5. The Observatory

The Titans had been separated for three nights. Terra and Speedy were holed up in the old Observatory with a dozen injured kids and teens. The others were somewhere across town. Neither group could leave what they were doing, and contact was brief. Cyborg's radios needed new batteries they didn't have, and Raven couldn't 'talk' for long periods. In truth, she communicated mainly by transmitting images directly into their brains – a piece of burnt landscape, the stench of fear, the feeling of nearby restlessness. As she'd told everyone at least thrice, she was an empath, not a full telepath.

The radios were more of a worry, since they reminded everyone about the problems Cyborg was having with his own recharger. Infiltration by a stray Misshapen had left his power pack damaged, so that whenever Cyborg used it to recharge himself, he leeched out power that wasn't replaced. To make matters worse, the damage was irreparable. He'd given it three weeks, tops, before it stopped working. He'd given himself another forty-eight hours after that before his vital systems went offline. And he'd said it all with a straight face.

That was why she and Speedy had been dispatched up here, to see if there was anything they'd missed on previous missions that might make a new power source, or patch up the existing one. Robin had argued. He did that a lot when they tried to make their own decisions, so that sometimes she wanted to sock him instead of be grateful that he was looking out for her welfare. However, as Terra had said when she finally convinced him to let them go, "We weren't looking for this before. We might have brushed over something because it wasn't what we were looking for then, but it's what we're looking for now."

As it turned out, they hadn't found anything resembling useful. Instead, what they'd found was a small group of kids no older than themselves, courting survival by hiding in plain sight. It had worked, too, until the Misshapens realised they were there and laid siege to the place.

It was late. Speedy was on watch outside. Terra was making the rounds, in and out of whatever bed-things were available. Nobody here was Titans material. They were all civilians, and viewed her with a sort of reverence as she passed. Part of her was pleased, but another part wanted to yell at them to stop it and do something to save themselves other than hide away and hope for the best. Passivity was yesterday's news. The only way for survival now was to be prepared to fight for it.

There was a girl no older than thirteen or fourteen sitting up and feeding her baby. It latched onto her nipple the way babies have always done, and the scene was so familiar and instinctive that it was almost possible to believe that there wasn't a campaign to wipe them all out going on in the rest of the city.

Speedy came in. He had someone leaning on his shoulder and thick greenish liquid splashed on his face. Terra didn't recognise the new girl. She was sallow, thin as a rake, and also missing one eye and part of her lower lip, but they were old wounds compared to the fresh cuts on her arms and legs. She stared the I-was-just-nearly-killed stare, as she was helped to sit down in an available space and Terra brought over a bowl of water to clean her up. They couldn't sacrifice clean drinking water when they didn't know how long they'd be here, but she made sure it wasn't too filthy.

Speedy waited for a moment, standing over them. "You okay?" he eventually asked in that 'Okay, I did something, now how do I deal with this next bit?' voice he sometimes got.

Terra thought he'd asked the girl, so she didn't answer until he poked her on the shoulder. "Hm? Oh, yeah, we're cool. Everyone's fed and bedded down for the night, with strict orders not to go outside." They'd lost one boy, Nathan, the previous evening when he thought himself above the rules. The others had been much easier to convince since they heard him screaming and Speedy came back inside shaking his head. He couldn't sacrifice arrows when there was no hope, and none had gone from his quiver.

Speedy frowned, indicating this wasn't quite what he'd been asking. Eventually he nodded and went back to keep watch for any other stragglers who'd wandered up the hill. It was like some sort of warped homing instinct, drawing the kids to each other.

Nobody was entirely sure what they'd do with the kids. They couldn't just abandon them, but on this hill they were sitting ducks. Some crackpot had obviously made this their base before, since there were stores of food, maps and a few candles and the like in anterooms. But with so many mouths to feed those supplies couldn't last forever…

The new girl watched Terra while she bathed her cuts. Her one eye was midnight blue and long-lashed, impossibly pretty given the state of the rest of her. Her hair was dirty with the same green blood as on Speedy, but might have been blonde underneath. Her skin had a yellowish tinge that indicated malnutrition. When Terra broke off to wring out the rag, she reached into her shirt and brought out a small locket with a ridiculously fine chain.

"It ain't much, but it's all I got," the girl said. "Is it enough? Can I stay here for awhile, please?"

Terra paused a moment, then pushed the locket back into her hands. "You can stay, sure. But we don't need that kind of payment."

"Why? You lookin' to get your jollies instead? 'Cause I'll go back outside if that's it."

"What - ? No! We're the Teen Titans," Terra asserted, as if that would explain everything.

The girl's eye narrowed. "No you ain't. I saw the Titans before. You ain't them."

"Yeah, well, we are. So deal with it. I'm Terra, he's Speedy." Terra gestured at the passage Speedy had gone through. "We're the upgraded squad. I'd show you the communicator, but I left it in my other pants." Her voice was not totally devoid of sarcasm.

The girl opened her mouth to say more, but a shriek cut across them both. Terra looked up to see a girl with dark curly hair and olive skin stumbling through the sleeping people. Ella, she thought her name was. Spoke with an accent. Been there when they first arrived.

The effect on the new girl was electric. She stood up, knocking over the bowl of precious water and not stopping to apologise. Terra's knees were soaked within a few seconds – the time it took for them to meet and wrap their arms around each other. The naked relief in their eyes was almost scary in its intensity.

"I thought you were dead", Ella gulped out between sobs, running her fingertips across the new girl's bruised skin and torn mouth. "I thought I would never be seeing you again."

"As if," the new girl replied. "You know the deal. I'll always come back."

And then they were kissing. Not sisterly peck-on-the-cheek kissing, or a French either-side-of-the-face air smooch, but genuine lip-locking, drinking each other down the way that took three pages to describe in romance books. Ella had tears on her cheeks. They didn't seem to care that they had most of the room's attention. The whole world was falling apart, and they were kissing like they'd never been happier.

Terra watched them for a second, and then silently went about cleaning up the spilt water to salvage what she could of it.

So many of them had become like children again. The teenagers who, in another world, would have spent Saturday afternoons combing CD racks and ducking in and out of the mall, had faces wide open with childishness. It wasn't that they made the effort, per se, but when hope disappears, when you find you've even given up hoping for the possibility of hope, you tend to fill the spaces left behind with dreams – little childlike stories to keep you going. Even the most hardened of people have trouble stopping themselves at that stage.

So it was with these kids. They weren't even really conscious of it, they just did it. Without fuss or prelude, they would break off from what they were doing, sit down, and talk about the desires welling up inside them.

Food was a favourite topic, of course. Often Terra would overhear a cluster of them describing a meal in painstaking detail. They ranged from five course dinners to McDonalds and KFC, but each telling was exhaustive, starting from the method of preparation, of waiting by the counter and smelling the hot grease, going into the taste of each bite, not stopping until everything was in the belly. The conversations would sometimes go on for hours, and had the kind of rigorous protocol that said they'd been going on long before she arrived on the scene. Nobody was to laugh at a teller, and nobody could let their hunger overcome them, because that led to tears, and nothing spoiled a food conversation faster than crying. Eric was seventeen, but he'd told Terra to her face that there was even some nutritional value in the food talks – provided you had a strong enough desire to believe the words being spoken, of course.

"Of course," Terra replied sincerely.

There were lots of wishes floating around, too; sentences that grew from those two simple words: 'I wish…' These also had protocol. The wishes had to be something that could never happen, something big and rare and unattainable. Apparently, it made the game more fun, gave it an extra zest and encouraged their imaginations to run wild. While they were sick with dreaming they weren't sick with fear.

"I wish the sun would never set," said one.

"I wish the ocean was filled with strawberry soda," said another.

"I wish mermaids would come and take us away to their undersea kingdom."

"I wish I could ride a golden cloud all over the world." That one was from Nancy, the one-eyed girl, curled close into Ella's side. They'd barely let go of each other since she arrived.

"I wish I could be flying," Ella said next in her soft burr.

"I wish flowers would grow in my pockets."

"I wish I could trip over a diamond as big as my head."

"I wish butterflies would come out of the taps."

"I wish I had a swimming pool of chocolate to swim in."

"I wish the city would be like the old days."

Terra had no taste for these games. She refused to participate, but she would to one side and listen. Listening to them made her feel … strange. Hopeful in some ways, hopeless in others. Nobody should have to go through what these kids had been through. They were mostly orphans, or else hadn't a clue where their parents were. Brian and Isabel were brother and sister, but none of the others were related. They'd just gravitated together, some from wandering the streets, some from defunct survivor compounds, a handful of children against a world of creatures the grown-ups didn't understand and couldn't handle.

"I wish the monsters would go back under the bed…"

The Observatory was burning. It scorched Terra's cheeks to stand here, so close to the conflagration. It dried out her eyes to look at it, but she couldn't stop. There were streak-marks on her face where the blaze had dried her tears.

Speedy had tied a tourniquet around his upper left thigh. One of the Misshapens had made a deep gouge there, and though he'd fought on while he could, now it was a case of sit down or fall down.

The smell of gore had been replaced by the scent of roasting meat.

"Cy was right," Terra said softly. "People are changing. More of them every day."

Eric and Brian had woken in the night. Except they hadn't been Eric and Brian anymore. Not fully. Neither had Jennifer, or Isabel, or Margaret. They'd torn through the sleeping kids like tissue paper. When Terra brought up a stonewall to shield them, Isabel had smashed through it with her new exoskeleton, while Brian took to the air on gossamer wings.

But Even exoskeletons could burn.

Speedy'd had no choice. There had been no choice. No other option. No choice. Nothing they could do. No alternative. Nu-uh. Nothing…

Terra remembered Ella's face; open with disbelief for the few precious seconds she should have been running. She'd refused to leave Nancy, even though Nancy's throat had been torn out. Ella had woken to find gouts of her girlfriend's blood pumping into her face where they lay in each other's arms. And in the tiny moments it took for her to realise what was going on and tighten her hold, for Speedy to nock an arrow and let it fly, the creature that had once been Margaret was already on her, ripping and tearing and rending like a thing possessed. Ella never even tried to escape.

Terra remembered having to scoop up one of the little ones and dash for the exit. She remembered a little forehead flopping bonelessly against her, as she realised too late that she'd grabbed an already-dead body. She remembered clutching it close anyway, as if by getting him out she could bring him back to life. She remembered getting outside, debris flying, flames starting to take hold. She remembered screaming at Speedy, "Where are the kids? Why didn't you bring any with you? Why!" and him holding her shoulders, shaking her, telling her they were all gone, it was too late, too late…

Six days and six nights they'd stayed here. Six days and six nights they'd kept this little cluster alive. And what did they have to show for it?

She lay the little one down on the gravel, rearranging his limbs into a more natural position. She didn't have to close his eyes, for which she was grateful. She didn't know if she could've brought herself to touch the half-missing face, with its tiny features and frightened rictus.

She sat there for a moment, until the cries of the dying Misshapens had faded, and the blood began to dry on her clothes and skin. Bits caked in her hair. She stood up, went to the fire – which, by virtue of its location and a few well-placed cryo-arrows, could not spread any further outwards – and summoned a hand of dirt to bring her something flammable. It brought back a table leg, which she used to torch the corpse. She stared at it until the browning blood on her started to flake away. Then, impulsively, she threw a blanket of soil over the Observatory to smother it, to suffocate the fire, to hide the bodies.

It was a poor kind of burial.

Terra sat down next to Speedy and allowed him to lean on her while she yanked loose the rock around them and geokinetically flew it back to the caves. His breathing was quick and shallow. He'd lost a lot of blood. The fact was not lost on her.

Starfire met them, having heard of their spiking distress from Raven. They'd been back two days already. She was all atwitter with anxiety, checking them over for injuries and spiriting Speedy off the moment he told her his wound was 'no biggie'.

Terra's cheeks remained resolutely dry as she found Robin and made her report. She talked in short sentences, answered any questions he had, and waited for him to excuse her. When he did, she walked to her personal area, pulled a piece of wood across the entrance, sat down, took several deep breaths, and hurled her notebook at the wall with such force that the cover tore loose.

She lay and cried dry sobs until the shuffle of footsteps arrived and shifted aside the wood.

"Terra?" said Beast Boy.

Terra said nothing. She didn't even turn to face him, not even when he came over and laid next to her, spooning her body with his own and reaching around to lay a hand over hers. He didn't bother with meaningless palliatives, but it was a comfort to have him there. Nothing brought a dose of existentialist angst back to earth like the solidity of a warm body nearby.

It took over fifteen minutes, but eventually Terra returned the squeeze of his hand.

To be Continued ...

Once again, apologies for things being short. Maybe I should just make that a blanket statement whenever one of these things turns out on the little side. And just say 'flagabah' here as some sort of codeword…

Review Replies!

Lol, I understand what you mean, Mature Immaturity.

I wrote Speedy's entrance before I'd seen either part of Titans East, Raven's Girlfriend, but I liked him anyway, so I was kind of playing fast and loose with his character. His role changes slightly in the next chapter, so watch this space.

Maybe this chapter was more to your liking, celestial cimmerian catalyst? I admit, in hindsight I wasn't too happy with the last chapter either, but … well, formatting got away from me. You have to understand that when I was writing these segments, they were all supposed to run on one from the other in a single narrative. Speedy's intro was originally supposed to be followed by the stuff at the Observatory and the stuff that's now going to happen in Chapter Six. Hopefully, when you see it, you'll forgive me for all the explanations.

Um … thank you, Forlorn Melody? Yup. Can't get enough of those finger lickin' metaphors.

You remember I told you I didn't know either, Jefepato? Well, I still don't, but I hope you like it, too.