I'm curious.

Robin used to try and get me with the old "curiosity killed the cat", but sometimes my being curious has actually been good. Like when I went all 007 and found the bad guy lurking in Raven's book.

So I figure it isn't that bad when the thing poking at my curious is my own mind.

That night after everyone goes to bed, I go through what Raven taught us. It takes a while, just like the first time, but I make it into my mindscape OK. I go back into my dream-room, take a good deep breath and choose one of the corners.

Perspective is funny in this place. As I get closer, the darkness seems bigger, until it feels like I'm standing at the mouth of a cave full of something dark and tangible like cloth.

Creepy.

I wonder if I can bring up a dream flashlight. It doesn't work, so I guess I have to actually face my darkness, not just in the metaphoric sense. My mind sucks though. How can it summon a whole continent and not give me a flashlight?

I stake another step into the darkness, and for a second it feels like stepping through a dense velvet curtain, but then I'm through and there's light. At the other side is Terra's room.

For a moment, my breath catches painfully in my chest. It looks just like it did a few months ago when I took Not-Terra to see it, the stars and the faux rock bed, the box I made her. Even the sky outside her windows is still orange and purple.

The walls are plastered with posters of things I know I don't have pictures of, just like my room: a poster of Terra on the day I met her, winking that flirty wink at me. There's Terra's profile out by the rocks, frozen in the act of tossing a pebble into the water. Terra laughing openly, my hand on her shoulder, and I remember the pizza eating contest. Terra crying and clinging to the purple and black of my uniform, lost, afraid and ashamed after losing control of her powers that one time underground. Terra rising over the edge of our roof framed by the setting sun, smiling and sure of herself – the day she came back while we played volleyball. There's a poster of Titans Tower sticking halfway up from the ground, and while there is no Terra visible, that memory is full of her.

There're other posters, but these look like I got at them in tiger form, because they're completely shredded. There's a poster by the window that has just enough left of Terra's head to let me know she's wearing Slade's neural interphase suit in it. Another, torn down the middle, looks like it has a border: up close I can see it's the moment before she closed a rift in the ground in my face, her mocking expression and the jagged earth around her. Several other ripped up ones have just enough left of a torso in a white shirt or bits of a black tie, so they belong to memories with Not Terra.

I walk further into the room, invaded by that feeling that comes just before you puke your guts out, when you know you're about to feel pretty bad, but couldn't stop it if you tried. In the wall behind the head of Terra's bed I can see a perfectly whole poster of Terra's face as seen from way up close, her eyes closed, her mouth just barely parted. The rusted old netting from the Ferris wheel cart frames her face.

The last poster makes me sad and angry. My date with her was one of the happiest days of my life. The almost kiss wasn't as happy, because she was so sad and sounded so desperate, but it was emotional, and I'd thought it was ours. Finding out that she was talking about my friends getting flattened by Sladebots while I was out eating pie with the person that made it all possible makes this memory feel wrong. Poisoned.

I lunge for it, but I don't even touch it before an invisible force rips it to pieces. And then the voices start. They're loud and sharp, not echoey like the movies make them out to be.

I'm just a girl with a geometry test next period and I haven't studied

Perhaps she wanted to keep you as a pet

I don't have any friends, remember?

I hope you're not expecting a goodbye kiss

The voices are coming from the walls, or the ceiling, I'm not sure, but they're cutting me to the quick. Mostly it's Terra's voice, with Slade adding his twopence every now and then.

What's the matter? Had enough?

Ok. Apparently Darth Beast Boy's voice is there, too.

No wonder "Terra dumped you"

When I turn around, he's right there. Gray and black and with eyes glowing red in a way that'd give Trigon a run for his money. And I still feel like I ought to be a little taller.

"Hey dipstick."

"Oh. I'm so scared. I just called myself a dipstick." I shudder dramatically. That infuriating little smirk doesn't go away as he passes me by heading for Terra's bed and dropping himself on it like a ton of bricks. Lounging on it like he belongs.

Dude, this is messed up.

"Weren't you only brought out by Trigon?"

"Yeah, I don't actually exist physically. But that doesn't make me any less real in here. Trigon can take me out of you, but you created me to begin with. I'm…Darth You."

"Tch. Very original."

"Yeah, you're pretty cliché sometimes. I mean, calling a game that uses your dirty socks for a ball stankball?" That smirk has a really nasty edge. I never smirk at anyone like that. He snickers at me, mockingly. "So, what d'you think of the place? Emo romanticky enough?" My jaw clenches. "Or maybe you'd like to mope on her empty bed for a bit, for old times' sakes?"

I don't answer. I just morph into a Grizzly and lunge at him.

"Aww, poor Garfield. Got you in the feels again?" He doesn't morph, probably because most animals can't keep up much of a conversation. Not unless he morphs into the same animal form I'm using- and that'd be a tactical mistake. Darth Me just keeps up dodging and avoiding, moving away or out just seconds before I strike. I don't know if he's reading my – our? – mind or anything. I don't know what I'm doing myself.

After a while, one that feels endless, I feel tired, barely aware that I let myself morph back. Darth Me snickers at me again from beside Terra's lava lamp. The more he does it, the higher the sound bumps on my anger triggers list. "Not a scratch." He plucks his black and gray uniform for emphasis. I look around. He's...right. The room should be in ruins after all the scratching and pouncing, but everything is just the way it was. Even the sheets on the bed are straight.

"Ugh…"

I feel tired, sore and angry, and Darth Me still lounges, fresh as a damn lettuce. Maybe this isn't the right way to fight the dark side. I'll need to ask Raven-

"Oooh. What's this I hear?" Darth Me stands up on the table and cups his hand around one ear. His red eyes open wider, but I can't tell if it's part of the act. "Is widdle Beasty Boo calling…for Rae Rae?"

Rae Rae? Isn't that what Mother May-Eye called her? Darth Me looks suddenly inspired. "Come on. Call her. Let Raven see just how messed up it is in here. Whad'ya think she'll say, seeing this here? How you still worship the girl who actually tried to kill her? Who knew all her weaknesses thanks to you?" He jumps off the table and walks, walks till he's all up in my face. "She'll be so happy to know…everything about you." You could cut glass with that smirk now.

But then I know Darth Me's messed something up, because I feel a thumping, four-legged run in what should be the hall outside, and his red eyes turn round with shock as my primal side, with the long hair and huge claws, lopes into the room, huffing and growling at him.

O-oh man, it is so my turn to be all mocking. "What's the matter? Had enough?" Darth Me backpedals into the window so fast he trips. The Beast is on him, growling menacingly.

"Dude, how'd I forget the dog…" Darth Me tries to push the Beast's snout away. It earns him a loud roar and not a little drool as the Beast, angry, shows him all its teeth. "Fine, I'm leaving." He crawls out from under the menacing snout and starts to turn towards the window. "Oh. But before I do? Catch." Darth Me chucks a small brown something at me "Food for thought." I catch it instinctively. Darth Me evaporates.

It's a penny. Why'd he throw me a- oh. We were talking about Raven. I guess this is the penny I found the day the world was going to end.

The Beast darts to my side, then kneels beside me. His ears are relaxed, and you could almost call his expression smiley. If he had a tail, he'd probably be wagging it: where Darth Me radiated aggression, the Beast is friendly, glad to see me almost. Which he should. We made peace a long time ago. "Good boy." I pat his arm and the Beast gives me a pleased drool bath with his huge tongue. Eurgh. I'm glad psychic drool doesn't travel into the physical plane. Then he rises onto his hind legs in a way so disturbingly human I almost gawk, grabs my arm and hauls me enthusiastically out the door.

Funnily enough, we don't pop up back in my room after the darkness. This time we reach a long room, barely lit by a wan moon that pokes in through a corner of the windows. It still looks like it belongs in the tower. The room is all floor-to-ceiling windows, no furniture.

Except for that long thing like a closet in the very center. As I walk up to it, the light in the room seems to increase marginally, and I'm looking at my own face reflected in a massive mirror.

It's not all elegant like the Mirror of Erised from Harry Potter. It's a plain full length, a little old-fashioned but not ancient. And really big. I take a step back, and notice that my reflection isn't holding the little copper coin, but a golden apple.

"So this is the part where I pull the Stone-I mean the apple, out of the mirror." I look around the room, but only the Beast is there, sniffing at a patch of floor with interest. No Professors in turbans hiding bad guys on the back of their heads lurking in any corners.

I look at myself in the mirror again. Other than the fact that I'm holding the wrong thing, it's exactly me there. I bare my teeth, the image bares them too, I make all sorts of funny faces and the image makes them back at me. Then the Beast finishes checking out whatever fascinating scent it found and walks up to the mirror: then everything gets weirder.

At first sight, the Beast's reflection in the mirror is perfectly ordinary, but then I notice his eyes aren't blank. I've morphed in front of my own nonmagical mirror, I know all my animal forms have freaky blank eyes. Everyone has told me so at least once, too. In the mirror though, the Beast has dark green eyes.

My eyes. I've seen them enough to know.

"Okay, I think I get it. You're not the Mirror of Erised, but you must be the mirror of something or other, because you do not reflect things as they are." But I put the penny in my pocket, just to be sure. It doesn't turn into the apple when it gets there, or the Sorcerer's Stone for that matter. Beside me, the Beast stares, then gives its reflected face a good lick: I can think of plenty of animals who can't recognize themselves in mirrors, but I guess he can tell.

I'm ready to sit down in front of the mirror and puzzle some more when my mindscape shudders, as if it's made of water. As everything starts to dissolve I focus on the Beast standing very still, its completely perked ears moving sharply to capture sound and eyes wide like he's expecting something. His blank eyes are the last thing to lose their solidness. And I can imagine, maybe even sense a longing there, as if for something he'd been waiting for a long time.