Disclaimer: We do not now, nor ever have, owned Teen Titans.

Authors' Note: We apologize for the long delay, all I'm going to say is inside our minds are very scary places.


The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

-John Milton


Beast Boy's mind was swimming. Slowly, things started to come back to him: the fall from the tower, Soto, the endless darkness… and Raven. She had been with him, and he hoped that when he managed to open his eyes, he might see there still.

His head- no, not just his head, but his whole body- felt like it was floating away. He tried to sit up, but his muscles refused to do his bidding. Concentrating as hard as he could, Beast Boy tried only to wiggle his fingers, and his efforts met with success. Strangely, he realized that he couldn't feel the ground beneath them. With a jolt, his body came once more under his command, and his eyes snapped open to the realization that he really was in water!

He let out a startled yelp and thrashed violently out of pure instinct. Much to his relief, he found that the water was hardly three feet deep, so he stood up and started to take in his surroundings.

The water was dark and murky, its total stillness now disturbed by the dozens of erratic waves and currents he created with his sudden motions. Wading towards the dry rocky shore, he fought his way through thick reeds that obscured his view of the shore beyond the edge of the small pond.

After a few minutes struggle with the thick mud under his feet and the uncooperative vegetation, the green Titan finally managed to drag himself ashore. He took in a startled gasp at what he saw before him: dry grass plains and periodic brush stretched out as far as the eye could see in every direction. A few gnarled trees spotted the landscape, their only purpose seemingly to break up the utter monotony of the grassland.

He could hardly believe it; he was back on the African plains, back on the savannah, for the first time in almost a decade and a half.

For a moment, he thought how odd it was that he should suddenly find himself in Sub-Saharan Africa, but his mind simply pushed that thought away and replaced it with a desire to explore just a little bit further.

Everything was just as he remembered it from when he was little- dry, light grass stretched out all around him, too sparse to keep his feet from kicking up clouds of dust and dirt from the land in almost perpetual drought. The shrubs were weak, stunted, and just as his recollection best served, nearly dead. Still, despite the uncanny resemblance to his childhood memories (right down to the very smell of the air!), something seemed to be… off. There was nothing else around; even in this seemingly desolate place there had always been an abundance of small animals and insects- but here, here it was different.

After a few minutes of walking he stopped under a short, gangly tree, trying to hide from the oppressive heat of the midday sun hanging over his head, under a pitiful patchwork of near washed-out shadow. There were no birds' nests in the tree's thin branches, no burrows at its roots; there were no signs of motive life anywhere. It was starting to give him an eerie feeling.

Just as he was about to lean on the withered tree to rest, a flicker in the distance caught his eye. He brought his hand to his brow and squinted off in the direction it was coming from. Whatever it was, Beast Boy could tell that it definitely was not natural. It looked almost like someone flashing a mirror or something reflective off the sunlight at him. Maybe it was Raven. Hope and curiosity demanded that he go and investigate, and the changeling readily complied.

He started walking back, trying to keep his pace up despite the stifling heat of the sun beating down on him. He finally made it past the pond where he started, and realized he was already bone dry thanks to the heat. It seemed to take longer than it had the first time to walk this far, and he realized he was extremely thirsty as he wiped more sweat from his green forehead.

The changeling decided that he could always come back here for a drink after finding out what it was that was flickering off in the distance, if he really needed to. So he kept walking, and walking, for what seemed a very long time until he finally came close enough to see what was reflecting all the sunlight.

To his immediate disappointment, it wasn't Raven. Nor was it anyone, it was just a small, three foot tall, narrow steel pole with what looked like a complex mirror-backed circuit board about the size of a post-it note.

Beast Boy just stared at it for a moment, considering what such a peculiar object would be doing out in the middle of the Serengeti. Deciding that trying to pull it out of the ground was a good idea, he grabbed the shaft and tugged… and to his considerable surprise, was successful. The small post jerked out of the ground and Beast Boy found himself staring at a dark, synthetic floor where dirt and grass had previously resided. He looked back from the pole to the floor, then the floor to the pole, then took a step back, gripping the post tightly.

It was about then that he noticed the huge wall only a few yards away from him. He stared at in shocked disbelief- a moment ago there had been an endless expanse of plain and sky that ended only at the horizon. Now there was a blank wall, the same material and color as the newly changed 'ground' with a huge hole in it- at least twenty feet wide and ten feet high.

The small shimmer and reflection told him there was glass filling the void in the wall. He kept on staring, peering beyond the window in the wall. Suddenly, he jumped back, raising the post in his hands like a baseball bat.

The look of shock on his face was almost as total as that on the faces of the fifteen people looking back at him from behind the glass.

This wasn't possible! How could he be in the open country, and then suddenly find himself being gawked at from behind glass like some kind of zoo exhibit? He turned around, frantically searching for something, anything to tell him he was only seeing some terrible mirage or hallucination.

He knew he should have drunk that water, he was delirious with thirst. Behind him stretched the pristine savannah, untouched, open, and definitely not manmade. He looked up towards the sun, but found a massive spotlight, the heat was the very same, but the ceiling above proved to be a fabrication as well.

The green Titan took a few steps forward, the post dragging at his side as he crossed back over into the 'plains' and looked up. There, the sun was in its normal state- a fireball hanging in the deep blue sky. As he walked backwards in his own footsteps to the artificial earth, it once again became just a bright spotlight.

Beast Boy's mind was rocked by waves of panic. He turned back to the glass, where more people had gathered- they were whispering to each other, talking to each other, pointing, laughing. They were people. Regular people. They were old people and young people. They were people eating ice cream and people chewing gum. They were kids with their parents, and husbands with wives.

They had freaking balloons.

He stood frozen in place, not having the slightest idea what to do. A whirring noise to his left snapped him out of his trance, and another section of wall disappeared, but this time the illusion on the floor in front of it remained intact. Behind a much smaller piece of the same glass stood three stern looking men in white lab coats.

"Log November 12, Chief-Doctor Muhler reporting," the man in front of Beast Boy began. He was tall and thin, wearing thick glasses and speaking with a deep made-for-narration voice that bore just a hint of a German accent. "Subject 11-65 has discovered and destroyed one of the six holo-transmitters in the enclosure. Let it be noted that Dr. Sebastian's suggestion of locating the transmitters on the walls and ceiling of the chamber would likely have prevented the subject's discovery and the current predicament."

"Thank you," added a stout olive skinned man sporting and high-cropped haircut and a light smirk on his pudgy face. Beast Boy presumed that he was Dr. Sebastian.

"Subject 11-65," Beast Boy realized the man in the middle was now addressing him. "Take this sedative immediately, and we will not be forced to subdue you to restore the condition of this enclosure." A hole in the floor suddenly slid open and a small obsidian podium with a single, translucent blue gel pill rose through it. He stared at it as the three men stared at him… as the now huge crowd of on lookers stared at him.

Men in lab coats, tourists, kids, ice cream, balloons? He really was in a freaking zoo. Raising the pole over his head, Beast Boy brought it down in a swift snap and smashed the blue pill into the column. The window with the men in lab coats was only a few yards away, and he could see the surprise, and extreme displeasure on their faces, especially on the one in the middle.

"That was not a good decision." The tall man in the middle said, adjusting his thick glasses in agitation.

He walked up the few yards to the glass, gave them an extremely rude gesture, and took a swing at the glass separating them.

Even though he swung as hard as he could manage, the steel poll bounced harmlessly off the clear barrier- the three men standing on the other side didn't even flinch. Beast Boy tried a few more times in disbelief and desperation.

He took a few steps back, he saw the other window was packed with faces staring at him intently, every useable inch had a pair of eyes coming out of it, all wanted to watch the show. The changeling looked around for something to help him, but anything he touched turned out to be fake, everything was a hologram.

He tried to transform, desperately hoping that he would be able to. The first thing he thought of was a rhino, and an instant later, that is what he found himself to be. He turned slowly back towards the smaller window into a empty room with the three men behind it. If rhino's were physically capable of anything even remotely close to a mischievous grin, then Beast Boy knew he was doing it.

The two men on either side of Muhler stepped nervously back; he didn't move, his expression remaining emotionless. Beast Boy charged.

The green horn of the rhino smashed into the double-thick bullet-proof Plexiglas with crushing force- just not enough to even scratch it. Beast Boy fell back to the fake earth seeing stars. Hell, he was seeing whole galaxies. He laid there for a moment, in a complete daze, barely noticing the tall man, Muhler, speaking again

"You can't win. Just take the pill and you can avoid further injury. We wish to study you, and all these nice people wish to… gawk at you. Now, I wan- " Beast Boy couldn't see his face, but he was sure he was smiling with some sort of sick satisfaction. He'd try to break the glass again, but as he was trying to sit up, he wasn't even sure if he could still see straight. He looked behind him, the people at the massive window were obviously laughing, even though he couldn't at all hear them, which somehow made the act that much worse; being silently laughed at.

He noticed in the back of his mind that the guy had shut up, he wondered why, but as his vision focused in again (thank god) he saw all three men lying flat on the blue and white checkered tile floor, and a pair of pale legs and a long, navy-blue cloak standing over them.

"Raven!" He leapt to his feet and pressed himself against the glass. She did the same, their hands ending up over one another's. "You gotta get me out of here, I can't break the glass and- " he stopped when he realized she was making motions of not being able to hear him. She crouched down next to the tall German man, his glasses now askew across the top of his light blonde hair. She reemerged at Beast Boy's height a moment later, a small microphone in her hand.

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Raven pressed the button on the small mike and spoke into it.

"Beast Boy, we don't have much time, you have to get out of there, I had to get through a lot of guards to get here, they must be sending backup."

She saw Beast Boy looked around, they both could see the large window, where a pair of guards with nightsticks and handguns had parted the large crowd of onlookers and was pointing over at them, and using their radios. She watched as he turned back and held up his open hands, saying 'I don't know how.'

Her amethyst eyes scanned the room; it was totally bare, except for a single large diameter pipe running its length, with an offshoot in the middle that pointed at the floor and a large, circular red valve.

"Beast Boy, there's a valve in here is there- " her question was cut off as she watched his eyes spring to life with an obvious idea and he darted off, towards a wall of tall reeds in the distance, disappearing through them a minute later.

She waited for him to reappear, but after about two minutes she was getting impatient. "Ugh, Beast Boy, we really don't have time to- " again she was cut off by a tapping coming from the pipe. She ran over to the valve and threw all her physical strength into turning it open. As water gushed onto the tile floor of the 12 by 12 room a green fish popped out and quickly transformed into a green Teen Titan.

"What took you so long? I thought I was going to crack my skull open ramming into that pipe." Raven bent down an helped the dazed teen to his feet.

"Come on let's get out of here." They both took off down the hallway, slamming open the door to the room and smashing through a wall of guards trying to block their path. They sprinted for all they were worth down the now super-wide hallway, darting around guards and tourists alike, making as straight a line for the doors they could see off in the distance.

After one final push of endurance, they burst through the large glass door into cold air and bright, streaming, almost blindingly real sunlight.

Beast Boy smiled. She had found him again.

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Despite flying at (what seemed to Robin) speeds recklessly approaching the sound barrier, he couldn't help but notice how easily Starfire came to a stop and gently… gracefully… set him down onto the Tower's roof. After his own legs regained their function, he ran towards the door to the stairs with the red-headed Tameranean close behind.

They raced down the stairs and through the halls of the Tower, making it to the infirmary several floors below in what Robin imagined to be record time. Cyborg had said there was good news, and as much as he didn't want to admit it, his hopes were up.

"What's the good word, Cyborg?"

The cybernetic Titan was amazed at how cool and collected the Boy Wonder was, after just being in a battle and then running several hundred yards at full speed- he wasn't even breathing heavily! 'Well,' he thought, 'there was a reason he was the leader.'

"They both have REM on their charts, and on the equipment."

"This means they are alright then? They are just dreaming…" Starfire said, her hopes were far higher than Robin's.

"No Star, the REM is too light for that. It's more like they are in the deepest sleep imaginable; not quite a coma, but close to it." Cyborg frowned as the green-eyed girl's smile faltered slightly.

"More importantly, it means their brains are still active," Robin continued for the metal teen.

"Exactly. I didn't want to say anything earlier, but that was the one thing I was afraid had happened to them; they're not brain-dead."

"That is good news, but can you-" Robin's voice was cut off by the sound of the alarm's blaring sound and flashing red lights. He flipped open his communicator and studied the alert as Starfire and Cyborg did likewise.

"And now it looks like Control Freak is going around raiding all the Best Buys in the city." Robin let out an exasperated sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. He and Starfire spun on their heels and headed out the door, but Robin hung back at the frame for a moment "Cy, please put on some coffee while we're out this time. Something tells me this is going to be a long night."

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Raven blinked her eyes a few times in deliberately rapid succession. She'd been here before. This was familiar, this whole… place… was familiar.

The destroyed and decaying buildings crumbling around her were familiar. The deserted, desolate streets strewn with rubble and burned-out husks of long abandoned cars were familiar. The sound of only the quick, shallow wind and her deep, methodical breathing was familiar. Even the ash, falling lightly from the sky with the same gentle silence as a midnight snow, was familiar.

But the sky. The sky this time was different. It wasn't the same sky she was used to. It was a dark, deep red, with dark gray- nearly black- clouds rolling slowly along it. She had thought the shattered city, the devastation all around her stretching out unto the ends of the Earth was an appalling sight to look on, but the dark, ominous red glow the sky now cast upon everything was almost unbearably horrible.

This couldn't be real, she kept repeating in her mind as she walked down the middle of a ruined avenue. It just couldn't. But it felt so real, smelled and looked so real. Maybe she just didn't want to believe it.

The purple-haired Titan had made the conscious decision not to fly around the city- not that she was sure she could if she even wanted to at this point. No, Raven wanted to survey the devastation close up. She needed to make sure it was real.

While she was staring at the half-collapsed 80-Story Hyndman Building- still the tallest half-building in the city- she wasn't watching the rubble scattered on the ground beneath her feet and she soon found herself rushing face-first towards the ground due to a careless misstep.

Managing to catch herself before she smashed her nose into the ash-covered pavement, she allowed herself a second to recover before attempting to get up. And promptly whacking the back of her head against something hard hanging just over where she had fallen.

Cursing loudly at her eternal bad luck, she turned back to see what she had banged her head on. At first she thought it was a statue, thrown out of place in whatever anarchy had caused all this, but she quickly learned she was wrong. Her mouth fell open in dismay, for before her stood a perfectly rendered stone Robin.

His stance was aggressive, and he held the broken end of bo-staff in his hand. His face bore a look of bold determination, but mixed with it was a knowing look that said he knew he had no hope, but that he would keep on fighting against… it… anyway.

She backed away as quickly as she could, turning a few steps later to get the horrible sight out of her vision, and bumping into another horrific statue. Starfire was frozen in her last terrible moment, a starbolt had obviously been charging in her fist, pulled back to her waist, as her other arm was raised above her head in an attempt to shield her from something that she had obviously failed to stop.

Tears formed in the corner of her eyes and began streaming down her face. She turned again, trying to get away, but came face to face with her formerly metallic friend. His last stand stood out in stark relief against the dark red sky, his sonic cannon raised against a foe he failed to defeat.

Raven sobbed, her chest heaved as the wind violently toyed with her hair and cloak. She turned again ran, fleeing as fast as she could force her legs to carry her away from the terrible sight. Trying desperately to get away from it, she looked down at her marked hands and away from what she suddenly knew she had done.

The dry, hot air tore at her lungs as she pushed herself to run, stumbling through the rubble-strewn street. Then she saw the one thing that she knew, in the back of her mind, she had really been trying to escape.

Raven fell to her knees, her anguish taking over as her body heaved while she wept. All around her the city continued to collapse and smolder, the destruction unyielding to her private grief.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I'm so sorry…"

"You have nothing to be sorry about, child," Or almost private. A deep, menacing voice had sprung up out from nowhere, a hateful voice she had had the misfortune of hearing in person only a handful of times before. "Quite to the contrary, in fact. You should be pleased. You managed to destroy the entire world, succeeding where I had failed. I'm so very proud of you."

Raven felt anger suddenly boil up inside her. She got to her feet, and turned to face the voice of Trigon. Before her stood her father, down from his normal fifty story height to a far more manageable seven feet.

"I did not do this. I would never do this!" She charged up her powers, encasing a few nearby pieces of debris in black energy and hurling them at the demon leaning casually against a nearly collapsed wall.

His eyes flashed brightly red as he nimbly dodged out of the way of the debris, the rocks smashing loudly into the wall behind him. At this size, his raw power seemed to be distributed among other physical abilities.

"I'm afraid you can… and you did, my dear daughter."

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For once, Beast Boy had nothing to say. Not that anyone was around for him to say it to anyway.

The city his friends had saved hundreds of times from super-villains, bank robbers, fires, monsters, and pick-your-poison anythings was totally and unequivocally destroyed. It was devastated in a way he had only ever seen back when Trigon was in town.

Shaking himself out of his shocked amazement, he started walking down the desolate street, trying not to choke on the air thick with ash.

After a few minutes of essentially wandering aimlessly through the city streets, he caught sight of a familiar shape off in the distance, through the smoke, and snow-fall ash. It was Robin.

But as he got closer, he quickly realized something was terribly wrong. The shape wasn't moving at all, and as he approached his friend, he could finally see why. It was stone, it was a stone Robin. Just like they'd all seen before. The green Titan was too surprised to note anything other than Robin's final repose, a fighting stance.

Beast Boy wanted nothing more than to be far away from his friend's horrible last moment, but as he turned away he caught sight of two others, Cyborg and Starfire. But then he breathed a sigh of relief, he didn't see Raven. And he instantly hated himself for the thought. These were his best friends, forever turned into statues. Still, he found himself glad she wasn't among them.

He heard footsteps, and ducked behind a burned out van in the road, peering over the hood at the approaching sound.

It was Raven; and she looked like a total emotional train wreck. Beast Boy didn't hesitate to run out to her.

"Raven, you're ok! Thank God, we need to get out of he- " Beast Boy was cut off by a few huge flying pieces of debris. His reflexes kicked in quickly and he dodged them easily.

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"I did not!" She yelled, sending a torn in half car hurtling towards the red-horned demon before her. Again he dodged it, moving forward some to taunt her some more.

"Look around you, little girl. Someone did all this; and it sure wasn't me."

She made another hunk of concrete levitate behind her.

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"Raven! What are you- " She cut off the changeling's words again by flinging another heavy chunk of rock at his head at lethal speeds.

This had been going on almost five minutes now, and Beast Boy was getting tired. He couldn't transform, and jumping all over the place trying not to get impaled or crushed was really taking it out of him.

"Please, Raven, it's me, Beast Boy!" he said for the hundredth time as she muttered something about Trigon. Then it clicked- she thought he was Trigon! He needed to make her see him, and not her father.

He was just about to consider how to go about doing that when a shotgun-blast of small hunks of rock managed to hit him square in the forehead with a rock the size of a baseball.

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Raven inwardly cheered at the hit she scored. It had dazed her father, given her enough time for a follow-up hit with something much… bigger.

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Beast Boy coughed as he got to his knees, just in time to get caught right in the chest with a piece of collapsed building the size of a small car.

The changeling lay sprawled one his back in the thick ash, unable to move for a moment. With no further projectiles coming his way for a few moments, he regained some of his breath and got back on his feet...

… and was rewarded with a piece of rebar running straight through the right side of his chest and clattering to the ground behind him some yards away.

He sputtered, feeling both cold and hot at the same time. A trickle of blood left his mouth and running down his agape lips, and he barely felt his knees smash into the hard ground as he crumpled.

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Raven heard the sickening sound of the iron support bar hitting its mark with a small amount of satisfaction. Talk about slaying your demons.

She walked, almost casually over to the sputtering red demon 20 feet away. Only, after a few steps, he wasn't red anymore; he didn't have horns anymore- he had pointy ears, and was… green.

"Oh God, Beast Boy!" she cried as she ran over to his side. "Oh God no, no, no" Shaking pale hands held his head as his eyes closed and she frantically checked- good, he's still breathing. Putting everything she had into her healing powers, she placed her hands over the sucking chest wound the iron bar had left.

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Back in the Tower's medical wing, a monitor began beeping. Cyborg looked up to see which of his friends needed help- it was Beast Boy. Then the beeping got faster, going from ten beats per second, to somewhere approaching one hundred. Springing out of his seat, Cyborg dashed to the green teen's bed.

Every instrument the cybernetic doctor had hooked up to his friend was going haywire, and one by one all the little lines that said Beast Boy was still alive in mind and body started to level off. The metal Titan opened his mouth in shock. His best friend was crashing.

"Oh shit."