AN: Hello again, Thank you all again for your favorites and reviews. I'm sorry you only got one chapter last week and this one is a few days late, but it was the week before my spring break and unfortunately that means I go from having little to no homework to horrendous amounts of projects and tests that I have no time for because of my job and responsibilities at home. However it's finally spring break and I can at least attempt to relax even though I still have eight pages of integrals to do...
Anyway, I wish I could write you all longer chapters but unfortunately this is the last of my pre-written content. I'm now officially picking up where I left off. SO if I was serious about reviews before I'm doubly serious now. I want to know what you guys like and dislike SPECIFICALLY, and not just events but themes, word choice, plot, etc... deep stuff. That helps me develop my story and gives me ideas. Also if you have any songs or fanart you think would be inspirationaly, please do send it my way it would be greatly appreciated and maybe even reflected later on.
But ending this unforgivably long author's note, please enjoy the next chapter.
Complaining of a Sudden Unnatural Cold
His boots splashed in the water just a few inches deep as it rushed around his shoes. The sunlight was glaring before him, his hand followed the wall in his blindness as his blue eyes longed virgined of sunlight re-attuned.
He stumbled from the mouth of the sewer pipe as the water rushed past his heels and poured in a stoic waterfall into the sea. His mind was numbed with terror and denial, a single careless step and the ground never met his shoe. His leg was swallowed by the blinding sunlight and in mindless desperation Danny twisted and grappled with the lip of the tunnel jutting out from the seaside cliff.
The water washed over him as his lay there huddled at the mouth, the weeping jaws of the underbelly, one leg dangling into white nothingness and stale water slipping past. Ebbing around him, thoughtless obstacle, an island in the river, a rock in the stream.
A pebble under the ice…
He started to shiver.
All he could see in the blinding light was frozen black holes and frostbitten skin. Lost in the screaming white out.
All he could see was a dead hobo, a blue skinned corpse with sticky eyes. He was haunting him, this cold. It was a ghost he was haunting him. The icicles hanging above break.
Danny sprang to his feet and glared down the tunnel. All he could see was the dark nothingness. He was in twilight, caught between the sunlight and the gloom. Caught under the ice flow.
He was a hunted man, a wanted man, he was a murderer. His heart was pounding his chest. Burried in an avalanche.
His hands flew to his head and he cried out. Falling into the glacial crevasse.
"IT'S NOT MY FAULT!"
The frozen winds are howling.
Absolute Zero.
"EEEEEEEEEPPPP!"
The shriek echoed down the corridors of the tower followed by a resounding crash that rang out from the small bathroom and carried past the concrete and steel girders that made the tower tall, and funneled down into the basement garage, causing Cyborg to drop his plasma torch and gouge a horrid scar in the body of his car.
"What the…! AH MAN!"
The scream broke his concentration and Robin stumbled, tripped over his own feet, falling head first into the practice dummy. His bow staff jabbing him in the gut. There was a surprised gasp in the corner followed by a thump.
Robin untangled himself from the straw figure and caught sight of a sour faced Raven picking herself up from the floor, having been jarred from her meditation.
The cry cut through even the screech of tires blaring from the sound system. The game control leapt from Beast Boy's hands and clattered across the floor tiles. The racer spun out of control and careened across the screen to explode in brilliantly rendered graphics.
Four pairs of shoes skidded to a halt outside of the bathroom door.
"Starfire!"
Robin pounded on the door.
"Are you alright?!"
A muffled response drifted through the steel door "Yes! Don't come in please!"
A few moments later the door slid open and a very wet and very bundled Starfire, wrapped in not one but two plush bathrobes, stepped out. Her teeth chattered and her orange skin was flushed. Four expressions shifted from concern to confusion.
"What happened to you?" Cyborg asked as Beast Boy edged around him and peaked past Starfire to get a look into the obscured bathroom. The young alien colored with embarrassment.
"P-please friends," she said between chattering teeth, "Are the b-bathing facilities on Earth always so suddenly c-cold."
They exchanged confused looks. And Beast Boy suddenly let out a yell of surprise.
"Whoa! Dude!"
Starfire stepped aside and the lasts wisps of steam cleared from the bathroom air. The mirror more often blurred with condensation was layered with frost, the shower curtains were stiff and glittering and a great frozen icicle hung from the shower head.
"What the…"
Robin never finished as the blaring tower alarms cut him off mid-sentence. Not staying to ponder the incident further, the four fully clothed Titans rushed back to the tower common room and a reluctant Starfire edged back into the glacial bathroom to retrieve her clothes and dress herself.
They regrouped in front of the view screen that previously displayed Beast Boy's racing game and now sported a digital civic layout of Jump.
Starfire was the last to arrive and hurriedly tossed aside the pair of bathrobes as she glided over the short set of steps and alighted beside Robin who stared intently at the screen and the flashing maze of lines that traced nearly half of the streets and alleyways depicted on the city map.
"What is it?" Raven asked, voicing the customary question they all shared. Robin jabbed the keyboard and pulled up the alarm report and data analysis.
"Looks like Starfire wasn't the only one who got a cold shower," he said and pulled up a few more files, "It looks like the plumbing in half the city is frozen. And not just cold, I mean frozen solid, as in the sewers and cisterns are completely encased in ice and were frozen instantly."
A series of images appeared on the screen. Images of sewer tunnels lined with ice and casting an angelic blue hue across the dark passage ways as the brief light shined in from the surface, of frozen waterfalls cascading from the lip of a frost coated pipe.
"Whoa, what could've done that?" Cyborg was astounded by the efficiency and suddenness at which the ice had appeared, there wasn't a machine he could imagine with the capability of freezing a minimum of ten miles of tunnels under a majorly populated city without also freezing the city above. Not to mention the kind of power such a machine would require. Which meant only one thing.
"Someone with powers did this."
Robin voiced what all of the Titans were thinking. Something super human was in the city, and it was something they hadn't faced before.
He was falling.
No.
Sliding.
Sliding down a wall of ice, a waterfall that tumbled down the seaside cliff and somersaulted in joyous waves into the ocean, but now the caps of the waves weren't the only white water as Danny plummeted toward the base. For several meters beyond the cliff side and the wondrous ice sculpture, the water was ice-locked.
A massive ice flow grew out from the waterfall and glued itself to the cliff while stretching several feet into the darkening depths, locking unwary sea-life in its sudden frosty grip.
Danny hit the bottom and rocketed out to sea across the white hills of sea ice in the late September California sun. As he slowed the whistling of the wind in his ears died until it fell silent entirely, and he lay their dazed, staring up at the unmoving sky.
A seagull floating lazy on the air currents drifted into his vision. Its beady black eyes trained on him and it let out a shrill cry before wheeling around on the wind and soaring beyond his sight.
What's happening to me?
Danny felt a lump forming his throat. His eyes began to burn.
Why can't I control this? Why can't these goddamn powers just leave me alone?"
A tear fell.
"Why can't I just be me?"
And lying there on the ice cap he created.
A seventeen year old lost little boy started to cry.
The sensor in Robin's hand chirped at him rudely for the fifth time that evening. A red set of words flashed across the screen one more.
Factor of origin unidentified.
For the fifth time that night Robin just frowned, punched in the data, and tried again, but it was getting old. His fingers were numb and his feet were freezing through his boots. They'd been tromping across the ice flow under the main sewage drain on the southwestern section of Jump Bay for the last three hours, looking for any trace of what may have instigated the freezing of the city's drainage system, and so far…
They's found nothing.
Nada.
Zilch.
And on top of that the mayor was getting impatient, wanting already to begin breaking up the ice cap and freeing up the main tunnels. After the first few hours they'd discovered the ice was a tightly packed, super dense, super hard form of glacial ice that only formed as a result of high pressure and intense cold, and was only found in the Arctic and Antarctic. The ice is so dense, it's difficult for heat energy to fully penetrate the ice and begin the process of melting.
In other words, after the entire afternoon had come and gone and evening wore on, all of the pipes were still frozen and the overall mass of the ice under the city streets had only decreased by maybe five percent.
With repairs already needed on the buildings whose pipes had burst as a result of the freeze, the mayor desperately needed to assess the damages to the tunnel ways themselves.
And Robin's in depth investigation was currently in the way of that.
Regardless however, the data had indicated that the main drainage tunnel to Jump Bay had recorded the lowest temperatures at the time of the incident which meant that it was the likely origin of the sudden… cold snap… So far, though, Robin had nothing else to back that up. No chemical abnormalities in the area were present to indicate anything at all, unfortunately, ice does preserve foot prints.
The rest of the titans were in other areas of the city that had bolstered and remote suspicions, none of them had reported anything significant, and all of them were growing weary and disheartened as well as confused.
Any villain would have issued a statement of demand after such an event, and yet there was nothing.
No vengeful phone calls, no broadcastings of ransoms or domination aspirations, not so much as a spiteful letter.
To Robin it was beginning to feel more and more like an accident, albeit a tragic one as many homeless settlements sprang up in the sewers and already some bodies had been found, but there didn't seem to be any malicious intent. Damages were incidental at best and the situation itself was beginning to beg the question.
If one has this much power, why freeze the just the pipes? Why not freeze the entire city?
The only answer was that the perpetrator never meant to freeze anything, but something got out of control. And for the Titans, that meant it was their responsibility to ensure it never got out of control again.
The scanner chirped again, equally as rudely, but now twice as annoying.
Factor of origin unidentified.
Robin sighed and grew more disheartened. His eyes drifted from the unyielding ice out towards the sea. The waves were calm and the sunset shocked the horizon with orange and fiery blush. His thoughts drifted back to his other investigations and cases, first to his most previous.
The Fenton case.
The image a young pale boy with dark hair and bright blue eyes drifted across his mind, and Robin was instantly somewhere else.
He was standing on a dark city street in the rain with Johnny Rancid screaming of ghosts.
And Beast Boy was complaining of a sudden unnatural cold.
The dirty gas station bathroom provided him with clean clothes and a body washed in sections. He hitched a ride back into the city. Just looking for some normalcy.
Something normal.
None the less he was lounging in the back of a pickup truck as the sun sank in the sky, the city lights erupted in a glare of neon and fluorescents. For once he was glad at how the artificial light washed out the stars and turned the night sky from inky and deep to smoky and dim. He didn't want to see the stars tonight. He was worried he might dream about being among them.
Despite the harsh city glare a few hopeful pinpricks of light sparkled through, Danny blocked them out by shutting his eyes. He let the gentle rhythm of the engine soothe his aching chest as the engine growl subsided to a hum and then escalated into a snarl at the whim of the driver's half attentive foot on the gas petal.
After breaking down on the ice under the sun and the motionless sky, he was despondent now. He was exhausted from the stress and the trauma plaguing him, haunting his steps. So exhausted. So tired, all he wanted was sleep, and somewhere safe with which to rest.
But those eyes were black on his mind and he couldn't get them out of his head. From now on, till the day he really died, he felt that they would be watching him.
Someone always seems to dying around him, and always because he can't seem to control himself.
The pickup began to slowdown again and the turning signal came on. Danny felt his body pulling him sideways as the driver turned and pulled into a parking lot. A brightness burn through his lids and he opened his eyes, protected from the stars by the flashing neon sign that put the last of them out.
The light from the sign hurt at first, but it was a blessing he took without complaint. He didn't bother read the name it displayed, he only saw the word Inn and that was enough to guarantee his temporary satisfaction.
He climbed from the bed of the truck, came around to the driver's window. He thanked the man who acknowledged with a dismissive wave. Even so the hard cut man with the softest eyes didn't pull away until young Daniel's hand grasp the handle of the hotel lobby doors and the last glimpse of his boot disappeared beyond the glass.
The motel was cheap, the bed was cheaper, but never had Danny been more relieved to see a thin spring mattress and half stuffed pillows in the entirety of his half-ghost existence. His boots and jacket tumbled to the floor, but nothing else made it off before he collapsed on the bed and fell into unguarded sleep, and drifted into foolishly unwary dreams.