Teen Titans
Adaptation
By Cyberwraith9
Technis: Test
Victor stepped off of the wall and lurched out onto the floor of Sector Prime, fighting down the bile in his throat. The Fast Action Level Lift he had rode down from Ops retracted back into its housing. "No wonder everybody hates those things," he muttered, and burped.
His inner ear swam with vertigo from the rapid descent. His stomach tingled and his legs wobbled. As he righted himself and ran for the distant security door, he watched a green eagle soar ahead of him, and grimaced.
Sickbay's doors opened as he barreled past. Starfire emerged, her pallid golden skin painted in the pulsing blood light of the Alert. She straightened the straps of her armor as she ran into step next to Victor.
"Hell no," Victor puffed, struggling to find air enough to snap at her. "Get back to bed, Kory."
Green defiance glowed in Starfire's narrowed eyes. "I am fit for battle. I invite you to try and stop me if you disagree," she said, flashing Victor a humorless smile.
They reached the security door a moment later. Beast Boy had reverted at the control panel, pounding on its keypad with a frustrated hand. He finally thumbed the right sequence into the pad, and backed away as the massive door unsealed with a hiss.
Starfire couldn't stop fast enough, and collided with Beast Boy as he backed out of the door's way. Beast Boy's apology died in his throat when he saw who it was he had bumped. "Oh! Kory…hey."
The defiant spark in Starfire's eyes faded, replaced with humiliation as her gaze trailed to the floor. Through the din of the klaxon, her voice came meekly and distant. "H-Hello, Gar."
His pointed ears drooped. "Hey, c'mon…I don't want us to be weird, okay? I'm really sorry about what happened—"
"No," she said quickly. "The fault was mine entirely. I apologize—"
Victor leaned on his knees and gulped to fill his aching lungs. "Could you guys save your Kodak moment for later?" he snapped. "We've got a city that needs saving."
"Meathead is right," Beast Boy said, and smiled. "Besides, I don't need any kind of apology from you, Kory."
She returned his smile, beaming with gratitude. "Nor I from you," she agreed, and took his hand. "You are my very good friend. I would hate for anything so base to come between…us…"
"It would be pretty…silly…" Beast Boy said, trailing off.
His pupils dilated, swallowing up her luminous smile. His nostrils flared, and his breathing sharpened. Starfire's thumb made circles on the back of his hand as their grasp tightened. A tremble ran between them.
Victor stared at the pair as they mooned at each other through the flashing, blaring Alert. "You have got to be kidding me," he huffed, and panted.
A cold shower fell from the Compound's upper levels wearing sweat pants and a Green Lantern shirt stretched over her stomach. She carried a dark blue cloak draped over her arm, and startled Beast Boy and Starfire apart with an irritated look. "I will find a hose," Raven warned them both.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Victor barked at her, finally finding breath enough to straighten.
She swept her cloak over her shoulders, draping her mundane clothes in a swath of navy mystery. "You said I get three hours of monitor duty. I'm starting my shift now, and I intend to monitor whatever situation is making this racket."
Victor loomed over Raven with folded arms. "Raven, there is no way—!"
"—that you're going out in the field? I agree," Raven said coolly.
Bushido dropped from the second level, landing in a crouch next to Victor and his gnashing teeth. "What is the emergency? My communicator was unforthcoming with the details. And shouldn't you be resting?" he added, lifting his eyebrow at Victor.
"Would everyone stop treating me like I'm—?"
Victor's snarl faltered as the floor shook. Tek landed behind him, dwarfing his broad frame with her armor. "Vic," she said, her tinny voice brusque, "you should probably get to Ops if you're gonna run the show."
A knowing look brightened in Bushido's eyes as he caught on. "Absolutely. Our lack of intelligence could spell disaster for us," he agreed.
"Mine always lands me in trouble," Beast Boy said.
Hooking her communicator on the thin violet strip around her waist, Starfire said, "We will maintain an open channel to Ops to facilitate coordination." She tapped the device's side, making its emblem flash with activation.
Victor's eye ticced. Their paper-thin facades didn't fool him for a second.
Then he looked down at himself, at the borrowed sweat clothes stretched over untested muscle. In the three years since his accident, he had been shot with every kind of weapon he could think of, and punched by enemies capable of tearing cars in half with their bare hands, and slammed through reinforced concrete. All of those trials had hurt enough through his implants and armor. And whatever had happened to him earlier that day, he didn't want to count on it happening again.
He gritted his teeth, to the point where he thought his molars would crack. "Stay together, and stay sharp," he said, meeting each of their gazes with a hard look. "Keep your ears open. I'll do what I can from here."
They nodded as one, and then rushed through the security door. Victor watched them funnel through the lobby's doors before forcing himself to turn back toward Ops. Aching legs and burning lungs weren't going to stop him from doing what he could to help his friends.
Sunset blazed, peering between the shadows of the skyscrapers. The streetlights flickered on in sequence. Distant sounds blended together into a murmur of turmoil. It was a sound the city had become familiar with, one that each of the Titans could easily, wearily recognize.
"He's going to freaking kill himself!" Beast Boy snapped. He cleared the sidewalk outside of the lobby's doors and then fell onto his hands. A snort split his muzzle as his shape poured into that of a lithe green gazelle. Clopping his hooves, he hurtled down the empty street.
Bushido rode atop Tek's shoulders, gripping the crest of her helmet. "Victor's ordeal is worrying, but perhaps now is not the right time," he shouted above the din of Tek's thunderous sprint, which left a trail of cratered footprints in her wake.
"Ryuko is right," Raven said, pacing the others in the air. "We have more important worries right now."
"Nothing is more important than Vic," Tek snapped.
The tight group of Titans backpedaled hard, and scattered out of the shadow of a spiraling city bus. Ten tons of public transit slammed grille-first into the street where they had been, mashing the pavement flat with a cacophonous spray of glass and rending metal. The upended bus skidded, tilted, and finished its flip, smashing onto its roof. It groaned to a halt ten yards behind the startled Titans.
Bushido glanced at the upended bus, and then followed its trajectory back to its source. His eyebrow twitched. "You might want to consider reprioritizing, Allie," he deadpanned.
It loomed. The surface of its silvery mass topped the buildings around them, and filled both lanes of the street. Half its lower mass schluffed forward, rolling across the pavement, seeping into cracks and potholes. Then its other half schluffed ahead, as though in a shuffling walk. Abandoned cars in its path were tossed aside by thick tendrils extended from its mass as it continued toward the end of the street, where the cheery lobby of the Compound waited.
The gazelle reared on its hind legs, and shrank into an astonished Beast Boy. "Okay, I know our lives are usually screwed up," he murmured, gazing up at the oncoming, shapeless, enormous behemoth. "But seriously? God damn…"
A tendril whipped out and lashed around a parked Prius at the curb. With an effortless jerk, the tendril flung the car out of its way. The car nosedived through the window of boutique, honking in death as its front half crumpled.
Tek winced with her whole body at the car's knell. "What the hell is this thing?" she asked.
The inferno coursing through Starfire's body bled into her eyes, where it sparked into a luminous scowl. It pulsed in her hands, making lanterns of her fists. "I do not care," she growled, "so long as it burns."
Traffic stood at a dead, honking standstill. The four-lane one-way out of the downtown area sat, bumpers kissing, drivers shouting and furious. Robin angled his bike between the lanes and forced himself not to notice.
Traffic jams happened for all sorts of reasons, he knew. It didn't necessarily indicate an emergency, even if people seemed more fearful than agitated at being stuck in their cars.
He gripped the throttle, keeping the Redbird balanced on the white lines. Traffic didn't matter. All that mattered was putting as much distance between him and the city as he could. For the life of him, he couldn't remember why he had come back in the first place.
He hadn't, really. Not on purpose. His coming back to California had just been a natural progression of casework since leaving Titans Lair. Backtracking that ring of metagene growth hormone—Gigastim—peddlers had taken him to the Midwest. The Gigastim ring, in turn, had clued him to the existence of a small cartel of metahuman traffickers and their trading with Triad sweatshops. And when he had broken the spine of the cartel—and the legs of its leader—in LA, he had caught wind of an important S.T.A.R. Labs shipment with links to the Titans…a tempting target for any of the Titans' myriad of nemeses.
The work had brought him back. He hadn't wanted to come. And it was past time for him to leave.
A tremor shook his handlebars. Robin checked the bike's display for an explanation before he noticed the rattling of the cars around him. Peoples' shouts grew panicked. He eased the Redbird's throttle back.
No. Earthquakes happened. A little tremor like that one meant almost nothing. He gritted his teeth and cranked the throttle, drowning out the rumble with the sound of the engine. Jump City had municipal countermeasures for any sort of emergency and a bevy of heroes at its beck and call. He would only be in the way. He needed to leave.
A second tremor struck, worse than before. In his rearview mirror, Robin watched a plume of dust rise above the city line. The air rumbled, resonating deep in his chest.
Robin mashed the Redbird's brakes as car doors flew open. The stranded commuters spilled out of their cars. Some ran to the sidewalks to flee from the distant cloud. Other stood in amazement. A few looked to Robin, silent questions etched into their panic.
Trapped between cars, Robin dismounted his bike and ducked out of his helmet to stare at the dust cloud. The tremors continued, too sharp and localized to be anything natural. Flashes of light trailed through the cloud in staccato bursts.
His fist clenched until it hurt. "Redbird," he snapped in a commanding tone, "release Redtail assembly and prep for launch."
The rear section of his bike shuddered. Everything behind the Redbird's seat above the wheel rotated upward. Its sweeping wings folded out, nearly punching through the windows of the cars around it. As the section folded up, revealing a pair of oversized thrusters, Robin donned his helmet again, hiding his scowl behind its visor.
"This usually works a lot better!" Tek cried.
She backed toward the Compound, her armor blazing in the muzzle flare of her repeating cannons. The weapons' heat seeped through her armor and seared her forearms. Tears blotted her eyes, blurring her helmet's HUD. Even still, she knew she was losing.
The creature undulated after Tek at alarming speeds. Its silvery mass suffered little from her barrage. Wherever her plasma bolts tracked, the creature simply altered its shape, allowing the bolts to pass around it, or even through it. One or two bolts would glance off its surface before it moved out of her bolts' way.
Green fire rained from the roof of a nearby delicatessen. The flanking bolts caught the creature unaware and struck deep in its central mass. Silver smoke hissed from its skin, but the creature showed no signs of slowing.
Starfire leaned over the rooftop's edge and doubled her efforts. A starwave beam poured from her hands. Where the creature did not ooze around her fire, it simply ignored it. "We must find a way to hurt it!" she bellowed.
As Tek continued to back away, she saw Beast Boy sprint past her, charging the creature. "Cool your flashing, Titanettes. I'm gonna take this one head-on," he called.
The Titans' barrage ceased as Beast Boy filled the street with the bulk of a triceratops. His horns plunged into the creature's mass, spattering the neighborhood in metallic gore. The green dinosaur's sheer momentum arrested the creature's approach. For one brief second, the creature stopped against the lowered frill around Beast Boy's head.
With a horrifying slurp, the creature's edges enveloped Beast Boy, spilling over his leathery hide. Quicksilver tendrils wrapped his stout legs. Screeching, Beast Boy shrank his colossal shape into that of a sparrow to flit from the creature's grasp. It closed around him faster than he could shrink. He trilled in alarm, and ballooned into a pterodactyl, jetting against the creature's hold with a thrust of his wings. All but his clawed feet pulled free, slamming him against the pavement.
His beak became a terrified face as the tendrils drew him back into the creature. "Tackling was so the wrong way to go on this one," he yelped, and dragged his claws through the street.
He felt a breeze behind him. Then the coils around his legs slackened. Flipping himself over, Beast Boy saw Bushido standing over two stumped tentacles, his katana bathed in metallic gore. The swordsman kicked deftly at Beast Boy's legs, splattering the dismembered tendrils.
"Quickly," Bushido snapped. "I don't—"
The tentacle stumps grew new ends. They lashed around Bushido and yanked him off his feet, drawing him through the air toward the creature's center. Beast Boy cried out, but a thick tendril smashed at him, forcing him to slither away as a snake or be crushed into the pavement.
His arms pinned, Bushido grasped the hilt of his katana and closed his eyes. For an interminable moment, he hung in the creature's grasp. The shouts of his allies grew distant, drowned out by the sheer emptiness roaring at him from his hand.
"Why not now?" he whispered to the emptiness. "I cannot do this alone. Why not now?" He opened his eyes, and saw them reflected in the blade. "Please…"
"Azarath, Metrion, Zinthos!"
Black blades of ether rolled across the creature's front, mowing its tentacles into sodden chunks. The tendrils carrying Bushido melted, dropping him to the street in a crouch. He raised his blade against a swarm of new tendrils rising toward him, only to watch the thin appendages be crushed under a soul-self steamroller.
"I don't think cutting it will help," Raven said, landing next to Bushido. "Blasting it isn't getting us anywhere either. Or hitting it."
"Unfortunately, those are our strong suits," Bushido said, and sheathed his katana.
Raven's hand drifted to the communicator at her waist. Sunset burned in her knit twilight brows. "Victor, we can't contain it. It's too big, and it seems to be heading straight for the Compound. And there's something else…"
Victor watched his console screen, resting his chin against his fist. The external cameras of the Compound's security grid fed Ops with a live accounting of his friends' difficulties.
The sight of the shapeless behemoth churned his stomach. "I think I see it. That's what I looked like, isn't it?" he said.
"You mean four hours ago? Yes," Raven replied.
"You're a lot prettier now," Beast Boy added.
The screen split at Victor's typed command. Working so slowly frustrated him. He wasn't a poor typist, but compared to sifting through code with his mind, even the simplest task on the computer felt sluggish.
Text filled the other half of the screen. Victor began to read, but gave up at the end of the first page of five hundred. "Sarah," he snapped, "scan the open document, analyze, and cross-reference with Doctor Brown's logs from earlier today. Is there a correlation to the creature outside?"
"Affirmative," Sarah's disembodied voice answered. "The subject outside matches key elements from Doctor Brown's observations and the recorded notes of Doctor Stone."
Victor bowed his head and cursed. A cursory match wasn't proof, but Victor knew better than to believe in coincidence. The attonites that had changed him had gotten to someone else. Or something else. For all he knew, the creature outside could just be a non-sentient mass of subatomic machines. Or it could be a person, mad with confusion, lashing out at whatever it encountered.
They knew nothing about the alien technology, and he doubted his father had known much more when he had fiddled with its programming. Fingering the canister shard, Victor muttered, "Looks like I wasn't your only test case, Dad. Only this one doesn't look so good."
Would this be his fate? Would he deteriorate into a shambling blob?
He shook his head. "Sarah, look at the notes again. Are there any specific vulnerability described in the attonites' design?"
After a pause, Sarah answered, "Negative. The focus of Doctor Stone's research appears to be the machines' reprogramming to replicate biological tissue."
"The creature does not seem to appreciate our energy attacks," Starfire interrupted, sounding breathless. Her starbolts crackled in the background. "But Tek and I are not generating enough damage to impede it."
Tek's voice strained as she chimed in. "Maybe we can lure this thing into the Compound, and then really zap it with the defenses. That might—"
Her idea ended in a scream. Through the comm, Victor heard a groaning of metal, and a wet, viscous sound that made him bolt out of his seat. The other Titans screamed Tek's name over the open channel.
"It's got her! It's pulling her in!" Beast Boy yelped.
"Everything you have!" Starfire bellowed. The air sizzled on her end of the comm. "We must not fail!! Titans, GO!"
Victor grasped the edge of his console as he honed his ears on the sounds of struggle. "Hold on, guys! I'm gonna…I…"
He trailed off. His hands started to ache with the force of his grip. Cursing, he slammed his palms against the console, and then hissed at the sting. The shallow cuts in his hand glistened in Ops' emergency lighting. There was no sonic aperture underneath his palm anymore, just bone and blood. There was no armor left to protect him anymore.
If he had time, he could jury-rig some kind of weapon. But he didn't have the time. He needed something mobile, something with firepower, something that worked.
…or something that mostly worked.
"I'll be there in two minutes, guys!" he shouted, and ran out of Ops. "Sarah! Meet me in the Bay!"
Tek couldn't hear Victor's message over the sound of her own hyperventilation. Her armored legs sank into the creature's amorphous back against all her struggling. Tendrils wrapped around her arms and shoulders to push her down.
She kicked and flailed, spraying quicksilver mass with the force of her blows, but the creature surged upward faster than she could dismember its innumerable appendages. She tried angling her cannons down into its mass, but the tendrils forced her hands over her head. Desperately, Tek willed the unfamiliar flight system of her suit to lift her out of the creature. New tendrils emerged to slap shut the glowing thruster ports that opened at Tek's back.
"Force field," Tek squeaked to herself. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the incandescent walls of energy she had summoned during her fight with the Justice League. "Force field, force field, force field, force field force field force-field-force-field-forcefieldforcefieldforcefield!"
An impact rolled through the surface of the creature. Tek opened her eyes, wondering if she had succeeded. Instead of a force field, she saw Starfire sunk to the cusp of her thigh-highs in the creature's back just a few feet away. "Starfire, no! You have to—!"
Wordlessly, Starfire swept a glowing hand through the tendrils that bound Tek's arm. She wrapped herself around Tek's massive elbow, and then twisted her entire body with a shout. The gesture tore Tek from the creature's hold and flung her armored form high and away from the reach of the tentacles.
Without Tek's armor to wrestle, the forest of tentacles on the creature's back turned to Starfire. She felt the creature shudder as it continued its slog toward the now-looming Compound. Its mass pressed into her legs, slurping her deeper into its clutches, pulling her waist beneath its surface as its tentacles fell upon her.
Righteous fury blazed from her eyes and hands. She flung bolts at her feet, vaporizing entire handfuls of the creature while her cutting glare severed the tendrils around her. More and more cropped up to take the place of the severed appendages, lashing at her faster than she could burn them down. She fought the creature's pull with every ounce of her strength, and slowly lost.
Through the writhing mass around her, Starfire saw her friends gathering soul-self and green dinosaur bulk and exploding shuriken to come to her rescue. She felt the creature's grasp climb up around her bare ribs, and knew they wouldn't reach her before she vanished into the creature. It slurped at her hair, yanking her head back to spoil the aim of her blazing eyes.
Then an explosion rocked the creature from behind. Force slammed up through the creature, pounding Starfire's legs. Its tentacles flailed, losing their interest in Starfire as she was hammered out of its mass and into the air amidst a sparkling geyser.
Starfire tumbled, the world around her spinning too fast to make sense. Something firm caught her by the armpits and jerked her forward, straightening her in a burst of acceleration. She heard burning thrusters, and looked up.
The reflection of her astonished face stared back at her in Robin's visor. He wore on his back a pair of red metal wings with black rockets clipped to their undersides. One rocket was noticeably absent. Thruster backwash shimmered behind his trailing heels as he carried Starfire above the street. He pressed her against the front of his tunic to steady their flight.
"Are you okay? I'm setting us down," she heard his shout filter through his helmet. The pounding heart in her throat kept her from answering.
They landed on a nearby rooftop. Robin let her drop first, and then cut his thrusters and touched down, staggering beneath the weight of his cumbersome flight assembly. He staggered again when Tek long-jumped up from the ground and shook the rooftop with her craterous landing. Seconds later, Raven fluttered to join them, followed closely by a green pterodactyl ridden by Bushido.
"Check it out," Beast Boy said, shrinking out from under the swordsman to examine Robin's red wings. "It's Battle Pack Robin, now with kung fu rocket action!"
"You came back!" Tek cried. "That's great! Not that it really makes up for you turning your back on us earlier, or anything…but yay!"
Raven leaned on her knees, breathing hard. She bent carefully around the bulge of her stomach. "We need a new strategy, fast. In less than half a block, that thing is going to be in our lobby."
Planting his foot on the lip of the building, Bushido leaned over and examined the creature from on high. "Nothing we do is slowing it down. If anything, its progress has improved since we first encountered it," he noted. "We cannot stop it."
Robin flipped the visor of his helmet, revealing a hard, masked look. "We don't need to stop it. We just need to adjust your strategy."
Puzzled looks met his declaration. Tek swiveled her helmet, checking to make sure everyone else echoed her confusion before she said, "Huh?"
Staggering to the edge of the building, Robin pointed down into the street behind the creature. The breadth of his wings almost swept Bushido off the roof as he turned, and said, "Look at the mass the creature has lost. All the appendages you keep cutting off, or the pieces you tear out of it when you attack it."
The other Titans looked back along the creature's path. Metallic carnage littered the street in puddles, and painted the buildings, and dripped from street lights. Directly behind the shuffling creature, glimmerings of its mass lingered in potholes and cracks, rough patches of the street that had scraped off parts of the creature.
Beast Boy shrugged. "So?"
"This is the same material that changed Victor, isn't it?" Robin asked impatiently.
Hesitating, Raven said, "We think so."
"But it isn't reacting after it's separated from that thing's central mass. Whatever it is, or was, the creature's structure seems to become inert once it's removed," Robin said. "It's already been reduced, which is probably why it's moving faster now."
Bushido brightened. "I see," he said.
"I don't," Beast Boy complained. "Say it again in English."
"If we remove enough of its mass, we can disable it," Raven said. "Or at least reduce it to a more manageable size."
"Eng-lish," Beast Boy repeated, elongating the word with annoyance.
"Tear it apart!" exclaimed Robin, Raven, and Bushido.
"Eng. Lish." Beast Boy chopped his hands between the word.
Daggers leapt from Raven's eyes as she straightened. "Even you can't be that stupid," she snapped.
He grinned. "I'm not. I just wanted to see how far you would dumb it down." Then his smile became fangs. "But enough yakking. Let's shred!"
Beast Boy's whoop became a screech as he dove headfirst off the buildings edge into the shape of a falcon. Scooping up Bushido, Tek followed in a wheeling leap, with Starfire dropping hot on her heels. Raven shot through the air, her cloak rustling with speed, while Robin launched from the roof in a thunderous blast of his Redtail's thrusters.
The creature's probing tendrils had just touched upon the sidewalk in front of the Compound's lobby when a concentrated fracas tore into its back. Bolts of green and white ate its body into an acrid, metallic smoke. It shifted away from the bolts as it had before, trying to keep ahead.
Twin rockets outguessed the shifting creature. The bolts herded the creature into black projectiles, which plunged beneath its surface, and then ballooned its mass with fire. A wave of silvery pus leapt off the explosion and coated the street.
Tendrils whipped from the creature's back to retaliate. The wiry appendages snaked into the air and over the ground to grasp the bolts' source and bat the rocketeer out of the sky.
Trumpeting a war cry, a green mammoth stampeded across the reach of the tendrils. His trunk tore the appendages wholesale from the creature's central mass while his thick feet mashed them into quicksilver paste. What few appendages the mammoth missed were cropped by Bushido and his flashing sword.
More tendrils arose to overwhelm the mammoth and the swordsman. The creature's mass became a writhing wave of tentacles that leapt upon the pair, wrapping into them faster than they could flatten or cleave.
Robin loosed his last rockets into the far side of the creature, disrupting the anchor of its tentacle assault. He twisted skyward to avoid the creature's gushing wound. "Raven, now!" he bellowed.
The sorceress dove past him, her face taut against the rush of the air. Her cloak billowed around her as she stopped high above the creature. She pushed her will into the air, focusing her soul-self into the overextended creature. A bitter chill swam in the air as four flat blades of ether materialized, hinging together along one side to become a crude beater. With a twisting gesture, Raven plunged the beater into the creature and willed it to spin.
Silver splattered everywhere as Raven's soul-beater spun into a blur. The creature's mass painted everything in sight—buildings, cars, and unlucky heroes. Tendrils jerked and writhed as the beater severed their connections.
Seconds later, the black beater slowed, stopped, and dissolved above the remainder of the creature. Only a fraction of the creature's central mass had survived, barely more than that of a compact car. Even that dwindled, as rivulets of its skin drizzled off of the trembling, diminished creature.
Raven landed next to her gathering friends. Starfire and Tek had escaped the worst of the spray, bearing only a few splatters and a misting of flecks. Beast Boy and Bushido were living mirrors on one entire side, with startled eyes peering from their reflective fronts.
Spitting quicksilver, Beast Boy offered Raven a halfhearted scowl. "What a wasted opportunity. 'Let's mix it up?' 'Turn around?' You had a whole world of quippage open to you, and you choked."
"I suppose so," Raven deadpanned, arching her eyebrow. "Next time I'll remember to give it a whirl."
Robin's descent drowned out Beast Boy's reply. The Redtail lowered him to the ground on rippling waves of thrust, which he snuffed with a twist of the controls strapped to his hands. He shucked the pack, letting it drop behind him with a clatter, and loosed his scalloped cape from his back with a gesture.
"Stay sharp," he barked, letting his hand poised at his belt as he watched the quivering creature. He walked in a slow circle, drifting between the creature and the cluster of Titans behind him.
"Will you relax, Rocket Bird?" Beast Boy scoffed, and wiped at the reflective discharge covering his face. "We just went Steve McQueen all over this thing."
"Who?" Tek murmured sidelong to Bushido, who shrugged.
Beast Boy's hands cleared the runny metal away from his grin. "Stick a fork in it, it's done. Let's get Vic out here to science the hell out of it while the rest of us hit the showers."
Robin drew closer, ignoring the chatter behind him. His eyes narrowed on the bottommost edge of the trembling creature, whose outline shrank as its mass perspired down its side and pooled onto the street. Miniscule divots appeared in the puddles, where the street had cracked and the creature's mass poured in to fill them. More mass continued to sink into the street as the creature shrank. More mass, and more, too much to fill a few simple cracks.
Realization split Robin's face for a shout as he whirled around. "Hit it now!" he bellowed, already drawing an explosive disc from his belt.
Too late. A sharp buzz resonated up from below. Each Titan tingled with a sound reminiscent of the final completed circuit of a mad device. The creature's tremble became a jitter that rippled its skin. That jitter spread through the street, tickling their feet with vibration.
Memories of Victor's resurrection flashed in Tek's thoughts. She remembered the way Victor's progenitor substance had reacted to an electro-disc, and recognized that reaction in the creature now. As the street quaked, she backed away, and cried, "Underground! It's in the power lines underground!"
The street rumbled, spraying pavement from chasms that spread beneath the toppling Titans. Whole sections of the street rolled up, the rough concrete and black tar glistening as it became smooth, silvery mass. Columns of the metallic substance grasped the Titans from belowground, imprisoning them in tentacles too thick to break and too strong to overpower.
As the rumble of the street quelled, the remainder of the creature began to pull itself upright. Its sprouting tendrils hardened around the Titans, the shimmering metal dulling into static, cold, immersive bonds.
"Power source…better…" a reverberant voice said. "Stabilizing…control…"
Raven arched in the steely grasp of her bonds. Her whole body suffered in the grip of the metal. Air crawled down her throat in labored gasps, her chest constricted to the point of collapse. Panic knifed through her heart as she felt the fetus kick. She tried to focus her soul-self into a tool to pry the metal apart, or to open a portal wide enough for escape. Her concentration fled as the edges of her vision began to blacken.
Deep crimson color poured through the metal around her. It grew hot to the touch, like fire kept under glass, and murmured with a voice that Raven didn't hear with her ears, and couldn't quite understand.
With a screeching wrench, the bonds around her split open, spilling her onto her knees on the cracked pavement. Raven collapsed around her stomach, heaving for breath, and looked back at the broken column of metal. The murky red coloring evaporated from the alloy, leaving it a tattered blossom of jagged, torn steel.
The soft babble of emotions inside of Raven eased. She hid her brimming eyes in the shadows of her hood, overwhelmed and surprised by the relief she felt. "Good fetus," she murmured between gasps.
More panic clawed at her psychic walls, emanating from behind her. She turned to her trapped friends, who struggled as she had in the metal bonds. Soul-self gathered before her as she chanted her mantra to focus her ragged will. "Azarath, Metrion…"
The creature stretched itself into a thick tendril and lashed out at Raven. She caught the flickering motion out of the corner of her eye, and braced herself for the hit, unable to interpose any kind of defense in time.
She was saved by a roaring, gunmetal blur crossing the battlefield. It plowed over the creature, mashing it under enormous black treads and spraying it off of a snub face. Raven caught a spray of metallic residue to the face as the tendril exploded. She flinched and blinked as the blur locked its treads, skidding to rest on the broken street.
Only the skeleton frame of the CUTTER had been finished. Half its fuselage was missing, leaving the interior visible through empty panels and unfinished welds. None of its heavy armor had been mounted onto the frame, making the tank appear diminished, even emaciated. Its missile racks and plasma turrets were absent, and its engine was visible through the missing hood as a network of conduits and pistons. Its fusion micro-core glowed blue in the metal maze of its undercarriage.
Immersed in the solid metal of his bonds, Beast Boy could only follow the tank's arrival with his eyes. His half-covered mouth split for a strangled cheer. "Robo-Vomit!"
Victor waved through the empty windshield. He sat on a folding metal chair that had been duct taped to the stripped interior of the CUTTER like a makeshift harness. "Cut everybody loose!" he shouted to Raven.
As Raven carved the other metal columns open with her soul-self, freeing the other asphyxiating Titans, the spattered silver puddle at the epicenter of the torn street began to rise. Victor tensed his foot atop the gas pedal, his hand clasped around the tank's gear shift. The motor beneath him rumbled hungrily.
The puddle climbed from itself. Beneath it, the soft buzz of the live current drawn up from unseen, underground electrical conduits fed the creature's growth. Its base split apart, while its top bulged into three growths, one bulbous, two gangly. Details arose from its skin, which dulled into pale shades of white and pink. In seconds, the creature became a sight that took Victor's breath away.
"It can't be…" Victor whispered. "D-Doctor Smith?"
Walter Smith clasped the lapels of the lab coat manifested out of his own body. His face bulged, producing spectacles, which he straightened over his cold gaze. "Hello again, Victor. We seem destined to meet always under ignominious circumstances, do we not? This time, however, the embarrassment is mine. I require your assistance."
Raven freed Tek last, helping her down from the column to stand next to their gasping friends. Tek's armor had protected her from the suffocating grasp of the metal, leaving her voice more than strong enough to carry her confusion. "Who's that guy?" asked Tek.
Beast Boy hung in Starfire's grasp, her arm wrapped around his shoulders as he filled his lungs. He tried to ignore the way her hand kneaded his arm as he wheezed, "That would be our friendly neighborhood mad scientist. This is…what? The second time he's come back from the dead?"
"That we know of," Robin wheezed back, braced on his knees.
The CUTTER's growl ebbed as Victor abandoned the gas pedal. He pushed through the empty windshield, bracing himself on the bottom of the frame, and gaped at the scientist born from the quicksilver. "You were the monster all along?"
"Stones and glass houses, boy," Smith said, his flat voice carrying across the distance. "It seems the process was successful for you. You aren't experiencing any fluctuation in mass? No loss of physical structure?"
Victor bristled at the scientist's tone. "You tore apart half the city just to quiz me?" he shouted, and gestured to the devastated wake left in the creature's—Smith's—path.
Smith said, "I have not been as fortunate as you. When the material made contact with my skin and implants, it triggered the experiment. I surmise you experienced a similar But the metamorphosis appears to be unstable. The regenerated mass requires a constant flow of electricity, or it relapses into its inert state. Thus, I required an excess of mass in order to reach—"
"You attacked innocent people! You attacked my friends!" snarled Victor.
The corners of Smith's eyes crinkled. "I will admit that the assimilation of excess material put something of a strain on my cognitive faculties. When you children thoughtlessly lashed out at what you did not understand, I defended myself on instinct. Such matters are now in the past, Victor. There are more pressing issues at stake now."
"Like what?" Victor seethed.
Electricity hummed into Smith, drawn up from a tendril snaking from his heel and through the ground. "I am breaking down, Victor. I require continuous electricity and matter in order to retain my form. Your father's technology is flawed, and I must correct it."
Muscles bunched in Victor's jaw. "Seems to me it worked just fine," he said.
"Indeed. You remain whole, and I must discover why." Smith stepped forward. The tendril at his heel tugged his foot back, forcing him to stop. "I must examine you to ascertain the key difference in our mutual experience that allows you to maintain your structure."
"Examine me? I don't think so," Victor retorted. "I'm not your lab rat anymore."
Smith's cheek twitched. "That was not a request. And lack of cooperation on your part will make the experience needlessly unpleasant. I recommend you acquiesce."
"Or," Beast Boy called, dropping from Starfire's possessive grasp, "how about a different plan? We bottle your gooey ass up and shelve you in the meanest, toughest prison pantry we can find."
Birdarangs filled Robin's hands as he threw back his cape. "You want to surrender while you still have some mass left, 'Techmann,'" he snapped.
"Honestly, Victor. These annoyances are intolerable," Smith said.
The flesh of his arm rippled. Dark circuitry patterns emerged from the flesh as it expanded outward from the bone. His fingers and palm folded back, becoming a glowing aperture, which he turned upon the row of Titans to his left.
"No!" Victor shouted, too late. Smith's arm belched plasma fire brighter than anything Victor had ever seen. The heat of the blast kissed Victor's face with the dry, acrid taste of ozone all the way across the battlefield. Anyone caught in the torrid geyser of the cannon would be ash before they realized it.
Raven grabbed Bushido and Beast Boy and melted into her own shadow, dragging the startled pair with her. Starfire tackled Robin in mid-leap, carrying him even higher. The heels of her boots softened like putty in the rippling air that surrounded the beam.
Tek couldn't move her armor fast enough. She threw her arms over her face and screamed.
As the white fire swallowed Tek, she felt her armor hum. The trim of her armor glowed, and a wash of blue light surrounded her. Coalescing, the light became a force field, encapsulating Tek from the vicious plasma.
Fire crashed over the blue sphere like a lethal tide. Pavement boiled underneath her. Tek began to swelter as excess heat began to overpower the field's limits. Tek peeked around her arms, and watched her force field flicker and shrink. She had no idea how long it would last, or if it would move with her if she tried to run. She didn't even know how to activate it.
"Help!" she screamed.
The CUTTER roared as Victor stomped the gas pedal under his bare foot. His duct taped harness strained with acceleration as the tank leapt forward, its treads chewing through the ruined street, its enormous front wheels bracketing Smith.
"A regrettable choice," Smith murmured. The geyser from his arm ceased as he swung it around. Its aperture shrank, and glowed red. Taking aim, Smith unleashed a pencil-thin beam of red light upon the CUTTER, drawing it up through the center of the oncoming tank.
Victor twisted away from the beam as it flashed through the interior cabin. Dazzled by the beam's intensity, he felt the tank shudder and begin to veer, its engine dying in a cough. He groped across the dashboard, feeling for the proper cluster of controls. When his hand found them, he felt the control panel drifting away.
The bisected CUTTER wobbled apart under its own momentum. Its halves tilted together, the metal frames twisting as they clashed. The wheels and treads splayed out from under the weight of the rolling wreckage, and dumped the remains of the venerable Titan transport across the street.
The smallest debris skittered up to Smith's feet. He noted them with a dismissive look as his arm resumed its previous shape.
Tek punched through the waning bubble of her force field and tromped across molten pavement in a dead run. "Vic! No!" she cried.
The rest of the Titans converged on the tank's wreckage. Metal shrieked and flew back as Starfire and Tek laid into the CUTTER's gnarled frame. Black ether wrapped into the debris, peeling it back from the remains of the cockpit. A green ermine dove into the gaps in the frame.
Working together, the Titan women pried open the wreckage interior. Beast Boy shoved on the frame from underneath, growing with gorilla strength. His hairy bulk overshadowed a limp, stirring form wedged between the wall and the driver's seat. Beast Boy tore the seat away and cradled Victor in his oaken arms.
Blood spilled from a cut spanning Victor's forehead. Purple bruises bloomed all over his face and arms. The shapeshifter's whimper stirred Victor, who groaned, and opened his eyes. "Oh, hell," he groaned. "What a face to wake up to…"
Shrinking into his human shape, Beast Boy smiled. "Better?" he asked.
"No. Way worse," Victor grunted.
Compression waves enveloped Beast Boy's head. Victor fell from his grasp as Beast Boy plowed through the wreckage along the path of the blue sonic beam.
Sonic blasts plunged into the Titans' midst with pinpoint accuracy, striking Robin and Bushido, and batting Raven out of the air. A doubled blast hammered into Starfire, snuffing the starbolts from her hands as she tumbled down the street.
Tek spun in time to watch Smith's arms refocus on her. The ends of his empty wrists glowed blue with sonic power. As she raised her cannons to return fire, the blue glow became white. A bemused look crossed Smith's face before he disappeared behind a curtain of white electricity that spanned the distance to Tek in an instant.
Victor watched the last of his friends fall to the ground with a howl, her armor overloaded by the electric storm Smith poured into her. Grasping the CUTTER's frame, Victor hauled himself to his feet, remaining there only by the grace of his grasp on the twisted metal around him.
The cannons in Smith's wrists became hands once again. "As you can see, I've exceeded your father's meager expectations for the attonites. This so-called 'Technis' was meant to be simple prostheses for his useless son. Silas always lacked vision. He had no sense of scale."
A hard fist clenched in Victor's stomach. He leaned against the dashboard, pushing his glare as far as it would go. "You shut the hell up about my father," he said hoarsely.
"Do you have any idea of the implications at work here?" Smith said. The tendril connecting him to his underground power supply limited his movement. So he lengthened his arms into silvery extensions that pushed across the battlefield toward the CUTTER's remains. "This technology can literally do anything. Become any substance, any machine, even any living entity. It can replicate any physical material. Weapons. People."
The world lurched around Victor. His head throbbed as he caught himself against the tank frame, and glared at the tentacles coming for him. "Shut up," he tried to snarl.
"With this kind of power, I will eradicate disease and hunger. I will conquer aging. Death will become obsolete once I discover the secret locked inside of you," Smith said. "The reign of Nature is over. Mankind will graduate to a new form, to Technology. And I will shepherd its evolution."
Smith's tendrils parted the CUTTER's frame with ease. They slithered in and caught Victor by the wrists, jerking him hard into the dashboard.
Reeling, Victor fought the tentacles to no avail as they dragged him out of the wreck. Jagged edges cut into him, sparking pain across his arms and sides, soaking patches of blood into his clothes. He staggered, but kept his feet under him. His eyes trailed up the tentacles to their source.
Through sheer force of hatred, Victor's world shrank. He banished his surroundings, and his worry for his friends, and the pain eating his body from the inside and outside. Everything he knew became the tentacled scientist grasping him and the dwindling space between them.
He hated Smith. He had hated Smith from the day he met the scientist, who had helped his father bastardize him with cybernetics. Smith represented everything Victor hated about science, about the kind of work that consumed his parents' lives: that cold, sterile, mechanical detachment, the inhumanity Victor had feared since waking up as a nightmare amalgamation of man and machine.
That hatred, that sheer outrage, throbbed in Victor's temples. It tingled up his arm, which languished in Smith's grasp. Skittering across the ground inexorably toward Smith, Victor pushed every ounce of hatred he had at the monster that grasped him.
"NO!" bellowed Victor.
Sonic waves shattered Smith into a thousand miniscule globules that sprayed over the street. The tentacles holding Victor disintegrated, splattering into two lines.
Victor stared down at his arm. The smooth, metallic casing of his sonic cannon had subsumed the limb, turning his hand into a glowing aperture. Even as he watched, the cannon's metal undulated, collapsing back upon itself to become flesh and blood once more. His hand emerged from his wrist none the worse for wear. All of the cuts and bruises that had been in his arm were gone.
A sudden fatigue dropped Victor to his knees. Every cell in his body felt drained, leaving him lightheaded. Biting back a wave of nausea, he fought to keep his eyes open, and tried to understand what his body had just done.
Quicksilver poured at Victor from a hundred different directions. It converged together into the mass of a man and pounced on the teen's chest, driving him onto his back through a shallow mess of the CUTTER's wreckage. Dazed, Victor struggled with the reflective blob as it took form once more.
"Altering your form can take its toll, as I'm sure you now understand," Smith said through a rudimentary mouth. His skin remained silvery, his features, blunted, as though he lacked the strength to resume his former shape. It looked to Victor as though the real Smith were trying to push his way out of a mirror, and failing. But the metallic creature's pseudopodia more than matched Victor's waning strength.
Something blue glowed in the reflection of Smith's undulating skin. As Victor wrestled against Smith's grasp, he looked up above his head, and saw an object pulsing with light a few feet behind him. It was the CUTTER's fusion micro-core, the fist-sized power source of the tank. Smith's cutting beam had mercifully missed breaching the core, or else Victor would have been charred, free-floating attonites.
Pseudopodia oozed from Smith's chest and lashed around Victor's throat. The world around Victor turned red, blackening at the edges. As Victor's eyes rolled up into his skull, they fell upon the micro-core. His hand clawed over his head as he convulsed in Smith's ironclad grasp.
Smith drizzled as he crushed Victor's throat. "Consider," he said, "you suffocate only because you've convinced your body that it needs air. Had you sufficient power, you could eliminate every one of your paltry biological needs. But that sonic attack took its toll, didn't it? You're fatigued. You're finished."
Scrabbling, Victor's fingertips brushed against the micro-core. It tilted onto its edge, and then rolled under his palm. He grasped the device with desperation, and closed his eyes, focusing on the warmth of the infinitesimal fusion reaction under his palm.
The flesh of his hand poured around the micro-core, enveloping it. It pulsed softly under his skin as it traveled up his arm, disappearing at his shoulder. Victor used his panic to fuel his thoughts, forcing himself to remember circuitry, and alloy, and mechanics. Blueprints he had etched into his mind through endless repetition emerged from his memory. He concentrated on their design until he could think of nothing else.
Smith's pseudopodia stretched as the neck in their grasp expanded, its flesh and bone galvanizing into armor. The sweatshirt beneath him ripped, splitting apart to make room for a molybdenum steel chest plate. Smith felt himself rise atop Victor as the teen's body burgeoned with metal.
Blue light pulsed through a window in Victor's chest. Steel swallowed half of his face, pouring around his smile. His left eye disappeared into a red glow.
"Funny thing about power," said Cyborg. He sat up and snapped Smith's pseudopodia with a gesture. His oversized hand wrapped around Smith's head. "You don't appreciate it until someone with more comes and kicks you in the teeth."
Cyborg rolled over and slammed Smith's face into the ground. The silvery creature exploded beneath Cyborg's palm, which blasted a crater into the pavement.
Clambering to his feet, Cyborg shook the glittering mess off his hand. "Consider," he said snidely to the lurching, headless mass at his feet. "You've been a machine for all of, what? Half a day? I've had three years' experience driving a body like this, thanks to you."
The metal around his face started to recede. Cyborg paused for a breath, refocusing his thoughts on his former body's blueprints. His body solidified again.
"Feeding on the city grid, though? That's gotta be a pain. With all those brains you keep bragging about, you think you'd find some kind of mobile power source, like this." Cyborg tapped the glowing window in his chest. "It's a little too Iron Man, right? I know. You can't expect too much from a 'troglodyte' like me."
His arm mechamorphed into a cannon, bathing Smith's trembling remains in blue buildup.
"But I'll tell you what you can expect," snarled Cyborg. "Nine thousand decibels of ultrasonic foot-up-your-ass if you don't give up right now. We'll put you on a nine-volt drip until we figure out how to stabilize you, and then we're shipping your sorry ass to jail."
Pavement crunched behind him. Cyborg twisted around to look, keeping his aim on Smith. One by one, the other Titans staggered back to the edge of the battle, dazed, but alive. Tek preceded the others, the joins of her armor still smoldering. Her visor flashed with blue at the sight of him. "Vic?" she asked. "Or…Cyborg?"
In the moment's distraction, Smith's quivering mass gathered together, and sprang up in a shapeless leap. The wake of Cyborg's sonic blast kicked Smith hard into Cyborg's chest, where he splattered, and stuck.
Cyborg screamed as his chest dissolved into agony. A foreign presence seeped into the very alloy of his armor, corrupting the sub-molecular attonites that composed him back into their default, silvery form. The presence dug until it touched the micro-cell deep in Cyborg's chest, and forced its connection into the cell's leads.
Smith emerged whole out of the blob on Cyborg's chest. His wrist merged unnaturally into Cyborg's sternum, which darkened from alloy into skin. As Cyborg screamed, his implants dissipated into his body, becoming muscle and naked flesh once more.
"I suppose an examination is unnecessary," Smith said, and wrenched his connection to Victor's chest, twisting a howl from the naked teen. "You possess everything I need. Absorbing you should correct the deficit in my attonites' program."
Metallic veins crawled through Victor's skin. The reflective pallor spread across his chest, swallowing the detail of his body into an amorphous quicksilver blob. His scream spurred the Titans to him. But their readied shots and poised blades hesitated, unable to strike Smith without hitting Victor.
Scowling, Smith pressed harder, pushing more of himself into Victor's chest. "Give me the secret," he hissed. "Give me what I need."
His hiss became a yelp as Victor's veined hands closed around his wrist.
Clenching his teeth, Victor turned his scream into a snarl. He shoved his feet underneath him, and forced his legs to straighten. It took everything he had to stand and keep his hold on Smith's arm while his body racked him with pain. "You know what you need?" he growled.
The color in Victor's skin succumbed. Every inch of him became gleaming metal, losing its detail to the quicksilver's undulation.
Then, as Victor straightened, the lines of his body steadied. They solidified. Silver expanded and swirled, becoming not armor, but neither flesh. Muscles set into angular shapes. Facial features softened, receded, until all that remained was a sharp, lipless mouth set beneath two burning blue eyes.
What had once been Victor now stood taller than Cyborg ever had. His body gleamed, reflective and hard, like a Greek god sculpted from pure, perfect metal. Smith dangled from his chest, his eyes wide with fear behind spectacles.
"Will," the metal creature said, spilling blue light through its reverberating voice. "I lived for years in a hell you made for me. You and my dad. And I made it because I wouldn't let myself quit. You don't have what it takes to hold yourself together, old man. You don't have the will."
Smith's hand ejected from the creature's chest, throwing the old scientist to the ground. He bounced with a cry, and scrambled back to his feet. His arms blurred into quicksilver tendrils and stabbed at the creature. "No!" he sobbed. "No, I must have the key! Give it to me!"
His tendrils stabbed at the creature, and spattered across its chest. Smith tried accessing its attonites again, pouring his will through himself to contact the subatomic machines that formed the creature. Again and again, a thousand times in the space of a heartbeat, the creature rebuffed his contact. Smith howled, and poured everything he had into wresting control of the creature's body.
The creature's lucent eyes narrowed as Smith drove himself against it. Rivulets streamed from Smith's body, which lost its color for a silver sheen. "You'd better take it easy," the creature said. "You look a little 'fatigued.'"
With one last roar, Smith collapsed into a writhing mass of tendrils. He wailed and writhed, spilling toward the creature in a tsunami floundering tentacles.
"Don't," the creature said. "We can still—!"
The tentacle wave swelled. Broken pavement beneath it succumbed to its touch, adding to its mass until it loomed over what the battlefield. Its shadow swallowed the other Titans as it reached for the creature.
The creature raised its arms. Its structure changed fluidly, without any ratcheting mechamorphosis, shifting its shape and composition until it pointed two massive sonic cannons at the oncoming tentacle wave.
A mountain of ultrasonic sound erupted from the cannons. Windows rattled for miles, and car alarms shrieked through the city in waves. The flash blasted the night sky, painting the city blue. An inhuman howl evaporated inside the flare of the cannons, dwindling until it became nothing.
When the cannon flash ended, it haunted the Titans' eyes as dancing spots. They each fought their vision clear and charged forward to meet the threat, whatever it had become.
Victor knelt on the street, naked and alone, breathing heavily. He lifted his eyes to the stalwart approach of his friends. Pushing a wan smile through his face, he said, "S'okay. He's…gone."
Drifting back to the ground, Raven gave the silver-speckled street a quirked eyebrow. "It looks more like he's everywhere," she said in a cautious tone. "Is he…?"
"I don't know," Victor said. "He must have run out of juice trying to…I'm not really sure what he was trying to do. But I couldn't let him."
Robin wrapped his cape around Victor's waist as the tired Titan shambled to his feet. Amazement wrought the Teen Wonder's heavy mask. "What was that thing you turned into? It was…It was…"
"It was freaking awesome is what it was!" Beast Boy whooped. "First you got all Cyborg'd up, and then you went all gooey, and then you turned into some kind of…Cyberion thing!"
"That's not actually a word, but okay," Victor grunted.
Questions rattled from the Titans around him, falling on deaf ears as he surveyed the absolute disaster on the Compound's doorstep. Everywhere he looked, there was destruction, all of it painted with metallic ooze. Deep inside his chest, he felt a strange warmth continue to pulse.
"We can figure out what happened later," he said, shaking away the persistent questions. "Now that the real fighting is done, the SCU is going to be all over this place. And it looks like a chemical spill threw up all over us. We should call S.T.A.R. Labs and—"
He tried to take a step. Lightheadedness struck him without warning, sending him into a nosedive before his feet could recover. A large metal hand caught him by the chest, easing him upright.
"I think you need to sit down," she said, her tinny voice tinged with warmth. "You've had a long day."
Victor hung in Tek's grasp, too tired and dizzy to argue.
The Commons glowed with the light of a single screen. A small holographic window hung above the dining table, black and white with text. In the late hour since the Titans' battle with Smith, the Compound had stilled. The city noise rolled past the windows, looking in, but remaining outside.
Victor hunched over the tabletop. The light-screen prodded his bleary eyes. He pushed aside a plate with the remains of a hamburger and a few fries, all stone cold. His yawn fell into his hand. Words scrolled on the hovering screen, but he had lost the ability to discern them half an hour ago.
His whole body ached. He luxuriated in the feeling as it soaked into his bones. Being able to work up to a hundred hours without recharging had been nice, but he looked forward to his first night of real sleep in over three years. He only wished he had a real bed for the occasion.
A face appeared through his text without warning. "You need to stop working," Tek said, and pushed her smile through the light-screen's membrane. She had snuck into the Commons under cover of his fatigue. She could have walked in wearing a one-man band on her back, and Victor still might have missed her.
"It's not work," Victor said through another yawn. "I promise. I'm just getting some reading out of the way so I can get an early start on the—"
"No." Tek circled the table and straddled the chair next to his. "No, you won't. You're not working on anything for at least a week. No monitor duty, no missions, and no maintenance."
Smiling sleepily, Victor said, "So now you're in charge? Somebody's gonna have to teach you the secret leader handshake."
Her hand settled atop his. She squeezed, and murmured, "You really scared me today. What's going on up there?" Her fingertip prodded his forehead.
The sensation of her touch tickled long after she lowered her finger. He stared down at their hands intertwined, watching his tendons jump as he squeezed back.
"I don't know," he said. "I mean, obviously the attonites respond to conscious thought. God only knows how, or what it means. That's how Smith produced all of that hardware on demand. That's how I managed to reassert my implants. I concentrated, and they were just there."
He touched his chest. Underneath the taut, borrowed T-shirt, he felt the steady rhythm of his heart. The heavy weight of the CUTTER's fusion micro-cell sat next to it. The heavy metals and electrical output contained in the cell would kill him, if he were as human as he looked.
"With this big honkin' D-battery in me, who knows what I can do?" he said, and knocked on his chest. "I just gotta figure out what—"
"No," Tek said with an exasperated sigh. She brushed his brow, smoothing the confusion from his forehead. "What happened to you? Not your body. You? It was like you wouldn't even admit that anything had happened to you today."
He shrugged uncomfortably. "Didn't have time to stop and take stock of my fingers and toes, kid. When you get a day like the one we just had, you just gotta keep going." His eyes glazed at the memory of a similar day, years ago, with similar changes. "Gotta keep it together."
The corners of her mouth stretched. "I guess," she drawled.
A deep breath whistled through his nose as he straightened in his chair. He focused his will into his hand in Tek's grasp. Gradually, the flesh condensed, drawing mass from other parts of his arm as it shifted into angular metal. Tek gasped in surprised and let go of the cold appendage as he lifted it in examination.
His concentration became amazement at the alien design of his new hand. Without his focus, it reverted back into flesh and bone. "But maybe you're right," he mused. "I've got time now. I can get a handle on this 'Cyberion' thing, and then I can be part of the team again."
Tek stared at him with naked shock. "Again? When did you…?" Then her face fell. "That's what this has been about?"
Her fist drilled Victor in the arm, making him jump with a yelp. Rubbing the new bruise, he complained, "Ow! I never realized how strong you were until I got skin."
"You moron!" she exclaimed. "You are, like, the dumbest genius I will ever meet! You've been freaking out all day about nothing!"
"I haven't been freaking out," he protested.
"You have! You've been doing that stupid guy thing where you pretend like there isn't anything wrong even though everything's wrong and you don't want to deal with it!" She gave him a pained look. "Vic, did you seriously think we were gonna kick you off the team because you lost all your robot parts? How could you even think something so horrible?"
He frowned. "It's not horrible. It's just facts. I'm not a kung fu guy like Tim or Ryuko. Without my powers, I—"
Tek scoffed, "Your powers sucked. You shot sound and punched stuff. Whoopee. Kory was always stronger than you. Raven was always smarter than you. And I always had way better firepower."
Cringing, he said, "Great. Now my arm and my feelings hurt."
She punched his other arm. "Your stupid hardware never made you part of the team, idiot. It was everything else.
"Did you know I still get freaked out every time we square off against these Tyrants and monsters and psychos with death beams that keep calling us out? Every time. And when it happens, I look at you. Not at the metal. You. And I see the way you keep it together, keep us together, and I just want to…to be like you." Her voice trailed off as she broke his gaze.
Even in the dark, Victor could see the brilliant color flushing her cheeks. He felt his eyes sting at Tek's open, vulnerable candor. The embarrassment she radiated seeped into him until it broke down a wall he didn't know he had.
"I got really scared when I woke up like this," he said, his voice starting shakily as he looked at his hands. "It's like, I kept praying for this to happen since the moment my dad and that doctor freak hardwired me. I wanted my old life back more than anything. I wanted it so bad."
"I know the feeling," Tek said quietly to her feet.
"But when it happened…" Victor faltered. His hand ran over his face, masking the glistening of his eyes. "I started to think about what I had to go back to. My dad died. Grandma didn't last long after him. I don't…I don't have any family left. And when I thought about leaving here, about leaving you guys, I realized that I didn't have anywhere to go."
His voice grew thick. "I just wanted to prove that I was still part of the team. I didn't want to leave. You guys are all I…"
As he faltered again, Tek slid her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him. She felt him shudder with a choked breath as he hugged her back. She didn't try to speak. She didn't need to.
Parting reluctantly from his embrace a moment later, Tek smiled, and dried her eyes. "So," she said.
"Yeah," he said, and dabbed his own eyes with his thumb with a manly sniff.
"'Cyberion,' huh?"
Victor cringed. "It sure as hell beats 'Robo-Vomit.' I mean, it's nonsense, sure. I've been toying with other words for…whatever the hell I am. Technomorph? Omegadrome? But damn it all if Salad Head's thing isn't starting to grow on me."
"He's sneaky with names like that," Tek said with a grin. "Just be thankful your make-up word has more than three letters. People take a longer name more seriously."
They chuckled together, until his laugh became a yawn. "Sorry," he said, chagrinned. "It's not the company, I swear. I'm just—"
"Tired. Which is why you should sleep." Tek rose from her seat and patted Victor's shoulder. "I should, too. Even people made of regular old matter get tired. I can't imagine how tired Cyberions can get."
She hesitated for a second, her hand lingering on his shoulder. Then, before he could move, she leaned forward and pressed her lips to his forehead. They lingered there an instant too long to be chaste. Drawing back, she let her fingers slide off his shirt. "G'night, Vic," she whispered, and backed out the door.
The sensation of her kiss glowed in his skin. He sat at the table and stared through the light-screen at the door where Tek had disappeared. In the moments that followed, his eyes' focus drifted back to the screen. It had scrolled through the entire document to return to its first page, which read, "Project: Technis." Silas Stone's name hung beneath the title in bold print.
Tapping the touch-sensitive table, Victor brought up the command to close the screen. He gave the hologram one last look. "Thanks, Dad," he whispered. Then he tapped the table, plunging the room into dark.
Beast Boy stepped from the shower stall wearing a towel around his waist. He ran another towel over his face and hair, trying to scrub out the memory of the silver detritus.
S.T.A.R. Labs technicians had poured over every inch of him—of all of them—ensuring twice over that the renegade scientist's "material" was collected, inert, and had no lasting repercussions for anything it touched. Even after two hours of being scrubbed by men in hazmat suits, Beast Boy still felt dirty. After three showers, he still felt dirty, but he was too tired to care anymore.
As he pulled the towel over his face and sighed, he heard the bathroom door slide open. A familiar scent wafted up under the sodden folds of his towel, jolting him to a halt. He tore the towel from his eyes, and stammered, "Hey."
Raven stood in the doorway, toothbrush in hand, hair still damp from the forced hazmat cleaning. She wore a velvety robe, the belt scarcely long enough to tie around her waist. Mild discomfort twisted in her face to mirror Beast Boy's surprise. "Hi. I was just…" She lifted her toothbrush to finish the thought.
"Huh? Oh, sure!" Beast Boy scrambled aside, giving her five times as much room as she needed to walk to the sinks.
She afforded him an odd look before settling at the sink on the end. As he watched her begin to brush her teeth, he saw her odd look return to him through the mirror, and realized that he was staring at her.
"So," he said, rubbing the back of his neck. "Uh, crazy night, huh? Crazy day. People melting, technology evolving, emotions running wild…understandably…"
Raven brushed her teeth, staring in reply.
"Nobody to really blame for the, uh, wild, running emotions. These kinds of things happen, am I right? We just gotta shake it off. So-and-so says this, so-and-so does that, so-and-so kisses so-and-so. It gets crazy. Am I right?"
She kept brushing. Her eyes haunted him from the bathroom mirror.
Beast Boy slumped back against the row of shower stalls. The back of his head banged against the shower door as he groaned at the ceiling. "Okay, look. I'm sorry. I'm really, really sorry about what I did today, Raven. It was stupid and thoughtless. Can you please forgive me? Are we gonna be okay?"
Raven's toothbrush paused. She left it hanging in her lips as she turned around with a curious look. "Do you even know what you're apologizing for?" she asked around a mouthful of foam.
He groaned again, and knocked his head against the shower stall. "Son of a bitch," he swore to himself, "I should have known better." Pasting her with an annoyed, exasperated look, he said, "No, I don't have a clue. But I'm smart enough to know when you're really mad at me, 'cause you don't act like you're mad at me, you just get all cold and Raven-y about it.
"And now on top of my first apology, I gotta apologize for apologizing without knowing what I was apologizing about. And then I gotta apologize for having to ask you what I was apologizing about." Beast Boy straightened against the line of shower stalls. He tied his second towel around his eyes like a blindfold, and said in a defeated tone, "Okay. Fire away. Tell me what I did wrong, and then let me have it. I know I deserve it."
He cringed, listening for Raven to lay into him with a cold, snappish list of his transgressions. Instead he heard her resume brushing her teeth. Tugging the towel out of his eyes, he looked to her expectantly.
Raven glanced at him through the mirror. She took her time finishing, letting him stew. Then she spat, wiped her mouth, and said, "You don't have anything to apologize for, Garfield. So don't."
Beast Boy blinked. "No. No, this is a trick," he said slowly while she washed her face. "I'm gonna believe you, and then not apologize, and then you're gonna turn around and get me for double because I still don't get it. Well, I'm not falling for that one, Raven. I'm sorry. I apologized. You have to accept it. It's in the Geneva Convection, or something."
Her eyebrow rose. "No tricks. In fact, I should apologize to you."
He waited, still expecting more. But Raven simply turned and waited for him to speak, her features calm. "I don't get it," he said at last. "You were super-pissed at me for kissing Kory earlier today."
"No," Raven said patiently. "I wasn't angry. And if you knew me half as well as you think I did, you'd be able to tell the difference. I was…"
Beast Boy took a cautious step toward her. "Raven? Is everything okay?"
Her jaw set, and her brows knit. She looked past him, unable to meet his questioning gaze. "I was jealous," she said.
Thunderstruck, he rubbed his towel at his ears, sure that he had misheard her. "You were…?"
"Jealous," she said again. Seeing his surprise, she added, "Not like that, Garfield. It's…more complicated than that."
He stepped toward her again, forgetting his surprise at the worried expression on her face. "Well, you could explain it to me," he suggested. "Just make sure you use small enough words."
With a wry look to his smile, she said, "I saw you kissing Koriand'r…and I know it was involuntary…mostly…"she said as he opened his mouth to protest. "But that doesn't matter, because it made me realize…"
"…what?" he asked.
Sobering, Raven looked away. "It made me realize that one day you really are going to find someone else. And you should. You deserve someone, Garfield. You truly do. But a relationship like that is going to mean less time for…other people."
The confusion faded from his face. "Oh," he said.
"I got accustomed to you being there for me, and…let's face it, doting on me," she admitted. "I even grew to like it. It made me feel like I had a safety net always ready to catch me. I needed that, even if I didn't know it. But when I saw you and Koriand'r, I realized…you can't always be there for me."
"I will be," he told her. "Besides, the girlfriend thing? Not much of an issue. I have to keep myself off the market. It's the only way to be fair to the millions of beautiful ladies who can't—"
"Garfield," Raven chastised him softly.
He sighed, and rolled his eyes. "Come on, Raven. Don't be like this, okay? Not now. I'm tired, you're tired, a big goo monster tried to eat our friend and tear down our home…"
Raven shook her head. "What did I tell you, Garfield? The people we care about never stay. When I saw you and Koriand'r together, it made that abundantly clear. Seeing it made everything seem very…real." She touched her stomach. "And that scared me, just for a moment. But I'm fine now. And I'm sorry."
His jaw clenched. He folded his arms across his taut, lean chest, and said, "Apology not accepted. I don't care what happens. Even if we both move to opposite sides of the planet, or one of us gets hit on the head and winds up speaking in crazy made-up language, I'm always gonna care about you. No matter how many hot girls are into me, or what brooding goth guy finally wears you down, I will always be there for you and that kid you're lugging around. You can't get away from it, so don't even try. Don't even think about it, 'cause it's not gonna happen. Ever. End of discussion, chapter closed, roll credits, finito completo. Deal with it."
She stared, waiting for him to break his gaze, or crack a joke. He did neither.
A tired half-smile broke through her stony demeanor. "I'm going to bed," she told him.
He swaggered to the door, slapping its panel. "I'll walk you there," he told her. His steely eyes dared her to argue.
She didn't. Not even when he held her hand.
The upper level of the Habitation Wing afforded Starfire complete solitude. Hers was the only room upstairs, next to the nursery that wasn't needed yet. She hated the quiet, and needed it all the same.
She stood at the end of the hall, watching the city through the bay window. At the right angle, she could see all the way to the end of the street, where the last of S.T.A.R. Labs' hazmat trucks were pulling away from the cleaned scene outside the Compound. In the morning, city workers would arrive and start putting the street back together.
It had been a glorious battle, one that made her heart ring. She sighed. With each battle she fought, and each foe she bested, she felt a little of herself return, filling the shell that had awoken on the beach at Blackfire's feet.
"Starfire," she heard suddenly, without the warning of footsteps in the hall.
Her hand shot to her chest at the sound of the voice behind her, pressing between the straps of her honor armor. Her heart pounded in her breast, but not for the memory of the battle. Her blood boiled, charging her veins with unbearable heat.
She didn't turn around. She didn't dare. Her face was a traitor, and would give her away in an instant. "Hello, Robin," she said, her voice flat and ugly.
His scent overpowered her. She felt him move behind her, a rustling of cape and Kevlar and muscle. He started to speak, but lost his words halfway through the first syllable, and fell silent. Closing her eyes, she tried to banish him from her senses.
"I wanted to see how you were doing," he said. It wasn't what he meant to say the first time, and they both knew it. "Vic said you were sick earlier today. You seemed okay in the field, but I thought—"
"I am fine," she said tightly. Her hands clasped over her chest as if to keep her heart from bursting.
He hesitated. "That's…good. That's good," he said.
Starfire clenched her eyes, wishing with all of her might for Robin to leave. She bit her tongue to keep from crying out, and locked her legs so she could not run.
"I'm just staying through the morning. Making a few adjustments to my bike," he said. His voice was a gossamer fraction of his normal, commanding tone. Starfire heard the uncertainty in him, if only because he filled her ears to the exclusion of her own thoughts. "I'll keep to the Bay, and be gone before you know it."
"Yes," she whispered hoarsely.
She heard his boots shuffle away. A prayer of relief crossed her clamped tongue. But to her horror, the footsteps stopped after only a few feet.
"I tried to stay away," she heard Robin say. "I wanted to. I didn't even realize that I had come back until I saw…" He swallowed audibly. "It doesn't matter. I just wanted to say that I'm sorry. I tried to…"
A dam broke in Starfire. The heat pulsing through her became excruciating. She shuddered, and turned, and found relief in the cool, empty gaze waiting behind her. Her body moved before her mind could decide.
Robin balked at her purposeful stride, and stepped back. "Starfire?"
His question died as her lips crashed into his. A fervent hunger exploded in her, and poured into Robin through the force of her kiss. She kneaded his hair with a forceful grasp, pressing against him until her deafening heartbeat thrummed against his own.
He emerged from the kiss with a gasp, tongue-tied, tongue-tired, shocked and awed at the naked desire swimming in her eyes. His hands found her hips, and he hesitated, unsure if he should push her away, or draw her closer still. "What—?"
Starfire slammed him against the wall. His teeth rattled as the thin alloy bent behind him, leaving a divot roughly the shape of his torso. When his eyes straightened, he saw Starfire's face in his, leering at him with a predatory smile. Her body pressed into him, pinning him with his feet three inches off the floor.
She kissed him again, and grasped him by the tunic. They staggered down the hall with no more words, no more questions, no more fatigue. They broke only to open the door to her room before they lost themselves in each other.
To Be Continued