Bargains and Balance

The offer still stands to see who can guess the meaning of the title. The one person who did attempt to guess was close, but not quite there.

I don't own Teen Titans.

Chapter VII

Raven was sitting on her bed with a book when it had happened. It wasn't much, but she recognized the feeling and the sensation.

First, her hands started tingling as though they were falling asleep. Then the sensation crawled up her arms to her shoulders, and encompassed her entire body.

Raven dropped the book, and clutched her head and closed her eyes. When she opened them, she found herself in a void. So black, she couldn't see herself, regardless if she waved a hand in front of her face.

There wasn't a breeze or a stable ground which she could stand or sit on. Raven was just hovering in the void, surrounded by the sound of deep, rumbling, amused chuckle.

"You were gone!" Raven shouted into the void.

"I am never gone. For I am TRIGON!" her father roared. "You're magic surprised me, I admit, daughter. But I have a plan. I always have a plan. You will be of use once more."

"I'll never help you! Ever!" Raven tried to use her powers, but immediately felt dizzy.

"Heh heh heh. Child, you can't even use your powers to protect the ones you love." Raven felt something go behind her and she whirled around but couldn't see anything. "But if you do what I request, then you won't have to worry about your friend's safety."

"Yeah. I know. Because you'll kill them!" Raven countered.

Trigon merely chuckled as if she had made a cute joke. "No. I give you my word that they will be untouched if you do what I request of you."

Raven just growled. "Bite me."

"Fine. Dismiss me. But I warn you, daughter: you will come crawling back to me for your friends sakes." Raven felt hit breath on her ear. "Especially. Your. New. Friend," he breathed.

"NO!" Raven whirled around with her hand out to strike him in the face but only fell with her momentum and opened her eyes to find herself tumbling off of her bed.

"Raven!" she looked up and found two concerned green orbs looking at her carefully.

Raven hadn't seen him since yesterday when Cyborg had given them the all clear. She had gone to her room for the rest of the afternoon, and Beast Boy had gone to find Robin. The next morning, she had come out of her room to find that Beast Boy had gone to help Robin double check the upgrades that Cyborg had made the day before she had been taken.

"Raven!" he said again.

They hadn't really had time to talk since . . . well since then.

"Ra -"

"I'm fine. Just, a lot on my mind I suppose," she said as she sat up with a groan. "My head hurts, though."

He was looking at her funny.

"What?"

"You're not telling me everything, Rae." Beast Boy looked almost scared. "Last time, I think you knew something was going to happen, but you never said anything. Looked what happened after."

Raven stood up and pulled her hood up. "We're all going to be fine," she said shortly before phasing into the floor.

Beast Boy was left standing in the room he'd only been in maybe twice before. He blinked. "This can't be good."

It was their first battle since Raven had returned. And Raven was forced to stay in the tower. So she watched the news on the Titans Television

And she really wished she had been there. Because she knew why they were getting their butts kicked.

It was a monster she had only seen in her dreams. A monster of nightmare and shadows. It looked like it had been created sorely out of Raven's dark magic, but it wasn't her. It looked a lot like a dragon, chimera, and octopus all warped into one, and when it hit Robin in the forehead, and he fell to the ground with green pus oozing out of the impact area, she knew this thing was incredibly poisonous even though it didn't look like a solid creature.

Everything the Titans threw at the monster went directly through it, for Raven knew the thing was literally made of shadows. Only her magic would've been able to so something to it, but she wasn't there. And whoever had sent the monster, she knew exactly who, had that knowledge in mind.

Starfire was struck in the stomach by a tentacle in a whip like fashion, and instead of a poisonous effect, it left a deep, clean gash that slowly started seeping blood as she fell to the ground unconscious.

Raven winced. This was absolutely horrible.

Cyborg pressed a button on his wrist and the metal on his body expanded and unfolded until he was covered in some sort of metal armor which held against the monster's attacks.

Beast Boy waited until Cyborg distracted the monster and closed his eyes tightly as if concentrating. Then he transformed into the Beast, causing Raven to give a small gasp. When had he . . . ?

The Beast dove at the creature, but sailed straight through. The monster roared and the last thing Raven saw before one of it's tentacle-like things made contact with the news' camera was Cyborg yelling Beast Boy's name and a great white light flashed in the middle of the street.

Not too long after, Raven's communicator rang and as she floated to the infirmary to get everything ready, she opened it up to see Cyborg's exhausted face.

"Hey, Rae."

"Cyborg! Is everyone okay?" Is Beast Boy okay?

"I don't really know. Robin's literally looking paler by the second, Starfire has already lost a lot of blood, and Beast Boy . . ."

Raven's heart lurched in her chest. She paused halfway through the infirmary door. "What, Cyborg? Why did you stop?"

Cyborg finished his sentence slowly as he drove his T-Car. "BB . . . is, well, as the light flashed, no one could see anything and he knew what I had planned, I called his name, and he said okay, and . . . Raven, Beast Boy -"

"He's alive, right? Tell me he's in that car with you," Raven demanded. She still hadn't moved an inch.

"He's alive. And he's in the car with me. He's unmarked, but he's not here, here. Raven, his mind . . . he won't wake up."

Beast Boy was in a meadow. The grass waved in the wind like the ocean, and the insects buzzed around from plant to plant peacefully.

"Where am I?" Beast Boy asked aloud.

The ground rumbled and Beast Boy was thrown off balance and fell on his butt. The earth stopped shaking and the green changeling shook his head.

Probably from under ground. He tried to transform into a mole to see what was happening under his feet, but when he looked down at himself, nothing had happened.

"Great. No powers in this place, huh?"

Beast Boy saw something strange over the top of the hill next to him, and walked to the top of the hill. He saw a forest stretching out beyond what he could see.

Then something gleamed in the woods. Beast Boy felt something tug at him, and resolved to go to it.

Beast Boy honestly had no clue where he was going, or why he was going towards the strange light source, but he eventually found himself at the entrance to a cave. From what he could tell, it was deep and dark, but his animal powers gave him some decent night vision.

Beast Boy went for it and entered the cave. Once he was encompassed in blackness, he was surrounded by the rumble of a deep, demonic chuckle.

Raven and Cyborg had patched up Starfire and Robin.

Bird Boy, as Cyborg called him on and off, had been close to death. The poison had entered his blood stream and had caused his throat to swell so that the oxygen entering his system was limited. Raven had used a special machine Cyborg had made to suck all of the poison out, then had put fresh blood into Robin's body. The Boy Wonder had looked practically asleep when she had finished with him.

Cyborg had worked on Starfire. He had stitched up the wound, after cleaning it of course, and then he had put her own Tamaranian blood inside her that he had been collecting over the course of the past two years. It barely did the job.

Beast Boy was more difficult. He hadn't been touched physically, and all Cyborg could do was put a thick blanket over his best friend's trembling form.

Raven had then sat down next to Beast Boy's cot as the three Titans lay unconscious.

"So what did the thing do to him, Rae?" Cyborg asked the cloaked empath.

She looked just as lost as he felt, but answered in her monotonous voice she used when she had a lot of thoughts and emotions running through her head.

"If that monster is what I think it is, it probably did what I did to Dr. Light, but on a completely different scale. I made Light face his worst fears. That monster trapped Beast Boy inside his own mind with his fears and thoughts. And if I'm not mistaken, something much worse than that."

Cyborg could only stand in silence, watching his dear friend stoke Beast Boy's hair absentmindedly.

"So B is in a coma?" he asked.

Raven hesitated before answering. "Yes, and no. I just hope he wakes up soon."

"He got there first!"

"Do not fret. We can play off of this."

"But, sir, how will you be able to bargain with him if you don't have her?"

Slade slammed his fist into his chair's armrest. "I don't want to hear your voice at the moment, you sniveling coward and fool! Ordering what we needed in plain daylight, letting the changeling get to your house!"

The man looked more stunned than afraid. Slade hadn't ever had an outburst before.

"It doesn't matter," he continued in his cool tone. "I have different plans. If he could eliminate the Titans for me, the plan would be much simpler."

"And the girl?"

"He wouldn't hurt a hair on her. Not yet. We need the gem again. But first, we need something to get her to come to us before he gets her to go to him first."

"Code 276?"

"Excellent idea. Sven, launch Code 276. The gem will be nothing but a shell when I'm done with her.

Just when you thought everything was okay. Now Raven is against the intellectual torment of Slade, and the pure evil that's her father. Seems hard :P

Reviews, peeps. You know the drill.

-Belgaria