Black had enveloped Raven's eyes as well as her hands as she hovered in front of them, trembling. Her force field was being hammered ruthlessly, but she kept it in place, growling at the effort. Robin winced as the glass doors behind him shattered in their frames. He looked at Beast Boy, but his teammate was in no condition to do anything. As if reading his mind, Garfield tried to move and promptly coughed, convulsing until blood came to his lips and he fell to his knees. Robin grimaced, tightening his grip on his teammate's shoulder.

The bulbs of the streetlamps shattered in bursts of black energy as Raven let out another animal growl. Robin, looking at her trembling form, found himself doubting her control.

Not helping, Robin.

It took him a moment to realize that the voice had sounded in his head. As he felt a flash of chagrin, Raven brought her hands down in one swift, decisive motion and cleaved the last of the bots into twitching pieces. The darkness faded from her eyes as she drifted to the ground, followed closely by Starfire. Carefully, Robin lowered Beast Boy to a sitting position and wiped his forehead with the back of one gloved hand.

"Thanks. Nice save."

Raven dipped her head in acknowledgement and crossed to Garfield's side, placing gently glowing hands over his chest.

"Where did they come from?"

Starfire yanked the debri from her hair, wincing as she encountered singed edges.

"We think they were defensive. We were in pursuit of the other criminal when they attacked."

Robin was watching her carefully. She detected a tight sort of anxiety in his mental landscape. Actually, a similar feeling of apprehension was emanating from all of her teammates. And they all seemed to be watching her. Having finished her healing, she stood slowly, brushing dust from her jeans.

"What?"

Beast Boy accepted a metal hand from Cyborg and straightened his spine, rubbing his newly healed ribs with one hand.

"Um…we were kinda after handyman dude. You know, 'This city needs purifying and you would kill the one brave enough to do it'…"

Raven's hand went to her pocket, where she still had some of the strange, smooth stones from her therapist's office. They're called worry stones, he had said. You should take them. They help with meditation. The act of rubbing them between her fingers reduced her sudden urge to attack everything in sight, but she felt the blood drain from her face nonetheless.

"He…got out."

Robin nodded tightly, still watching her carefully.

"From what Cyborg managed to hack out of the jail security cameras, it looks like he was working alone."

Cyborg typed a few things into his arm, brow furrowed as he watched the footage back.

"Dude's out of his mind. Faked some kind of seizure, let the medics take him halfway to an ambulance, knocked 'em out and ran for it."

Raven nodded robotically, still trying to fend off memories that made her blood run cold. She barely felt Starfire's hand on her shoulder.

"We believe the madman is wishing to join our mysterious recruiter."

More to hide her face than for any other reason, Raven summoned her coat from where it had fallen and let it envelope her, the hood hiding most of her panicked expression from view. Robin pulled out his communicator, radioing in the city for clean up and emergency medical help as he spoke.

"We tracked him to the East side of town, near the beaches. When we tried to follow him into the cliffs, the robot army here came after us. We must have tripped a force field somewhere."

Beast Boy wrenched his gaze away from Raven long enough to gesticulate in four different animal forms.

"It was way trippy. But that's good news right? We know where super-dude lives now!"

Robin ran both hands through his hair.

"Not necessarily. It could just be a base. Whatever it is, we know he's got a human army too. We'll need to do some surveillance."

He shot Raven a quick worried glance, trying and failing not to betray his concern for – and attraction to – her. He had been about to ask her to take them back to Titan's Tower, but had stopped short, not wanting to put her in the uncomfortable position of refusing. She met his glance and blinked once, reading his thoughts on his face as easily as a cereal box. After a few uncomfortable seconds enveloped in icy black energy, the five of them found themselves securely in their living room. Beast Boy shivered theatrically.

"Dude! How many times do I have to tell you not to spring that dark energy stuff on me? I wasn't ready!"

Cyborg raised an eyebrow – or his metal version of one anyway, and gestured to the living room.

"Hate to break it to you, BB, but Raven isn't here. You'll have to vent your spleen some other time."

Robin, having found himself on the carpeted floor, got to his feet and dusted off his uniform.

"I've got to go talk to Aqualad about setting up some kind of surveillance. Cyborg, get to work on those robots. We brought back a head, right? Beast Boy, get yourself checked out in the medical wing. I might need you to go undercover, and I need you in perfect shape."

Visibly annoyed at his suddenly brusque tone, they obeyed, Beast Boy more reluctantly than Cyborg, who liked looking at new technology almost as much as playing video games. While he pulled out a cartoonishly large toolbox and began to dissect with almost obscene enthusiasm, Robin turned to Starfire, who had been greeted by whines from her pet maggot and was now rummaging in the fridge.

"Hey Star, can I talk to you for a second? I need you to do me a favor."

She put some mysterious goo into Silkie's bowl, then drifted over, tucking a long strand of auburn hair behind her ear.

"It is related to our present mission?"

"Sort of."

As briefly as possible, Robin told her about the missing gaps in the prison system, and the missing funding.

"I've set up a meeting with some important people in law enforcement, and Bruce made a large 'donation' to the Jump City prisons. I'd like you to work with the city to try and make them safer. You were kind of a diplomat on Tamarand, right?"

Starfire, after some initial doubt, nodded.

"I was a princess, yes. But many of your earthly ways are still strange to me. Are you sure I will be…diplomatic?"

He grinned at her, remembering the many times he had seen her comforting and liaising with civilians. People felt instinctually comfortable around Star in a way that they didn't around the other titans. Despite a lilting accent and some odd mannerisms, she was an easy person to talk to, and her empathetic nature colored her interactions. Robin trusted her to bridge the yawning gap between the titans and the people they protected…or at least to improve things slightly.

"I think you can talk to people better than the rest of us. And this requires a lot of talking. They wanted to get the whole team in to talk strategy, but we're swamped, and I figure you'll be a good representative. Besides, if anything goes south, you're one of the strongest fighters out there."

Starfire smiled slightly at the praise, the worry clearing from her brow.

"If you believe it is best, I will gladly go to this meeting."

He placed a hand on her shoulder.

"Thank you. It won't be easy."

"Diplomacy never is."

She moved to the main computer to begin gathering data, schematics, and floor plans. Star didn't let on much, but she was almost as good with computers as Cyborg, and better at hacking into earthly databases. Ideas for new training programs and more advanced weaponry were already flying from her fingers as she made notes. Robin smiled slightly watching her, then took a deep breath and disappeared into the hallway.

He stood in front of Raven's door for perhaps longer than was necessary, trying to gather himself enough to knock. It wasn't that he was scared of her per se, but he was hyperaware of her need for privacy and didn't want to interrupt meditation. On the flip side, they had sprung a fight on her immediately after a therapy session, and he wasn't fairly sure that she hadn't been all right either before or during the battle. As he stood there, arguing with himself, the door slid open, metal screeching discordantly against the wall.

Raven was pale, even for Raven, but her expression was fairly neutral and she had changed out of her singed clothing, into a different pair of jeans and one of her millions of oversized t-shirts.

"Um. Hi."

She smiled slightly.

"I sensed you standing here. Were you planning on knocking?"

Robin rubbed the back of his neck with one hand.

"I hadn't decided."

Her hair was damp; the scent of her shampoo clung to her frame.

"I just wanted to see if you were okay. I tried to keep the battle away from you, but…"

"I'm fine – "

She broke off and sighed, lifting her eyes to the ceiling as though there was something extremely interesting embedded in the doorframe.

"I'm supposed to stop saying that."

Robin found himself unsure of what to say, suddenly, which was stupid given the point of his presence. If he was honest with himself, he had expected her to say she was fine and slam the door in his face.

"I noticed some stuff during the fight."

She pressed her lips together and shifted her gaze again, this time to look at the ground.

"It wasn't…the most pleasant experience."

"I'm sorry."

"Not your fault."

It was his turn to sigh, mostly out of frustration.

"Cyborg is working on the robots. Hopefully he can tell us something about why they were – "

Cyborg himself came toward them, a tablet in one hand and a small box of wiring in the other.

"Speak of the devil."

With a half-glance at Raven, Cyborg held out the mini-computer for Robin's inspection.

"Was just looking for you. The robots are pretty advanced. Once you trip their sensors, they'll hone in on the GPS in the communicators and go after the titan furthest away from the other five."

Raven leaned over his shoulder to look at the schematics. He found himself, once again, distracted by the smell of her shampoo. There was something like jasmine there, and a scent he couldn't pinpoint, maybe incense? No, it was more subtle than that. Tuning back into the conversation, Robin intercepted an odd look from Cyborg and cleared his throat, feeling heat in his cheeks as Raven touched the screen lightly.

"So that's why the fight came to me. Clever."

She was right. It was a diabolical move, and one that showed just how clearly the titans were being targeted. He scowled as he handed back the tablet.

"It's a good strategy. What signals them?"

"I was getting to that," He swiped a couple of fingers across the screen. "There are sensors planted all over the city, set up kinda like digital guard dogs. I honed in on a couple of locations, but there's a self-destruct sequence programmed into the motherboard of these things. They're designed to raise an alarm – meaning a robot army – whenever somebody's gettin' too much information. I had to fry the thing before it tipped off the rest of em'."

Robin frowned.

"We can handle an attack, especially on the tower."

"That might be true. But I figured it was better if superdude up in his headquarters didn't know how close we were gettin'."

Robin conceded the point.

"You're right. Good work. Think you can get anything else we can use?"

Cyborg grinned broadly.

"Thought you'd never ask. I'm just on my way to plug their weapons structure into the main frame. We can learn their weaknesses during the next training session."

"Good. I'll let the team know."

Victor paused for a second, then shifted a blunt gaze to Raven, who looked impassively back.

"You okay, Rae? I know you weren't up to much fighting."

"I…will be."

It was a more evasive answer than she'd given Robin, but it was more honest than she tended to be. Cyborg clapped a metal hand to her shoulder.

"You need anything, let me know, all right?"

Robin watched him leave, mind already whirring with ideas to combat a robot army. Raven followed his glance.

"I should be helping."

Her voice was bitter, and when he looked at her, her jaw was tight.

"You should be taking care of yourself."

She folded her arms across her chest.

"I can do both. It's not like I'm suddenly incapable."

"I didn't say you were."

He tried and failed to capture her gaze.

"Raven, you know you don't have to fight to help the team. We need you, powers or no."

She blinked slowly, and Robin thought he saw tears in her eyes before she looked away.

"I feel…useless. Like he took something from me."

Robin put a hand on her shoulder, feeling her shaking slightly under his grip.

"Raven…you're a lot of things, but I don't think useless will ever be one of them."

A shrill beeping rent the air, not the alarm bell this time, but Robin's communicator. An incoming call only sounded the alarm when the number was unfamiliar, and he frowned as he flipped it open. His eyes widened as he looked at the familiar face that occupied the screen, feeling a strange jolt in the region of his stomach. Raven glanced from the communicator to his face, then backed into her bedroom, letting the shadows envelope her face.

"I'm guessing you need to take that."

Thanks so much for reading! Reviews always appreciated.

xx