"Maaa-maaa! Can you say Mama? Go on, you can do it!"
Derek sat on his haunches, watching Raven, head tilted in curiosity; the other Titans merely sat, watching her make a fool of herself trying to get the proto-werewolf to speak. It would be hilarious, if it wasn't terrifying. Raven didn't do the whole 'baby-talk' thing, and that was a fact; but here she was, doing baby-talk and trying to get a feral man-child to call her Mama.
"Meh!" Derek barked, which was more progress than he'd made in the last hour. Raven rolled her eyes, letting him snatch a piece of jerky from her fingers before giving the order again.
"Mama. Say Mama, go ahead…" she encouraged, and the whole group leaned forward in their seats, now fully invested in these escapades. Derek opened his mouth, and everyone held their breath, clutching the arms of their chairs; or, as was for Beast-Boy, his knees.
"Mmmmmm…" he hummed, seeming to draw it out, almost, before finishing with "Ama!", causing everyone to burst into cheers, Terra spinning Beast-Boy around in her arms like it was Dirty Dancing while Cyborg launched confetti from his shoulder, covering the living room in it.
"This calls for celebration!" Robin declared, getting everyone's attention. "We've been trying to get more than two words out of him for two weeks now! Get changed, we're going for pizza!"
"Booo!" Terra called. "We've done pizza every night for the last week!"
And here, she climbed onto the back of the couch like James Morgan on a barrel of rum, preparing to make a speech. Terra was weirdly good at speeches (though nobody would go so far as to call them inspirational), and everyone geared up to listen to another good one.
"Pizza! Pizza! Every night, Pizza! We have to lay low, I understand that, my brothers and sisters, but we are not turtles! Robin is not a rat! We are not ninjas! We cannot subsist on pizza, video games, and sex alone!"
"Here, here!" Raven agreed.
"We need activity! We need inspiration! We need entertainment! We need to let our bodies rest, yes, but we must stimulate our minds!"
"Yeah, and my jaw is starting to hurt!" Beast Boy joked, earning a glare for the interruption.
"We need to get out of the house, stretch our legs, have some fun! Does Superman hide away in Metropolis, scraping out a living in the sewers? No! He rules that city with an iron fist! And I say, if we're as good as Superman, why can't we do the same? Why, if we can't rule, can we at least not go out as we are, and be feared, but accepted?! Why don't we get a cool tower like the HIVE Academy?"
"A tower would be kinda cool…" Robin admitted, and it was a fair point. A Tower would be ridiculously cool.
"And beyond all of this! Beyond the need to hide, beyond the lust we all feel in our hearts to see the sun, beyond all these things is one simple fact. I'm out of tampons…" she admitted, sitting down with a blush.
After a beat of silence, Starfire raised her hand. "I am also out of the pads, and do not wish to use the tampons I know friend Raven possesses. The last time I did this, it vibrated most pleasantly, but was quite distracting."
"That's what happened to my bullet…" Raven mused, rather amused by the revelation.
"Ok so do we wanna take over the city, or just go to Walmart?" Cyborg questioned. "I mean, I'm down for either, I need to get some new wrenches anyways."
"If we're leaving the base, we need to stop at the toy store, I need a new vibe anyways, thanks to Starfire," Raven added.
"Ok fine, let's do both!" Robin agreed. "We go to Walmart, the porn shop, we stop for pizza, and then we take over the city, got it?"
"I'm kinda feeling more like pasta," Beast Boy admitted. "Could we go to Olive Garden instead?"
"Their breadsticks are delicious," Robin conceded. "Fine! Walmart, porn store, Olive Garden, then we take over the city!"
"Can you believe Olive Garden called the cops on us?" Raven groused, sitting on Derek's back as he lazily did push ups with one hand. His other arm had been vaporized by some new weapon the police force had used, though it was swiftly growing back.
"Yes" everyone else monotoned.
"Ok fine, but still. We even had the money to pay our bill!"
"Until Fido chowed down on the maitre'd's liver for our food taking too long, we were doing great," Terra groused, glaring at the wolf boy, who at least had the decency to look up at her with a grin before going back to his exercises.
"It's not our fault my poor baby got hungry, is it sweetie?" Raven cooed at Derek, who looked up at her with adoration, tail wagging.
"Ok ok legitimately none of this matters" Beast Boy snapped at them both. "We all got fucking arrested. We're literally in jail right now!"
Derek made a low, confused growl, and the other shapeshifter shook his head.
"Nah, dude, they blocked our powers. It's the collars."
Again, Derek looked at him confused, letting Raven slide from his back as he stood. He scratched at his new collar with his one hand, then grinned at his teammates as he ripped it off, tossing the pieces to the ground.
"Fff-ffuck thaat," he grinned at them, snapping his shoulder forward and forcing his new arm to shoot forward, finishing the job in half a heartbeat. He reached over and tore Raven's collar off, then grinned even wider.
"Mmmama! Plan!" he barked, and Raven skimmed his surface thoughts before laughing at how ridiculous of a plan it was- ridiculous but effective was something the Titans could work with.
"Good boy," she smiled, before teleporting the rest of the team out of the cell before the guards could come charging in, guns blazing.
Derek grinned, looking skyward for a brief moment as the guards took aim.
"Think are brave… Can smell your fear… want live, leave now." He warned them, and had any of the Titans been there to hear it, they'd have been shocked by the fact that he could speak in full sentences.
And then he blurred, lightning crackling off him as he moved, the guards firing on him as quickly as they could, only to fall, one by one. Some of them died well, by Derek's approximation, firing to the last and refusing to give in. Some died like cowards, whimpering on the ground like worms. But all of them died screaming. Every last one of them, to the man, died screaming.
When he left the room, he was greeted by the sight of a sickly looking man, rail thin and sitting in a wheelchair. This should have been easy, but Derek personally doubted it would be. The man had the bearing of a threat, even from that chair of his he was sitting in.
"Master Al Ghul said you wouldn't be contained that easily," the man mused, his voice regulated by the modulator in his breathing tube. "You have the chance to go back into your kennel now, you know."
Even through the tube, he had a thick South American accent, though Derek didn't care to place it any further, just then. Besides, any further didn't really matter. The man would be dead soon enough anyways, and the gods didn't care where your accent was from.
"Not happen" the wolf growled, and the man nodded.
"I can respect that. We're not so different, you and I. We were both intended to destroy a greater threat… but that similarity won't aid you here, pup."
He pressed a button on his wheelchair, and tubes on his back began to fill with a noxious green liquid. Derek watched, vaguely amused, as the man stood up, his muscles filling out, his size doubling, no, tripling! His muscles ballooned outwards, and he stepped forward, pulling his breathing tube from his throat and sliding a mask over his face.
"My name is Bane, boy. You will remember it. I was created to defeat you, after all."
That wasn't entirely true. Bane hadn't been created to fight anyone, he hadn't been created at all. He'd been born in the worst prison known to man, and rescued at the age of eight. Eight years of Hell can twist a man, and Bane was certainly twisted by the experience. But freedom had come to him with his greatest creation, derived from the Lazarus pit beneath the prison. Venom was unstable, yes, and it had damned him, but it had given him freedom to fight back against the system that would have condemned him for daring to be born. It made him strong enough to go up against Gods and Monsters, and power like that always came at a cost. Even though he'd stabilized the formula over the years, he'd be dead within a decade.
He intended to do something worthwhile in that limited time, though. A man could do a lot of good in a decade's worth of time.
Derek swung first, claws slicing through the air with a whistle, catching onto nothing even as Bane nailed him in the face with a still-growing fist. It was a war, in a way, Bane stronger but Derek faster, and neither one able to cause any permanent damage to the other. They went back and forth, like a tennis match, neither gaining anything like the upper hand over the other. Had Derek chosen to draw his sword, he might have won- but something ancient and instinctual in him said that it wouldn't be fair to end the fight now. That instinctual voice told him, quite firmly, that this was meant to be, and that if he didn't triumph with just his fists and fangs, he'd never truly triumph.
"You're quite good at this," Bane complimented in an offhanded fashion, getting a shrug as Derek dodged another punch, only to fall into a knife hand strike as he did. The proto-lycan retaliated with a slash of his claws that caught Bane across the chest, though it healed nearly instantaneously.
"Had nothing but time for practice," the teen admitted, jumping up into the air to launch a series of spin kicks that Bane was forced to use both hands to block. He grabbed his foe by the ankle and smashed him through a wall, then above his head and into the floor before tossing him away. It was a practical move, giving him time to breathe, while resting comfortably in the knowledge that Derek wouldn't flee the fight anytime soon.
"It shows, mi amigo. Most people I spar with cannot stand up to me."
"Most people pussies," Derek growled as he stepped back into the room, shaking off the drywall dust and forcing his shoulder back into the socket so it could finish healing properly. "I killing machine."
Which was true. Pound for pound, death for death, Derek was the greatest killer on the planet. Superman could kill them quicker, The Flash could kill a thousand men in a minute, but Derek would outlast them. When Superman had seen his Kingdom Come, and The Flash had run his last race, Derek would still be standing and still be killing. He had the staying power of Eternity, and now that he was out of his 'kennel', he intended to show the world why letting him loose was the worst mistake it could have made. A death every day, and if the Titans wouldn't grant him that, he would move on.
"I know. That's half the problem," Bane mocked, tossing a chair that had miraculously survived their fight thus far. Derek blocked it and moved, punching the air so hard that it broke the sound barrier and struck Bane in the chest, even across the room.
Giving a grunt, Bane dropped, rolling through the rubble and letting himself rest for the briefest of moments.
"Let us end this," he snapped. "I am meant to get you back. You are meant to try and avoid that," he said as he stood.
"Fine," Derek grunted, only to disappear a moment later, leaving a blinking and confused Bane behind.
The muscular mercenary lifted his wrist to eye level, a hologram of his employer activating.
"Did you succeed, Mr. Dorrance?"
"No. He ran to fight another day, Sir."
"Pity. You'll pursue?"
"I would if I had been able to see the direction he fled. He's faster than you told me… Stronger, as well. I'll be feeling this fight for a few hours. I'll need to go to my lab and create more of my Venom if I am to continue in your employ as more than a corpse."
"Do so. I want him dead if you can do it, captured failing that."
"Understood. I'll do it, though it will take time."
"We have precious little of that, but do what you can."
The hologram blinked away, and Bane let himself relax, carrying his chair outside and sitting it down at the nearest bus stop. He donned his coat and let his Venom drain away, sitting in the chair as he shrank, his muscles atrophying away as the Venom faded. He hated being reliant on the chair, but he hated being reliant on Venom even moreso. The drug was tearing him apart, but it made him feel so good whilst doing so that sometimes all he wanted to do was let himself drown in the stuff. Overdose on the feeling of existing without pain and never hurt again.
"One day, perhaps, but not today," he mused to himself as the bus pulled up.