It's been awhile. I apologize. I'm going to try to get back into a regular updating schedule, but we'll just have to see, won't we? *cackles*

His head was pounding, and his body did not want to cooperate with him. Groaning, he slowly rediscovered how to move his hand again and eventually located his head with it. Then his face.

As the numbness slipped away, taking with it its protection, his head felt more and more like it'd been hit by a train. Nothing felt broken, but he was bandaged up in several places. Oh, and his throat was painfully dry. A small detail nearly swept away beneath his fiercely aching body, but getting water was one of the few things he might actually be able to take care of right now.

Very slowly and carefully, he rose to a sitting position and immediately regretted it. Stars flooded his vision and threatened to drown him, but he hung on and waited until he could see again. The sluggish part of his brain responsible for coherent thought decided on a whim that he maybe ought to get his head checked out.

Eventually, he was able to make sense of the jumble of sensory information plaguing his skull. The room was dark, but not so dark that he couldn't see. Dim light was filtering through a grimy window wedged up against the ceiling. But he could not for the life of him remember where was, or even how he got here! Squeezing his eyes shut and rubbing his temples, he tried to remember.

Back at the Tower.

Patrolling his city.

The warehouse.

His eyes snapped open. Beast Boy!

That familiar cocktail of panic and adrenaline was already surging through his system when the slam of the door's heavy lock rolled over and the door itself swung smoothly open to reveal none other than-

"Slade," Robin hissed.

"Good to see you awake," Slade returned, sounding frighteningly confident. As usual. in fact, he even leaned against the doorframe like he hadn't a care in the world.

Robin felt rage add itself to the chemical cocktail already in his bloodstream. But there would be no banter or games today. "Where's Beast Boy?" he demanded.

Slade's single eye narrowed by a hair. "Alive." He paused, letting the word and all its meanings sink in. The follow up "for now" was left unsaid, but it echoed around the room anyway. "It was very generous of you to deliver him to me, Robin." His tone came across with what Robing fumingly recognized as glee. "One more hostage to use, and a very useful one."

Sudden confusion broke through Robin's usual set of emotions associated with Slade "What-"

"You will," Slade spoke over him, cutting him off. "Serve me. Or Beast Boy will die."

The threat wasn't surprising. Neither was this whole plan, really. But something felt off. Hostages? Slade had never involved innocent people before. Not this directly, at least. It had always been between him and Robin, before. Except for Terra, but that had been a different situation.

Robin opened his mouth.

"And then we can move on to the OTHER room full of hostages."

Robin suddenly felt very cold, and numb except for the fear and dread pooling in his stomach. He knew where this was going. No, he knew where it had already gone. It wasn't just the Titans' lives on the line this time. They had proven too unpredictable, to hard to control for Slade to really want to use them again. But civilian hostages...people that Robin could not, under any circumstances, allow to die...

"You're a smart boy, Robin," Slade interrupted, in almost a whisper. He could, no doubt, see where Robin's train of thought had led him. "You knew you'd always come back to me, didn't you?"

"Slade..." Robin said. But he didn't know what he wanted to say next. Begging and pleading was not just out of character for him, but also far below his standards. But he found himself having to actively not do so. He couldn't play his usual game, this time. No, if he wanted to save those people, he had to come up with a failsafe plan. And in the meantime...

Slade was probably grinning behind that mask. "I ALWAYS finish what I start."

Starfire just about scared herself to death when her communicator suddenly went off. Next to her, levitating in her meditative trance, Raven was by contrast completely unruffled. But from her newly found place on the floor, Starfire could see that Raven looked about how she herself felt.

As they checked their communicators simultaneously, Starefire gasped, clasping her hand over her mouth. "Robin's in trouble!"

Raven didn't seem to react at all, but the Tamaranian princess knew her friend well enough to guess that the pair of them felt about the same: sick, and scared.

"Cyborg," Raven urgently called into her communicator.

"I got it, Raven," came the response. "Grab Star and fly ahead. I'll take the T-car."

Starfire and Raven locked gazes, and were gone through the window in the blink of an eye.

"Raven, do you think," Starfire started asking as they flew. "Do you think..." She trailed off.

"I can't hear you, Starfire."

But she knew she didn't have to finish her thought. She knew they were all thinking it. Robin and Beast Boy had to be okay. They had to be. Robin and Beast Boy were together, so they'd be able to handle this. Right?

She didn't want to think about if she was wrong. Please, please let this be a false alarm, Starfire thought. Please let it not be Slade...

"There," Raven said in her flat monotone. It was strange to think that just a couple years ago, Starfire had found Raven's emotionless state unnerving, unnatural, and confusing. Now, she knew better. Now, she knew that Raven DID feel, just as much as any emotion-driven Tamaranian. She just didn't like to show it.

Starfire liked to think that she could still feel it though.

She glanced towards the roads leading to the collapsed warehouse, and caught sight of a blue car speeding towards them. The T-Car really could go, when it needed to. It wasn't long before the three remaining Titans stood solemnly before the warehouse.

Starfire was trying hard not to worry. It wasn't working.

"The signal's gone," Cyborg said, reading something flashing on his forearm. But it WAS here."

"Perhaps it has been broken somehow?" Starfire offered.

"The only thing we can do now is search through it," Raven barked. Or, it was Raven's tired, monotone version of a bark. But Starfire felt the tension in her words. Her shadowed friend was close to her breaking point with worry.

The three of them began shifting blocks of concrete and plaster, beams of wood and bits of metal. This couldn't have been Slade, Starfire thought as she worked. Carefully, in case she accidentally crushed someone she was trying to find. But Slade wouldn't do this kind of thing. Experience had taught her that much, she hoped. She didn't want to think she was just thinking wishfully, but what were the odds that a warehouse would RANDOMLY collapse just when Robin and Beast Boy were inside it? What were the odds that another villain had decided to strike just when they suspected that Slade was back in town, unless that particular villain had a particular masked employer.

It was hard to keep from searching through the debris frantically. Worry ate away at her mind, slowly working her thoughts to faster and faster speeds. She'd have been practically manic by now if she hadn't started using the meditation techniques Raven had taught her. She hated worrying, and she hated feeling useless, and she didn't cope well with either.

Their alarms went off again before they found anything. It was Mumbo, robbing another bank. Starfire looked up at her two friends for direction, and caught Cyborg giving Raven a questioning look.

Raven shot him a simmering glare back, but quickly covered it with a sigh. "Starfire, you stay here and keep searching. Cyborg and I will take care of Mumbo."

Starfire nodded slowly, feeling like she was missing something, but trusting in Raven. "I'll call you if I find either of them."

The empath nodded, and began walking towards Cyborg's car, forcing him to follow after her.

Starfire watched them go, feeling her heart breaking in two. She didn't much like being alone. But being alone in the wake of so much destruction, searching amid the debris for two close friends, neither of whom she knew for certain was alive...

She choked back tears and tried to lose herself in her work. In moving the rubble around.

This was a nightmare not even Control Freak could conjure up.

Beast Boy was no Robin. He wasn't new to the whole superhero thing by this point in his life, but that didn't mean he had the equivalent to Robin's training. He hadn't. But everyone had their strengths and their weaknesses, and one of his particular strengths was his natural ability to not stay captured for very long. It was part of the whole shape-changing thing.

Except, Slade had already thought of this. He didn't have magic like Mumbo, or Mad Mod's gadgets; he hadn't ever really had to deal directly with Beast Boy before, or had any reason to, so he hadn't actually had anything readily prepared for the little green changeling.

Unless, of course, Damien counts.

Confusion splattered across the inside of Beast Boy's skull like bird poop all over a windshield when he saw the girl. He was no Robin; it took him a lot more than a few seconds to put together who he was seeing, and why he was seeing her.

"Wha-who are you? And what am I-"

In a well-intentioned move to stand, he realized a little too late that his feet were tied, and so ended up flat on his face. "Ow."

"You're not really all that smart, are you?" the girl questioned.

Beast Boy rolled over and looked up at her, still confused. Then he looked down at his tied hands and feet.

Then he remembered.

"You're Slade's new girl!" he practically shouted to the heavens.

She winced. "Sure. Can't you, like, change your form or something?"

"What? Oh, yeah." He shrugged, but stayed where he was. "Yeah, isn't kind of weird for Slade to use rope?"

"How am I supposed to know?" She flung her hands up in the air, and then crossed them over her chest and leaned back against the wall. "He just told me to watch you."

"Slade," Beast Boy hissed, eyes narrowing, tone grim. He had to find Robin. Oh, this was SO not good! He had to find Robin, and get them both the heck out of here; how hard could that be? He was a master of disguise, and escape, and Slade had clearly underestimated him...

His train of thought faded into mist as he slowly noticed that his new companion was looking at him funny. "Robin does that too," she finally remarked.

"Look, I don't know who you are, or what you're doing with Slade," the little green one began earnestly. "But he is one seriously bad dude. I'd get as far away from him as I can get, if I were you." If he could save her, maybe that would make up for...

She wouldn't meet his eyes. "It's not quite like that. Anyway, he told me to tell you not to try anything, or he'd start killing hostages."

Start killing... "Wait, there are hostages?" His sense of "ability to handle this thing" suddenly dropped to zero. Hostages meant he couldn't do anything. ANYTHING. Maybe other bad guys could be reasoned with, played maybe, but not Slade. Slade was not a stupid man, far from it, and he was a killer. He'd do it. He wouldn't even hesitate.

Hope steadily draining from his heart at the same rate as the color drained from his face.

"I'm Damien. I'm going to be your only friend from now till Slade decides to kill you."