Brotherhood

Chapter 8: Kinship

The sun rose over Jump City just as it did over Gotham. For once, though, the feeling in the air of the Titans' former home was more sinister than the feeling hovering over Gotham City.

This shift was no doubt because of the group of villains seated around a large table in the heart of Slade Wilson's underground base, currently in the middle of a very heated argument.

"You want to do what, Slade?" Brother Blood rasped, his aged eyes widening in a rare display of surprise. Slade was completely unmoved by the outburst, and his reply came in the same cold tone as his original declaration.

"I believe I said I wish to run for public office here in Jump City," he repeated. "And I want all of you to help me succeed."

"But why?" Blood asked, failing to see the point of such an elaborate scheme when simple brute force would be so much simpler. Not to mention more fun.

Slade's single eye narrowed at the challenge to his plan.

"Because I have fought the Titans before, more often than anyone else sitting at this table, Brother," he answered. "As such, I think that gives me the right to say that I know, better than any of you, how they fight. The Titans thrive on adversity, my friends: beat them down, and they will simply rise again and again. Give them even the faintest ghost of a reason to fight, and they will.

"What we must do is destroy their reason for fighting, which is to protect this city and its people. But merely leveling Jump City to a pile of rubble wouldn't be enough; Trigon did just that, and it only spurred the Titans on harder to find a way to restore it.

"No, the Titans' soul will be much harder to crush than that. But it is not impossible. If we can manage to convince the people of Jump City that they are better off without the Titans, that their streets will remain safer in their absence, then we will have successfully taken the Titans' most prized strength and turned it into their single most devastating weakness."

Mallah's wide mouth curled up into a wicked grin, baring his fang-like canine teeth in excitement as he grasped the insidious nature of Slade's plan at last.

"They will be hounded out of their own city, left adrift and alone, all without us having to fire a single shot," the mammoth gorilla broke in with a rumbling chuckle. "Scattered and broken, it will be so much easier for us to crush them beneath our heels."

"Precisely, Monsieur," Slade said, "and that is where I need the assistance of each and every one of you. Elections for Mayor are a few days from now, which unfortunately leaves us very little time to string together a campaign. But that shouldn't matter, I think, when we have the power to swing the votes in our direction. Don't you agree, Brother Blood?"

Blood smiled. His one human eye gleamed with malice, his support now completely behind Slade's scheme.

"Of course, Slade," he said smoothly, nodding. Perhaps this would be fun after all.

"Good. Trigon, have your minion Malchior pay some visits to the other candidates and convince them that their campaigns are pointless and a huge waste of money. Politicians are most easily reached through their pockets, after all. Brain, make sure that the voting machines are rigged so that our victory doesn't look crooked. Just enough to keep any zealous investigators off of our backs; having to kill them would be rather counter-intuitive.

"The rest of you, start spreading the word to all of the scum and petty criminals that they have two choices: join up with us and commit crimes on our orders, or we kill them."

"But I thought the whole point was to cut out crime entirely, Slade," General Immortus spoke up. "Why would we have them commit crime, if that would undermine our whole image?"

"Because we need an enemy to fight, however illusionary it might be," Mallah said, relishing the opportunity to make Immortus look foolish. "It would seem odd if all of the crime just up and vanished from the streets. If we actively remove it ourselves instead, the people have a new group of heroes to look up to: the need for the Titans vanishes entirely."

"Exactly," Slade affirmed, a cruel amusement in his voice.

"If I may play the Devil's advocate for a moment, Slade," Trigon finally broke in, his deep voice compelling all others into silence, "how exactly do you intend to ensure that the people of Jump City will willingly choose to accept the worse of two evils? I feel as though your plan is nothing but a mere smokescreen, which could be punctured by even the basest street-level criminal who is unwilling to play by our rules."

Slade smiled beneath his mask, his one eye narrowing again.

"Fair points, Trigon," he allowed, "and I would expect nothing less than a keen eye from one such as yourself. However, this plan of mine goes deeper than simple misdirection. Consider that, with myself at the head of the political pyramid, it would be a simple thing to install all of you—the ones that can pass for normal in public, at any rate—as members of the City Council directly below me. Soon enough, we will control every single aspect of the administration of Jump City. And since your faces are all unknown to regular law enforcement, having you all on the staff will raise no red flags whatsoever.

"But just that won't be enough to guarantee the complacency of the everyday citizens, which is where the vigilantes come into play."

"Vigilantes, Slade?" Madame Rouge asked with a raised eyebrow. "Once again, you appear to contradict yourself."

"Appearances, as I am sure you know, Madame," Slade replied evenly, "can be deceiving. There is a key difference here, which is that these vigilantes would be ours, and not maverick crime-fighters like the Titans."

The Brain was catching on now, and a robotic cackle emanated from the part of his casing that resembled a mouth.

"So, we would control crime on two separate levels," he said. "The police will do their jobs as usual, but introducing a vigilante element among the common criminals will make sure that no one on the streets tries to rebel, for fear of being discovered. And since these manufactured vigilantes will be doing the Titans' job without any collateral damage, the normal citizens will have the satisfaction that comes with a crime-free city, without having to get their own hands dirty.

"Furthermore, since their houses and property won't be damaged in the slightest, there would be no incentive for them to get involved in any way. Apathy truly is a powerful force, Slade."

Slade laughed, a sharp, humorless sound that echoed sharply off the walls of the room.

"That it is, Brain," he agreed. "That it is. The only thing we would conceivably have to worry about would be the Mafia, or some other form of organized crime, uniting against us. But those threats, such as they are, are insignificant."

A feeling of agreement and anticipation settled over the Brotherhood as they each envisioned a perfect, corrupt utopia with themselves at the head, but there was one member who did not share his comrades' enthusiasm.

"This is a fine plan, from a human perspective," Trigon growled, his red eyes glowing faintly like embers in the dim light, "but you seem to forget, all of you, that I am not human. I do not have the patience for your minuscule, material schemes; I seek power of a different sort. Power over whole worlds, and not just power over a single city."

"However shallow your patience may be, Trigon," Slade countered coldly, "it would be wise of you to exercise it. As I have said before, we have to first break the wills of our opponents completely before we can strike them down without fear of retaliation. Once this is done, plucking your daughter's heart from her chest will be a small matter. You have spent centuries as a God, Trigon," the one-eyed mastermind finished pointedly, "but now you walk among the humans. I would council you to act like it."

Trigon scowled, but remained silent. For now, he would follow the beat of Slade's drum.

For now.

Blackfire came awake with an annoyed groan, the pain in her midsection and shoulder only slightly less than it had been the night before. The bright lights of the medical bay were mercifully turned off, sparing the Tamaranean's sensitive eyes.

"Morning, starshine," a droll, but familiar voice deadpanned from her left. "Has anyone ever told you that you snore like a goddamn freight train?"

"My cellmate did, once," Blackfire said slowly, yawning. "I blew her head clean off her shoulders."

Damian chuckled, a sound that was cut short by a light stab of pain in his chest that came from his healing knife-wound.

"I would expect nothing less, Blackfire," he said. "How're you feeling?"

"Shittier than I have in a long time," she answered, "but I'll live." She turned over slightly, looking up at the young man who had saved her life as he sat in a chair by her bedside, still hooked up to an I.V. "How about you? Shouldn't you still be lying in a bed over there?"

Damian shook his head dismissively, smirking as convincingly as he could through his own discomfort.

"Nah," he said, "I hate being bedridden; drives me nuts." He paused for a moment, reaching down and removing the I.V. needle from his hand. A long, low hiss slipped out from between Damian's teeth as he did so, but he gave no other sign of being pained.

"Well, the doctors said that the poison should be all out of my system now," he continued, rising slowly to his feet, "so I'm gonna go take care of some business that should have been handled last night. There's someone else here who wants to speak to you, Blackfire."

Damian walked out of the room with quiet strides, the Tamaranean's next visitor taking his place mere heartbeats afterward. Silence hung in the air as Blackfire said nothing and looked pointedly at the wall, leaving it to the person sitting beside her to speak first.

"Hello, sister," Starfire said softly, looking down at her sibling with worry. "I heard that you were wounded in a fight; are you all right?"

Blackfire scoffed, finally bringing her narrowed eyes up to glare at her sister.

"What's it to you?" she asked, the hard tone of her voice making Starfire flinch slightly. "You didn't seem to care how I was doing in prison, sister," Blackfire pointed out, lacing her words with an acidity that clashed sharply with Starfire's concern. "Have you come here just to see me brought low again; to lecture me?"

Starfire shook her head slowly, sadly.

"I never said that. Why would you assume I would no longer be concerned for you, no matter what has happened between us in the past?"

Blackfire barked out a harsh laugh at the question.

"It's so easy for you to say that, isn't it?" she said. "It's like you forget that you were the one who got me thrown into jail twice, Starfire."

Starfire's patience snapped at that. Her green eyes hardened as her voice took on a similar tone, her Tamaranean nature emerging in a way that Blackfire had never seen before.

"And that is my fault, sister?" Starfire shot back. "I was only doing what any rational person would have done! You tried to frame me for an act of theft, and the sentence fell upon you instead. You tried to wed me off to a sentient blob creature, to deny me the right to marry someone I myself loved instead, and somehow that is my fault?!

"How can you be so selfish? You act as though I wanted to be the chosen heir to the throne; that I was spiting you, and robbing you of your right as the eldest child. But I was doing no such thing, Blackfire! Every day I would go to mother and father, and ask them to change their decree. 'But no,' they would say, 'your sister is a petty thief, a lowlife, who chooses to stand apart from her people. And in addition, she is a mutation of Tamaranean blood, different from any of her kin. She is poison, and we will not have anything to do with her.' And do you know what I said to them, Blackfire?

"I said that if they would deny my own sister her right as ruler, if they would treat her like she was no child of theirs and an unwanted freak, I had no desire to be a princess of Tamaran any longer! That is why I left the planet in the first place and came here, to Earth!

"So whose fault is it that you wanted to be a thief and a criminal and a rebel, just because you were too afraid to try and make peace with your own people? I would have helped you, sister! Why didn't you just talk to me!?"

Starfire was crying openly by the end of her speech, emotions and memories that she had locked away spilling back into her thoughts. She felt so useless, being unable to do or say that right thing to get her own sister to see the error of her ways.

Blackfire could only stare at her sibling in open shock, hit hard by Starfire's words. She had always seen herself as having grown up alone, an outcast amongst her own people. Hated, shunned and unloved. So she had turned to a life of crime to escape from Tamaran, and to rebel against the parents who hated her so by staining the Royal Family's name with her thievery.

And over time, Blackfire's hatred for her family had twisted and focused itself into hatred for her sister. Starfire, the favored child. The one who had been given everything that should rightfully have passed to her, the elder sister, while doing nothing to earn it. Blackfire had been so blinded by anger and bitterness and heartache that she had been utterly oblivious to one simple fact: that the sister she hated so vehemently was the only person standing up for her on all of Tamaran.

A fierce heat coiled in Blackfire's stomach, knotting around itself again and again, and the Tamaranean realized that it was shame. Deep, piercing shame, made all the heavier by the regret that came with it. She had done truly horrible things to Starfire because of her selfishness. Things for which she could never expect, and would never accept, forgiveness. But the least she could do was stop her sister's weeping; she looked as though she would only let up once her eyes had fallen out of her head. So Blackfire forced herself to sit up and swung her legs over the side of her hospital bed, getting to her feet in one smooth motion.

Blackfire stood above her bowed, crying sibling now. From here, she saw just how kind and innocent Starfire was at heart, underneath the warrior training she had received as a Tamaranean. Blackfire felt a new wave of regret wash over her for having tried to break someone like her sister, someone with such a rare degree of compassion among their people. Reaching down, she placed her hands on Starfire's shoulders and pulled her gently to her feet, taking her into an embrace and holding her there. Blackfire felt the damp heat of her sister's tears against her shoulder as they fell, but after a few moments they stopped altogether.

"I was so afraid," Starfire spoke softly after a moment, "that I would wake up one morning and hear that you had been executed for some crime, or killed trying to escape from a prison somewhere. I had nightmares, sister, and sometimes they were so real—"

Her voice broke off in a half-sob. Blackfire began instinctively to run her hand through her sister's bright red-orange hair slowly, again and again, whispering as she did so.

"Shhh; it's okay, it's okay; it's all right," the older sister said as comfortingly as she could. "I'm not going anywhere, Starfire. Not anymore."

"Do you promise?"

The tone of the question was earnest, but also very serious: Tamaraneans took their promises as oaths, and an oath-breaker was worse than filth in the eyes of the Tamaranean people. Blackfire knew this, but she didn't give her answer a second's hesitation.

"Yes," she said, "I promise."

Blackfire felt her sister relax against her with a contented sigh, and decided that she would keep the bad news for another day.

The news that their parents were dead. The news that they had been murdered, and the news that a Tamaranean general without pity or mercy now sat on the throne of their homeworld.

Damian watched the reconciliation between the two sisters from behind a two-way mirror, and smiled. He couldn't hear what had been said, but that didn't matter; Damian knew from his past experience with Grayson that sibling conflicts could be the most bitter, especially if wounds were left un-mended. Walking down the hall and out of the medical wing, he couldn't keep a small tune from escaping his lips in a satisfied hum.

As he reached his room, Damian walked to one of the walls and pushed aside a painting of him and his grandfather to reveal a safe. Quickly tapping the combination into the keypad and placing his thumb on the scanner, Damian reached in as the door swung open with a small click. He felt around for the object and found it soon enough, withdrawing a long, black box carved out of polished wood about three feet in length. But despite the beauty of the box itself, it was what was inside that mattered the most.

Damian moved with practiced ease though the hallways, and wound up standing in front of the door to Robin's room a few minutes after leaving his own. He reached up and knocked sharply.

"Coming," was the terse reply, and a few seconds later the door opened to reveal Robin standing there, looking alert as ever. He was still clad in a League uniform, but he'd taken off the layer of unneeded armor. Damian almost smirked as he saw his adoptive brother's face fall slightly: clearly, he had been expecting a different visitor.

"Damian," Robin said, a hint of annoyance in his voice. "What do you want?"

"Sorry to disappoint you, Grayson," Damian answered, a smirk now flashing across his face, "but your girlfriend is still talking to her sister. I just wanted to give you this in the meantime, before Starfire comes back and your door gets locked for a few hours."

He held out the black wooden box. Robin took it cautiously, and with a raised eyebrow.

"Don't worry, it's not a bomb," Damian said. "I think that would be a pretty tacky thing to give someone on their twentieth birthday, even for me."

Robin's gray-blue eyes widened slightly at that; he'd completely forgotten about his own birthday. It had been yesterday, but he had still been so thrown off by all of the chaos and his own temporary death to even think about it. Robin lifted the lid of the box slowly, and couldn't keep his mouth from opening slightly in awe as he saw what rested inside of it.

Two smooth metal sticks lay side-by side, shining dully. Robin reached in and picked them up, putting down the box so that he could take one in each hand to feel their weight.

"I remember you used to bitch and moan sometimes about the lack of maneuverability with your bo-staff," Damian chimed in, "so I figured these would work much better. I always liked Escrima more myself, anyway. And if you ever feel nostalgic, they can combine to form a staff and then separate again."

Robin finished a simple warm-up exercise and exhaled, pleased with how well the sticks seemed to fit.

"I don't know what to say," he said at last, before reconsidering. "Thank you, Damian."

"You're welcome, wonderboy," the other young man replied, a small smile on his face as he used the teasing nickname he'd used to call Robin years ago. "I hope you won't have to use 'em for a while, but something tells me they'll be seeing the moonlight real soon." Damian turned around and began to walk away, waving lazily back over his shoulder. "Take care of yourself."

Damian was down the hall and gone before Robin spoke again.

"You too, kid," he said, a small smile on Robin's face as well. Damian might be a pain in the ass most of the time, but nonetheless, he would always be his brother.

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A/N: Man, it feels good to finally have this chapter finished. Exams are over and done with, and thanks to everyone who wished me luck with them. I hope you all enjoyed the chapter, and reviews, as always, would be most appreciated; they really do mean a lot. Thanks again to everyone who has reviewed so far, you guys are awesome.

So, things are starting to move in earnest at last: Starfire has reached an understanding with her sister, but something grim has happened back on Tamaran. Robin and the Titans are starting to get back on their feet, but Slade's master plan is only just beginning to unfold. Should be an interesting ride, and I'll see you guys at the next chapter!