had become. Her sixth sense, the one that tapped into her geokinesis, had already formed a picture in her mind of each petrified contour, line and curve. She didn't need it corroborated by her eyes.

Then she concentrated hard, utilising a new trick she and Beast Boy had been working on. She felt the molecules in the soil speed up, felt them fuse together, and then let them cool into a plug of no less than three feet of solid rock.

Fatigue made her muscles shake. She didn't realise until she came back to herself and grasped that her outstretched arms hurt and her legs were threatening to give out. She leaned against a part of the metal that wasn't too hot, scrubbing at her eyes, and then looked at the three faces in the corner. Each one was etched in nothing less than pure horror.

"It's okay now," she said in what was meant to be a soothing voice. It didn't help that the dust had made her throat all scratchy. "It's gone. It won't hurt you anymore. You're safe."

The man swallowed loudly. He was dressed in a hopelessly incongruous blue wool suit, and had prematurely grey hair curling into his eyes. "From what?" he asked. "Them, or you?"

The woman held her son close and gaped at Terra's handiwork. "What've you done? You ruined our shelter. You ruined it. How could you? How could you do that to us?"

Terra regarded them for only a second. The kid said nothing, but met her gaze with something like curiosity. He didn't make any move away from his mother's arms, though. Terra raised a hand, paused, and then let it drop back to her side. She stumbled back to the surface through the network of corridors without another word.

Beast Boy advanced on her with a towel in his hands. It was threadbare and greyish, and looked altogether too unsanitary for medicinal purposes.

Terra scooted backwards and immediately regretted it when fire blossomed in her chest. "Keep that thing away from me. It's a health hazard!"

He stopped, looked down at it, and then back up at her. "I'll keep it away if you tell me where you hurt."

"Fat chance – hey! Leave off. It's probably infested with Bubonic Plague, or something!" She made shoving motions with her hands that turned to pulling at the tattered sleeves of her shirt. They'd never gotten around to uniforms or anything, so she'd scraped by on whatever clothing they could scrounge. Right now it was too-big shorts and a non-gore-covered tee-shirt of indeterminate colour. Heat-retention was no longer an issue – the city was baking hot all day and all night. "My back teeth feel weird, my ribs are turning a nice shade of purple, and I think I might have broken my pinkie, but I'm fine, okay?"

He made a snorting noise. "Yeah. You really sound it. C'mere."

"No."

"Just let me take a look - "

"Leave off." The walls around them began to tremble.

Beast Boy froze. Being underground when an earthquake hits is never a good thing, and he looked to Terra with questioning eyes.

She ran a hand through her hair. It got stuck in knots on the crown of her skull. "Yeah, that was me. Sorry. Lost my concentration for a second. But I really am fine. Really. I can last 'til Ray gets back."

"Yeah. Right. Don't let her hear you calling her that, or she'll hang you out to dry."

"What – Ray? It's not that bad a nickname, is it?"

"Better than Booger Breath – which I really don't appreciate, by the way." Beast Boy made an attempt to look imposing, but failed miserably. "Green's a very handsome colour."

"Yu-huh."

He sighed. "Terra, I'm sure you could wait until Raven gets back, but since I have no idea when that'll be, and I don't want you passing out all over the floor, you're gonna sit down and let me take a look at fixing you up. All right?"

"You're gonna go great white shark on my ass unless I do, aren't you?"

"Nu-uh. Gorilla. Or maybe velociraptor. Or even - "

"Okay, okay, I get the picture." She shifted back on the cot, pressing the heels of her hands into the mattress. Her palms were chapped and a little raw. She really had to look into getting some gloves. "But I swear, you go anyplace but my ribs and I'm so gonna nail your ass to the wall."

"Why Terra, I had no idea you even thought about my ass." He grinned wickedly.

"Dream on, lover boy."

"But you gotta admit, it is a nice tush." He wiggled it, peering over his shoulder and straining to look down. Then he turned back to the cot. "Uh, you're gonna have to lay down - "

"I said dream on."

"Terra, seriously," his voice lost a little of its colour, "work with me here. Lay down so I can get a better look. I'll be good. Scout's honour." As if to emphasise, he saluted.

"You were a Boy Scout?" she asked, as she leaned back on her elbows.

"Lie down properly, please. And no, not really. Too rigidly organised."

She snorted. "And yet, here you are, part of a superteam with perhaps the most anally-retentive person in the world for its leader."

Beast Boy shrugged. "Robin's not so bad. It could be worse. We could have Batman as leader."

"Oh, woe betide us. Hey, watch it," she warned, as he lifted her tee-shirt to just beneath her bra.

"Sorry."

He poked experimentally at her left side, which was closest, and was rewarded with a sharp hiss. The lower half of her ribcage there felt wrong, she knew – like slightly overripe fruit. She could have told him that, but she was never one to flag up her hurts. She'd always been fiercely independent in her own way, and since joining this band of merry misfits made her, by definition, reliant on others, her independence had sought other outlets. Which included bull-headedness and bloody-mindedness.

"You're good, but you're gonna have to be taped up until Raven gets back. The minor cuts I can dress, easy, but I think I may have to splint that finger."

"Oh, lucky, lucky me." Terra sat up and tugged her top down.

She watched as Beast Boy sifted through the rapidly diminishing medical supplies in the corner. From what she understood, Titans Tower, symbol of all things Teen and Titan, had been gassed and then bombed before everything went to hell in a hand-basket. Luckily, the Titans hadn't been in it at the time, but they'd lost most of their equipment and data files, as well as almost all means of radio communication – much good it would have done them anyway after so many satellites fell. It had taken months for Robin and Cyborg to cobble together something approaching a base of operations in this cave, while Starfire applied herself to making it feel less like a refuge and more like a home.

Provisions still ran short, though, generally centring on what they could find and scavenge. Beast Boy was very strict about his vegetarianism, and so refused to accompany anyone when they went out trapping in what little remained of the forest. Some survivors talked about eating Misshapen meat, but the very thought of it made Terra feel sick. Needs must when the devil vomits into your kettle, but still…

"What was it like?" she asked suddenly.

Beast Boy looked up, a roll of bandages in his hand. "Hm? What was what like?"

"Fighting before all … this?" She waved a noncommittal hand, ensnaring everything around and beyond them into the gesture. "Being a superhero when it actually meant something."

"It still means something," he said carefully.

"Pfft. Yeah. It's a real big deal, scrapping for food and finding bodies to bury. And even if we do save people, what good is it in the long run? What good's it do them? What good's it do us?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"Look around you, Beast Boy. What's left to fight for? I mean, are we really doing these people any favours by saving them? What kind of life can they lead in a place like this? Or any other place since that-thing-we-don't-mention."

He stared at the bandages, turning them over and passing them from hand to hand. He'd lost one of his gloves somewhere, and two fingers on the other were missing. "I don't think I like where this conversation is going."

"Why? Because it doesn't follow the superhero code of honour? Because it's more realistic than what we've been allowed to talk about lately? Listen, I didn't sign up to play 911-substitute. Sure, I want to save lives, but I don't like the idea of being just a short-term solution while the long-term stuff goes untended. I thought the Titans were all about the big picture – y'know, saving the planet, not just one crummy little berg that's as good as dead anyway."

"And the people on that crummy berg?" There was silence for a moment. When he spoke again, Beast Boy's voice was soft, his eyes downcast. "You haven't been with us very long, Terra. You don't know how things were before."

"I saw how the Justice League used to handle stuff. And Supergirl. And Green Arrow. And half a dozen other heroes. And I don't have to know what the glory days were like from the inside to know that there's some serious lack of planning going on here. 411? If somebody doesn't do something about the aliens and their strongholds, the Earth isn't going to get better. And even if it doesn't get worse, things are screwed as they are. Misshapens, diseases, chaos vents, in-fighting among survivors." Terra paused. She took a long breath and looked at her toes, rotating her feet at the ankles. "Today I had to bury three kids. Not one of them was over six years old, all healthy apart from the fact that they were, y'know dead. They were killed because they found a stash of canned foods in some wreckage, and someone bigger than them didn't want to share. Beast Boy, a world where I find that three times a day is completely FUBAR, and I … I start to think that maybe we're just prolonging the inevitable by going down this small-time route. Times have changed. The world's changed. The old Titans M.O. just isn't going to cut it anymore."

"You really feel that strongly?"

"I've buried … I've buried too many people recently." She lifted her gaze. "Don't get me wrong. Saving lives is a great thing to do. And it's pretty much the only thing keeping me from going insane right now. It's just … I don't want to save some kid from a Misshapen just to find him dead five minutes later by a human hand. That's not the way I want things to be."

Beast Boy snorted. "You think this is any easier for the rest of us? Geez, Terra, do you really believe we want things to be like this any more than you do?"

"Did I say that? No. I just want to know why we aren't getting our world back for these people to live in. If the aliens did so much damage, maybe some of their technology can turn it around again. Make the chaos vents go away, or turn the Misshapens back into … get rid of the Misshapens.

"And if it can't? If a thousand people die in Jump City while we're away finding out that it can't, what then?"

"At least we'd have tried." Her voice rose. Terra prided herself on keeping situations light, on not making like this could be the last few seconds any of them had. But this … she'd had an especially rough day, her body was a mess of bruises and contusions, and she'd really just had enough of pussyfooting around what was bothering her. "That's better than saying 'woe is us' when everything goes down the crapper anyway."

"We don't know that'll happen. The Justice League - "

"Could be dead, for all we know. We could be the only superheroes left, and we're sitting on our hands because we might make the wrong decision. Might. I'm sick of holding dead babies in my arms. I want to make a difference."

"You are. We are. To these people."

"But our planet is dying, Beast Boy." Her voice hit a note to shatter glass. "How can we compensate not trying to save it by saving only a few lives each day?"

Beast Boy opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He spent a few seconds running his bare hand over the bandages, then turned away and busied himself with something she couldn't see. "You should talk to Robin about this, not me. He's in charge."

Terra waited a moment before hopping delicately off the cot and crossing the space between them. She laid a hand on his shoulder, felt him tense up and stay tensed up at the contact. Beast Boy had been her ally since she arrived, defending her when she messed up, teaching her as much as he could about being a superhero, taking a vested interest in manipulating her powers outside 'don't crush yourself or other people by accident'. They'd stayed up nights when they couldn't sleep. Everyone had nightmares – it was a given – but they talked about theirs, and it took the sting out. He'd told her about the TV commercials he starred in as a little kid, freshly greened and raring to show off his powers. She confided about burying her mother and the shrivelled baby, about how she'd cried when Superman died and the poem she read at his tribute. She'd taught him how to cuss in her native tongue, and he'd told her about past Titan exploits and adventures.

Yet now she felt like she barely knew him at all. His back was blank, his shoulders hunched, and she wanted nothing more than to have him corroborate what she'd said so they could get back to normal – or as normal as they could – and deal with any repercussions of it later.

"Beast Boy…" She couldn't say she was sorry, because she wasn't. She'd meant every word. Still, the apology dangling from the tip of her tongue.

"I won't say it hasn't crossed my mind," he said softly. "Bailing on Jump and finding what's left of other heroes … taking on the aliens … getting our planet back … But I won't be the one to explain to those people out there why I wasn't here to stop their mother, their sister, their friend from being killed or worse, because I saw the 'big picture' and they weren't a big enough part of it to get my attention." He pulled away, out of her grasp. "I'm sorry, Terra."

Terra said nothing.

A long moment passed. When she reached out and laid her left hand on his left shoulder again, he didn't shrug her off. Neither did he flinch at her right hand, nor when she leaned her brow against the back of his skull. The tips of his ears twitched, but that was all.

"Fifteen years old and debating the needs of the many against the needs of the few," she said with humourless chuckle. "And not even in a Star Trek conversation. Man, we are so fucked up."

Beast Boy just went about splinting her finger and taping up her ribs.

"Fall back!" Robin yelled. His voice was hoarse, and he wore a necklace of bruises courtesy of a Misshapen Starfire had obligingly turned into a plate of month-old Jell-O.

Terra sent up a flurry of sharp pebbles, trying to knock a creature with thick, leathery wings out of the air. Damn it, they could fly now? She had no time to reply to the order, but Cyborg voiced her thoughts.

"Not everyone's through yet - "

"We're getting pulverized!" Robin shouted back. "There's too many to handle this way. Fall back!" His right arm hung slack and bloody, and Terra noticed for the first time that he was ambidextrous. Either that, or he'd done extensive left hand training with that staff. Neither idea surprised her.

Cyborg had an unconscious Beast Boy slung over one shoulder, so he knew better than anyone that they had t back off. Raven was jabbing fists and flashes of dark energy at the horde of Misshapens, but for every one she took down there were at least two to take its place. Terra had never seen so many fangs and claws and feral eyes at once. The floor was slick with drool and blood of all colours.

The flying creature shrieked, one of its wings ragged from Terra's missiles. It plummeted into the writhing horde, where it screamed loud and long as it was torn apart. Misshapens had no compunction about eating their injured.

Where did they all comefrom? Terra thought. No way had there been this many in Jump before. The Titans had dedicated endless hours to finding and systematically destroying Misshapen nests and hunting packs. There was a possibility they'd migrated here because of the relatively easy – or at least stationary – prey, but surely they would have noticed this many getting in? Surely they would have had some inkling of the sheer number …

Then there was the possibility that these things used to be the people who were already in Jump. Robin and Cyborg had said on several different occasions that they'd found half-Misshapen, half-human carcasses after raids. Terra's stomach heaved at the idea, as well as the notion that it could have happened right under their noses. Only the complete lack of evidence for this many transformations kept her from fully believing it was true.

Four creatures bearing only the most tenuous resemblance to anything human, or even mammalian, knelt over a fat human corpse in the corner of the city hall lobby. Its midsection was split open like a Christmas turkey, and the four were fighting over what they pulled out, shoving viscera into mouths that hinged open like alligators'. They were sheltered behind an upturned desk – the only reason the other Misshapens weren't getting in on the action. Instead, the rest were all trying to get past the Titans, to the cluster of people stumbling onto the street.

The fat corpse twitched.

"No!" Terra called up a mound of earth and used it to propel herself at them. "No!"

"Terra!" Robin's tone was interchangeable as either concerned or angry.

Terra ignored him. The sight of the four Misshapens and their not-quite-dead-yet meal had struck something deep within her, and she was no more in control of her actions than when she breathed. She knew her eyes were luminous. Her rage was boundless now. These things would pay.

One of the creatures noticed her. It dropped a length of intestine to wave its hands and make frenzied clacking noises. The other three looked up, drawing away from the body into defensive postures. Long, transparent wings unfolded on their backs, beginning to flutter and buzz. By the time Terra reached them, the first was already in flight.

She launched herself at its spindly legs, using her weight to bring it down. Her left foot grazed the body. The head fell to the side, blank eyes staring at her through ginger hair that was visibly greasy beneath the sweat. Its beard was stained with blood. If it had been alive when it twitched, it wasn't now. Terra jerked her foot away in revulsion.

The Misshapen she'd grabbed scratched at her with too-long fingers. She called up a spike of dirt from beneath the marble floor, compacted it into an inflexible mass, and impaled the creature. Large fragments of marble flew everywhere, but she was much too concerned with the trilling screech to notice. It sounded like a small child with a grazed knee wailing for Mommy to come kiss it all better.

The dying Misshapen fell on top of her, pinning her. It bled green. Terra spent a few haphazard moments wriggling free and wiping blood from her eyes. In those moments, the other three moved in on her amidst a host of furious clacking. She punched and thrust as much soil at them as she could concentrate on. The mounds were warped and smaller than usual, testament to her divided attention. Even so, one Misshapen went down with a squeal, a wing torn off and mashed. Another evaded the attack and bit down hard on Terra's shoulder, shattering her collarbone. She screamed in pain.

And then there was a squelchy sort of noise, not unlike a side of beef falling off its hook. Terra felt the pressure on her shoulder give a little, realising seconds later that this was because the muscles in her attacker's neck had been severed. The point where the neck ended was scant inches from her face. The Misshapen's head glared balefully at her, forever fixed in a snarl. Then it, too, was gone, and she was being picked up and deposited on her feet.

Pain sharpening her senses, Terra saw the remaining Misshapens charging towards her. In the same heartbeat, she used the spilled earth to catapult all the broken marble at them. What the white chunks didn't rip through, the earth pelted and buried along with their shrieks.

Cyborg's sonic blaster pitched three hairy Misshapens against the far wall. A couple of Robin's explosives collapsed it on top of them.

Starfire soared past, a thrashing something in her grasp. She thrust it headfirst through the ceiling, where it shuddered twice and hung limp. She left it there, nothing like satisfaction on her face.

Terra caught the expression and impulsively yelled, "Way to go, Starfire!"

Starfire looked down, nodded, and flew down to pluck another particularly dangerous-looking Misshapen from the dwindling crowd. She didn't smile, didn't scowl, didn't so much as resemble the warlike people Beast Boy had described Tamaraneans as being. Instead, she looked impossibly sad, as if taking the lives of these horrendous beasts was as much a travesty as the humans lives they had taken.

The battle passed quickly after that. Terra couldn't remember a lot of it, but she did recall standing over a fallen Misshapen, breathing hard and ready to take down the next, only to realise that there were no others. The horde had been wiped out. The threat, for the time being, was over.

Adrenaline leeched from her system as she reconvened with the other Titans. Without saying so, all of them trailed outside into the fresh air and midday sunshine. Her clothes stank of gore. Her knees trembled. She braced one hand against a wall that was sticky, not looking to see what with.

Robin was waiting to rip her a new one. "I said fall back," he snapped, wincing as Starfire inspected his damaged arm. "I gave an order. Yet you deliberately deserted your position and defied that order. You could have got us all killed pulling a stunt like that."

"Got the job done, didn't I?" Terra replied sulkily, since she could give no good reason for her defiance that wouldn't come out like a toddler stamping its foot.

"That's not the point. I – ow!"

Starfire's hands were at right angles from her body. "Apologies, Robin. I believe I have located the source of your discomfort. A point in your upper musculature has been disengaged from the calcium-enriched substance you call bone."

Robin gritted his teeth. His mouth was a thin line. "Terra, you've been with us long enough to know that I don't give orders because I feel like it. I do it to keep us successful. And alive. You nearly got yourself killed back there - "

"Near misses don't count." Terra's head felt thick and woolly. She wondered whether it was all the blood she could smell, or just plain exhaustion. Probably the latter. The smell of blood was a common occurrence these days. She'd only slept three hours out of the last thirty-eight, and spent what felt like the rest fighting.

Robin looked like he was about to say more, but Cyborg came up. Beast Boy was rubbing his head and too woozy to be put down.

"Ugh – what'd I miss?"

"I believe it is better unsaid." Starfire patted his arm and eased him to his feet. "We were … victorious. It is enough."

Robin opened his mouth. Starfire shot him an eloquent look, and he closed it again. For all her brutality in battle, she never resorted to violence around the other Titans. She didn't need to. Sometimes it was incongruous how gentle and kind she was, given the world they lived in, and it was this mildness that made her such a formidable force. She exuded an aura of wounded nobility that made each of them want to abide by her wishes as far as they could – nobody more so than Robin.

Cyborg had gone back into the building. It was too full to be cleaned out, and the smell of carnage would surely have more Misshapens sniffing around. Terra didn't like to hope this battle had wiped them all out. Most likely the place would have to be burned, which meant fetching anything useful out of it first.

She rubbed at her forehead with the back of her hand. Those civilians they'd managed to evacuate were milling around, unsure what to do. Anything of value to them was inside. She glanced at them, wondering if Robin was going to take point and tell them where to go now.

A living shadow funnelled up beside her. Terra jerked away, tripping on a rock and shaking her already sore bones. A pair of unnaturally white eyes coalesced from the darkness, fixing her with a withering look.

"No more inside," Raven said when her mouth appeared. "None living, anyway," she added.

"Civilian casualties?" asked Robin.

"Fifteen. Maybe twenty. Maybe more." Raven shrugged. The gesture was so callous, so unfeeling, that it made Terra want to slap her.

Robin bowed his head. "Damn." He didn't curse as much as some, so the minor invective carried more weight than if Terra or Cyborg had said it.

Raven crooked her finger. "Let me see that arm." She moved so elegantly that it was hard to believe she didn't just float above the ground instead of walking on it. Maybe she did. That cloak answered for a lot.

Terra turned to Beast Boy, intending to ask if he was okay, but Raven's voice looped around her larynx first.

"You're welcome," she said, and then she was at Robin's side, telling him the tricep had been partially gouged out and it was a miracle he wasn't in full-out shock, let alone still standing. She didn't look at Terra, didn't give her any acknowledgement, and Terra spent a few seconds waiting for the attention that didn't come.

"Hey, Beast Boy."

He looked up. The tip of one ear was missing. "Hm?"

"I think I understand why we're looking at the small picture, now."

"Yo, Robin!" Cyborg bounded down the steps of City Hall and made a beeline for the group.

"Cyborg. Problems?" Robin's face was lit by the eerie glow of Raven's healing energies. She didn't bother looking up, but Starfire's brows pulled together.

"Friend Cyborg, have you discovered something of significance?"

"Y'all might say that."

"Cy, talk straight, man," said Beast Boy. "My head won't stand a game of Twenty Questions. What've you found?"

Cyborg sighed. His voice lowered to a volume only they could hear. "I … I found what's left of Mammoth."

To Be Continued...

And now we have some REVIEW REPLIES!

Hey, Lyranfan, how's it going? I was quite proud of that intro (I can't write intros, they wind up turning into prologues) so it was nice that you noticed it. And I was a Marvel Girl (no pun intended) before finding an old, ooold copy of Teen Titans: Cyborg ... No More? in a local thrift shop a couple of years ago. Now I'm equal parts into Marvel and DC. One has the streamlined, cohesiveuniverse, and one has the X-Men. Hee.

You have no idea how many tries it takes me to get your name right, Psycho-Neuroticaly Disturbed. My fingers are refusing to cooperate today. Terra's background here is an abbreviated/updated/mangled version of her backstory from the comics, less the craziness. She was the illegitimate daughter of a king, but they were never going to get that past the censors for the cartoon. And I did update Fortune's Fool! See? There it is, right there.

Thanks, Lunatrixy.

Want to know a secret, Jefepato? I don't have much clue where I'm going with this, either. Well, I have an ending, and several key events I need to happen, but joining the dots is going to be a learning experience for both of us.

You're welcome, UnknownSource. But less of the throwing yourself at my feet, 'kay? It's really not that good, andIjust cleaned these shoes.

It's funny you should say that, Water81, as I used to be a hella lot more longwinded than I am now. Obviously I still need to work on it, but ... your comment gurgled up an ironic laugh anyway. I do have a beta who checks these things for me, but I'll ask her specifically about my paragraphing next time.