Disclaimer: We don't own Teen Titans.
Authors' Note: Happy 2008 to all our readers, it is the year of the FanFic after all…
Disaster is a natural part of my evolution. Towards tragedy and dissolution.
-Chuck Palahniuk
Raven stared in disbelief at the lifeless green Titan a few feet away from her. The shrill, continuous beep of the heart monitor tore through her consciousness like a jet engine; she could hear nothing else. Cyborg loomed over her friend's dying body, casting a shadow over the unnaturally calm expression on the changeling's face.
She didn't breathe. She didn't blink. Not a single part of her body as much as twitched as she gaped at the expiring teen. Even her mind was frozen, the one solitary thought echoing through her skull being a horrified 'oh God, no.'
Suddenly everything snapped sharply back into focus and the world started moving. Cyborg's frantic movements on their friend resumed, her eyes blinked, her lungs inflated, and all the while the sorrowful siren continued.
She sprang to her feet, easily clearing the hospital bed as she vaulted over to the empty side of the dying changeling. Adrenaline rushed through her body, blasting away her fatigue. Cyborg peeled back one of Beast Boy's eyelids, and then the other.
"He's going into cardiac arrest!" he announced, unnecessarily. Ripping open Beast Boy's uniform from the neckline, his large hands easily shredded the stretchy Kevlar-like material. He turned around and grabbed the defibrillation paddles on the crash cart next to the bed and hit the necessary buttons. The electric capacitor began to whir loudly, building up its life-giving charge as Cyborg applied the necessary gel and rubbed the paddles together.
Raven had grabbed hold of Beast Boy's hand, but a second later Cyborg yelled "CLEAR!" and Raven instantly dropped it, leaping back just as the metal Titan hit his green compatriot with 300 volts of electricity.
Beast Boy's body jumped in the bed, but half a second later and the monitor signaled no change, the horrid beep still accompanying the flat line. Cyborg turned a knob to up the wattage, hit the charge button again, and the machine quickly whirred back to life.
"CLEAR!" He shouted, more from training than anything else, as Raven knew to pull her hands away. He zapped another 500 volts into Beast Boy, and produced a bigger convulsion, but still no pulse. He was getting desperate: come on little buddy, come on…
"Cyborg, what do you want me to do?" Raven asked as Cyborg flicked the switch on the defibrillator once again, a slight cracking of her voice the only thing betraying the emotions threatening to tear her apart at the seams.
"Get ready to heal him if this doesn't work!" he said, rubbing the paddles together one last time. "CLEAR!" 750 volts ran straight through the changeling. His body convulsed and bucked wildly in the bed for an instant before coming to rest flat against the bed, the monitor showing no heartbeat.
Raven didn't have to wait for Cyborg to direct her—before he could say a word she had her hands on the center of Beast Boy's chest and was focusing all her power into healing him. The soft glow that emitted from her hands rapidly increased in intensity, until it blazed like a piece of burning magnesium, casting new, intense shadows of herself and Cyborg on the well lit walls behind them.
She focused everything into restarting his heart, imagining it working again, beating once more. She felt it pump once, twice, and once again… but then stop. Another long four seconds passed, then another beat followed the last. She began to feel light-headed, pushed it out of her mind and lowered her head in concentration, her purple hair falling across her eyes and blocking the sight she didn't quite need at this point.
She could feel her power flicker and she swayed back, sliding out her feet slightly to get a more stable stance. She found her second wind and redoubled her efforts, and was quickly rewarded with another beep on the monitor… but it wasn't followed. Three seconds passed, then five. After ten, Raven tried to sense his life force and couldn't find it. She tried to feel out for his mind, but it too was gone. Twenty seconds passed. Her energy began to wane, the light flickering now and again. Twenty-five seconds. Thirty. Her power flicked more rapidly. At thirty-five, the light went out completely.
"No…" she whispered, staring in disbelief. "No, no, no" She snapped out of her stare and started to perform CPR. She compressed his chest again and again, with no results.
Tears were flowing freely now. She stepped back, her hands coming up to her face as her body was suddenly racked with sobs. The lights in the room started flaring up and down as some started to burst. The desks and chairs shook while glass vials and beakers had their contents boil and shatter. The steel and concrete walls started to shake and the thick, bullet proof windows rattled and began to crack.
Just as she was about to fall over backwards, crying uncontrollably, she was caught in Cyborg's wide embrace. He closed his massive arms around her small, shaking form, his hyper-advanced cybernetics allowing him to hold her as if he still had human arms.
Raven couldn't bear to look up at him, which was just as well, as she would have seen the tears streaming down from his one human eye.
"It can't be" she sobbed "he can't be gone."
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Beast Boy's head hurt. His chest hurt. His feet hurt. Truth be told, everything hurt, right down to his fingernails, which—being keratin—he didn't know could hurt.
He wanted to double up into a little ball, but found he couldn't move an inch.
'What in the hell is going on?' he asked himself inside his own head, before realizing that it would actually be a little frightening if he got an answer while Raven wasn't around. Raven! He was with her, just a second ago, or was it days? He couldn't be sure.
Where was he? The green Titan couldn't be sure, and listing off all the places he wasn't would take way too long. He thought about it a moment and it seemed familiar…like, he was in water. He remembered waking up in water, and then being in a zoo… oh god, he prayed he wasn't in the zoo again.
No, Raven had broken him out of there. And then he was with her in loonyville. And later, after becoming the Beast, she had calmed him down. How were they zipping all over the place like this, doing crazy things in a thousand different places? 'One mysterious mystery at a time,' he chided himself. It felt similar to being in that pool of water (aside from the constant, bone crushing pain), but aside from that…
He attempted to open his eyes, but when he did (or at least, he thought he did), he couldn't see anything. He tried to move again, but none of his limbs particularly felt like cooperating.
He felt a rapid pressure all over his body, but as quickly as it was there it was gone. Sudden warmth enveloped his face, and on impulse he tried to open his eyes again. For reasons he couldn't understand, it worked this time. Looking around, he saw that he was now standing upright, and all around him was an endless green field. A single park bench sat a few yards away from him, and for some reason he felt compelled to sit down on it… so he did.
As he took his seat, he took another look around, although his new position hadn't changed the look of wherever the hell he was. The endless fields of grass hadn't gone anywhere, and the whole place looked even flatter than Kansas—which Beast Boy had read somewhere on Wikipedia wasn't actually all that flat compared to other places.
Mildly afraid of where his brain was going, he turned his head back to face front. As he did, someone sat down next to him on the bench.
He snapped his head over and jumped back in surprise, thoroughly startled by the appearance of a pale man dressed in what even Beast Boy could tell was a very nice pin-striped suit. His short, slick black hair was combed over to the right. He turned to teen and smiled with perfect teeth in a way that, while seemingly genuine, nevertheless sent a chill down Beast Boy's spine.
"Hello, Garfield."
"Uh, do I know you?" As he spoke a feeling tugged at Beast Boy, that he was forgetting something, that he really needed to be somewhere else right now.
"No, but that's not important, you know my work-"
"You designed Monkey Madness 6!?" Beast Boy stalled as the same creepy feeling washed over him as the back of his mind was starting to yell that he had somewhere to be.
"-and I know yours, as well as what work you're capable of. This whole incident was unexpected. But not at all… unwelcome."
"What whole 'incident' dude? What the hell are you talking about?" The thought was now sweeping over his mind, he had to get out of here, but he still wasn't sure why.
"You'll find out in due course. Ah, yes, I suppose since this time it was an accident of luck, I expect they'll want you back topside. Oh well, what's a few more years of life in the grand scheme of things?" He stood up and Beast Boy unthinkingly followed suit. The man was no longer looking at him, and Beast Boy followed his gaze; a plain, brown wooden door with a shiny brass knob had appeared in the middle of the endless field twenty feet away.
"Well, don't you have somewhere to be?" he asked with mock impatience… or at least it seemed like it, since Beast Boy couldn't get any sort of read on this guy at all. He stared at him for a moment as the man gestured for him to go towards the door.
Then the feeling in him grew stronger and he started walking quickly towards the door. As he turned the knob and pushed the door open, he hesitated just long enough to hear the man's parting words:
"I'll be seeing you, Beast Boy."
Beast Boy fell through blackness as he stepped into the doorway, then a millisecond later he was standing in the middle of a sidewalk in Jump City, the warm sun high overhead beating down on him. He could tell this wasn't where he needed to be, but he could also tell he was a hell of a lot closer than the endless fields.
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Raven couldn't believe it.
"He's not gone, how can he be gone?" she asked again, still sobbing in Cyborg's embrace, and his response again was the same.
"I know, I know."
Raven finally gained some semblance of control over herself and stepped towards the still body, which only a minute before had contained her friend, more than her friend… she angrily flicked off the sound of the still blaring heart monitor, but the solid, unmoving line remained plastered across the screen.
"Oh, Beast Boy," she whispered, dropping her head into one hand as the other lay across his exposed chest. Then she felt it: a slight tremor, imperceptible but for the particular location of her head. Her head lifted and her eyes darted to the screen; where the thin green line rose and fell slightly again and again.
"Cyborg!" She flicked the sound for the monitor back on, and was rewarded with a steady succession of evenly spaced beeps.
"How can-" the metal teen rushed over to the bedside, using his arm's built-in scanner to collect quick data for the computer. His friend was alive, and very improbably so.
Oh thank god, Raven thought, he's alive.
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"Come on Jerry! Let's get the hell out of here before the Titans show-" the bank robber's call to his partner was cut short when his face slammed into the ground, his knees taken out by bo-staff swung seemingly from nowhere. A few milliseconds later, the masked hero the staff was attached to came into view from the same place, just as the second thief—Jerry, as it were— came running outside, a black duffel bag full of cash in each of his hands.
Jerry stopped dead in his tracks, and seeing the look on the Titan's leader's face, instantly dropped the bags and held his hands high in the air.
"Thank you for being reasonable," Robin said as he jumped backward into the air, landing expertly on his R-Cycle a few yards away. Just as he started the engine, two police cruisers pulled up to the steps of the bank to arrest the criminals.
His communicator vibrated on his belt, and Robin thumbed a button on one of the handlebars to patch it through to his helmet.
"What's the story Bee?"
"We're taking out run-of-the-mill bad-guys left and right. You weren't kidding, it's like every crook in the city knew you guys were short. Bad timing I guess."
"Yeah, well it's not that important right now, we just have to take care of these guys as they stick their heads up, just one big game of Whack-A-Mole. No major baddies yet?" Ever since they had stopped the last batch half an hour ago, things had been quiet…relatively speaking, anyway.
"No, nothing yet." Robin wasn't sad to hear that. While actual villains usually provided a more challenging and entertaining fight, he was getting more than a little tired, and most of them were just so damn annoying; he didn't want to deal with it if he didn't have to.
"Thank God, the last thing we need right now is—" He was cut short as Starfire's voice broke in over their channel.
"I think perhaps everyone should be aware that Mumbo has started bewitching mannequins from the department store to break into every building on Gilman Boulevard. Oh, and it also appears as if he has mail-boxes chasing people around, trying to eat them." She reported in a way one would comment on yesterday's weather.
Robin sighed; he had just had to say something, didn't he? "Ok Star, we're on our way."
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"He's fully stabilized. It looks like… well hell, he is totally normal. There's nothing wrong with him again." Cyborg stated as he finally looked up from the charts and monitors and machines all hooked up to or reporting on Beast Boy in some way.
"But how…" Raven asked, staring at the still form of the green Titan.
"Deus ex Machina?" said Cyborg, grinning. For his efforts, he received a frosty glare and an irritated snort, simply par for the course with Raven. Recovering quickly, he continued. "I have no idea, but I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, even if it's green. The real question, though, is why you're awake while he's not?"
The statement hit Raven like a brick; she hadn't even considered that until now… she hadn't had the chance.
"I… don't know." She looked at the ground as her mind searched for an explanation. Sitting on the empty bed next to the changeling, she thought out loud. "I remember most of what I was dreaming while I was out. It was really… odd. It was like running through my nightmares, one after another, like everything I've ever been afraid of hit me one after the other." She stopped, considering this. "Beast Boy was with me for most of those." She looked up at her metal companion.
"What?"
"You know how when you dream of someone you know, even in a vivid dream, they're pretty limited? They can't do much, can't say much. They're like a caricature of themselves, because your mind can't think for them, you just get the outside."
"Yeah, well we only get so much of someone, our dreams can't really compensate for that…"
"And that's my point; he was really Beast Boy, Cyborg. He was exactly like himself, totally independent. And half the time, when we met up in a different dream, he'd already been doing something else. Cyborg, I think we were sharing dreams."
"That doesn't make any sense though, how can that possibly happen?"
"It would be the same thing as when I connected my thoughts with Robin, only when we were dreaming. I guess it was because we both got hurt at the same time."
"Ok, so you were telepathically linked when you were both in the coma, but why dream what you did?"
"Dreams are supposed to work out problems in your subconscious; I suppose serious bodily harm made it go a little farther than that. And together, we worked them out rather than being trapped by them."
"But he's still out."
"I can try to bring him out of it." She stood up and took a few steps forward, positioning herself so she was standing directly next ho him. Placing her hand on his forehead, she closed her eyes and concentrated. She could see glass… no, mirrors… endless reflections of empty halls and twisted rooms. She couldn't hear his thoughts, but she could feel his emotions. They crashed into her like waves, alternating between intense fear, a twinge of anger, seemingly bottomless sorrow, and something else she couldn't quite place; a sort of hatred, but different somehow. She'd never known Beast Boy to hate anyone… but this wasn't the same as most hates she had empathetically sensed before. It was… directed inward?
Deciding that she'd felt enough, she tried to call out to him in her head. She tried three more times and couldn't sense any change. She tried to reverse the flow of emotions with positive ones, but found that wouldn't work either. She tried to grasp at him, to pull him out of his sleep, but couldn't get a hold. She couldn't bring him out of the coma. She couldn't talk to him, or comfort him, or even help him. She couldn't do anything. Except for maybe one thing. She turned to her cybernetic friend, the look on her face passive, yet somehow very fierce.
"Cyborg, I need to go back into a coma."
