Twisted Hearts: Triangular

by DBAinsw

RobStarRae: A romantic commedy melodrama of epic proportions, with a boat of angst to boot. Who gets Robin when he loves them both and dosn't want to hurt either? By the end, you won't care... in a good way.

4. Man of her Dreams

This story has some mature content, but it's meant to be entertaining rather than offensive (I swear its simultaneously funny and mildly disturbing (in the good way)), and I'm not a lemon writer, so I don't be scared off, or you'll miss a great fic. On the other hand, if this all just bothers you too much, feel free to skip over it and wait for next chapter. I aim to entertain, and sex, or even the thought of sex, is just really entertaining to me. Oh well.

DISCLAIMER:

This story contains references to physical intimacy, sexual desire, and sexual arousal. Even though I don't particularly think its something the average 13 plus year old person wouldn't be able to handle, I'm obligated to rate this chapter M for mature. If you think for even one moment that the idea of single teenagers expressing sexual thoughts or desires for one another might cause you some kind of offence, then shove off, and don't bother telling me about how disgusting you find me. That said, this isn't exactly graphic stuff, so really, I don't know who would complain. Just covering my ass here people.

This is definitely 'Blue' Romance—you have been warned, and warned again. At the same time, no one gets past intimate groping, and the average American youth has done more than that to his or herself by 13, so once again, I never really understood the whole rating system. Also worth warning, there is an extended scene that a stickler might label 'lesbianism' (or 'yuri' to use the popular Japanese term), but I don't really consider it thus… and there's really a few rather good one-liners about it… but I digress, read and see for yourself. On a final note, though it is overshadowed by the sexuality, there is some rather graphic violence too, just so I don't leave anything out you see.

Chapter Four: Man of her Dreams

It's a funny thing, when a person enters stasis freeze. Despite its misleading name, it is not a process that cools down the body at all. Rather, it uses special magnetic and electrostatic energy fields to cause all metabolic processes to slow down so much that seconds of life for the suspended person become weeks in the real world, removing the need for catheters and bedpans and such other nasty things during time-sensitive medical processes like waiting for organ transplants or, as in this case, complex medicinal synthesis. What this little tidbit boils down to is that, while the body can be nearly paused by these fields, the mind, the nervous processes, will tend to be only barely restrained. In other words, the sleepers dream.

The dreams, the incredible, fanciful, spectacularly realistic dreams, will inevitably dance through the semi-conscious minds of persons whose every other biological activity is in nearly a dead pause. Where the frightening part begins, where people have at times found ample room for terror, is immediately at the fact that, there is no way to wake up from these dreams on one's own. One can never escape them until one is released from stasis freeze by somebody on the outside. Tales abound of those who once entered stasis, then were simply left there too long, left to the not-at-all tender mercies of their own unbridled subconscious expressions.

Under such ministrations, people become… different. Something about such unrestrained meandering through the wasteland of the mind's random emissions and abstract descriptions of fears or desires one might not even have consciously known—tends to work an almost mystical alteration on those subjects experiencing them.

Of course, it's hardly desirable for a standardized medical technique to have such drastic side-effects, and so an extra sedative is added to the stasis process to suppress consciousness and create a dreamless slumber, so that the experience from insertion to awakening becomes akin to the blink of an eye. Unfortunately for two young women, the automatic doctors overseeing their recovery automatically refused to drug them properly, detecting the much more sinister chemicals already affecting their minds and defaulting to standard procedure under such circumstances—standby.

But who knows… maybe the delusions of a drugged sleep won't be as bad as one's own unaltered dreams. Perhaps there will be some leniency finally granted to two women who have suffered far more than enough. Or maybe it will all become something far, far worse. My money is on the latter.

—Starfire—

Starfire was in space.

Or at least, it sure seemed like space. If it was space, she'd have had to admit that it was a lot darker and more abandoned than the last time she'd been there, not a single planet, star, nebula, or galaxy to be seen in any direction. In fact, there was nothing all, not even the most infinitesimal speck of light, nothing but an endless void.

Moreover… she felt… strange. Considering how much more the feeling bothered her than the unnatural emptiness of this place, one might understand just how strange. It wasn't a sensation she was at all familiar with, and though it was currently little more than a muted heat throughout her entire body, she had the strangest idea that it had been, and could yet become, a great deal more intense. Her head was muddled by it, and her pulse seemed hard in her body, tangible in every extremity as a forceful pounding rather than the constant, unnoticeable patter one might expect it to be. Then again, all this was quite readily swept from her mind at the first sound of a single, delicate 'click.'

She turned toward the sound and right away her entire world paradigm had to be rearranged. It was, in fact, the sound of a light flipping on, and as she became able to see something other than black void, her eyes automatically corrected perspective, and there was now quite suddenly a definite form to this place, there was a ground under her feet and a roof over her head, though she could see neither. All of her new input about this strange world, from the height of the ceiling to the existence of the floor, was coming from the light, which turned out to be the glare of a lamp shining down onto a solitary chair and its quiet occupant. Even from behind, she recognized him instantly.

"Robin!" she shouted happily, overjoyed to see something familiar in this odd place of infinite darkness. Though she could not perceive a ground beneath her feet, she ran toward the edge of the light quite without concern, and it turned out that her feet didn't complain in the slightest about there being nothing under them as far as moving her forward was involved. In a moment she was by his side, repeating her call as he seemed to have missed her first one.

"Robin!" she exclaimed anew, her cheer at seeing such a familiar and beloved figure tempered by the increasingly terrifying infinity that surrounded her and her apparently oblivious friend.

"Shh, the movie's starting," his familiar voice spoke faintly, almost dreamily, and he did not turn to face her, instead tossing an annoyed and dismissive wave her way.

"Uhh…?" Starfire's eyes widened in plain confusion, first of all by his odd distance, second of all by his completely nonsensical statement. Could he not see that this place had nothing? Was there some way he could see more than the harsh lamp light glaring down on him and his chair, the circle of which she now stood on the edge of, almost clinging to the minute island of reality in this unsettling, unending void? "Oh… very well Robin…" Starfire found herself whispering, her trusting nature overcoming anything else as she placed her entire faith in Robin as the only sensible thing in this utterly weird place, "The watching of filmed entertainment sounds… nice…"

"Great, great," he muttered in a harried whisper, continuing to effectively ignore Starfire and managing to shock her even further, "Pull up a chair."

"A—a chair?" she asked absently as her face molded into a mask of numb confusion. More and more her fear was being overcome by bewilderment, Robin's obvious lack of concern about their surroundings making her wonder if this phenomenon of darkness was afflicting her perceptions uniquely. For example, this chair Robin was offering… she couldn't see it. She turned incredibly wide eyes to look around the blackened space for a moment, and Robin answered her question.

"Oh—right, sorry, no more chairs," and he sounded sort of embarrassed, paying her some mind at last, "here, please, just sit next to me."

"…Next to you?" Starfire was beginning to feel like an echo, but she honestly couldn't imagine how she could sit next to a guy in a spindly wood-frame chair. "How shall I fit next to yo—" she started to express this rather distressed concern as she turned back to face him again, no longer able to stand gazing into the inky blackness around them, only for her question to die on her lips.

The chair had transformed.

Rather than the bare-bones amalgamation of kindling Robin had been sitting in when the light came on, there was now a deliciously intimate love-seat, with Robin himself sunk deep into the right side of its plush cushioning. It looked to be about the most comfortable piece of furniture Starfire had ever seen, and her body circled around to the front, even as her mind fizzled out in disgust of ever understanding what was going on here. Was she just tired? Was she already dreaming? Was someone playing a prank on her?

Robin, at least, continued to stare directly forward, and as his nonchalance endured, Starfire continued to doubt her own fears. Instead, she paused for a moment, as though wondering if this new seat would transform if she took her eyes off of it as the last one had, then went ahead and sat down next to Robin. As soon as she sunk into the cushion, the very moment she leaned back into the delightfully giving surface, her every concern evaporated. It was the most comfortable chair she'd ever been in, and she was now pressed slightly against Robin—a none-too objectionable situation that took the last of her fears and flung them flatly out the window.

"Ooohhh, Robin—this chair—" she began to chat compulsively in a jangle of nerves and mind-clouding heat as the once growing terror quietly died and she settled into the glorious embrace of the small couch, her leg brushing innocently against Robin's and eliciting a flaring tingle of that strange sensation. Before she could get anything else out, however, Robin once more shushed her, pointing forward distractedly as a new source of light flickered brilliantly into life with an unmistakable clacking noise.

Starfire did not have a terribly comprehensive knowledge of human history, but because of a few old silent comedies Beast Boy and Cyborg had taken her to, she was still able to recognize that sound, especially when it coincided with the appearance of a gigantic rectangle of flickering light perpendicular to the nonexistent floor in front of them. It was a movie, projecting from nowhere to land on nothing, and for some reason, as it started, Starfire could truly no longer bring herself to worry about any of these mysteries, where she was, or how she'd gotten here. After all, everything she needed was sitting right next to her, close enough to touch.

"Starfire…" Robin began slowly, just as the movie was warming up, violating his own precept against noise for no apparent reason at all, "do you ever think about… kissing?"

The young woman's face instantly flushed through eight shades of magenta, and she turned her head slowly to the side to look at Robin with bulging eyes. If the surreal nature of this whole experience hadn't already numbed her to shock, and had the chair not been so entrancingly comfortable, she probably would have leapt away from Robin the moment he uttered that fantastically unexpected question. Instead, she sat there, wide green eyes staring unblinkingly at the side of Robin's head as the man watched the movie start, completely oblivious to her discomfort.

"W-why do y-you ask this?" She managed to squeak out eventually, her voice tiny as she dragged her eyes away from Robin and focused them directly forward, her entire body tense just as his was utterly relaxed.

"Oh, no reason," Robin said lazily, apparently paying her only half a mind of attention, "it's just that this is a pretty steamy movie, and the subject came to mind. Watch and see."

That suggestion made, Starfire forced her eyes to begin taking in the view that they'd been staring at uncomprehendingly as her mind skipped over volumes of embarrassment. The scene presented was a field of wildflowers with a background of majestic blue mountains, the dozens of brilliant colors projected to such perfection that the rectangle of light resembled more of a window to another reality than an old-fashioned film, and in moments Starfire's mind was absorbed by the vision, her embarrassment choked away as her attention was funneled totally into the movie.

She was flying over a field, circling round and round a specific spot, a place where a lonely blossoming apple tree sprouted up like a gigantic bouquet out of the brilliantly multi-colored mountainside. The warm springtime sun was beating down gently onto the landscape, and the shadow cast by this tree was the only refuge, as well as the final destination of the camera, which came to a rest on the scene of a picnic held in said shadow. The stars of this movie were immediately recognizable, for one was Robin, and the other was Starfire herself.

With a growing sense of deja-vu, Starfire watched the two of them enjoying the gorgeous day, a feast of Terran and Tameranean delicacies spread out between them on a fluffy plaid blanket under the shade. As she continued to observe their merriment where they sat on either side of the blanket, Starfire could not shake the sense of familiarity, until at last, she recognized the scene, a peal of panic flashing through her at the same instant. She'd seen this before… she knew what was about to happen.

Unable to avert her eyes, Starfire watched in numb, mute, horror as the version of her in the image plucked up a handful of wildflowers and flung them playfully at the image of Robin. He laughed, batting the gently floating projectiles away with ease, and in return, he leapt agilely over their picnic and wrapped her in a delicate embrace, his momentum rolling the both of them out into the sunlight and flowers to the sound of their combined joyful laughter. They rolled to a stop in a patch of tall grass and fantastically fragrant blossoms, Robin just above her, holding himself up on his elbows and knees as his masked eyes gazed down endlessly deep into her own green irises. There was a pause that seemed to stretch out, protracting into a magnificent tension, as though the air around the couple had become electrically charged, a humming current of excitement possessing the both of them. Finally, in a deliciously slow motion, Robin lowered his head down towards hers, her eyes fluttered shut, and they kissed.

"Ohhhh…." Starfire on the couch gasped out weakly, finally wrenching her eyes away from the movie as an unbelievably intense pair of sensations began to dance through her.

On the one side was that heat, that frightening heat that she had finally come to recognize at the same moment that she'd recognized where this movie came from. A dream, a decadent little fantasy she'd been having every so often, was what Robin next to her had projected onto the void, and this sensation of heat pressing roughshod through her body was the same sensation she woke with every morning after tasting that dream's delightful touch.

The apposing sensation was also a heat, and it was the competition of these two burning flames that brought such a pathetic moan to her lips as she averted her eyes from what Robin was showing her. This second heat was the ache of embarrassment, a wash of stinging and prickling fire over her body that sprung up as she realized what Robin now knew. Her most secret fantasy had just been paraded before his eyes, and from comments he'd made, it hadn't been the first time.

The idea of this alone, without her ever even attempting to see his reaction, was enough to make her want to shrivel up and die, the piercing agony of embarrassment giving her no greater desire than to shrink down to a tiny spec and vanish from existence. Anything at all would be better than seeing him shocked, seeing him disgusted, or perhaps worst of all, watching him laugh in contempt at her dream.

It was such a forceful and self-reinforcing sensation that it soon overcame its competing heat, burning her so badly that she found herself curling up into a ball on the seat, wrapping her arms around her legs as she brought them up to her chest and leaned as far away from Robin as possible. She would very much have liked to run away, to loose herself in the inexplicable void that surrounded their island of existence, but she couldn't bring herself to part form the chair's enclosing plush embrace.

"I told you it was some pretty hot stuff," Robin said pleasantly enough, and at the sound Starfire jumped as though pricked. She couldn't bring herself to look at him, such was the heat of the radiant blush that possessed her face, but that didn't seem to slow him down in the slightest. "So… I've just got to ask again… do you ever think about… kissing?"

If anything could have increased her horror, it was this question repeated, and she figured her heart would just about have to pop out of her chest to get beating any faster or harder than it was at this point. She was now officially wound so tightly that she was ready to either explode, or just pull herself apart in a symphony of flailing bits as everything in her yanked on everything else. It was terrible, and it all came to a stupendous head when he made his next move.

When the gloved hand landed on her far shoulder, when Robin's arm wrapped itself around her back, Starfire's whole body flinched once, her heart skipped a beat, and her mind blanked out as utterly as it had ever emptied. There was nothing but the sound of her exhaling slowly, the air wheezing gently out of her lungs as Robin's warm arm rubbed coolly against her fantastically hot skin, his slow embrace pulling her unresisting fetal ball over until she rested fully against his chest, her maroon-blushing face resting on his shoulder just under the curve of his neck. In a flash, there was such a chaotic battle of drives and desires that Starfire was nearly torn in two.

The instant her body pressed against his, the embarrassment, so far ruling the day, was bitch-slapped into submission by that other heat, dropping off the map as that incredible, gooey warmth possessed her mind and body. However, her compulsion toward modesty would not die so easily, and she found herself split between equally intense impulses to either melt like butter on a hotplate, wrap herself around Robin, and just enjoy the glorious, messy heat roiling through her body, or to throw herself off of him, wind up, and punt him into the stratosphere with a bone-snapping left hook for the unbelievable liberties he'd just taken by so brashly drawing her into his embrace. It was a long instant of mind-splitting indecision before she had a revelation, and recognized this embrace for what it was: a tacit acceptance of the fantasy he'd somehow found out about. The joy that shot through her at this thought reinforced the former choice without reservation, leading it to a resounding victory, and she let herself relax onto the fantastic slice of man next to her, her heart overflowing with happiness.

She unfolded slowly, like a blooming flower, her body spreading out in every direction as she surrendered to a heat of delight rather than shame, her expression softening quickly to match as she caved in around Robin's form. Her legs drooped down again until they settled on the couch, one long limb pressing enticingly into his slightly shorter leg. Her arms, which had been clenched around her shins, relaxed back to her sides, her left hand settling into her lap across her body until her fingers touched the inside of her right elbow, her right hand coming to rest on his thigh just above his knee, the contact with the armor of his leggings almost electric. The blush spread steadily down her face and over her chest, coming to her arms and belly, and then eventually moving down her thighs, tracing the progress of the heat's true intensity as it melted out of her belly and face to coat her body. Finally, she let her stiff neck loosen as her shape molded itself into his, the shift allowing her long hair to cascade down his chest in flowing waves. Her eyes phased out to a dreamy blankness as sensation rather than thought overcame her mind, and this was the state she was in when he began to talk again.

"Isn't that nice?" he asked, in a tone that assured her she need not answer. The heat was ruling her mind so much just then, she probably couldn't have answered anyway, and so it was all good as Robin used his free right hand to reach over the side of the couch and fiddle with something. In a moment, they were leaning back, back, back as the love-seat reclined, becoming ever more comfortable and allowing Starfire to get that much closer to Robin.

At this point then they were both staring into the vast emptiness of the relative 'up,' and it was here that the lamp, glaring down so mercilessly all along, faded out into a softly glowing wafer and edged over until it was on Starfire's side of the chair. The light came out from behind her and landed slightly on both of them, but more importantly it got out of their eyes, removing the illusion of a ceiling above them, and Robin took the opportunity to point his right hand up into the sky, even as he pulled her ever closer with his left, pressing his warm body against her steaming-hot skin. At his gesture, the emptiness began to swirl with very faint colors, almost like the hints of colors that will twist before tightly closed eyes. Indeed, the darkness was quite as complete as being blindfolded, and the intimacy that ensued only caused Starfire to heat up that much more. His hand remained in place, serving as a focal point for her eyes as he began to talk.

"Starfire… have you ever wondered what 'sleeping together' refers to—I mean, when a man and a woman do it?" Robin asked, not even the slightest hint of anything but complete openness in his tone. Starfire was shocked by the question, very slightly shocked, as it were, through the veil of fluffy goodness that was padding her brain just then, because it was indeed something she'd wondered about more than a little.

Once, she had viewed a movie 'bearing the seal of 'R'' as she'd put it, and this phrase had been referenced several times in a manner suggesting that it meant something other than what it said, just like so many other strange English expressions, along with vague connections to the term 'sex,' which her translation dictionary related somewhat indistinctly to the mysterious process of having children. Thus, she had asked the very same question Robin had just uttered to no less than Raven, Beast Boy, and Cyborg in turn, and their reactions had been identical: they each turned some odd shade of purple, muttered a confused dismissal, and had gotten the hell away. The reaction had impressed upon her that this was an intensely embarrassing and personal subject, which is where her own mild shock had come from. It was a subject of confusion for her, just as Robin had suspected, and as her shock passed, she managed to find room to squeeze a few cogent words through the magnificent percolating heat cooking her brain and body.

"Well… yes… I have wondered about that…" she said dreamily, still staring up at Robin's hand and reveling in the sensation of being so close to him on this godly chair, "I gathered… that it had… something to do… with… childbearing…" This last word she could not say without blushing again, but considering that her entire body was basically one continual blush now, and considering the way the new rush of blood sent a wave of tingling pleasure through every inch of her, she didn't really mind. The idea of how naughty this all was had settled pleasantly into the fluff of her brain some time ago. "Could you…" and now her voice caught in her throat, embarrassment trying to rally against the overwhelming press of pleasure clouding her mind, "could you tell me… more?"

"I'm afraid I only know as much as you do," he said flatly, and there was an odd tone to it, as though it meant more than what was immediately apparent. She couldn't help but frown in disappointment at this news, having hoped to finally gain some insight into the many odd things she'd witnessed in that fateful movie.

At her sad sound, Robin looked over at her, his eyes landing on her face and body for the first time since she'd met him in this odd place. As he looked at her, his right hand came down from above them to land on the exposed flesh just below the hem of her skirt. She gasped, the feel of his glove on her bare thigh like the touch of an ice cube against her toasty-warm flesh. In the next moment, the shock of cold was replaced by an inexplicably building heat that spread out from the almost nonexistent caress so quickly that she was forced to catch her breath, her mind overloading at how unbelievably indescribable this new feeling was. As her breathing sped uncontrollably, her chest giving great heaves as she struggled for air, Robin's touch began to migrate.

Before she really knew what was going on, the single-finger touch had climbed the outside curve of her hip, reaching her exposed midriff and the deeply flushed skin there. In a few exceedingly slow motions, he stirred her intestines into a tingling inferno of sensation by drawing small circles across her belly, his finger just barely touching her, and yet still causing a reaction unlike anything she'd ever known. She felt like a fever-heat was flashing through every inch of her body, breathing was becoming a distinct effort, and the butterflies in her stomach had been overcome and consumed by an entire flock of bats flitting around within her.

Finally, his hand culminated its upward journey by slowing almost to a stop, crawling its way the last few inches off of her bare stomach and onto the material of her top. Her pounding heart and bellowing lungs each came to a jarring halt as she felt his next touch, a strong palm coming to rest on her left breast, squeezing once, and the feeling—the feeling—well…

"EEEEEE!" she shrieked as the sensation blasted through her mind, and before she realized what she'd done, her right hand had come away from Robin's leg to shield her chest reflexively as her left hand had clamped down on the wrist of his offending digits full-strength and jerked it away, holding it once more in the air.

"H'rek na yelbar c'hock?" (What do you think you're doing?) she screamed in reflexive Tamaranean, her mind still blown by what had just happened. She may not have known much about intimacy, but she knew that was not an appropriate place to touch without—without—err… permission.

"I was doing exactly what you wanted," Robin said calmly, not the least bit put off by her scream of protest. Her mind boggled at the unbelievable implications of that statement, and in a snap-reaction mixture of anger and betrayal, her grip tightened quite by accident, going to her absolute maximum, a power known to crumble concrete and put finger indentations in steel bars. Robin didn't even flinch.

"What—what is going on?" Starfire begged desperately, the haze of overpowering heat still polluting her brain making it impossible to think clearly as she witnessed Robin's impossible imperviousness to her grip, not to mention the offensively nonchalant way he fondled her when they'd yet to even speak of 'dating' in any serious way. As though in response, the hand in her grip slid through her fingers in a way that was not physically explicable, almost flowing like water through her palm, then advancing to cup her face in a delicate caress that she was too stunned to bat away.

"Don't be afraid Star," Robin said, his voice overflowing with a compassion that struck straight to her abused heart, "I only know as much as you do… I know only what you know… I know exactly what you want… even better than you do."

With this last comment, the chair flattened out of its own accord, and was suddenly a huge bed, Starfire's eyes darting around to take in the new boundaries, then focusing on Robin right above her where he'd somehow managed to slide out from being partially under her. In a flash of rising panic, she tried to shove him away with all of her considerable strength, only to have it impact uselessly against him. At her continuing struggles, he spoke again.

"There's nothing to be afraid of…" he began ever so gently, a face overflowing with obvious affection gazing down at her with nothing but open love, all the more terrifying for its total innocence, "I want only to give you what you so deeply desire."

"NO!" She screamed, almost sobbing the word, "This is not—not how—it isn't real! It can't be real!" she continued to sob the words out, ineffectually banging her fists up against him with blows that would pulverize solid stone. Her screams had even less effect, and in fact, they died out quite suddenly as both his hands moved down to lie gently on her stomach once more.

Starfire had to work for air now, overcome quite suddenly at this doubly-wonderful caress as his palms kneaded ever so gently at her bare stomach, then worked their way slowly upwards. In a moment, they were laying on her breasts, squeezing in a way that drove anything and everything else from her mind quite totally. In this moment of uninterrupted sensation, this stretching eternity of mind-blowing feeling, a… a… something… deep within her stomach… a something that had been floating like an over-puffed marshmallow in her guts since the moment she'd given into the sensation of Robin's embrace, finally melted at the assault of the electric sensations Robin so carefully elicited from her chest, and the moist, runny remains swirling around within her brought every sensation to an entirely new level.

As tears began to run freely down her cheeks, Robin's eternally loving gaze focused perfectly into her eyes, her world coming apart at the seems, this nightmare played itself to some conclusion Starfire couldn't even imagine. Indeed, it might have been interesting to see how far the dream could carry itself on her limited knowledge and primal desires, and one might have even had the opportunity, if everything hadn't picked right about that moment to dissolve completely. Like water draining from a bathtub, all sensation left Starfire's body, and the scene faded out all at once with her consciousness.

---Reality---

A robotic arm bearing a small hypodermic needled withdrew from the stasis field containing Starfire, its payload delivered directly to her throat to ensure near-instantaneous introduction to what was left of her metabolism. As it locked back into regular position, a nearby computer terminal automatically recorded its actions on a readout screen. It said—

:ALERT 1335: SOLUTION APPLIED. AT EXACTLY 3:45 PST, SUBJECT STARFIRE WAS INJECTED WITH MINIMAL DOSEAGE OF TYPE 4 SEDATIVE TO HALT EXTREME ALPHA-WAVE ACTIVITY AND PITUITARY OVERSTIMULATION. RETURNING TO STANDBY.

After this, for a few minutes, everything was once again as calm and dead-quiet as Robin had left it. Perhaps if the Boy Wonder had had any concept of how badly the stasis fields would malfunction, he would never have left these two women at their mercy, but there was no real use for such speculation at this late date. Both women were locked in for the duration, the robotic doctors waiting for emergency brainwave activity before applying sedatives that both subjects should be under at all times. As I was saying, however, for a few minutes, everything was back to calm and quiet—but only for a few.

:ALERT 1336: DIAGNOSING—read the computer readout suddenly, as a beeping noise began to emanate menacingly from the monitoring devices next to Raven's bed. CONDITION CONFIRMED AS UNUSAL BRAINWAVE ACTIVITY. CURRENLTY NON-CRITCAL. RETURNING TO STANDBY. CONTINUING TO MONITOR.

What the computer could monitor, however, was far short from what any actual doctor would have been able to see with his or her eyes. Raven's body was currently burning with a heatless black flame that consumed every inch of her flesh, licking up out of her clothing as well so that she was utterly enveloped. The flames were wraith, and would not touch or heat anything they flickered at, but they were a hint to the intense occurrences within. Let us watch.

---Raven---

Raven peeled herself slowly off the ground and looked around. And then she continued to look. And then… well… she looked some more. It was that weird.

The sky above was a infinite swirl of distinct colors, a luscious scarlet and a compassionate violet competing endlessly in a roiling dance that made the eyes water to look at. Dark grey clouds with odd shapes floated languidly through that excited sky, and seven crescent moons stared down, all lined up in a row, slightly eclipsing one another. She looked to the horizon and saw that the boundaries of this place were set by towering, thorny rose bushes, their enormous blossoms having just reached peak bloom, so that their perfect shapes opened invitingly in picture-perfect spirals.

A glance to her right brought into view an enormous patch of orchids, all surrounding a bee hive swarming with busy pollen-gathering insects, the fat, fuzzy workers flying from flower to flower in endless succession, crawling in to suck out the sweet nectar hidden within the folding petals, then moving on again. The hive itself was titanic, and it literally poured out a gentle flow of excess honey down one side as bees made their way in and out.

A glance to her left then and she saw several large birds, many with rather extravagant plumage. Peacocks, in fact, quite a few of them, were languishing in a garden of completely undamaged statues done in the classical style, the human form celebrated in marble a dozen times over as the gaudy birds strutted and preened among them. She frowned slightly when she noticed they were almost exclusively the frilly-tailed males, considering that peacocks mated in female-heavy harems.

Turning around without getting off her knees, she looked behind, and this time she knew something was off. There was—get this—a model train set where an electric bullet train made its way around a track that seemed to consist exclusively of tunnels. The train chugged continually in and out of the tunnels as it made its way over the track, riding in and riding out, its shiny, cylindrical surface disappearing and reappearing in steady succession as it clicked along. Finally unable to take it anymore, Raven frowned deeply.

"Oh yeah… this is reeeeal subtle. Where the hell am I?" she asked the environment, a bitter sting to her tone.

"I thought you'd be able to recognize a piece of your own mind," said a strikingly familiar voice in immediate response, and Raven glanced around again, searching for its source.

"Well duh," she sniped caustically, "the question is where in my mind? I've never… I've never seen this part before."

"I'd have to say… that's probably because this part just formed quite spontaneously a few minutes before the sedative wore off," the voice said, gaining a more distinct quality as it went. "It just formed… because I just formed," and this time the voice came from directly behind Raven, who twirled around in a rush of cloak to spot an instantly recognizable female figure.

"No—but you're—!" Raven choked out in surprise, only for the woman standing across from her to cut her off.

"You!" Raven's doppelganger, the source of the familiar voice—her voice—finished Raven's accusation for her, taking the opportunity to walk closer to her stunned mirror-image. "Yes, I am—or at least—we are. I'm just another little piece of your mind… a simple aspected projection of your emotional fragmentation. It's nice to finally meet you—err—me."

"But—but—I didn't create you!" Raven protested, knowing quite well that she'd never given an aspect independent manifestation that had such a gawdy, crimson-and-violet swirled cloak, exactly matching the shade of the sky. For that matter, she'd never created this lewdly suggestive excuse for a mental realm, and well, these things just didn't make themselves.

"Ah con traire, ma'petite" her double stated, wiggling her index finger in admonishment as she got ever closer to Raven, who was too confused by all this to worry about the proximity. "If you recall, you haven't really been in control of yourself for quite a few hours now. In fact, you've been taking orders from outside… if I'm not mistaken."

"What's that got to do with anything!" Raven snapped, her mind racing to find some explanation for how this disgusting place and this strange, mysterious aspect had come to exist without her explicit orders. "I've been unconscious since Robin—since he—since he left… and no one exactly said 'Raven, create a mental realm containing as many lewd objects of sexual symbolism as you possibly can.'"

"Oh you poor baby…" and quite suddenly the aspect seemed to pity her, floating forward quickly to place her hands on Raven's shoulders in a forcefully compassionate gesture, "you really don't know, do you?"

"Know what?" Raven bit out, still too ticked to be bothered by the way she had just touched herself.

"Your empathy dear," the aspect said slowly, as she pulled herself closer to Raven, the two edging together like either side of a reflection, "it's been picking up on ambient emotional noise all by itself. For hours now, your whole mind has been resonating to the only source of emotions in the entire tower… the only one who's been anywhere near you since you two terrified Robin earlier. And well…" the aspect's eyes narrowed, and she gave Raven a look that made the woman's gut twist, "you know there's only one thing that's been on Starfire's mind."

Before Raven could possibly react, the aspect lunged forward, slipping her arms around Raven's back and jerking them together into a heated embrace. Raven gasped, everything finally clicking into place, just too late now as a black force gripped at her blue hooded cloak, unclasped it, and drew it gently off. The next moment, she was squirming determinedly to get away, but this aspect had unbelievable strength, and was able to hold her easily. As if to prove this control, the aspect morphed into shadow for an instant, twisted around her, and was suddenly pressing into Raven's back with her hands gripping at her stomach.

Raven's hands covered hers, pulling at them uselessly for a moment just before she remembered herself and tried to teleport away. When nothing happened, her mind shifted through a haze of panic, and she tried to summon any power at all, reaching for the well of telekinetic force that had never before failed her. There was still nothing, no power, and as real, solid terror began to shoot in icy towers through her chest, she began to struggle almost manically. In a moment, she realized the drug was somehow still inhibiting her, even inside her own mind, though that did nothing to calm her down.

"Let me go!" she shrieked at her doppelganger, who showed no difficulty at all preventing her escape no matter how wildly she struggled. "I am your progenitor—I command you to release me!"

"Oh please," the aspect whispered calmly into her ear, and Raven was pierced by the sound, loosing much of her ability to struggle as a rush of tingling overcame her body, calming her spasmodic attempts to escape, "even you can only control your emotions so far. Tonight, happenstance has given me form, given me control, and so it's about time you and I had a little heart to heart, dearest."

That stated, her aspect drew Raven's increasingly limp, flushed body even further into the embrace, molding every inch of her form into the identical, cloak-less woman she held, pressing her chest into Raven's back and laying her chin on Raven's shoulder. When she had a really good grip, she began to float, and Raven was forced to lean back into her support as they lifted slightly off the ground. With her hands still gripping the aspect's, Raven was quite completely wrapped up, her own hands doubled up and touching gently but firmly to her stomach, and her own bust squished tightly into her back.

"I get it…" Raven found her voice again quite suddenly as a flash of realization lit her mind, even through the haze the aspect had bespelled her with, "you're… you're…"

"That I am," the aspect finished for her again, whispering into her ear, her hot breath increasing Raven's boneless slump, expanding her inexplicable inability to escape her tormenter with every syllable that washed warmly into her mind. "If you continue the pure-adjective naming system previously used for your emotional aspects… I'd most likely be called… Horny." She let that hang in the air for a moment as her hands began to rub Raven's stomach slowly while she pressed their bodies together, gradually bringing forth a heat and buzzing tingle to the flesh under her leotard, then went on, "Or perhaps… Lascivious would be better. But of course, Horny lacks dignity… and Lascivious is too long… so I think you can just call me…" and suddenly the aspect's hands moved strongly under Raven's, sliding quickly up her body to cup her breasts, "Lust" and the aspects tongue flicked out with the word to draw quickly and wetly along Raven's earlobe.

Raven wheezed for breath, her whole body jerking harshly against the sudden intense sensations assaulting her from two fronts. It seemed that the fact that the hands which now pressed just under the line of her bust through the elastic leotard were essentially her own was no more a deterrent to extreme, heart-piercing sensation than the similar fact that the tongue flicking so hot, moist, and nimble along the rim of her ear was similarly hers. In the end though, the shock of such a painfully spiking instant of pleasure brought back some of her strength, and she used it to quickly drag Lust's hands back down to her stomach and flinch sharply away from Lust's face on the side where the tongue had trespassed. Her heart pounding a mile a minute, Raven continued to struggle for air as Lust's delicate giggle tickled up at her.

"Hehehehe, I can't believe how much fun you are dearest," Lust spoke again, moving her head over to rest her chin on Raven's other shoulder, whispering into her other ear, "such a glorious bundle of repression… and yet… balanced by desires so strong… well… they created me didn't they?"

"What—what do you want?" Raven managed to moan, still coming down from Lust's molestations as the aspect's hands continued to massage her stomach.

"Oh come off of it darling," Lust admonished, "Don't play at being stupid, it doesn't suit you. You know what I am—that I am 'your' desire. I am nothing more than a manifestation of what your avarice beholds that has been made independent of your ego. Thus, the question is not, 'what do I want?' but rather, 'what do you want?'—or perhaps even, 'what do we want?"—for that is exactly what I represent."

"I don't want this," Raven managed to sound acid past the breathless wheezing that was all she could manage in the face of this attack. When she heard this new protest, Lust giggled again, and the sound percolated through Raven's furious and panic-ridden brain, bringing a new wave of calm that she was helpless to resist.

As Raven slumped back into Lust again, the other raised their right hands together (Raven's was still riding atop hers) up to accost her left breast anew, exacting a piteous whimper from the helpless mystic which in turn drew a delighted hum from her overpowering emotion. To say that the sensation was electric would have been beside the point, because her touch was like nothing Raven had ever felt. Far and beyond stimulating, it was as though Lust's fingers passed straight through her leotard and danced across her bare nerve endings, forcing a gut-wrenching pulse of fire into her body and causing the flesh under those fingers to tense and erect with a rush of blood.

"What, was this what you didn't want?" Lust asked cruelly, fully aware of combined pleasure and disgust she was eliciting in Raven, "or perhaps it was this?" and Lust bent her head down and began to suck lovingly on Raven's neck. With this last sensation, Raven squealed like she'd been stung, hopelessly attempting to twist away from her own hot lips as her neck was wantonly tasted by this out of control feeling she was ruled by. As her own tongue ran across the veins and corded muscle just beneath the pale flesh of her delicate neck, Raven's mind was whitewashed of all thought, flashes of light popped continually behind her eyes, blanking out her vision in fitful bursts, and her heart crashed in her chest in an adrenaline-fueled violation of any natural rhythm.

"No!" she shouted, her disgust finally overpowering the sensations, "Stop! I'm not… I'm not… I'm…" her protests grew more and more feeble following the initial outburst as the sensation from her neck and bust combined somewhere in her lower stomach and started to melt her core, heating her entire body from there, causing her to break out in a hard sweat. Still, she jerked weakly against Lust's grip, and so Lust finally let off, dragging her lips up Raven's neck until she could whisper into her ear once more.

"Ohh honey… I know that feels good… because I can feel it too… but still you resist?" Lust didn't actually sound that confused. "I know I'm bothering you… you never were at all attracted to other women… but you must understand Raven…" and this time the pause was such so that she could pull her head over to Raven's other ear, giving it a tiny, wet nibble that caused Raven to gasp anew before whispering again, "this isn't lesbianism…" and her voice reached a peak of husky, heated depth, "It's masturbation."

"Stop it!" Raven shouted, "just stop!" and there was conviction in her tone again, finally making an impression on Lust's playful fondling of theirself. With a final, languishing lick along Raven's ear, sucking the entire lobe into her mouth, and with a lingering touch that crawled up Raven's sides without ever contacting anything truly sensitive, Lust halted her reluctantly accepted ministrations, lowering the two of them back to their feet, but not quite letting Raven out of her hug as she continued to press herself shamelessly into the woman's back.

"You're quite right Raven, it's time to stop my fun… for now… because there is a serious matter we have to discuss," Lust spoke to Raven, who was wavering on her feet, just before she fell quite limply into Lust's arms. The aspect was then holding up her creator, the woman quite unable to stand as the gooeyness in her stomach persisted, even without Lust's active efforts. "Good idea—we should lie down," Lust said, as though Raven's helplessly wobbly legs had been some active proposal of hers.

With that statement, the environment around them began to alter, the plain ground growing upward beneath them until an enormous, quadruple king-size rectangle had formed, hefting them upward as it went. Easily twenty feet by thirty feet, the rectangle softened, and from nowhere its plain surface differentiated into silk throw-pillows, a sheet of the deepest crimson underlying them, all on a fantastically firm, fluffy mattress.

When it had fully formed, Lust allowed them both to lower to their knees, then collapse fully onto the bed, her form still immovably linked to Raven's back, even as the original woman was overcome by some kind of swoon. As they settled fully onto the mattress, Lust's swirled color cloak settled over them like a blanket, concealing everything but their identical heads. Lust's head was over Ravens as they lay on their sides, ear to ear, Raven's rather shell-shocked expression a jarring contrast to lust's playful smirk on its identical pale surface.

"Raeee-veeen…?" Lust called playfully into her ear, drawing her head back and blowing a slow breeze over the surface she'd just recently wetted with her saliva. When the other woman shuddered all over again at the intensely delicate sensation, Lust took it as her cue that Raven was sufficiently conscious to hear her.

"That thing we needed to talk about love… it's Robin, you know?" Lust said seriously, almost out of nowhere, and Raven felt her body stiffen at the mention of his name. It brought to mind a wonderful, wonderful kiss… her first, actually.

"What—what about Robin?" Raven found herself asking, as she knew to ignore Lust at this point would be to invite a return to 'masturbation.' Lust had been toying with her so far, and Raven had no illusions about how far the aspect would take this dream given provocation.

"Oh, well, it's just, you've been setting me aside for sooo long now darling," Lust continued to use those terms of endearment, expressing what had to be a kind of narcissism Raven hadn't realized she possessed, "and now that I have this chance to get my say… I've got to take it. Self-denial seems so noble, and you've always been one to suffer in silence, but you've been doing yourself, all of us, so much more harm than you know! My message tonight… the thing I need to say… is to command you to stop suppressing your feelings for Robin."

"F-f-feelings?" Raven sputtered, squirming under the cloak, trying in vain to turn her shocked gaze on Lust to support her denial, gaining a furious tone, "I don't—I don't—there aren't any feelings!"

"Oh sweetie," Lust returned to that tone of pity she'd used earlier, her face contorting in sad concern as she expressed her rather condescending sentiments, "you never were any good a lying to yourself."

"I'm not!" Raven continued to protest, "I don't feel—oh!" her protest was cut off quite suddenly as Lust began to do something strange behind her, moving around just out of her sight in such a way that didn't transmit to her hands, which never stopped gripping around Raven's waist, but which none the less drew her cloak over off of them.

"If you don't feel anything for him…" Lust whispered delicately into her ear, still avoiding Raven's attempts to look back and see what was going on—

"…then you won't mind this one bit," said Robin, from the exact place Lust had been a moment ago.

"By Azar…" Raven heard herself whimper, as she realized who was now in this bed with her, gripping her gently from behind as she lay helplessly under Lust's immobilizing spell. She truly didn't want to believe it at first, but as she felt the hot breath on her neck, as she recognized that the soft duplicates that had lain under her hands gripping her stomach had transformed into larger, calloused paws, she could find no room in her mind to deny it, and her body went cold and stiff. Still, through the ice, there was that tingling heat pulsing just under the surface, threatening to explode at any instant enormously beyond that which she'd felt so far.

It was now Robin who held her so gently from behind, the bare arms under hers suggesting that he wore little more than what he had when the two had shared that illicit kiss under the delightfully convenient pretence of her conformation to the Joker's mind control drug. As that concept beat its way into her brain, as the fact that it was Robin only inches from rubbing his mostly bare body against her leotard dug its way slowly into her consciousness, the cold of shock ebbed to be replaced by the ever-expanding wash of warmth from deep in the core of her being. That heat flowed ever more freely from the fluid, melted, oozing center Lust had personally awakened within her. It was with eyes widened by these tantalizing sensations, as well as copious amounts of disbelief at her situation, that Raven witnessed Lust reenter the scene.

"Do you feel that Raven?" Lust asked, as she slowly reappeared on the bed. Like the Cheshire Cat, she materialized bit by bit, her head first, hooded again by that swirled pattern cloak, then the rest of her body in a gradually expanding mesh of existence. She was lying full-out on her belly on the bed, perpendicular to where Raven still lay on her side, long legs bent at the knees and kicking in the air over her back, knocking that crimson and violet cloak to the side. With her chin resting on her folded arms and a smile of obvious, lazy delight gracing her languidly care-free face, she looked very much like a satisfied cat as she stared at the obviously intensely disconcerted Raven, reveling in the confusion and arousal this newest factor was wringing out of her. "That feeling, the one in your stomach, the one spreading out from dear Robin's fingers… that's what you want… what we want."

"No…" Raven managed to whisper, then the sound became a moan of "Ohhh!" as Robin took the word as his cue to slide up against her back and pull her fully into his arms. The barrier provided by her leotard was negligible, and the instant he pressed against her, she could tell he was wearing nothing above the waist, the rippling muscles of his chest and abdomen easily distinguishable as he wrung a new gasp from her with his silent embrace.

"What was that darling?" Lust asked tauntingly, "I couldn't hear you past the groan of delight. In fact, you're making me jealous…" and immediately a new shape began to materialize above Lust's languishing form.

Beginning as a dark silhouette, the shape gained color slowly, the utterly black, distinctly human blotch bleeding into a flesh tone that quickly made it recognizable. It was Robin, crouched on all fours above Lust, holding himself up over her lounging sprawl, dressed, Raven realized, with a sinking sensation barely countered by the simultaneous flash of desperate heat, in almost nothing. Much like the Robin that was even now shortening her breaths with the pressure of his sculpted chest into her back and strong hands into her stomach, the Robin hanging over Lust was bare-chested, wearing nothing, in fact, other than extremely tight, black spandex shorts something like bicycling pants, and his mask. The tiny portion of Raven's mind that was still working properly figured he was clothed by even this much only because those were the places she'd never actually seen, and was somehow capable of preventing herself from imagining.

"Mmmm… that's better," Lust drawled as she slowly rolled over under the other Robin, her cloak balling up on one side and her hood drawing back off her unnaturally pristine hair as she turned to look up at the boy-toy she'd conjured from nothingness. "It's not fair for me to be the only one getting the second-hand sensations," Lust went on cryptically, and then, as the other Robin pressed down on top of Lust, Raven realized exactly what she meant.

The very moment Robin's weight settled onto Lust's body, Raven felt an inexplicable sensation dance down the front of her own form, even though she was still lying on her side with Robin impressing himself into her back. The phantom caress took her off guard, and she whimpered anew, eyes still taking in her doppelganger as the second Robin bent his head down and exhaled a breathy sigh down her neck. Lust and Raven gasped at the same instant as that hot breeze languished across their throats, and it was this combined sound that clued Raven to the fact that, as Lust had so off-handedly mentioned, they could feel what one another was experiencing.

"Let's face it Raven," Lust managed to speak between harsh breaths as she clenched her eyes against the agonizing pleasure of Robin nuzzling against her neck, "We really, really, want Robin."

"Nehh—" was Raven's muttered gasp as the Robin physically gripping her began to nuzzle her neck on the opposite side from where Lust's was nibbling on hers, doubling the assault. The two of them flushed matching brilliant scarlet hues under these fantastically subtle, arousing ministrations, and so Lust's next words were a little scattered.

"We want him so bad…" came her aspect's hesitant whisper, "we want to taste his flesh and be tasted in turn… we want to feel his hands… to accept his caress… to dive into his embrace and become totally wrapped in him. You can't deny it… we can't resist… we want every little bit of him all to ourselves…"

"STOP!" Raven shouted, breaking the atmosphere with her shrieking bark, "just STOP! This isn't ME! This isn't—I'm not—don't do this to me!" her voice literally bursting with the force of her disgust, her self-loathing reaching a peek that it had never before even approached. The image that Lust was painting, the wanton, lascivious portrait of a woman out of control, was by and far exactly what Raven detested and reviled. She could not bear to see this side of herself a moment longer, no matter how good it might have felt, and the depth of her conviction shook even Lust from her quiet enjoyment of this nasty little fantasy. But it wasn't the shout that did it… it took a little more than that.

"Oh darling…" Lust spoke softly, shoving the dream-Robin away as she noticed Raven's bitter tears, the slowly running trails of which were now shining in the dusky light of this dream, gently wetting the expansive silken sheets of their bed, "…There's no need to cry… I was just trying to make a point… we don't want to cry over this…"

As if to prove that the torture was at an end, or at least in an attempt to stop her misery, which was bringing her down off her high quite mercilessly, Lust altered the situation. In a flash, Raven and lust were lying across from one another, once again opposed like perfect mirror images, only the coloring of Lust's cloak to differentiate the two as each was gently, almost platonically embraced by her own shade of Robin. Still embarrassingly aroused, still ridden by that disgusting, all-permeating heat, Raven's tears were slow to stem, and Lust took the moment to get back to the meat of the discussion.

"Understand, dearest," Lust spoke softly, her dry eyes staring directly into Raven's moistened pair, "I am you taken out of context. I am your lust empowered by empathic resonance with Starfire's drug-induced heat—somewhere in this mind of ours you realize this, and so I know it too. We both know you aren't any kind of slut… but we also both know that these thoughts exist in you… their presence is where the resonance was able to get its hooks in, and it's time for you to stop ignoring them… before little thoughts and urges like these have another chance to build up, possibly becoming something less understanding than the Lust you see before you right now."

"I—I don't understand—" Raven muttered, as she stymied the last of her panicked tears with a concentrated effort, "why… why did you suddenly…?"

"We're not sure…" Lust obviously knew Raven's mind better than she did herself at this moment, "We think we let up because Starfire cooled down a little. Besides… we don't want to cry… especially not over Robin."

"What if…" and Raven suddenly deflated spectacularly, despite the Robin-shaped figment of her imagination currently embracing her so tenderly, "what if we… what if I…" and Raven took a moment to discard the unnecessary plural that her aspect had roped her into using, "don't have a choice? What if I can't bring myself to do that to Starfire? How could I even consider hurting her like that?"

"How could you consider hurting yourself like that?" Lust asked, her face gone flat as her energy bottomed out, the Robin-figments seeming to fade slightly along with everything else in this place. The snipe cut Raven to her core, it lanced her heart like a poisoned fang, then began to siphon the life out of her, bleeding her of her miserable resignation and leaving her bare in front of her own feelings. Before this instant, before desire intoxicated her heart, giving in to heartbreak and letting Starfire have her way, letting her friend gain the love of that wonderful man, has seemed easy. Now… with her eyes shaded by her own need for the first time… Raven realized that she'd never be able to sit quietly by ever again. Even the thought of not pursuing him was violently taboo—in this instant of revelation, she couldn't imagine just letting Robin walk into Starfire's arms—it was unthinkable!

Finally, Lust's power sputtered and died, everything around Raven went dull and lifeless, and the desire riding through her body was snuffed out. Still lying on her side in the now bland world, staring blankly at Lust's shell, Raven was faced with the terrible, heart-breaking truth of her situation. She was going to have to choose between Starfire and Robin… there was no other way… and after this nightmare… she was relatively certain who would come victoriously off of the scales. The tears were creeping back, her stark misery driving any further consideration of this terrible nightmare she was trapped within utterly from her mind as she became focused on the mind-bending unfairness of it all, but especially as she cursed her own weakness, her inability to overcome what she wanted, to walk away from Robin and spare all but herself the terrible pain this tragedy threatened to dump on the looser.

"OHHH MYYYY!" came a shout from Lust, as a flash of purple and red light lit behind her eyes, completely unexpected, the entire world coming back to life with the sound of it, much like a carnival ride bursting into motion, sound, and color as it is flipped instantly from quietude into activation. It was quite the shock to Raven, who was reeled back from the brink of tears and heartbreak quite forcefully as fearful anxiety became her most immediate concern.

"What!" Raven shouted, when she'd gotten her breath back, more than a little aware that she could once again feel the Robin clone at her back squirming against her and gripping tightly at her stomach, "What the hell is going on now!"

"It looks like Starfire wasn't quite done yet!" Lust squealed, barely able to contain herself as she writhed against the gentle grip of the Robin at her back, "The resonance—it's…!" but she was unable to finish the statement, her body arching back against her Robin as she began to put off a iridescent glow of hottest scarlet and most passionate purple.

"Oh Azar damnit!" Raven screamed in a most curious mix of frustration, fear, and… anticipation. She had to flinch away, unable to look at Lust's glowing body even as she realized that things were going to become much worse than they ever were before any moment now. Indeed, no sooner did she get a slight grip on the disorientation of going from heartbreak to adrenaline-rush in the space of a split instant than did the Robin holding her spring into activity.

With a grunt, she grabbed at his hands as one went for her chest and the other streaked south along her leotard, her grip somehow actually halting his advance before he could get to anything sensitive. She was so stunned to be out from under Lust's disabling spell that she didn't notice Robin's next move until he'd already poked a prominent bulge into an area she had not invited it.

"EEEEEEE!" she let out an embarrassingly girly shriek as she felt that invasion, and she lashed out with her power completely by reflex. A black fist of energy immediately exploded from her back, spearing through the fake Robin's chest and impaling him in a spraying gout of blood. Her eyes widened in cold, numbing terror as she felt the Robin copy go limp and still behind her, and she dared not look back to see what she'd wrought, lest she have to gaze upon a murdered Robin, no matter how intimately positive she was that it was a fake. There was truly no telling what might become of her sanity should she behold such a sight, and so she was very careful to tiptoe around even the concept of what she had just done. Instead, she let her mind funnel in on the fact that she had her power back, and the next moment she was off of the bed and flying away from the bleeding corpse and brilliantly glowing doppelganger on the bed.

Not daring to look back, Raven landed some distance away in the garden of Lust, spotting her cloak and pulling it back on with a flash of her power, mostly to assure herself that she did indeed have her abilities back, but also to get another layer of clothing between herself and the universe after that frightening bit of involuntary intimacy. Next, still without looking back, she reached out her power within this place, this representation of her mind, and searched for some way to escape. She had almost connected to her mind's central area and the gate back to consciousness there when the hands gripped her.

Gasping in shock, Raven was jerked back to the present even as she was jerked to the ground, disembodied hands by the dozen springing from the thin air around her to latch onto any bit of her body they could reach. Four sets of hands on her legs kept her from taking off, another four sets on her arms held her still, and then came a storm of hands to attack different areas… areas less important to motion and… well… I'll bet you can guess. She was able to eradicate this third group with blazing bursts of her power, but the result was that she became so occupied by swatting away groping fingers that she couldn't get away from the gripping hands, nor concentrate enough to teleport. She didn't even notice when the hands began to grow bodies until she was completely surrounded by more than a dozen Robin clones, none of them wearing more than those tight black spandex boxers and the ever-present mask.

"Oh Raven… Ohhhh Raven…" Lust's voice echoed out from everywhere, much as it had when this nightmare began, "You aren't going to want to miss this. This is going to be… delicious…"

"Oh no…" was all Raven could say, as, pinned under a mob of Robins, she watched a swirling, glowing portal appear in the sky. There was a flash from the bed, and then a great ball of light that had ostensibly once been Lust blasted off of it and landed squarely on Raven, entering her with and accompanying flash of heat that dove away any other thoughts. She could only watch then as she, Lust within her, and the mob of Robins were dragged down… err… up the rabbit-hole and ever further into this surreal nightmare.

---Reality---

:ALERT 1337: DIAGNOSING… CONFIRMED AS EXTREME ABNORMAL BRAINWAVE ACTIVITY AND PITUITARY STIMULATION. TREATING WITH MINIMAL SEDITIVE DOSEAGE.

As per its silent statement, the computerized doctor activated the Robotic arm between Starfire and Raven's bed, directing it over the bundle of black flames that was Raven's recumbent, stasis-frozen body. It began to arc in with its cure for her extreme nightmares when things exceeded its programming parameters in a huge way.

:CRITICAL ALERT: MAJOR EQUIPMENT MALFUNCTION.

This was what the screen read as the storm of black energy lancing out of Raven like she was an angry thunderhead of obsidian lightning began to cook and blast through the various computers and energy-field generators dotting the stasis room. Like it was drawing the current, the robotic arm with the sedative took a huge hit from the black force and was obliterated into a lump of twisted, smoking metal, removing any hope of curtailing either woman's nightmares in the slightest from here on out.

The black force was not done, however, and in an expanding cloud of destruction, the emotion-driven murderous energy reached its way across the wall to the source of the emotional resonance that had summoned it. Starfire, who's brainwave monitor showed her on another upswing, was soon overshadowed by a cloud of destructive force that licked along the walls, across the ceiling, and over the floor tiles, annihilating everything it touched. Finally, with an unexpectedly feather-gentle motion, it settled into Starfire's immobile head.

:CRITICAL ALERT:CRITICAL ALERT:CRITICAL ALERT: the machine repeated over and over, then finally kicked in its subroutine. :EMERGENCY ACTION 1: EXECUTE… CONTACTING NEAREST LIVE SUPPORT PERSONELL.

By the madly fluctuating energy levels and spasmodic bursts of line motion on Starfire's brainwave monitor, it was doubtful if any amount of live support could stop what was going on at this point.

---Starfire---

"Star? Star, are you listening?" Robin asked, and Starfire jerked in bewilderment, blinking harshly as she stared in confusion at her surroundings.

Though she could hardly have told you when or how she'd gotten there, the young woman was most definitely sitting at an intimately small, round dining table with a luxuriously white tablecloth, all of which sat quite alone on an enormous patio under the clear, starry sky. To one side was a magnificent blue house, and to the other was a powdery moonlit beach with rolling waves splashing rhythmically against its soft, bleached white sands. Once again, she was quite clueless as to where she'd been prior to this moment, and her confusion over it all did not break until she took in the more immediate details of her surroundings.

"Are you okay Star?" Robin asked again as he watched her stare around in pure, stunned muteness, her jaw hanging slightly slack as she saw the details of this place.

First to come to eye was Robin, naturally, but specifically because he was wearing not his usual combat armor and cape, but rather, the most luxuriously tailored suit she'd ever seen. It was done all in white and blue silks, a spectacular cut giving his always stiff and hard body an edge so sharp the look alone could cut an observer, his always messy black hair a perfect contrast. Her eyes lingered on his chest, where the white silk of the shirt under the open jacket clung so tightly to his muscles that it looked to have been poured onto his skin and left to dry, outlining his physique in a way that made her chew her lower lip quite compulsively. With reluctance, her eyes moved on to other oddities of this place, even as Robin continued to give her a concerned look from behind his mask.

Indeed, though at first glance this place looked like a beach house, various out-of-place features told Starfire that there might be more to it than that. For example, she was in no way familiar with beach houses on Earth, but she didn't think too many of them had extensive beds of orchids arranged around a living bee-hive. Nor, for that matter, did she recall many human homes she'd seen holding statuary lounged upon by gaudy-feathered birds (though since she had seen pigeons lounging on part monuments, this was not quite as far-fetched). And finally, the model train set with its many tunnels that wound around the banister on this beach patio just didn't seem like a normal decorative feature. Of course she could have been mistaken, it wasn't her area of experience, and so she allowed her eyes to return to Robin (not at all reluctantly) in the hopes that he might remind her how she'd gotten here.

"Seriously Star, you're acting a little weird," he accused her, not at all hostile, actually growing a smile as he saw her come around to him after her protracted silence. "But then again, I guess I've been feeling a little floaty too, what with this being our first date and all."

"D-d-d-date?" Starfire managed to sound simultaneously mortified and ecstatic as this word was instantly snapped up into her brain. Goodness! What was she going to wear?

A little behind the times, she glanced down at herself, only to sputter as she tried to sigh in relief and gasp in wonder at the same time. She was wearing a dress, but not just any dress, no. This dress looked to have been pulled directly from a New York fashion show, the strapless violet frock cutting low across her bust, then clinging almost magically to every curve of her body as it trailed down to a pleated knee-length skirt. She could feel rather than see the hose she was wearing and the garter a little higher up her thighs, and she let her eyes trail slowly back upward as any fears about what she looked like evaporated. She was left with a very slight, bemused smile as she relaxed into the dream, tuning out the weird environment, focusing quite totally on Robin, even despite the enduring muggy, buzzing fog that pressed in on her mind.

"Uhh… uhh…" Starfire's eyes fell onto Robin, who was watching her in silence and smiling, and the fact that she was dating him finally settled all the way in, tying her tongue so badly it would have silenced her even without her head already muddled. "So… Robin…"

"No need to talk," He assured her, his smile only growing as he watched her charming, incredibly cute discomfort, any strangeness in her apparently forgotten, if indeed it had ever been noticed. "Please, let's just go ahead and eat. I have a surprise planned for after dinner."

"Dinner?" and indeed, though she'd somehow missed it before, the table was set for two with quite a variety of foods. On her side, the plate was arranged around a large prepared fish she didn't recognize, with a periphery of oysters, some pudding, and oddly (at least to her), a novelty candy sucker in the shape of a dolphin. On Robin's side was a wildly different fare, including a large sausage, a cucumber, some carrots, several regular round lollipops, a banana, and an oddly shaped French-bread. While it struck her as a strange food arrangement, Starfire had yet to be on an Earth date (though this bore little resemblance to the ones on T.V.), and she let it slide.

"So Star, I thought we could feed each other," Robin suggested, rather hurriedly, as though he was trying to rush things forward a little, though toward what Starfire didn't know. "So, if you'll eat my sausage, I'll eat your snapper."

Starfire's face scrunched at this comment, but it was not Robin's words that prompted it, rather it was the strangest sound of laughter echoing through her muddled head. The moment he'd made that perfectly reasonable statement, there had been a kind of giggling that Starfire usually associated with herself and the watching of cheesy daytime romances, specifically when the lovers started to make out. However, the laughter came from neither her, nor Robin, and so she grimaced in confusion, holding a hand to her head as the mugginess was supplanted by a slowly growing headache.

"Ohh, err, rather—" Robin seemed to take Starfire's expression as some form of rejection for his proposal, and he looked rather nervous as he glanced down at the various foods on his plate. "I suppose… I suppose I am double-jointed…" he went on uncertainly, "So I guess I could eat my own cucumber. But--!" and he looked up again with a big smile, "I'd still appreciate the chance to lick your dolphin!"

There was the laughter again, immediately as Robin made this second innocuous proposal, and now Starfire was truly concerned. Why was there a voice inside her head that found the idea of consuming dinner to be so funny? Indeed, the laughter would not subside, and Starfire was forced to hold both hands to her head as the pain increased, so much so that Robin noticed.

"Oh… well, sorry about that," Robin treated her pain as though it was from his suggestion once more, quite densely in Starfire's opinion, though she could not seem to form words, or any other kind of sound, through the ache splitting her skull. "I guess we should just skip dinner then!" and Robin didn't sound at all disappointed by this, "We can go right inside to the bedroom—I have everything all set up!"

"Grrr…" Starfire managed to growl quietly, shaking her head emphatically as she tried to dispel the pain and ever-growing laughter from her mind. Robin continued to ignore her agony, though he recognized this as a new refusal quite readily.

"You're right!" he continued enthusiastically, "why bother with the bedroom when we have an entire moonlit beach right out there? I'll go get a towel and some sea-lice repellent and we can get right at it!"

Starfire had no idea what Robin was talking about, but really, the pain in her head was too great for her to care about that. It was like someone was on the inside of her skull, pounding away, ripping at the sides, desperately trying to get out, even as that strangely familiar voice continued giggle and titter at Robin's odd behavior. When she did not acknowledge him still, he took it as more silent disapproval, and his eyes lit behind his mask.

"Right!" he shouted agreeably, suddenly grabbing the tablecloth and sweeping everything off of the table, leaving behind a sturdy little hardwood trestle that had lain beneath their food. "Why go anywhere at all when we can just get it on here! Come on Star, this is going to be great!"

With that final, undeniably weird statement, Robin took one long step around the table and grabbed Starfire roughly by the wrist, yanking it away from her head quite harshly. The pain would not stop building, and so Starfire was barely able to spare a thought for what Robin was doing, right up to the point where he lifted her bodily out of her chair and lay her on her back on the table. Like a switch being flipped, the pain ceased quite instantly, leaving her mind stark and cold, and thrusting to the forefront exactly what Robin as doing.

"Hey!" She snapped out, but by the time she tried to resist with her considerable strength, Robin had leaned down over her, placed his mouth next to her ear, and whispered a long, sweet, nothing directly into her mind. As the delightful nonsense syllables and unintelligible whispering snaked through her brain, all the strength left her limbs, and she lay back limply on the table, her head lolling to the side.

Robin did not hesitate, he took the opportunity to position her with her rear at the edge of the table and spread her legs to either side, forcing the loose pleated skirt of her violet dress to slide lewdly up her thighs. Some of her strength was coming back now, but not fast enough, and she was just barely able to look up into Robin's pleasant, humdrum expression as she felt a questing hand slide up the inside of her right thigh. It quickly trailed up her hose, passed right by her garters, danced along a tiny stretch of naked flesh, and pressed firmly and forcefully directly against her—

"AIIEEEEE!" Starfire screamed bloody murder, her mind twisting and her stomach turning at the horrifying sensation of violation that passed through her in that one terrible moment. Without ever thinking about it, her body instantly launched into a long-trained reflex taught to any warrior fearful of being pinned down by a heavier opponent. In a flash of motion that Robin frankly hadn't been expecting, she drew back her right hand, stuck out her first two fingers from a balled fist, then jammed them directly into Robin's right eye with a spearing motion too fast to see.

"GAAGHAHHAH!" There was a gasping scream, a wash of warm wetness over her fingers, and suddenly she was free of Robin's nauseating grope, the young man flinging himself away from her body in a desperate, completely reflexive attempt to escape the spearing fingernails that had just ruined his eye. "NAHAHHHHH," he bellowed again, his hands clasped to his face as he stumbled away, until he finally tripped over his own feet, dropped to his knees, then keeled over on the hardwood floor of the patio.

"WHAT--!" Starfire screamed, as she dragged herself off of the table and landed on unsteady feet, stumbling on what she suddenly realized were four-inch stiletto heels, her face twisted in a mask of unbridled rage, blood dripping down her hand, "WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING!" Her mind was blown away by what had just happened, and quite suddenly, that mysterious agony returned, piercing her skull anew and scrambling what was left of her senses. As her vision blurred, a tiny voice spoke into her ear, heavy with laughter, and suddenly she knew exactly what to say—"NEVER ON THE FIRST DATE!" as she wound up and kicked him full force, nailing him squarely in the same place he'd just violated upon her.

There was an 'umph' of air escaping his lungs as he slid across the hardwood in a heap, then crashed into the patio's banister railing so hard that he busted the wooden construction clean apart. The model train, which had been chugging its happy way in and out of tunnels along the banister's handrail, passing in and out, in and out, oh so steadily, was knocked to the ground in front of Robin and busted to pieces. Robin wheezed once, whimpered, then puked his guts out over the edge of the patio, allowing a hard peace to settle over the scene.

The agony in her skull satiated for a moment by this violence, prompting uproarious laughter to bounce around the inside of her head, Starfire was able to think about what she'd just done at long last. Breaking into a harsh trembling, she slowly looked down at the red stain glowing sickly-bright on her fingers under the soft moonlight.

"R-R-Robin…?" she asked gently, looking over to the slowly twitching sack of jelly that had once been the man of her dreams. "AAAAAEEEEEIIIII!" She shrieked the next instant, as the pain exploded through her head greater than ever before, throwing her to her knees and wrenching forth that most blood-curdling scream of agony. Whatever was inside her noggin refused to be contained for a moment longer, and she could feel her skull throbbing, throbbing, each consecutive pulse bringing her that much closer to full-on cranial detonation.

"Ggggaaahhhh—" she moaned out a piteous wail as the flesh on her forehead began to twist and distort under the strain from within her skull. A long moment of this terrible ache, and all the pain came to a sudden stop with the most delightful burst of relief, the strain leaving her in one huge lump that blew out of her forehead and threw her to the floor, its explosive exit leaving her head miraculously intact.

From her new position on the floor, Starfire watched in relief-addled bemusement as the agony from her head became a glowing white sphere. The sphere quickly flew into the sky, flattened and distended into a massive, swirling portal, and belched forth a great mass of… something onto the open space of the patio. She watched the lump squirm and writhe for a few long seconds as she basked in relief, its soft lines and twitching mass absorbing her attention quite completely. Finally, she began to recover something of her wits, and she recognized the mass for what it was—a great pile of mostly naked Robins all lumped together and all trying desperately to not be moved. It prompted a small internal query, 'who was Robin holding down?'

Her mind was placed on pause yet again when the lump of Robins picked that moment to explode like a nearly-naked hottie bomb, a flash of black energy busting out from the center and sending Robin sprawling all over the damn place, leaving a trail of beaten Robins in a radiating circle from the epicenter, where a distinctly familiar silhouette stood in grim relief, power crackling and spitting from her skin in great electrical gouts. At last, when Starfire recognized Raven, she knew things were about to get weird, as though this nutty excuse for a date hadn't already passed insanely, horrifyingly surreal from practically the word go. Hell, Starfire was so shell shocked at this point, Raven's sudden shriek of pain and subsequent fit of twitching and jerking barely managed to motivate her to sit up.

"Ohhhh…" Raven moaned, staggering in Starfire's general direction past the minefield of discarded Robins lying all over the patio. Starfire was amazed the woman didn't trip over some expanse of delightfully muscular chest or wonderfully tight abs, but then Raven's spasmodic, unreal thrashing became much more interesting than the army of babes she was navigating through. Below the waist, her body was calm and still, but above that, she was beginning to vibrate faster than could be imagined, her cloak and everything above her hips becoming a shimmering blur as she continued to moan softly in pain. Finally, she stopped with a jerk, halting utterly a few steps away from Starfire and yanking quite pointedly in two opposite directions.

Long past believing her eyes, Starfire still had to do a double take and dropped her jaw clean off her face as Raven leaned away from herself, splitting into a blue and purple/red version of herself all the way down to her hips, her legs still united in a disturbing Siamese twin image. As said, the two Ravens were leaning away from each other, and as they turned back to look at one another, the blue one glowered as the colorful one smiled out a lascivious sneer. The next moment, they gave a great heave away from one another and jerked apart into two separate women.

"Heeheehee," the swirled-color Raven gave a girlish laugh, the same one that had been tormenting Starfire's mind, and immediately Star did not like this version of her friend in the slightest, rightfully identifying her as the reason for this messed up situation, the crazy landscape, and the blood beginning to coagulate under her fingernails. "Ohh but that was a total trip!" colorful Raven went on, rubbing her hands down her body lewdly as though to make sure she hadn't left any important bits embedded in blue Raven.

"What the hell are you so happy about?" Blue Raven bit out nastily, also checking herself over, obviously upset by the experience of being squeezed through Starfire's skull then ripped in two. Starfire's mind grasped the particularly vicious edge to that tone and identified this as her true friend, the one she could rely on to explain such an outrageous circumstance as this was becoming, and she was quite suddenly happy enough to cry.

"Oh Raven, it brings me joy untold to see you!" Starfire shouted as she floated back up to her feet, having quite given up on standing comfortably in the stiletto heels. "Something terrible is going on—I just know it! I have had the strangest date imaginable, and Robin—I was forced to—well—it was terrible!" She continued to shout somewhat incoherently as she glided over and grabbed Raven up into a tearful embrace, all of her anxiety about the surreal night breaking out through her eyes and arms as she proceeded to squeeze the life out of Raven, who simply hadn't seen her sneak attack coming.

"Starfire—guh!" Raven managed to gasp out with the breath forcefully squeezed from her lungs, her body struggling fitfully in the woman's grasp, as though it bothered her even more than usual to be bound up in an unbreakably sound grip. "Need—AIR!" and Starfire managed to take this cue to loosen up a little, even as she held her friend away from the sinisterly colorful doppelganger and army of recumbent, almost nude Robins still inexplicably present in this place.

"Well, I see you have your cuddle-buddy darling!" the other Raven snapped out suggestively, though Starfire thought that a strange way to refer to the comfort gripping her friend granted her, "I guess it's about time I found mine. That is why I came here after all…"

"Lust, what are you up to?" the Raven in Starfire's arms gasped out with her first fresh breath, but the one referred to as Lust was already flashing through the air in a wash of blackest shadow, reappearing suddenly over where Starfire had ejected her Robin to when he'd made the mistake of violating her. "Wait—what are you doing?"

That was as far as the dark woman got before Raven and Starfire were both forced to stand in stunned, open-mouthed shock while they watched Lust's actions. With a harsh grip, the colorfully clothed Raven clone peeled Robin out of the pile of 'broken wood' and struck him with a flash of her power that lit him with a hot-green energy from head to toe. He was restored instantly, and before either woman could utter a single sound, both gasped hard enough to swallow their own tongues, because Lust hadn't wasted half a second before attaching her face's to Robin's like she was trying to see how far she could get her tongue down his throat.

"RAVEN!" Starfire shrieked, compulsively tightening her grip hard enough to make the other woman's bones crackle and eyes bulge, "what are you doing to Robin!" No sooner had she gotten out this panicked, wide-eye question then the Robin in Lust's arms began to transform, the green energy blowing away his suit, then his flesh, and finally his very body, revealing Starfire herself in his place, clothed in her Titan's uniform with her hair streaming wildly about her in the gust of ethereal wind that accompanied the green glow, Lust still doing her damnedest to suck her face off despite the sudden gender realignment.

"RAVEN!" Starfire shrieked even more fiercely, if that was possible, than she had before. She pried her eyes away from the indisposed photocopies and looked down to the way she was holding her old friend, promptly dumping Raven onto the ground with a forceful fling and giving the woman her first breath of air in a while. "What are you doing to ME?"

Starfire finished her shocked and disgusted question by pointing over to where Lust and other-Starfire were still tongue wrestling with extraordinary gusto. Starfire seemed to consider her question for a moment as Raven lay coughing for air on the ground, then she looked back down her pointing hand herself to see just what was going on. Her mind smacked into a flabbergasting wall of impossibility as she counted the number of Starfires, Ravens, and Robins in this place, then she moved her hand to grip her head, obviously developing a brand new headache.

"It's the drug Star!" Raven managed to cough out eventually, gathering herself back up to her feet only with great difficulty. "Those two represent its effects on you first and then on me by empathic resonance."

"Drug? Represent? Resonance?" Starfire asked in quick succession, moving her other hand to her head as these disjointed facts pumped her confusion to all-time highs, and Raven was forced to reconsider her approach drastically as she saw how little of this was getting through.

"Don't you remember anything that happened?" Raven queried, trying to get some groundwork lain down for helping her catch up, even as she looked past her bewildered friend to the ominous glowing overtaking both Lust and the Lust-Starfire that had been masquerading as Robin all this time. They clearly didn't have a whole lot of time here.

"What is there to recall?" Starfire asked in exasperation, shaking her head as the shock from one surreal occurrence after another caught up to her, causing her to loose her footing and plop down to her rear, crumpling her fine dress hopelessly as she landed, quite by accident, squarely on one of the many discarded Robin-toys, who grunted out a harsh breath as her weight caved in his chiseled abs. "The last thing I am certain of," Starfire went on without concern for her new chair, "I was here on my first date with Robin! None of this makes any sense Raven!"

"Listen to me!" Raven snapped, feeling the time getting away from them and growing ever more terrified of what was happening to their combined drug-induced horniness over to the side, "There isn't time to explain everything, but you have to understand that none of this is real! This is a dream of yours Starfire, and by some kind of weird telepathic coincidence, I've been sucked in too! Long story short, everything that's gone bad for you is THEIR fault, and it's high time we did something about that!"

"Err…" Starfire hesitated for a moment as this explanation battled against her epic confusion, the finer points of this 'being a dream' certainly appealing to her need for an account of so many nearly naked Robin's lying around, though certainly not providing any explanation for why she and Raven were swapping saliva and grinding together most inappropriately just behind where… well… where she and Raven were simultaneously not doing said disgusting act.

"Come on Star, we have to stop them, or something bad is going to happen. Are you just going to let them waltz into your dream and screw with you?" Raven appealed one last time, almost desperate to get Starfire going now as the glow from their doppelgangers reached a peek.

"NO!" Starfire finally shouted, her confusion, disgust, and frustration at this situation releasing in a burst of emotion that did not need to understand to be big and powerful. "I will not be screwed in my own mind!" She shouted forcefully, quite oblivious to what she'd just screamed, and Raven choked, looked at Starfire's newly determined expression, glowing eyes, and clenched fists, then shook her head sadly and turned on Lust and StarLust.

"Alright you two, time to break it up," Raven opened up, hoping she sounded more collected and confident than she felt right now. When they ignored her, she let spheres of black power form in her hands, then pointed them at the pair before continuing, "Most people get a room for that kind of thing."

"Yes!" Starfire leapt up to support her friend, a starbolt fairly dripping from her fingers and quite evenly leveled at the glowing pair, "if you must insist on using our shapes to carry out your—your—debauchery," and Raven rolled her eyes at the thought that Starfire considered mere kissing to be 'debauchery,' not wanting to know how she'd react to the further extremes of amorous affection, "then at least have the decency to do it where no one will have to watch!"

To Raven's great surprise, Lust actually broke her illicit kiss with StarLust, turning her head to glance over at the genuine pair of ladies from under her purple/crimson hood. There was a gleam there that Raven recognized instantly, and her guts dropped like she'd just gone over the edge on a rollercoaster, forcing her to lash out with a blast of black energy the next moment. The beam got within three feet of the pair, then deflected harmlessly off some invisible barrier, and Lust threw her head back in an inaudible laugh as the glow between her and StarLust flashed too bright to look at, then dissipated instantly to almost nothing. When she could see again, the two were gone, replaced by a sphere of violet, crimson, and green energy.

"What the grinblar?" Starfire asked, lowering her starbolt to look at where she and Raven had been only an instant ago.

"I don't know either, but what I do know is that we have to take out that sphere before—" Raven was cut off

"EEEK!" Starfire shrieked out slightly as she was gripped around the ankle by one of the long-forgotten Robin clones littering the area. She kicked him in the face with her pointed heel in a reflexive jerk, and he whimpered as he gripped at the fiercely bleeding wound that blossomed across his face, releasing Starfire, who promptly floated into the air away form him and the dozens of suddenly active compatriots rising up on all sides of them.

"Oh damnit." Raven muttered miserably, as she charged up her powers for the coming fight.

"No—Robin!" Starfire gasped, staring down at the Robin she'd opened the face of, watching the blood flow freely with a mixture of horror and terror. She seemed to only now realize what she had just done, and this time, with no distracting blast of cranial agony, there was nothing to stop her from fretting quite compulsively over the knowledge that she'd just injured Robin. She floated down closer to him, ignoring the others that were gathering into rings around them, and Raven noticed only now what she was up to.

"Starfire, don't be a fool, these guys aren't Robin!" She warned, but then she was defending herself, pressing her power into the hardwood planks beneath their feet and yanking them up to use like… well… like discarded 2x4s, laying about among the crowds of rather zombified Robins quite mercilessly, cracking heads and breaking faces. Starfire did not seem to hear her.

"Robin, are you alright?" she asked, rather blankly due to her panic, her flying form lowering horizontally toward Robin's prone form, both of his hands still clutched over the bleeding gash she'd put in his face. She got within about three feet of him, horrified by the oozing blood pressing out between his clenched fingers, determined to see that he was okay, that he forgave her for striking at him, only to see just how correct Raven was.

The very second she was in reach, the Robin stopped playing possum and reached out with bloody hands to grope her chest, squealing out an animalistic wail as he flapped his tongue at her and shook his head insanely, splashing her with his blood. The sudden move took her off guard, and he got in a truly offensive feel before she wrapped her hands around both of his wrists, broke his hands in her grip with a sickening crackling of bones, and snapped her head forward in a head butt that shattered his teeth and sent blood spraying ever more freely from his face. Incensed beyond words, she screeched out her best Tamaranean war-cry, yanked him up by his powdered wrist bones, and flung him bodily into the nearest group of clones, bowling them all down. She spared a moment to fly into the air and look at the disgusting, bloody handprints on her chest, then landed back to back with Raven, who had switched from wooden planks to pieces of the wooden banister as far as holding back the tide of Robins was concerned.

"You were right Raven, these are not Robin," Starfire confirmed ominously, as though there had been some kind of doubt, and Raven couldn't really spare any concentration to be exasperated, instead heartened beyond words to have the fierce warrior watching her back. She could hold off these shoddy clones all day, but they were multiplying faster than the eye could follow, and now had the pair completely surrounded. Raven was good, but she didn't have eyes on the back of her head.

"Should we not fly?" Starfire asked, but no sooner had the words left her lips than did the environment begin to change. The tranquil, if rather perverse, beach house scene faded all around them, leaving behind an endless grey floor beneath their feet, and a gigantic ceiling stretching ever-outward just a few feet over their heads.

"What is with this place?" Starfire mimicked that particular human phrase quite perfectly as she glanced up at the ceiling, only to see that it was a mosaic pattern of Robin in his boxer shorts, chiseled as always and holding a rose in his teeth. She couldn't deny the attractiveness of the sight, but she'd been rather numbed to it in the past little while.

"The dangers of an unrestricted Id Starfire, that's what this is," Raven stated, not deigning to explain, and the comment went right over her friend's head. The endless army of Robin's was closing in all around them then, and Raven had nothing left to throw at them. Starfire charged her power, but held back still, not even the leers twisting Robin's handsome features quite enough to allow her to start detonating starbolts among them, at least not yet. Instead, with a shout of her mantra, Raven enveloped them in a cylindrical shield, its translucent black surface soon coated in endless leering Robin clones.

"Azar no…" Raven muttered, as she strained to hold the shield. All around them, Robin was pressing into the black barrier, some licking its surface lewdly, other making disgusting hand gestures and suggestive motions against its curved expanses. "Star… Starfire… these things are not Robin," she reconfirmed what Starfire herself had told her, trying to imprint that main fact onto her friend as quickly as possible. "They aren't even actually alive. This is your dream, your mind, only you have the power to do this. Starfire… it's time to Take. Them. Out."

"But—" She tried to protest, for a moment still able to see that wonderful man in all of these twisted little copies, then looked down at those handprints on her dress again, remembering why blood still clung crusty and dried to her right hand. "Yes. You have but to grant me an opening." The icy determination in her voice would have frozen a live flame.

Waiting for her signal, Raven opened a small vertical gap in the shield, and instantly a gaggle of hands were reaching through it to try and grab hold of any part of Starfire they could reach. Instead, as Starfire wound her hands together in a special shape, gathering great swirling gouts of green energy into a massive, intensely hot sphere, the arms were burned away in flash of disintegrating flesh, the sound of the recoiling clones by far drowned out by Starfire's banshee shriek of effort and boundless, indignant fury.

"RRRRRAAAAAHHHHHRRRRR!" She roared her disgust with this nightmarish situation to the universe, an unbelievably wide, solid beam of her power arcing out of her joined palms to stab through the army of Robin clones like a high-powered cutting laser through damp cheese. The beam would simply touch them, evaporate anything it made direct contact with, and leave the scattered bits of charred Robin to fall to the ground, usually on fire. There was never really enough left over to utter any sound of complaint at annihilation, and so Starfire's voice was alone in the enduring, green-lit dance of carnage.

Slowly, Raven clinging right behind her, nearly scorched by the heat coming off her body, the two rotated, the shield protecting their backs as Starfire dragged the solid horizontal column of green death full-circle. The clones never even attempted to flee, disgusting and defiant to the last, many jumping gleefully into the incinerating heat, their flashing destruction piercing through to Starfire's heart where their vile hands had been unable to grip other areas. It was a long, slow torture, and before she was halfway done, her scream was accompanied by the harshest, bitterest tears of her memory, though they could not truly roll down her face at all far before evaporating from her terrifically hot flesh.

As Starfire's wailing shout of fury petered out, so too did the mega-starbolt, its conical arc shrinking until it was naught but a tiny twig of light, then that too dying down to nothing at all. The tall woman immediately crumpled down to her knees, Raven standing back to look a nasty askance at the Robins that stood alive still, all three of whom were making obscene jerking motions as they watched Starfire collapse. Without hesitation, the dark woman inverted her shield, wrapping it around the three remainder Robins and using it to snap their necks. She dumped the lot of them to the ground and knelt next to Starfire, who was whimpering slowly, beyond tears, just trying to get tiny bursts of breath into her lungs now.

"Star I—" Raven began, only for a jerky shake of Starfire's head to smack her into mute standby. It was clear that she was not ready to talk, that she might not be ready to talk for a long time, and so Raven instead looked out over the vast field of ash and charred bits of Robin at the center of which the two of them now crouched. There was an odd arm or leg still smoldering away, but other than that, there was nothing at all around them in this weird place between blank floor and mosaic ceiling, not as far as the eye could see out into the grey void the floor disappeared into. There was no sign of the sphere that had once been their combined lusts.

"I do not believe—" Starfire gasped out, shocking Raven out of her dark contemplations, "I can not—I can not—I just killed him!" and the last transformed into a mild bawling wail as the tears finally flowed forth. Great sobs wracked her crumpled form, billowing ash clinging to the wetness her skin had finally cooled enough to allow on her face, and Raven dutifully, even eagerly ignored the radiating warmth of her body and wrapped her arms around Starfire's shoulders. Recalling the Robin she'd impaled back in Lust's garden, she recognized more or less exactly how Star felt, and her heart bled for her dear friend, even as a nasty little voice in the back of her mind whispered black contemplations of how much longer they'd considered each other friends when they got out of this nightmare.

If they got out of this nightmare.

"Robin…" Starfire moaned out, "Oh Robin…" There was a sudden nose from behind them, and Raven snapped around to face it, even as Starfire continued to weep harsh tears into the ash she'd made of her true heartthrob. The noise became louder, and moved slowly around to coming from in front of them, Raven completely unable to locate its source, as though it was an invisible speaker groaning out the indefinable pulse of noise. Finally though, it came to stop, and in a crackling flash of light, the sphere that had once been Lust and StarLust appeared before them again. Before either woman could say anything, it flashed again, pulsed organically, then blinded them with an ever brighter shout of harsh light.

"I hear tell that someone's been desiring me…" came the instantly recognizable voice, and as both women rubbed their eyes clear, Robin came into view once again. It was not the same Robin, not by any stretch of the imagination, and as both women felt their jaws strike the floor, it was Starfire who placed a hand between herself and Raven and shoved the woman to the side. There wasn't much chance of teamwork this time…

CLIFFHANGER! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH

No, but seriously folks, I could get a billion, billion, billion flames for this and never regret a single thing. I mean, do you have any concept how spectacularly entertaining it was to write this? No—you don't, really, you couldn't possibly have had as much fun reading it as I had thinking it up, trust me. Oh God. I'm not even kidding, when I started developing the transition from frighteningly intimate to idiotically sexual—my good lord, I thought I was going to loose a finger typing it up, I couldn't get it onto the word file fast enough. That this was the result of me overcoming some rather serious writer's block should explain the rather extreme transition of mood and tone from start to finish, and god, what a finish! The motion from terrifying incidents of irresistible sexual advances to their full ability to combat the encroachment of their respective lusts as the telepathic contact formed—well—I just had a friggen ball writing it, I tell ya. Please, please tell me you like it too. Or hell, don't, I couldn't really care less for anyone else's opinion on this one, it was jus that great to put together. (That's not to say you shouldn't review, I still love to hear from people, even my detractors).

On a second note, when I was first considering to make this a completely serious chapter, a chapter without the oozing and sickeningly twisted ending it wound up with, I felt I needed a little comic relief, so I wrote a rather humorous little self-insertion disclaimer piece. It's gone now, but if you should happen to want a little chuckle, ask for it and I'll send it to you. It's almost as violently twisted as the end I wound up writing, but it is not at all sexual, so there.

Future—Look forward to next chapter, though I doubt seriously I can top this anytime soon, it'll still be great. Resolution to this rather nasty cliffhanger (sorry, but there was nowhere else to break anytime soon) as well as the crossing of the male and female storylines, and a truckload of angst to go with it all. Sooner than two weeks this time, I promise. No title yet—I'm posting this more or less hot off the presses, so I haven't thought that far ahead yet.

Review, please.

KAZZY 103—If you don't give me some way to contact you, I'm gonna go nuts. You can't leave such great reviews and then just deny me the chance to heap thanks upon you. If you don't want to leave your E-mail here, or if you don't have one, you can either send me a private e-mail by my address or just say that you can't or won't e-mail with me and I'll post review responses (reluctantly) on my next chapter.