Hey, robertskycard here!
Remember when I said that the last chapter was part of a larger fic? Well, I actually have a second scene I wrote around the time of the first. It's more angst and pain, but it kinda has a happy...ish ending. The larger fic in general was all about superhero identities and how that could seriously mess someone up, with the stresses of crime fighting devolving an OC hero into full-blown split personalities. I don't feel comfortable subjecting people to a horrendously inaccurate portrayal of Dissociative Identity Disorder.
With that said, here's little disclaimer before I proceed. Terra does NOT have multiple personalities. I admit, the way I wrote it tends to lend itsefl toward that hypothesis, but it's not the reality of the situation. Terra is doing what Terra does best. She's running from her problems. As much as I love her character, she does have a habit of refusing to face the reality of her situation, blowing things out of proportion, and reacting poorly when confronted. Because of this, I believe that when she was given the chance to start over, she took it. "Tara" is, for the purposes of this fic, a classic secret identity with a painful twist, a mask she uses when interacting with the regular, civilian world. In essence, she's put herself in a home-brewed version of the witness protection program using the identity she was born with, and the conflict between Terra and Tara is the reality of her superhero identity catching up to her civilian one.
These two chapters, as well as the OC-centric fic, was an attempt at exploring the darker side of superheros and their secret identities overall. In the full blown version of the fic, Terra would have to eventually decide if she wanted to be Terra, the hero, or Tara, the average girl, and it would deal with the fallout of her decision. As the Teen Titans (in the show proper) pretty much live as their superhero identities, the possibility of permanently deciding to be one of the two was entirely possible.
Finally, I want to profusely thank all of the people who viewed, reviewed, followed, and faved this fic. You guys are heroes in your own right.
Terra hadn't gone to school for two days after taking Doug home that night. She gave the school a courtesy and called each morning, a raspy voice telling the officials that she would be unable to attend classes on account of contracting the flu. The receptionist offered her sympathy and hoped she would come back soon. She had a few free sick days from her job, so she just cashed them in. They knew that Tara would be back. Eventually.
Terra stared at her hands. Her blood-stained hands. Slade wasn't the first. He probably wouldn't be the last. The first had been the victim of a mudslide in the Ukraine. He had been a little boy, only a few years younger than Terra had been. Terra had lost control of her power and the nearby mountain had crushed the boy's home. She had seen him, cold and pale, cradled in his weeping mother's arms, tears streaming down his father's face as he knelt beside his child.
The next had been an old shepherd in Switzerland. She had been helping him with his sheep in exchange for a place to stay and food to eat. He had been standing out at the edge of a rocky outcropping when her powers lashed out. The rock he stood upon suddenly gave way and he fell a hundred feet to his death. She made the mistake of looking over the edge and saw him, limbs twisted at odd angles, blood pooling beneath his greying hair and his broken, kind face. She would remember it till the day she died.
Then there was the earthquake that devastated a city. The casualties numbered in the hundreds, with forty-seven dead and a hundred and eighty five injured. The final body count was not established for two weeks, as the last death was someone who had been trapped under rubble and had suffocated. Terra had walked amongst the carnage, looking at the twisted wrecks that had once been homes and offices. She had looked upon the hundreds of people screaming and crying out for their loved ones.
And that was just Europe.
She'd made her way to America on a boat, hoping against hope her powers wouldn't break the ocean floor and swamp the boat in a tsunami. The ship made it safely to American shores, but Terra was foolish to think that she was safe, that everyone around her was safe. She tried to use her powers to help people, but when they lashed out, they hurt people. Killed them. And the others who witnessed it drove her away in fear and grief. She had eventually come to Jump City, where she met the Titans. And Slade.
Yet out of all the people she killed, Slade was the one who haunted her dreams the most. Unlike the others, his death wasn't an accident. She had killed him in anger, for coercing her to betray the only friends she'd ever had, for turning against her in her hour of need, for turning her into a puppet and an extension of his will. She killed him because she was sick of fighting, sick of hurting good people, sick of running. Every night spent sleeping in alleys, every night eating moldy food, every night spent running from families of people she'd hurt, it all came piling up, all came crashing down, and Terra unleashed all that pain, all that anger, all that fear, and all that hopelessness on Slade.
And it killed him.
He was evil, she kept telling herself, he never cared about you. You were just a means to an end to him. But when she looked at her hands, they looked stained with blood and they wouldn't stop shaking.
She looked up from her position on her bathroom floor, staring at the mirror on the back of the door. She saw a little girl, naked and alone, curled up in a ball, shivering, dripping water from a shower all over the tile floor. She didn't want to stand, didn't want to look at her own body, didn't want to see the scars over her chest where Slade's neural interface was surgically removed. She used to run her hands through her hair frequently, just to tuck it behind her ear. But now she couldn't, or else she'd feel the bumps where they'd sawed into her skull to remove the neural implants, the devices on her head that influenced her every thought, the devices that made her believe that the Titans wanted to kill her. That was all a lie, she realized later. They would never have crossed that blood-red line.
Except for Raven, maybe, she thought. Somehow, that morbid thought comforted her.
A knock on the door made her freeze.
"Tara? It's Kelly."
Kelly. One of Tara's friends, the blonde haired cheer captain and another one of Tara's coworkers. Why she had elected to be Tara's friend, Tara didn't know. Tara was average. No after-school activities, no especially high grades. Tara was just a face in the crowd. Maybe it was because Tara was the most responsible person in the diner. Or maybe it was because Kelly broke the stereotypical mold of an uppercrust rich girl and was kind to everyone she came across.
Tara found it in herself to stand up, keeping her eyes away from the mirror as she picked a bathrobe off its hook and wrapped it around herself. Keeping her eyes on her feet, she carefully stepped out of the bathroom, almost slipping on the water that had dripped onto the floor. She slid her feet into a pair of slippers and made her way to the door, coughing as she did so. She slid open the chain lock and then opened the door, not even looking up as she gestured for her friend to come in.
Kelly looked around and Tara could feel the pity begin to radiate off her as she got a better glimpse into Tara's domestic life, not the schoolgirl facade she put up during class. Kelly cast her a sympathetic glance.
"Are you okay, Tara?"
"I've got the flu," Tara said with a groan as she shuffled over to her bed, sitting down with a grunt. Kelly took another look around the apartment, like an appraiser looking at a house on the market.
"It can't be good for you to be cooped up in here all day," Kelly said, sitting down beside Tara gingerly. She reached over and tucked a loose strand of blonde behind Tara's ear. She was always touchy-feely like that, and sometimes it sent the wrong message to people. Tara knew it was just friendly concern.
"You don't look good. Have you been keeping hydrated?"
Truth be told, Tara had almost been completely forgotten. Terra had been behind the wheel, and she didn't want to eat or drink, just wanted focus on how exhausted she was, how many people she'd hurt. Tara had just come back to the forefront and was still unsure what she'd been doing with her life for the past couple of days. With the dry, sticky feeling in her mouth, though, 'hydrating' hadn't been one of the priorities. She shook her head.
Kelly stood up and went to the fridge, looking inside. She frowned, apparently not liking what she found in there. Tara knew why. Her drink supply was mostly soda with some expired milk she hadn't thrown out yet, nothing someone as health conscious as Kelly would ever drink. Shutting the door and reaching up into the cabinets, Kelly pulled out a glass and filled it in the sink. She brought it to Tara.
"Here."
Tara gently took the glass from Kelly's hand and drank deeply as Kelly sat beside her, "Thanks."
"No problem."
They sat in silence for a moment as Tara nursed her glass. It suddenly came to mind that Kelly was normally at cheer practice around this time.
"Aren't you supposed to be at practice?"
"Coach cancelled practice today. Inclement weather."
Tara looked out her window and saw the water running down the glass in rivulets, heard it pattering on the roof. She hadn't even noticed it was raining, or that Kelly was wet.
"Oh," she said, draining her glass. She moved to stand up, but Kelly gently pulled the glass out of her hand.
"Let me get that."
Kelly refilled the glass and brought it back. Despite Kelly's warmth and kindness, she was awkward when she didn't know what was wrong or why. Needless to say, Tara had a lot of awkward conversations with Kelly. This turned out to be one of them.
"Doug told me you said you were gonna call him," Kelly said as she sat down, trying to break the ice.
"I know. I just didn't want to hear an earful from his parents."
"He's just worried, Tara. Amber and Dionne are, too. Look, you know that you can tell me anything, right?"
"Yeah," Tara sighed. Kelly was wrong. Some things were meant to be secrets, "Everything's fine. I've just been sick these past couple of days."
Kelly shifted nervously.
"What?"
"It's just..." Kelly began twiddling her thumbs, "Ever since that Beast Boy kid showed up and talked to you you've been...sort of...different."
"Different how?" Tara said with more bitterness than she'd intended.
"I mean you've just kinda...closed off."
Well that was one way to describe it, Tara thought, a more accurate term would have been 'mental civil war.' She didn't say anything about that.
"I'm sorry, Kelly. It's just...awkward when some guy thinks you're somebody else."
The guilt of the lie nearly tore her heart out.
"He's not just 'some guy,'" Kelly admonished, "He's a Teen Titan."
"Exactly."
"Look," Kelly said, taking Tara by the shoulders, "I'm just trying to see if there was anything...untoward that went on."
"'Untoward?'"
"I mean...did he...did he try to...because you know how some celebrities get around girls. They just don't take 'no' for an answer."
Terra wanted to rip her in half for even the suggestion of it. Beast Boy was not like that. He was never like that. He was awkward, sheepish. Kind.
Tara glared at her friend, "Nothing happened. He just tried to make me remember stuff that happened with some other girl. He's left me alone since."
"Oh. Well...good."
Good. Right.
"Did...anything else happen? Anything at all?" Kelly said gently.
Tara had enough. She didn't want to talk about this. She didn't want to tell her that Beast Boy's little visit had brought to mind all the terrible things she had done, "Why are you asking me this?"
"It's just that everything's been normal but you've been in kind of a funk. The only thing that really stood out to me was that thing that happened with Beast Boy, so I assumed-"
"It has nothing to do with that, so just leave it, okay?"
Kelly suddenly went on the offensive, "Okay, then what does it have to do with?"
"It's..."
I betrayed my friends. I killed someone. I pretend to one of my best friends that I don't even know him.
"It's personal."
Kelly gave her a look and Tara realized it was probably the wrong thing to say. But Terra could never be permitted to come free. Not after that night. Not after she nearly lost control again.
Kelly spoke, "You go to school, go to work, and go straight home, barely talking to any of us, never making any plans to hang out. We call you, it goes straight to voicemail. We text you, get nothing back. All I'm doing is trying to look out for you, so you can at least do me a courtesy and clue me in on what's going on. We're concerned about you. We're your friends. Please. Don't shut us out."
"I'm sorry," Tara said and then did what she always did. She invented a lie and broke her own heart, "Okay. You're right. It does have something to do with Beast Boy. It's just...that poor kid. I could just tell he really felt something for that Terra girl he kept mentioning. He wanted so badly for me to be her. She must have been someone real special to him. But she's gone, and I can't be that girl for him. I feel sorry for the poor guy. He was never anything but nice to me."
"And that's why you've been avoiding us?"
"I guess so. I don't know why, but I keep thinking about how badly his luck turned out."
Kelly gave her a skeptical look, but didn't question the veracity of her statement. She took Tara's hands in hers, "He's gonna be fine, Tara. One day, he's going to find someone else and he'll be happy. Sure, he's grieving now, but he'll eventually move on. And at least one of the lady Titans is still single, right?"
Tara nodded in agreement but the words cut through Terra like a knife. She knew him better. He didn't 'move on' when she was dead, how could he move on if she was alive? Her only choice had been to lie to him, to break his heart, to pretend she was someone else. If you want to change your identity, she thought bitterly, you become a liar. Liar. Traitor. Murderer. All words to describe Beast Boy's perfect girl.
"Tara?"
"Yeah?"
"You kinda zoned out for a second."
Another memory wormed its way out.
"If you knew something bad about me, would you still be my friend?"
Experience had taught her that the answer was complicated.
"Oh. Sorry," Tara stood up, shaking her head. It was time to get out of this apartment, get away from Terra for a while, "Thanks, Kelly. I feel a bit better, now. Can we go get something to eat? I'm starving."
Kelly smiled as she stood up beside her, "Great! Do you want me to invite Amber and Dionne?"
Tara smiled, "Sure."