Hi...how long has it been now, like a month?! I'm sorry! But this is a really long chapter...which will be rushed BECAUSE it's a really long chapter and I got frustrated writing it for a month...um, there are things in this story that may not go along with the comics, but with the TV show instead, so please keep that in mind. If you have any other questions, send it to me in a review. I had so many announcemes and whatnot, but I forgot them all.

Disclaimer: I don't own the Teen Titans.

She'd been here for years...there was always more backbreaking labor to be done, always someone who wanted to scorn and humiliate her, always another way to make her suffer. Koriand'r couldn't understand what she'd done to deserve this. No one had ever told her anything about the reason she was here. If she didn't work, she was beaten, and that was all she needed to know.

One thing did keep her going, though. The memory of her parents still lived fresh in her mind, she'd been over it so many times. The very last time she'd ever saw them, both of them had been mouthing, 'Please forgive us.' They didn't hate her. They were probably trying to save her. She only had to wait.

A burly Gordanian stopped her, grinning maliciously. "Well, Princess, I hope your stay on Gordania has been pleasant...but it is time for you to leave."

"What?"

"The treaty has been violated. Therefore we assume all of our rights to do as we wish with you." His grin grew even more evil, if possible. "Princess Koriand'r...the Citadel awaits you."

"Oi! You two in the back! Wake up, this bus has a--WHOA!"

Dick was jolted awake suddenly, too frazzled to wonder how he'd been comfortable enough to sleep with some girl practically in his lap. The otherwise empty bus was thrust forward, the steering wheel spinning itself and the alarm causing a ruckus. 'The Girl' woke up as well, her eyes wide. Dick found that expression horribly familiar.

In seconds, both he and the driver were dragged out of the bus, both expecting it to explode momentarily, though only one of them actually had proof that it would. This time, there would be no trees to safeguard them. They were out in the open, not a house to be seen for nearly half a mile. The girl huddled close to Dick, bracing herself.

The explosion never came.

Instead, something broke through the clouds. Dark and ominous, it cast a shadow over all that they could see. It couldn't be...an actual UFO. Dick was actually, physically watching an alien spaceship fly through Earth's skies. No way.

A curious red dot, like the light from a laser pointer, appeared on the ground in front of the bus driver's feet. Dick had seen enough Sci-Fi movies to know what that meant.

"RUN!"

Neither of the three hesitated for a moment longer. They sprinted as fast as they could, but weren't able to completely dodge the wave of energy as some sort of missle from the ship above them detonated right where Dick had suspected. They were flung forward and fell face first on to the ground. The bus driver was, by now, sobbing about aliens about to kill him. Not a good idea.

Dick grabbed his shirt and shook him. "Get up, you idiot! They WILL kill you if you don't move!"

The girl dragged Dick by his free hand and urged them forward, snapping and growling in complete gibberish. It didn't matter, though, the ship wasn't firing anymore. It hovered for a while, intimidating the three on the ground into a petrified state. For a minute, all was still.

Then, the ship zoomed forward a few dozen yards, and started to grow in size...

"Why's it getting bigger? The aliens are gonna crush us!" the bus driver moaned.

"It's not getting bigger..." Dick muttered quietly. "It's getting closer. It's gonna land."

The girl started to run the other way, beckoning them to join her. Dick dragged the bus driver along until the guy caught on that they were leaving. The three of them rushed away from the landing spaceship, hoping to put enough space between the aliens and themselves to make an easy escape.

No such luck.

It touched down pretty far ahead of them with an earth-shaking thump and sent a cloud of grass, dirt, and dust flying. The same lizard-like creatures in the forest and on the news didn't even wait for it to settle before opening up a door in the side of the ship and swooping out on strange hoverboards. They were too fast for Dick and the other two. Their party was caught almost immediately.

Roughly battered with staffs to walk faster, Dick, the bus driver, and the girl were forced onto the spaceship. The redhead had actually put up an amazing fight, taking out five of the lizard-things, but she couldn't fight all the thirty or so aliens. The bus driver hadn't been much help, unless deafening half the sentinent beings in the state with his screaming would somehow give them an advantage. Dick himself couldn't have done anything. The aliens were a lot stronger than they looked.

He was a prisoner.

The girl seemed to resent this even more than the boys. She was spitting and hissing at her captors, not caring about the jabs she received. If you can get hit by a car and feel fine, there probably isn't a whole lot that could bother you, Dick figured.

The inside of the ship was plain, with identical guards all over the place. They carried the same staffs, only the ends were sizzling with blue electricity. If they turned those on him, Dick knew without a doubt he'd be dead.

They were led into another room, which was a little more luxurious. An equally ugly alien was sitting atop a raised chair, smirking down at them. They stopped right in front of him, and suddenly all Dick could hear was gibberish. They were talking in the same language the girl had been speaking all along.

Realization finally hit Dick. This girl...she might not be a girl at all!...she was an alien? She looked human enough...besides the fact that the whites of her eyes were distinctly green, but she was actually kind of pretty. Nothing at all like the monster sitting before them.

So now there were different kinds of aliens, too?

The said monster turned to look at Dick and the bus driver. "Humans..." it hissed in a raspy voice.

"You...you speak English?" Dick asked cautiously. Not only was he traveling with an alien, and not only was it probable that there were numerous aliens out there who could stop by Earth whenever they liked, but they also had English classes at their high schools. Wonderful.

"It's talking...to us! Please don't hurt us, Mr. Alien, I've got a wife and a kid at home and I can't leave them to--"

"This creature irritates me," the alien snapped. "Kill it."

One of their captors charged up the electricity on the ends of their previously semi-unharmful staffs. In the blink of an eye, the end was thrust into the bus driver's temple. The man shook violently, his eyes rolling back into his head and his mouth open in a silent scream. Then he stopped...and didn't move again.

Dick couldn't believe what he'd just seen.

"You, human, will also be destroyed...but not now. No, we would like to reward you for bringing our slave back to us," the alien said matter-of-factly.

"...Slave?" Dick managed to stutter.

"What else did you think this worthless piece of Tamaranian trash was? Princess or peasant, no Tamaranian will ever stand above the lowest of Gordanians. We are the superior race...they are Troqs." He cast a nasty glance at her, chuckling at the frenzy he'd sent her into with that one word. "So we will allow you to become our slave as well...for the time being."

Oh, well, that's nice of you. Hey, do you think you get cell phone reception in outer space? I've gotta make sure it's okay with my boss that I've bailed on him and now I'm apparently switching jobs.

"What if I--" The strangled cry of the Tamarind (or whatever she was) interrupted him. She was being taken away. His 'don't want to' never came. If he was allowed to go free, or killed because of his defiance, he wouldn't be able to help her out of here. Alien strength or not, she wasn't in any condition to be somewhere dangerous. "I mean...where do I go now?"

"Follow the guards. Oh, and welcome to the Q'st'a," the Gordanian said, his grin laced with malice.

Dick left behind the corpse of the bus driver and the screeching girl he'd come to believe himself the caretaker of without another word.

He was shoved in a filthy cell with another alien. The cell itself was small, the size of a walk-in closet, and very primitive. It was just like an old jail cell, with bars facing the passageway and three walls on the other sides. The back wall had a tiny window, through which Dick could see outer space. The cell had an old-fashioned, rusty lock on it, which his Gordanian captor fit an equally old key into and swung the door open.

This alien looked like a girl, too, but Dick wasn't sure of anything anymore. She was covered in a dark blue, dirty cloak. Attached to the cloak was a hood, which obscured her face. A few strands of purple hair fell out of the shadow it cast.

He really didn't want to share his cell with any girl, let alone this one. She didn't look too happy.

"Uh...hi. I'm Dick." He paused, almost slapping himself. "You don't speak English either, do you?"

He got no answer in return, but suspected as much. What shocked him was when the girl lifted back her hood. She looked almost like a normal human, around his age, save fo the fact that her skin was grayish and she had some kind of jewel planted in the middle of her forehead. She even had some of the same characteristics of that Tangerine girl he'd run into: far too skinny to be healthy, and abnormally colored eyes. But a giant steel band encircled her mouth, preventing her from speaking, and probably from eating, too.

Dick's eyes widened. "What the hell is that?"

She tugged at the band, but it wouldn't budge. Her eyes begged for him to help her. But what could he do?

"Um...okay...there's no seam or anything...how does it unlock? Is there a password, or a key, or...oh. I found the keyhole..." He wished he still had that paperclip with him. All he carried was his wallet, which had a few bills and some credit cards. Maybe he could break one of those small enough to fit into the hole and pick the lock. It always worked, no matter how high tech. That was the beauty of it.

Dick dug out his old American Express card. He would much rather having to deal with a broken credit card than having someone die on him. First he broke it in half, then quarters, and then eighths. He fed the first strip into the keyhole. Twisting and turning it every which way did not work--it broke almost immediately. He still had seven tries left.

The second one went just as badly. Not only that, but there was now a tiny piece lodged in there that he couldn't get out. The third and fourth strips broke trying to get the piece out. Eventually, Dick gave up and tried to work around it.

With his fifth strip, he ran into a strange discovery. Everytime he touched the bottom of the hole, a little 'chink' sounded, like someone was clicking open a pen. There was a button in there, like a reset button. He needed to press that down.

Dick broke the fifth and sixth trying to do just that. On the seventh one, he navigated it just so the forgotten piece was facing the button and pressed hard.

The band fell off the girl's mouth, leaving a red line of chafed skin across her face. "Thanks." Her voice was monotonous and almost indifferent to the pain she must have been feeling as she rubbed her raw skin. "I do speak English, to answer your question."

"What was that?" Dick asked, horrified.

"It was there to keep me from speaking." She fell silent and studied him before staring outside. Yeah, you probably don't even need one of those to keep you from speaking...you do it by yourself.

"Why would you need that?"

"Long story."

Another pause.

"How long have you been here?"

"Not very long, only a day or two. This is a holding cell, until someone dies and a space opens up." The way she said it, he'd have thought he was watching her comment on the weather on a boring date.

"But I have a friend...where did she go? Wouldn't she be in this holding cell, too?"

"Depends."

"Thanks for the description. When are they coming back? I need to get out of here and find her!"

"I've read about humans...my books said that chivalry was dead about eight hundred years ago, though."

Dick frowned at her. Something about this girl really irked him. "Very funny." He pocketed his eighth strip of credit card, hoping it would come in handy eventually. "I have to get her out of here. She's hurt, really bad. Don't we have to go to the control room of the ship to shut it down? That's what they do in all the movies. Aren't you going to help me out in this rescue mission?"

The alien thought about it for a second. "I guess I would. But my powers are out of control...I haven't been able to meditate for days..."

"What powers?"

She muttered something that he couldn't make sense of, and the strip of credit card in his pocket was suddenly enveloped in dark energy. While Dick watched in horrified fascination, the piece of plastic floated up to his eye level and broke into three perfectly congruent pieces. The black energy disappeared, and the bits fell to the floor.

"Holy shit."

"Please. No profanity."

Dick glared at her. "Well, you know what? That's the least of my freaking problems! I've run over a girl and made her lose her memory, and THEN my car blew up, and THEN I got captured by aliens who apparently ALL got run over by cars because they speak the same language, and now I've gotten that thing off your face and you don't even care that we're all in serious trouble because we're not even on our planets anymore! Did I mention that aliens actually exist? And that's not even the worst part! If I'm not back at my job ASAP, my own dad'll fire me!"

She watched him rant with an impassive gaze, and rolled her eyes when he was done. "I'm sorry about your problems. But really, humans are insanely conceited. The universe doesn't revolve around you."

Dick scowled at her. "I don't have time for this."

"You have plenty of time. We won't reach the next planet for a few more Earth hours."

He couldn't just find the Tamra-whatsit girl and jump into empty space. She was right. He needed to wait, and only hope that her confinement was at least a little bit comfortable. "Fine...so, when does the food get here?"

For the first time, the alien girl's mouth twitched up in a smile, albeit a bitter one. "Never."

The ship had taken off not long afterwards, and they were currently flying through space. Dick was amazed. He was possibly one of the only humans who'd ever traveled so fast or far, who'd seen the wonders he was seeing. Planets and stars zoomed by them; dark matter, bright galaxies...if he hadn't been concentrating on how to escape, he would have been frozen with wonder.

Besides being amazed, he was starving. Obviously, Gordanians didn't feel the need to feed their prisoners. He wondered how everyone else had gotten along for so long.

Raven, the alien he was sharing his cell with for now, had since sunken into a state of almost unconsciousness, muttering the same string of words over and over again. Dick, however, was working out an escape plan. There had to be some sort of central power source. He'd hit or tear or damage it in some way until it shut down or exploded. Then he needed to get as many prisoners as possible and get out.

Of course, there was the fact that the ship could explode with him in it. Or that they would land on a planet with no oxygen in its atmosphere. But with his limited knowledge of anything universe-related, this was as far as he'd gotten. Not like Raven was any help.

There was absolutely nothing for him to do, for the first time since he'd run into the alien girl. It was the first time he'd actually been able to realize what predicament he was in. He was a prisoner on an alien ship, for crying out loud. This wasn't supposed to happen to him! To anyone! Aliens weren't even supposed to exist!

And why did he even care about what happened to that other girl, anyway? He should be concentrating on saving himself. Let the aliens deal with aliens, he had his own planet to care about. Why couldn't he have just dumped her at some hospital and driven far, far away?

Dick groaned and buried his face in his hands. If he didn't get something to eat soon, he was going to lash out at someone.

Raven opened her eyes. "We're landing."

This was his chance. "Listen, I figure that if we can blow up this spaceship or something--get all the prisoners out first, I mean--then we can get outta here. I mean, we'll be stuck on whatever planet this is, but that's okay, as long as it's friendly. We just have to get down to the heart of this thing and bash it around some. But we'll have to be really sneaky, we can't get caught by any guards--"

"It really doesn't need to be that complicated." Raven grabbed his arm. All of a sudden, Dick sank into a terrible state of nothingness, like whatever made him human had been completely wiped out. He didn't know where he was, or how he'd gotten there, or even who he was. He couldn't even feel Raven's hand on his elbow anymore.

As quickly as it had come, the feeling left. The two of them were standing in the control room of the ship, in the middle of five surprised Gordanians. Without warning, Raven whipped what looked like fifty black streaks at them, binding them all to their chairs and covering their mouths. One by one, she pressed her finger to each one's temple, and they passed out immediately. "Gordanian pressure point," she explained to Dick, who's jaw was just about touching the metallic tile.

Raven pointed to a wall, and a square cut itself out from the side, revealing a mass of wires. "Do you want to just stand there gawking or help out this friend of yours?" she asked dryly.

"Well, obviously, you don't need me to do anything. Why again haven't you tried this before?"

"Later. These idiots are only on one shift. We have to finish before we're interrupted by a staff change. I'll be over here, looking at the readings on this computer, and I can't chance any unsteadiness. I'll tell you what to do, you do it."

The objects she controlled did have a tendancy to bob up and down, Dick noticed. Their 'plan' could go up in flames if two things that weren't supposed to hit each other clashed. He positioned himself in front of the cables, awaiting instruction.

"You wouldn't know what an automated voice alarm cord looked like, would you?" Raven asked. He stared at the millions of wires in front of him and shook his head slowly. "It's the blue one back there...no, the other blue one. Disconnect it from the orange cable. You see the yellow on right next to it? Pull it out of it's socket, it won't hurt you. Oh...you only have two hands..." Raven scowled and did it for him. However many times he'd seen it so far, Dick still couldn't get used to the fact that this girl was shooting black...stuff right out of her hands. "Now connect that blue one and this yellow one. I'll help."

The two obviously did not want to be connected, but with a little forcefulness on Raven's part, they managed it in the end. "Good. Now, like I said, don't let go of that orange cable. No matter what."

"I get it," Dick answered impatiently.

"Just making sure." Raven pressed a few buttons, and Dick felt a rumbling beneath him. She was going to blow up the ship now...his instinct to flee was definitely acting up. But she'd told him not to let go of the orange cable.

How weird was it that it took so many steps to self-destruct the ship? Wasn't there supposed to be one big, red, shiny button that did all the work for you?

"Here goes nothing." She pressed one last button and the alarm went off, probably screeching the Gordanian equivalent of 'self-destruct initiated.'

"Great. How much time do we have?"

She didn't answer, just stared at the door as if waiting for something...

"Uh, Raven? The ship's going to blow up. Now would be a good time to leave," Dick suggested, anxiety coursing through his voice.

Still, she made no movement.

"Raven!"

"We're not leaving."

At any other time, Dick would have spent a good minute letting that sink in before getting up and running. But he didn't have any sort of time right now. If Raven was on a suicide mission, that was her problem. He was leaving.

Just then, twenty or so Gordanians barged into the control room in a complete panic. They barely took notice of the two 'prisoners,' merely butting Raven out of the way and starting to press buttons. Obviously, nothing was working, because the alarm was still going off. Most of them ran out the door, and a couple hesistated, eventually taken along with them a few of their still-unconscious comrades.

Dick made to follow them, but Raven conjured up a black, threatening-looking wall in front of him. "Do. Not. Drop. That. Cable."

"Who cares about the damn cable? We're going to explode!" he cried, nearly in hysterics.

The final screech of the alarm sounded, long and terrible as the death march drumroll. Time seemed to pass by so slow, milleseconds were like hours to them. Dick could hear the screaming of the trapped prisoners, see all the control room's lights on the blink, feel the heat of the blast...

Wait...no he couldn't.

The screech ended, and the ship took off into deep space, leaving over a hundred Gordanians stranded on whatever planet the prisoners had just left behind.

"You idiot. We were never going to blow up," Raven scorned him. She walked over and took the cable from him, after which Dick promptly fainted.

Do guys really faint after they find out they're going to have a son/daughter? Or is that just in the movies? 'Cause I can really imagine Robin doing that...it would be fun to videotape...