Teen Titans
Adaptation
By Cyberwraith9
Ascendance: Prophecy
Victor was dying again. He didn't like it any better this time.
Blood pooled underneath him, rippling with each wheezing, rasping, weakening breath he drew. The agony radiating from his chest had dulled, becoming a numb chill that spread into the rest of his body. Copper and bile mingled in his throat, burning and stinking.
This death hurt less than the others. It still hurt, but not nearly so much as his first death three years ago. And it galled him to think that he had died so many times that he had created a pool for comparison. His most recent death had been just the day before, when every cell and circuit in his body had been consumed by repurposed alien technology. That had been sheer torture, if mercifully brief. Being stabbed couldn't compare. But it still hurt. And he was still dying.
Through darkening eyes, Victor saw the empty doorway of Sickbay flare red. Victor distantly remembered the black, chilling wave that had come from Sickbay only a moment before. This light felt different. It tingled under his skin.
Screams twisted through the light, which spread until it touched everything in the hall. Victor listened to the screams, and wondered how they could sound so far away when he was so close. He wanted to act, but his arms and legs still refused to help.
A thought sparked in his sluggish mind, that lump of fat and tissue sitting between his ears. It wasn't fat or tissue. It was a collection of machines, devices so small as to make nanites appear gargantuan by comparison. They arranged themselves to look like atoms, molecules, cells, organs, but they weren't. Victor's body looked human, and acted human, but it wasn't.
That had been the hardest part of his original accident. Looking in the mirror and seeing a face that was only half-his had almost killed him. It had taken him the better part of a year to learn how to function in his new body, and even then, he had never fully accepted it. Being a cyborg had been an affliction to overcome, not a permanent condition. His greatest wish had been to banish the offensive metal in his body.
Yesterday, Victor had done just that. Wish granted. His body looked human. It acted like a body should act. So when some lunatic swordsman shoved two flat sheets of metal through it, his body began to bleed out like any other human body would.
He had no time left to bleed. He could no longer afford the luxury of his humanity. He remained human because he had wanted—needed—to be human more than anything in the world. Now he needed to be more.
Stop bleeding, he told his body.
Vital fluid continued to spurt from his wounds, heedless of his stern command. He felt dizzy, and cold, like he was falling into a glacial pit somewhere where only the red light could reach him. He struggled to concentrate.
Stop bleeding, he said. You stop that shit right now. People are counting on you. People you love. Now quit gushing and get up.
The blood spurting from his chest may have slowed. He couldn't tell because he couldn't see. He screamed at the darkness, he screamed at the red light, with a voice he no longer had.
Get up. Get up! You're not even human! You can't bleed! You can't die! You are a big, bad robot wrecking machine, and no wussy poke through the guts is going to stop you. You are supercharged and pissed off about it.
He felt a little less cold.
You're not a person. You're a Titan.
His chest became a fountain of agony. He clenched his jaw shut, forcing the scream back into his lungs, where it resonated, fueling the shredded tissue inside of him. He focused his thoughts into the wounds.
Be a Titan.
The world came back to him, bright and loud. His chest throbbed, but it no longer screamed, and it no longer spouted. His arms and legs reported back to him with tingling, tentative readiness. They gathered underneath him, pushing him out of the puddle of his blood. Droplets spattered behind Victor as he wobbled toward Sickbay.
Something charred and feral peeled itself off of the floor. It snarled, becoming Beast Boy once again.
He opened his newly regenerated eyes to fading red light. Amidst the broken chaos of Sickbay, Shimmer's pale skin stood brightest. She had pressed herself against the far wall of the room, her hands flat beside her. Her mouth shook with horrified murmurings Beast Boy could not hear.
Jinx lay sprawled next to him. She stared up at the foot of Raven's bed. Her eyes pushed out of their sockets as though trying to abandon her to the horrors of what they saw. The witch didn't as much as stir as Beast Boy shambled to his feet. Despite the warning of her eyes, he looked for himself.
A nude figure loomed over Raven's bed. Over six feet tall, his body wore the sculpt of a Greek statue. Scarlet color clung to every inch of him, hairless, save for a flowing mane of hair the color of a fresh winter clearing. Two short, round stubs dotted the top of his forehead, like antennae that had been sanded down and lacquered. Every physical aspect of the creature exuded perfection, save for a single flaw. Upon his right hand, he lacked the tip of his littlest finger, possessing instead a halved, scarred nub.
The red glow shrank back into the figure's four narrowed eyes. He blinked one set, and then the other set stacked above. Wisps of smoke emerged from his lips as they curled into a smile.
In his flawed hand, the red figure held a mummy by the face. The gnarled, chalky corpse wore battered blue armor and sabers sheathed at its back. Its mouth hung open in a silent scream. Its hands dangled from the figure's arm, its bones wrapped around his impressive muscle.
"So much rage," the figure purred, examining the mummy in his grasp. His voice rang low, and glided like velvet pressed against silk. The words reverberated in Beast Boy. He heard the figure's voice, but he also felt it.
Every sense Beast Boy possessed screamed at the red figure's presence. Beast Boy smelled brimstone, and saw aberrant shadows dance in the figure's musculature. He tasted black bile as he gasped when the figure's four eyes turned upon him. Just a look, the barest touch of the figure's eyes, made Beast Boy's skin crawl.
The shapeshifter shrank back from those four burning eyes, and stammered, "What the hell are you?"
A smile spread the figure's lips, revealing a nest of white razors behind them. He said to Beast Boy, "I know your voice. You spoke at great length with my daughter."
"Wh-Where's Grant? What happened to Grant?" Jinx breathed. Her eyes flickered between the figure and the mummy trailing in his grasp.
The figure glanced down, as if Jinx's haunted question reminded him of the corpse he held. He let go. Fleck of paper skin clung to his fingertips as the mummy dropped. It crumpled against the floor, vomiting out the top of the battered armor in a gout of dust. Jinx's pale face whitened as the dust spilled over the tips of her shoes.
Beast Boy bristled as the figure stepped toward him. The smile defiling the figure's face elicited a roar from deep within Beast Boy, one that rang through his innards, and emerged from his fangs in a snarl. His clawed fingers extended, sharper and longer than ever. "Who are you?" Beast Boy demanded. "What did you do with Raven's baby?"
The figure stopped. Bemusement glowed in his eyes. Resting a hand on his sinewy chest, he said, "He stands before you now, mortal. The Child of the Portal and the Priest. My daughter's son."
Portal and Priest. The words rang in Beast Boy, dulling his claws with shock. Memories of a cavern swallowed him whole, transporting him back into that harrowing day beneath Brother Blood's mansion, when he and Raven had fought to stop the coming of the Church's dark, twisted god.
"It's you," he whispered, wide-eyed. "You…You're the guy Dominic tried to call up with his ritual. You're…Raven's son?"
"Lord of Demons, king of a thousand hells, ruler of all I survey." The titles echoed from his lips, the mere sound of it eliciting chills throughout the room. "And now, thanks to my daughter, I shall add this realm to my rule."
Beast Boy's pallid face twisted first with shock, and then with disgust. "Your daughter? You're Raven's freaking dad? Dude, what the fu—!"
Crackling hex blasted the demon, enveloping his chest. The blast threw him off his feet and slammed him into Sickbay's wall. Shimmer screamed and scrambled out of his path as he collapsed onto the floor.
Jinx clambered to her feet, kicking up a small cloud of her ex-boyfriend. Her eyes burned with a scowl centered on the struggling, six-foot newborn. The hex in her hands became roiling air, which radiated cold so intense that it made her breath steam as she snapped, "You son of a bitch! Bring him back! Bring him ba—!"
Her last word ended in a rasp as bands of black ether closed around her throat. The shimmering cold in her hands evaporated at once. Choking, she dug her fingers at the bands, trying to loosen them enough to draw a single breath. The bands refused to budge. They lifted Jinx off her feet, leaving her toes to scrape the floor as she thrashed wildly.
The biobed rustled with motion. The creature that arose from the sheet wore a medical gown and blinked its four sunken, luminous red eyes. Oily black hair framed its blank face. Its slender hand reached for Jinx, squeezing. The black bands at Jinx's throat tightened.
Beast Boy staggered at the sight of the creature on the bed. "Raven…?"
Raven's gaze turned to him. As she stood from the biobed, her medical gown slipped off her shoulders, stealing Beast Boy's breath. No sign of her pregnancy remained, not a crease, not a fold, not an ounce. She was a porcelain goddess, achingly, unnaturally beautiful.
Glowing brands emerged in Raven's ashen skin, written in a language the likes of which Beast Boy had never seen. Like neon tattoos, they clung to her, lining her arms, hugging her breasts, wrapping her stomach and legs, and despoiling her face. The brands glowed red as though they burned. Joined with the light from her eyes, the glow of the brands painted Sickbay and everyone in it to match her son.
The black bands choking Jinx faded, dropping her as Raven's attention fell to Beast Boy. Jinx collapsed into a gagging heap, and curled into a ball.
"Come on, Raven. It's me," he said, and gulped. "It's Gar."
Laughter rang around and within Beast Boy, coming from the far wall. The demon arose from the floor, his head tilted back in rich laughter. The cuts left by Jinx's blast pinched shut before vanishing from his skin. "She knows who you are, mortal. Do you know who she is?"
Hate spilled around Beast Boy's hand, a palpable sensation he could feel pushing against him as he reached for Raven. It spilled from her, that malevolent red light that made his insides scream and pucker. He fought through the light, taking two steps that cost him all but the last of his strength.
He collapsed to one knee beneath the weight of her scowl. Beast Boy could scarcely recognize the hateful creature looming over him. It looked like Raven, a perfect vision of Raven, but Beast Boy's senses screamed at the sheer wrongness of what she had become, like they screamed at the scarlet demon.
Her red glow bent his head toward the floor. Beast Boy reached out, blindly groping for her. By some miracle, he felt thin fingers brush his own, and he grasped them with everything he had left.
"Raven, snap out of it!" he bellowed, and squeezed her hand.
Seconds crawled by, measured by the hummingbird tempo of Beast Boy's heartbeat. As he struggled to breathe, he felt the invisible weight atop him begin to lessen. The muscles in his neck bunched as he lifted his head. Raven's four-tiered glare looked no less hateful than it had a moment before. But he could feel the difference. He smiled at her.
"What the hell is going on?" Victor yelled. He hung against Sickbay's empty doorway, aghast at the demonic presence in the room. His soaked clothes dribbled blood across the tile as he staggered toward the startled red figure at the center. "And who the—"
The instant Victor stepped into Sickbay, Beast Boy's heart split with a sudden stab of fear. He felt the weight return threefold, mashing him back to the floor as Raven turned upon Victor.
Her hand slid out of Beast Boy's grasp. Her four eyes narrowed.
Everyone and everything in Sickbay crumpled beneath a silent explosion of red light. Raven stood at the epicenter, untouched by the splintering biobeds, the shattering screens, or the shards tearing up from the floor. Beast Boy saw the two Tyrants caught in the blast slam up against the wall, the breath crushed from them before they could even scream. Then he felt the light's jackhammer touch, and then the punch of the wall behind him, and the world went black.
As hard as the blast hit the others, they felt a comparative kiss to what hit Victor. Raven collected her light into a battering ram and flung it from her open palm. Her unearthly power pegged Victor out of the doorway and into the air, where he tumbled, unable to cry out. The blow had collapsed his chest and shattered his spine.
The demon remained untouched in the dimming maelstrom. His laughter boomed while the light receded into Raven. "Magnificent," he purred. His hand teased the supple curve of her body. "All these years of hating me and fighting me have made you strong. When I claim this world as my own, you will be my greatest asset, my sharpest sword, my strongest shield."
A cry of outrage shot into Sickbay. The demon looked outside, through his eyes and through Raven's, and saw a slender, golden sylph across the great hall. Starfire, his daughter's mind told him. A creature as alien to this world as he was.
"Raven!" Starfire called. The alien's hands alighted with green fire. Her eyes blazed with it. The demon could taste the power of her soul even at such a distance, and it stirred his bottomless hunger.
Behind the alien groaned a large, copper-headed giant. And behind the giant, a multitude of red copies watched, pinning down a wide-eyed mortal with a curious sword. Still other specters haunted the corridor outside, all of them powerful in the demon's otherworldly senses.
Powerful, doubtlessly delicious, but too much for him in his current state. He had but a single soul, drained from the furious mortal in two-toned armor. With only one soul in his festering body of half-flesh, he possessed a fraction of a fraction of his true strength. The strength of his daughter might overcome the fantastic mortals of this realm, but he would not satisfy himself with victory by proxy. He wished to conquer. He wished to consume. He would need strength to do both.
And with that thought came the realization of where he could collect such strength.
The demon smiled, and grasped Raven's shoulders. "Come, daughter. Take us home," he commanded Raven. "We will return for this world soon after."
Raven's eyes flared. A rift appeared behind her, raw and red, boiling with a silent choir. It swallowed Raven and the demon both, and then closed, narrowly avoiding the barrage of green fire that bulleted through Sickbay's doors.
For the second time in as many minutes, Beast Boy awoke to pain and confusion. He fell out of the wall, landing on all fours. The beast living inside of him pulled back his lips, revealing long fangs. A rumble escaped his throat before he remembered who and what he was.
He battered the beast back down and stood. Outside the ruins of Sickbay, he could hear fighting in Sector Prime. Billys screamed as starbolts and birdarangs criss-crossed the floor. But here, the world was quiet.
Beast Boy ignored the Tyrants cowering against the wall. He stared at the black scorch mark at the epicenter of Sickbay's destruction. Beneath the stench of brimstone, and the dust stirring the air, he could still smell a lingering hint of her. Beneath the thing she had become, he could still smell her.
Claws ate his hands. Fur swallowed his expanding frame. As he charged on bear paws to join the fight outside, he pushed his concern for Raven aside. He couldn't help her until he found her, but he could help his other friends. And after that…
After that, Beast Boy didn't know what to do. He hoped someone else would. Victor would know what to do. He would lead them through this.
If Raven hadn't killed him first.f
The world between worlds was dark and small. It was a swirling purple blackness with no sky, and no stars, and no sun to fill it. Its only land was a speck of rock, more an asteroid, laughably small even by the standards of moons. Jagged crags littered the rock's ovoid face.
It was the last place anyone might look for life. It was here that the ancient prophet, Azar, had built his haven.
Azarath hung like a beacon in the void. The city-temple consumed one entire side of the rock, its towers reaching into the void like immaculate ivory fingers. Walkways arched from spire to spire, framing stonework pathways and fragile verdant fields. The architecture wove itself in mysterious patterns, patterns of protection, of mystic defense and obfuscation, weaves that were indiscernible to the scant citizenry living in it.
For one hundred generations, Azarath had stood as safe refuge for all who would escape the encroachment of evil. For one hundred generations, nothing had changed.
Today, a hole opened in the world. It was a small hole punched in the purple blackness. But it made the world bleed. A crimson pall spilled above Azarath, coloring the ivory city with hellish light.
Whispers pulsed through the city's walkways, carried by startled voices spoken from the hoods of rustling cloaks. The whispers became cries as the red light spread to subsume the world around them. The tilled fields and stone squares and temple chambers of Azarath rang with alarm.
One voice remained silent. On a walkway suspended between two of Azarath's uppermost spires, a lone white cloak knelt to the ivory stone, its hood turned up to the heart of the red maelstrom. The hood fell back, revealing pale human features slackened with horror. Iron gray hair framed her weathered loveliness. She heard others around her fall to their hands and knees as they prayed for Azar's guidance.
The woman was the mother of their end. She had fled to Azarath long ago, leaving behind her old life and its mistakes to live as a refugee. Her old life on Earth felt more like a distant dream than a memory. She couldn't even recall her name there. Here, she was called Arella.
"Raven, no…" Arella murmured.
Her heart seized when a haunting, basso laugh shook the city. Ancient masonry loosed stone to rain down on Azarath's terrified masses. Screams echoed from everywhere, barely audible above the laughter.
"And so Azar's meddlesome defiance ends." Arella felt the voice rumble inside of her. It resonated through the walkway beneath her knees. "After three millennia, his power and wisdom has dwindled to this sad collection of morsels."
A comet fell from the red whorls, licking a long black tongue across the world. It blazed into the heart of the city and stopped in midair. Dark flames spread from the comet, unleashing a cold wind that scraped all of Azarath raw.
Her cloak billowing in the cold, Arella raised her arms to the gale, squinting through tears at the dissipating flames. Two bodies revealed themselves at the core of the evaporating comet. With eight eyes between them, the floating, naked figures glared down upon gleaming Azarath. As their glare swept up to the walkways, Arella gasped in recognition of the pair.
"No longer can you hide. No longer can you fight," Trigon boomed from within the shelter of Raven's soul-fire. "Now and forever, at long last, Azar's peoples belong to me!"
Trigon grasped his daughter's bare shoulders. His will flooded through Raven, blazing brightest of all in her predatory stare. He had only a single soul's power within him, hardly a fraction of his former glory. But he had Raven, body and soul. He needed nothing else.
Red light consumed the airborne pair. Arella watched as the monster that had ravished her a lifetime ago grasped their daughter. She watched their daughter fill with his hate. Arella's tears blurred the rest, but she already knew what would come to pass.
From every corner of the city, the screaming began. Individual at first, screams of panic, and then of pain. They came at random, and in greater waves. A pair of lovers in the gardens. Three students in the temple. A class, meditating beneath Azar's statue. Azarath became a song, its ancient walls alighting with the chorus of its people's ends.
Around her, Arella saw other cloaks rooted to the stone. They convulsed in agony, emptying themselves in one perfect cry of pain and loss. One by one, their convulsions stopped. White cloaks became gray shells. Screaming faces became silent masks. Flesh became stone.
From these statues arose wisps of iridescence. Beautiful colors the likes of which Arella could never imagine breathed from the rocky skin of those around her. The light rose into the air, where it swirled in a slow storm around the burning core of the city.
Souls. Raven culled the very souls from Azarath, leaving their vessels as stones. The sight made Arella weep anew for its beauty, and for its terrible source.
The inner ring of the color storm slipped into Raven's grasp. Her knurled fingers pulled the color to her chest. As the light broke through her ashen skin, she became a living siphon. Iridescence drained from all over the tiny realm into Raven, filling her with a glow that blotted out her fragile body.
Trigon drank through Raven's shoulders. The souls of Azarath filtered through his daughter and entered him as purified embers of the divine. As he laughed, and fed, his body began to swell. His flesh crackled and ballooned.
"Pray!" Trigon crowed. "Pray to your prophet as you fuel my glorious return, mortals! Let me hear you pray to Azar!"
A fist of fire clenched in Arella's stomach. The pain doubled her over as the fire blossomed outward. Grayness spread through her skin where the heat escaped in vibrant bursts of light.
Arella wept through eyes of stone. With her last breath, she sobbed for her daughter. Her last thoughts reached for the mindless husk in Trigon's clutches. Remember, darling Rachel, Arella begged. Only the greatest sacrifice will defeat him now.
But the sacrifice will not be yours to make.
Tek hurled a wadded ball of Billys into the holding cell. The red wad broke apart against the back wall, spilling and grunting across the one short bench bed bolted to the floor. Her armored hand cracked the control panel next to the cell as she locked the cell.
"Y'know," she griped tinnily to the trio of cells in Lockdown, "you guys are lucky that we're the good guys. If we were bad guys, like you jerks, you'd probably be dead. Or at least in dirtier cells. Do we have dirtier cells? Like, dungeon-filthy. With rats. Big rats."
Starfire dragged Mammoth into the far cell by his heel. Gizmo already sat on the cell's bench, arms crossed, with daggers pouring from his eyes in the Titan's direction. Without his tech pack, dagger glares were all the hostility he dared to muster. As Starfire activated their cell, she returned Gizmo's look in kind.
"…the hell kind of good guys are you?" Behind the electrified bars and the shimmering force field of the opposite cell, wedged in the corner of the cramped space, Shimmer hid behind her knees. Neither Starfire nor Tek had seen her wide eyes blink since hauling her to Lockdown. "That purple-haired bitch, she… What the hell came out of her?"
"Hey!" Tek snapped, and stomped up to Shimmer's cell bars. "You shut up about Raven! You're the ones who—"
"You don't know, do you?" Shimmer demanded. "You don't have a clue! That…That thing came out of her, and he…he…" She choked at the memory of the red demon in Sickbay. Gagging, she scrambled for the cold, seatless toilet installed in the cell, and emptied her stomach into its bowl. Tek watched her wretch, and winced behind her visor in unwanted empathy.
"He killed Grant."
Jinx's whisper shook Tek. The Tyrant witch hadn't spoken since the Titans had taken her from Sickbay's ruins. She hadn't fought, or struggled, or even moved. Starfire had carried her all the way to her cell. She sat now on the bench, listing to one side, her eyes empty and wandering.
Eyes cast to the floor, Jinx wove her fingers into knots, and murmured, "He was going to get me. He came out of her in that light…that light, it was so bright, it burned, and I couldn't see. But I could feel him. And then Grant…"
Tek's hand clanged as she made a fist. "Shut up!" she bellowed. "Raven didn't… She wouldn't… This is your fault! You did…something!"
"Grant pushed me," said Jinx. Tek's volume couldn't break the witch from her reverie. "He pushed me out of the way, and that thing got him. It grabbed him, and it…and it…"
"You did this," Tek thundered. "You did something to make that whatever-it-was appear. He's the one that hurt Vic and Gar, right before he kidnapped Raven! Right, Kory?"
When Tek's visor swiveled upon Starfire, the golden sylph's face drew taut. Tek hadn't seen the confluence of events in Sickbay. Starfire had only seen the very end, when Raven had destroyed Sickbay before vanishing into hellish light.
Starfire's hesitation sapped the strength from Tek's insistence. "Kory? You don't think—?"
"Of course not. Absolutely not," Starfire said quickly. But her tone said otherwise.
Tek swallowed, and turned back to the cells. Her helmet hid her uncertainty. "I'm going to go…I don't know, sweep the perimeter. Make sure we got all you losers. Oh, and these cells? Yeah, they're hooked up to about fifteen different kinds of backup power, and they have stun blasters and knockout gas and all kinds of hurty-stingy ways of keeping you in here. So please, feel free to go nuts and try to break out."
She stomped out of Lockdown. Halfway down the corridor back to Sector Prime, her armor broke into a flurry of parts that flashed back into her. She dropped to the floor at the edge of the sprawling hallway and leaned against the corner.
The far end looked like another building entirely. As Tek walked the length of the sector, she counted the scorch marks mottling her home. The closer she drew to the entrance, the more numerous the battle's scars became.
A red-tinged crater stopped her cold. Tek's toes hung over the edge of the hole, more a furrow that had dug through the floor and smashed a divot into the wall. She stared into the crater, tracing the cracks in the tile. Dried blood glistened in the cracks, making the floor into a network of blackish veins.
An image flashed before her, of Victor strewn in the crater of his own making, his body gushing itself into the cracks. She closed her eyes hard, as though to squeeze the memory out of them. The image remained.
Raven, he had said, choking on blood as he had answered Tek's hysterical question. Raven did this.
Tek stared into the crater, reeling in statuesque silence. Victor had fixed himself, or willed himself better, and had vanished. She hadn't seen Beast Boy, Robin, or Bushido since mopping up the remaining and unresisting Tyrants. In the space of an hour, the Compound had gone from a joyous home to a chaotic battlefield. Now it felt empty and violated.
"What the hell is going on?" she said to the empty crater. "Where are you, Raven? What happened to you?"
"She's gone off to end the world, no doubt."
Turning with a start, Tek found Bushido crossing the length of Sector Prime with a long stride that bordered on running. His sheathed katana bounced against his leg. A duffel bag hung draped over his shoulder by its nylon cord, bulging with the unknown. Bushido lugged his heavy bag past Tek without pause or comment.
"Resolved themselves? What are you talking about?" Tek called, and chased after him. "Wait! Ryuko!"
"Raven has succumbed to her true nature. Or risen to it. I don't know, but the result is the same. And she has invited a demon lord into our realm. It's over," he said without looking back.
"Demon…? What the hell are you…? Wait. What's in that bag?" She caught up to him and matched his gait with a slow jog.
His knuckles whitened around the bag's cord. "My possessions. I am leaving. I suggest you do the same posthaste."
The revelation stopped her dead in his wake. "Leaving?" she exploded.
"You sound like an echo," he said.
Tek sprinted ahead of him. She began wheeling backwards, trying to stop him with outstretched arms and stormy eyes. "You can't just leave!" she shot.
"On the contrary," he said. "If you observe closely in the next few minutes, you'll see I'm quite capable of leaving. In fact, I think you'll find I excel at it."
She stopped suddenly. Bushido bounced off her hands as she struck him straight-armed in the chest. "You can't leave," she said, her voice firm. "We need you. For crying out loud, Ry, you're a Titan!"
His bag swung forward without warning. Tek jumped back with a squeak as it thumped the floor in front of her. She looked up, and felt her courage shrink back from the twisted red rage permeating Bushido's face. To see such powerful feeling in his smooth, peaceful features alarmed Tek.
"I am not a Titan," he spat at her. "I never was a Titan, nor will I ever be a Titan. Now stand aside!"
When he bent to pick up his duffel, Tek's foot sank into its lumpy folds, pinning it to the floor. He met her pointed stare with a furious look.
"You're one of us," Tek said, and folded her arms across her willowy chest. "You don't get to run away just because you're afraid of some imaginary demon thing."
"Imaginary? You foolish, ignorant, witless, mewling little girl!" Bushido fumed. "You have no idea—!" His rage choked him, forcing him to stop, and breathe. A fraction of the redness in his face drained as his shoulders rose and fell.
Tek trembled. Glassy tears waited in her eyes, held in check by the thinnest of wills. But she kept her foot on his bag, and said, "Ryuko, stop. You can't leave when everybody's counting on us."
It was several seconds more before Bushido found control of his voice again. His eyes narrowed into scalpels as he said, "You honestly believe that, don't you? You really think you and this sad circus of yours is doing this city any good. Tell me, Tek," he said, infusing her name with contemptuous emphasis, "How much of this good you do is necessitated by your simply being here?"
Confusion broke through her quivering mask. "I don't understand…"
"Slade held a personal vendetta against the Titans. It passed to his son, who gathered a whole team of malefactors to carry on the grudge. Control Freak exists largely to do you all personal harm, and for no other reason. The Puppet King sought to control you."
"Puppet-What?" Tek said.
"How many of your enemies would disappear if there were no Titans?" Bushido demanded. Tek had no answer, leaving him to smirk. "You're no heroes. You're the other half of the coin, flipping at your so-called 'villainous' counterparts, waging private wars across the city. And who should suffer the most, but the very people you claim to protect? If you cared one whit for them, you would disband this ridiculous endeavor and isolate your wars and yourselves from real people."
His venomous tone stole a tear from her eye. It trickled down her cheek, alone. She blinked back the others, and fought the losing battle to keep control of her voice. "So why were you ever here?" she asked.
The sword left its sheath without a sound, flashing into his hand. He held it between them, its blade flat to them both, reflecting their respective resolves. "Because I can't hear them anymore," he said. "Because they have abandoned me, and I foolishly believed you lot could help return them to me."
Again, Tek whispered, "I don't understand."
"The sword has refused my prayers since my defeat in Titans Tower," Bushido spat. "My failure robbed me of my honor, and silenced my ancestors. I sought to reclaim both by returning to the source of my failure. Time and again, I thought my efforts wasted, but I continued on with your ridiculous games, because I believed, because I hoped.
"But I was wrong," he hissed, and replaced the sword in its sheath. "I was wrong, and I have wasted my time here. And now, through some un-miracle of fate, you fools have actually stumbled upon a genuine threat. So it is far past time for me to leave."
He yanked his duffel out from under Tek's foot, and then circled past her as she stumbled backwards.
Tek crunched after him through the ruins of the lobby, and stumbled over Blackfire's insensate body. "Well, fine!" she snapped, and kicked off of Blackfire. "If we're so helpless and doomed against this demon monster whoosits, why don't you stay and help us? We're your friends!"
"I have no friends," he said, and slung the bag over his back.
"I'm your friend!"
He edged past the dormant paver's massive front roller, angling himself out of the lobby, when he felt his bag tug at him. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Tek grasping the bulbous end of his duffel, her heels skittering through the fallen debris.
"You have no idea what you're up against," Bushido told her. "This is no 'villain' to be punched, or blasted, or cuffed. This is a demon lord. At his full power, he will unmake reality with his mere presence. I refuse to throw my life away for anyone."
"I'm your friend," Tek insisted weakly.
"Let me go," he said.
"I'm your friend!" she sobbed. Her tears fell freely as her fingers dug into the duffel's sides. "You don't get to decide that! I do! Maybe I am all that horrible stuff you called me, but I'm still your friend. And I know you're my friend, just like I know you're a Titan. You didn't fake that!"
He shook his head. "You're embarrassing both of us. Let me go."
"Don't do this," she begged him. "You know we have to stand together. Don't leave."
Bushido watched her, waiting for her to break under the force of his disdain. She simpered like a child, sniffling, weeping, and her lower lip quivered, slick with tears. But her hands remained steadfast around his bag. She didn't pull him back. But she wouldn't let him go.
He pulled the bag gently from her grasp. Her fingernails whirred against the fabric of the duffel. "Beheading or impaling the heart. This is the only way to kill a demon."
Tek stared at him with glistening eyes. "That's how we beat it?"
"That's how you beat Raven," Bushido said. "To survive the coming of a demon lord, you will need providence and faith. I suggest you start praying."
He slipped through the gaping breach in the lobby. Tek watched him cross the ruinous construction zone and disappear into an ambivalent stream of foot traffic on the far sidewalk. He looked back only once, not quite meeting her wounded gaze.
Victor lifted his face into the shower's spray. Eyes closed, he lost himself in the sensation of the scouring water as it struck his forehead and traced warm patterns down from his shoulders. The red blood clouding around the drain at his feet had long since disappeared.
Raven's blast had all but torn him to pieces. It had taken him agonizing, endless minutes to reshape his organs and bones back into place. He had hung in Tek's armored arms like a child, just struggling to breathe while his subatomic machines reorganized themselves.
He was useless. After ten minutes under the scalding water, as he scrubbed, and tried to come up with a more diplomatic, more tactful, more tactical way of putting the dour notion, he had given up.
It led him to an equally miserable decision. He knew what he had to do to make everything right. He just hoped he could live with himself afterward.
A long sigh blew through his lips, spraying droplets through the shower's stream. He focused on the sensation of the water, the smell of the steam, and the sound of the shower echoing in the empty bathroom. His body ached, and burned where the sabers had pierced him. His father had given the last years of his life to make Victor normal again. It seemed disrespectful not to savor his last moment of being human.
Shutting off the water, he stepped from the shower stall, drizzling across the tile as he walked to the door. The door control, like every panel in the Compound, had a small connective port in the corner, in case he needed hard access to the base's systems. With a series of deep breaths, he managed to transform his finger into a data jack, which he slipped into the port.
Stark, precise thoughts began spilling into his head, none of them his. His brain adjusted to the data flow until a chipper feminine voice filled his ears.
Good morning, Cyborg, Sarah transmitted to him. Primary systems are still down. The cause remains unknown, although the unidentified energy wave that originated in Sickbay is currently my best working theory. Estimated time to primary systems' reactivation is currently unavailable.
Victor started to interrupt her, but then realized that she was done. Her subvocalized speech finished faster than he could think. "Okay," he said. "Keep at it. Prioritize security systems and main power. And I have a new program I want you to create and download."
Acknowledged. Please specify program type, function, and destination.
His jaw clenched. "Duplicate all operational management subroutines on-file, append them to one of your clones, and download the whole thing into me."
There was a pause before Sarah chirped, Please clarify your request.
"I need an operating system," Victor said to the voice in his head. "This attonite transformation trick of mine takes a lot of concentration to do it manually. If I get surprised or distracted in the middle of a fight, I can't afford to revert to my handsome, fleshy self. Somebody needs to stay inside my head to tell the attonites to keep doing what they're doing no matter how scatterbrained I get.
"That's going to be you. You download into the attonites. Into me. You'll control the form they take, responding exclusively to spoken or conscious input, and ignoring all unconscious input pending my approval. Do you understand?"
Yes. Thank you for the clarification, she replied.
Then, Request denied.
He blinked. In all the time since the SARAH Sim had gone online, he couldn't recall the program ever denying him anything. "Sorry, but did you just tell me 'no?' "
Correct. I am unable to comply with your request, as it represents a significant risk to the user. My programming prohibits me from allowing harm to come to any user, whether through action or inaction.
"Don't you Asimov me, young lady. Clarify," he said.
Cyborg is attempting to incorporate the SARAH program into himself to manage his body functions pertaining to a new, unknown, transitive technology. Data and program retention in this untested medium cannot be guaranteed.
Victor rolled his eyes. "Yes, there are some risks. But that doesn't mean you need to—"
Cyborg is attempting to incorporate the SARAH program into himself. The thought, Sarah's, startled him silent. Sarah had never interrupted him before either. Once the SARAH program is downloaded into his mind, the program will become integrated into Cyborg's existing software. The program will be subject to the new hardware's unique capabilities, including sentience. Overall program corruption due to unintended sentience would pose a significant risk. The outcome would be impossible to predict.
He remained silent, staring down at the control panel where his finger disappeared into the port. Sarah had never referred to him in the third person when speaking to him before. Three firsts in one conversation made him realize her actual reason for refusing him. "Corruption. You mean me, don't you?" he asked. "You climb inside my head, and suddenly you're not just a computer anymore. You'd be part of a living, breathing person, free will and all. You're afraid of affecting my thoughts, or my personality."
Cyborg is the creator, Sarah thought firmly. The SARAH program cannot be responsible for corrupting Cyborg's original program, regardless of her intent. Coupled with the unknown factor of sentience, the SARAH program's influence on other programs present in the same system are impossible to predict.
Victor sank down against the wall, sitting cross-legged. His arm snaked up across his chest to keep his finger in the data port. "Sarah," he said, and sighed, "I'm a wreck. I'm no use to anybody like this. I proved that today…
"I almost died today." He let the thought stew between the two of them. The painful memory nearly undid his concentration and the connection, until he forced his finger to remain a data jack. "I keep trying to be the big, dumb hero that I was, which makes me a liability. And my friends can't afford any more liabilities. We already lost Raven. Maybe worse. I can't let them down."
Cyborg will not lose.
Her certainty drew a single laugh out of him. "I'm not Cyborg anymore, Sarah," he said. "And I can't be Victor Stone anymore, either. The Titans need more. Raven needs more, if we're going to save her from…whatever. And the only way I'm going into a fight is if I have you watching my back."
Sarah did not answer at once. He could feel her thoughts, terabytes of information swirling through the processors in the mainframe upstairs.
"If I have to have anyone inside my head," he told her, smiling, "I pick you, Sarah. You can do this. It'll be just like managing another piece of hardware. Like a new toaster, only it walks and talks, and it has less impulse control."
I require clarification, Sarah replied. Why do you enter new input to alter my rendering? You could simply override my refusal to comply.
Victor stood again, careful of his connected finger. "Yeah, I could. But I don't want to. If you're gonna be my partner, I want you on board from the start. What do you say? Are you in?"
There was another pause. Then Sarah transmitted, New input processed. Request refusal reversed: processing request now.
Downloading.Throwing her unconscious sister into Lockdown had been more satisfying than Starfire cared to admit. But she had no time to enjoy petty revenge. Tek's discovery of another Tyrant on their doorstep meant there could be others. And the Compound's dead electronics meant they had to search the old fashioned way.
She circled the Compound's grounds at a light jog. Apart from the flattened lobby, the outside of the base appeared normal. Traffic hummed on the street. People walked along the opposite side of the hedge wall, laughing and talking. Birdsongs drifted from trees as she passed, their sources hidden in the leaves. The light breeze stirred her hair, chasing long strands across her face.
Her eyes blazed at the normalcy around her. She wanted to burn down the trees, and hurl cars through buildings, and drive the people away from the Compound, until the outside world reflected the mess waiting for her inside. It felt as though the world hadn't noticed the Titans' problems at all, and was continuing on merrily without them. It wasn't right. It wasn't fair. But it was familiar.
The lobby crunched underfoot as she finished her sweep. "The exterior is clear," she said into her communicator. "I am returning to Ops."
"Roof's clear," Tek replied tiredly through the device. "We might actually be out of bad guys for the moment. I'll see you downstairs."
As she clipped the communicator at her waist, Starfire heard a pained grunt echo out of Sickbay's half-collapsed entryway. Tensing, Starfire doubled back, slinking along the wall. She filled her hand with a starbolt and jumped into the doorway.
Green light splayed across Robin's surprised look. His tunic hung from the end of a smashed biobed. A roll of athletic tape dangled from his chest, where half of it had been wrapped around his ribs. His arms rose in a defensive gesture on reflex, only to draw a twinge to his face and another grunt through his nose.
The starbolt faded from her hand. "Robin," she said. The imagined threat had passed, but her heartbeat still filled her ears. "I…did not know that you…"
He took up the tape roll again. "Didn't mean to scare you," Robin said, and dragged the tape in another layer around his chest. His cracked stare strayed back to the floor.
"I was not scared," she said, and shied back from the doorway. "I just…did not expect to see you here."
As he swung the tape around his back, his grimace became a gasp. His whole body seized with pain as he dropped the tape, letting it swing from his side. "I didn't have much choice. Cracked a rib back in the fight when Slade Lite wiped his shoes on me. It took me a while just to dig out some tape. Don't have high hopes on getting anything better operational in here before…"
Robin trailed off with a sigh, leaning heavily on the wall. His eyes closed as he fought the pain radiating from his back. His breathing slowed, and his chin dipped to his chest. Then he felt the weight of the tape roll disappear, and he opened his eyes.
"No," Starfire explained as she straightened the tape on his chest, and gently drew another layer around his ribs. "I mean, I did not expect to see you still in the Compound."
He hissed in pain as he drew his arms up out of the way of her hands. "You don't need to—"
"You need help," she told him.
His brow furrowed. "I don't want your help," he retorted.
She looked up. "But you need it."
Robin turned away in disgusted defeat, letting Starfire wrap his chest from behind. He did everything he could to keep his mind off the light, brushing touch of her hands as they layered the tape around him. "Fine," he said snidely. "Just don't blame me if I trigger another biological 'need.' "
He felt her hands pause at his back. The tape roll fell silent.
The moment they left his mouth, he knew the words had been a mistake. "I'm sorry," he mumbled.
"You are not," she noted. "I would not expect you to be. I hurt you this morning. It is only natural to reply in kind."
The tape resumed, guided by her hands. Her arms brushed his sides whenever she brought the tape around the front of his chest. The scent of her hair maddened him as stray locks teased the small of his back. "I didn't want to hurt you," he said.
She stopped again. Robin stiffened as her touch brushed his skin at the edge of the bandaging, just to the left of his spine. Her fingertip traced the circular edge of the white scar on his back. The sensation made him look down to the scar's twin, which peeked out the top of the wrappings over his chest.
"All we seem to do is hurt each other," Starfire murmured. Her fingers left the scar, and instead patted down the loose end of the tape. Then she stepped back, setting the tape aside, and started for the door.
As she tried to circle around him, Robin thrust out his arms to block her. He turned, and insisted, "I don't want to hurt you! God, Kory, why do you think I stayed away for so long?"
Her eyes hardened into sparkling emeralds. Folding her arms, she said, "I rarely know why you do what you do. You insist on remaining a mystery to everyone, even those who care for you."
"A mystery?" Robin shot. "Are you kidding me? You're seriously going to stand there and pretend like everything I did when I lost control didn't happen."
Starfire's dotted brows dropped into a scowl. "That? That is the reason you abandoned us? Because of what you did when you were the Red Robin?" she demanded.
"Yes! Why else would I leave?" Robin exploded, throwing out his hands.
"Well, that is a stupid reason for leaving!" Starfire yelled back, her scowl glimmering in the dark room. "And you are a fool for thinking that we would resent you for your actions! You are a garfling fool for ever believing that I could resent you for something that was not your fault!"
"Not my fault?" Robin broke her gaze with a frustrated laugh.
"Yes!" she insisted loudly, planting her hands on her hips. "X'Hal, Tim! I am not stupid! I know what the symbiote did to you. I know that what you did, and what you said, was not—!"
"I meant all of it!" Robin bellowed. His voice filled Sickbay. It spilled out into Sector Prime, where it bounced off the walls until it became a shrill, muddied sound that haunted the entire Compound.
In the wake of his words, Robin crushed his eyes shut. The cracked lenses in his mask finally broke under the strain. Flakes of white plastic rained from his face. The deep, dark wells behind the shredding lenses glistened.
"I meant it," he said. "What I did, what I said, I… The alien didn't control me. It made me angry, and it made me strong, but it wasn't telling me what to do. Something inside of me meant those things I said. Some part of me…"
Starfire's body tensed. She lifted her chin, and clenched her fists. Even still, her lips trembled as she asked, "Do you hate me?"
"No!" he said, and then, "I…I don't know. I don't…"
In a faltering whisper, Starfire asked, "Did you love me?"
The question froze him. Robin stared, trapped in her expectant gaze. Then he sagged. His hands rose to his face. When they dropped again, his mask hung between limp fingers.
"The first time I put on this costume, it was for revenge," he said, his face bowed to the floor. "Two-Face killed my dad. He was a son of a bitch, but he was my dad, and Two-Face just left him floating in a river like he was nothing. And I got so angry. Like Two-Face really was calling my dad a nothing. Like that made me a nothing.
"So I put this on," he said, and flapped the empty mask. "And I went after him. And when I was hitting him, even though I felt sad, and furious, something…some little corner of me liked it. It liked making him hurt. At the time, I thought it was just retribution. Justice.
"We put Two-Face away. But I kept going. Batman was the fastest road to every freak and whack-job in Gotham. Every time some deformed, deranged lunatic popped up to hurt people, I ran in to put them down. And every fight, I told myself it was for justice. That it was always somebody who deserved to hurt.
"It went on like that for years." The rush of memories shut Robin's eyes. "As time went on, I spent more and more time in the suit, out on patrol, or taking criminals down solo. Started cutting class just to wear the tights. Sometimes I'd go days without being Tim Drake. Robin mattered. Tim didn't make a difference, but Robin did. And it felt so good just making a difference, knowing that I finally mattered…
"But there was more to it. I liked the thrill. The adrenaline. I liked hurting people who deserved it. It made me feel…
"Righteous," Starfire murmured.
He nodded. "I think Bruce started to notice. He tried to keep me out. He wanted me to be Tim first and Robin second, so he took away the costume and the gear, and he forced me back into school."
Starfire glanced at the tunic hanging next to him. "But you would not quit."
A humorless laugh flared his nostrils. "I got my GED the next week. Then I threw it in his face, stole the costume, and ran away. A month later, I came to California, and…"
He looked up at last. "It's been nothing but fighting since then. And when the alien pumped me up, I could fight even harder. It's all I was. It's the only thing that made me feel anything.
"But when you and I…" His eyes welled. "You made me look under the mask. You wanted more, and I looked, and…there wasn't anything there. I tried to be someone else for you. After I left, I tried to stop being Robin and be someone else instead. But it didn't work. I couldn't. There was nothing left except that dark little voice that likes to hurt. And you didn't want Robin, you couldn't be with Robin. How could I come back if…"
Starfire felt her own eyes burn and blur. She stepped forward, her hand outstretched. "Tim, that is not—"
He shrank from her touch. "This morning, I thought…I thought maybe you…" He choked again, and twisted his head to the side. "I thought maybe you saw something worthwhile. Something you wanted. But last night didn't mean anything, did it?"
Her silence was deafening.
"You were right all along," he said, and mopped his eyes with his gloves. "Robin really is a nothing. And Tim Drake is just a ghost."
With a sharp gesture, he affixed the empty domino back into place. The black cloth was no longer necessary. His face had hardened into a mask of its own.
"And I need to get back to work," he said. Jerking his tunic from the table, Robin left Sickbay without another word. His footsteps echoed down Sector Prime.
Starfire watched the empty doorway and listened to his presence fade from the hall. Like Robin, her features had calcified into something hard and terrible. It wasn't until her communicator chirped nine notes at her that she moved again.
"Yes?" she said into to the communicator, and heard several other voices echo the same over the open channel.
"Meeting in Ops. Five minutes." Victor's voice emerged from the device in a commanding snap. He sounded worlds apart from the groaning, vulnerable wet mass they had peeled up from the floor less than an hour before.
Starfire heard other Titans answering through the channel. She echoed her compliance, and snapped the communicator shut. Taking a deep breath, she strode out the door, wearing a confidence in her step that she didn't feel.
In the abandoned Sickbay, a soft rustling of cloth and debris broke the new quiet. Half-buried under the collapsed biobed with stirrups, a blue cloth stirred. A tiny, bewhiskered green nose poked out from under the cloth to test the air. Beady eyes followed the nose out, with mousy ears emerging soon after.
Beast Boy grew out of his field mouse skin, crouching on his haunches as he glimpsed through Sickbay's doors. His senses stretched into the hallway, and found nothing. Then he tugged the blue cloth free from under the biobed and stood, dragging it behind him.
"Sheesh," he said to the dusty blue fabric. "Can you believe those two? 'I'm so dark and moody.' 'It was all the hormones.' 'We keep blasting each other's feelings.' Am I right? I'm so glad we never wound up like them…"
Debris shook loose from the blue cloak as he bunched it in his fists. The cloak's heavy clasp swung down by Beast Boy's knees. A hairline crack ran through the clasp, marring the silhouetted blackbird trapped in the gem.
He lifted the cloak, letting the clasp swing back and forth. "We could've wound up like them. If I had told you how I…? I mean, it's not totally crazy, is it?" he said.
The cloak-and-clasp pendulum swung past his nose in reply. The cracked bird stared back at him with a single red eye.
"I know it wasn't you kicking my ass back there. No way. And I'm gonna get you back. I just…I need some help," he told the cloak. "Gimmie a sign, or a clue, or something. What happened back there? What did that red guy do to you?"
The clasp bobbed at the bottom of the blue fabric. His arm grew tired, making the cloak tremble as he held it aloft. Sighing, he tilted his head forward, letting the clasp bounce against his forehead as he lowered the cloak.
Raven's face filled his eyes. Her features shone, blindingly white and indistinct. "I hope—" she said in a faint voice.
Beast Boy yelped as the clasp and cloak pooled at his feet. Staggering backwards, he pawed at his face, trying to rub the stars out of his vision.
When his eyes worked again, he bounced them from corner to corner, searching for the white apparation. Sickbay remained achingly empty. Her ghostly words rang in his ears as a memory, and her scent teased him from the cloak on the floor, but nothing else.
Beast Boy groaned, and rubbed his face again. "I am too pretty to be going crazy," he decided, and chalked the apparation up to wishful hysteria. Bending down, he scooped up the cloak by its clasp.
Raven's face appeared again, this time in the palm of his hand. Her luminous, miniaturized head hovered above the clasp, its expression deathly somber. "I—" she began again.
He jerked back again, and watched the clasp drop back into the folds of the cloak. The large gem settled with its blackbird glaring up at him expectantly.
Craning his whole body, he picked up the clasp and held it in his fingertips as far from himself as he could. This time, when Raven's ghostly head reappeared above the clasp, he did not flinch.
"I hope this message reaches you. I don't have a lot of time." the phantasmal head told him.
Gloved fingers drummed on the rail of the Ops balcony. Robin leaned over the edge of the dizzying height, staring out across Sector Prime. His knuckles drummed on the rail as he glared in frustration.
"If he's going to order me around, the least he can do is be on time to his own meeting," he groused.
Tek propped her feet up on the center console. Her head bounced against the black fabric draped over the back of her chair. "Yeah," she said in an idle tone. "Bossy leader-types who bark at everybody are the worst."
His glare swung back over his shoulder. The arctic blue flash of his eyes froze Tek's head in mid-bounce against the chair's upholstery.
"Sorry," Tek said, and swung her feet down.
Starfire stood with her back to the far wall, watching Robin jitter with impatience. She caught sight of his eyes flicking to her before he turned back to the balcony's rail.
Six words sat lumped in the bottom of Starfire's throat. They had lurked there, desperate to be said, from the moment she had thrown Robin out of her room. The lump jumped at his innocuous glance, trying to jump out of her and shoot to Robin in a shout. She swallowed hard, and prayed that the words would stay down just a little longer.
"Where's everybody else?" a deep voice asked at Ops' edge, breaking Starfire's worry.
Victor stood at the entrance to Ops, his arms folded, with a furrowed expression. A sleeveless ivory jumpsuit clung to his muscles. Electric blue circuitry veins patterned the suit, glowing as they caught the sun through the skylight. The silver belt trimming his waist was buckled with an oversized cog.
Most striking of all were his eyes. They crackled with energy, the same color as the veins in his suit. Their faint glow flared as he passed through a shadow in the doorway and entered Ops.
As Starfire watched him stride into Ops, she realized that his wardrobe was the least of his changes. He had done much more than simply shuck the hand-me-down sweats. For as long as Starfire had known him, Victor had always carried a weight that no one else could see. Now he walked taller than she had ever seen him, even without the added height of his cybernetic implants. Whatever he had become, he wasn't just Victor anymore. He had become something more.
"Beast Boy? Bushido?" Cyberion asked. He sidled up to the holographic table at the center of Ops. The rampant system failure plaguing the Compound had left its projector inoperative.
"No one has seen Gar since the battle with the Tyrants," Starfire said.
Shaking herself free of Cyberion's electric gaze, Tek blurted, "Ryuko's not coming."
"Not coming?" Robin said, pushing off of the rail. "Where is he?"
"He just—!" Tek snapped, and then choked. Her eyes screwed shut as she fought the red color creeping up her neck. A small plastic vial rattled as she fished it from her belt. "He's not coming. He left," she said, and ate two of the vial's white, bitter pills.
Both Robin and Starfire edged clear of Tek, sliding further around the table. Cyberion waited until she had calmed herself, and then asked Tek, "Why?"
Tek unbunched her shoulders from her neck with a sigh. "He said it was because of Raven, and that thing that came out of Raven. Was that seriously her baby?"
"Immaterial," Starfire said. "It has taken control of our friend, and expressed intent to conquer Earth. We should prepare for their return."
Robin shook his head. "Our first step should be to figure out what we're dealing with. I was laid out for most of the fight, so I didn't see this thing take Raven. What did it look like? Do we know what it is, or where they went? We don't even know if they are coming back."
"Ry called it a 'demon lord,' " said Tek. "He said something about Raven sucking up to her nature, and that we had to chop off her head or stab out her heart, and that nothing we did could stop the demony-lordy guy."
"The first suggestion out of Ryuko's mouth is murder," Cyberion sighed, rolling his eyes. "There's a shocker."
"Raven's a demon too, right?" Tek said, glancing around the table. "I mean, not a bad demon, but like a…good demon?"
Cyberion growled, and punched the table. Cracked knuckle-prints marred the projective black surface where he struck. "This is getting us nowhere! We need something to go on! We need—!"
A bundle of red cloth thudded onto the table, cutting Cyberion's growl to the quick. He and the other Titans looked up in surprise at Beast Boy. The shapeshifter had entered Ops without a sound, and now stood at the tableside with a grim look darkening his elfin features.
Tek plucked at the dark stains marring the bundle. "Gar? What's this?"
Beast Boy didn't reply. Instead, he dug into his pocket, and pulled out the clasp from Raven's cloak. He held the clasp out over the table, its cracked red gem turned to the ceiling.
As soon as the clasp left his pocket, Raven's ghostly visage appeared from nothing to hover above the gem. The other Titans gasped and recoiled as the miniature head began to speak.
"I hope this message reaches you. I don't have a lot of time," the pale apparation said. "Infusing this object with my thoughts was the only thing I could think of. But I suppose you all could be dead already, so…" The musing Raven-head grimaced.
"My father, Trigon, has found a way to Earth through me. It was prophesized at my birth that I would be the portal through which he would emerge and conquer your world. To make a long story short, it's happened, but not in the way I thought it would. Which is still very, very bad.
"Trigon is a monster unlike anything you've faced. He's possibly the most powerful demon in existence. At his full strength, there's no limit to the destruction he can wreak. And he fully intends to devour every soul in this dimension before moving on to the next one. That's every living thing in existence as you know it.
"But he's made a mistake. By being born through me, he's become half-human, like I am. He's given up almost all of his power to get here, which means there's still a chance you can beat him.
Cyberion glanced up from the tiny, floating head, trying to catch Beast Boy's eye. The shapeshifter continued to stare grimly through Raven's proxy.
"The first thing he'll do is find a new, quick source of power. And I think I know where he'll go to get it." At this, Raven's head paused, tilting forward with great weight. She recovered an instant later, and continued, "This gives you hours, maybe only minutes, to prepare.
"I've given you the first thing you'll need: immunity. I've anointed you all, hopefully in time to protect you."
Tek squinted in confusion. "A-what-ed? What does that—?" she asked.
"You'll understand what that means when the time comes."
"Oh. Sorry," Tek said, sheepish.
The head continued, "The rest you'll have to figure out for yourselves. To destroy a demon, you have to decapitate it or destroy its heart."
Wordlessly, Beast Boy tugged at the cloth bundle with his free hand. It flapped open into a stained, tattered crimson dress. Resting on the wrinkled cloth was a long sword with a bone-white blade.
"Even at a fraction of his strength, Trigon will be unbelievably strong and dangerous. You have to find a way to hurt him," the floating Raven said.
She hesitated, and then said, "There's something else. Another prophecy. Or a dream, I don't know. But to defeat Trigon, someone will have to make the greatest sacrifice. I don't know what that means, but I can guess. And…the sacrifice won't be mine to make. I wish it were, but...I don't think I'll be able to help you anymore.
"By now, Trigon has probably enslaved me. I'll fight him however I can, but I don't think I can beat him. Whatever I do, whatever he says, try to understand that it won't be me. Not anymore. I'll just be another extension of his will. Which means if I come after you, you all need to do whatever it takes to stop me.
The ghostly memory of Raven hesitated again. "There isn't enough time to say everything. So I'll just say this: thank you, and I'm sorry. Stop Trigon. Save yourselves. Please."
Raven's face collapsed in on itself, becoming a white mote that fizzled out of existence. In the wake of her message, dead silence rang across the table. The Titans stared at the dead clasp, which Beast Boy let clatter next to the unfurled dress.
Cyberion ran his hand across the cold hilt of the sword. "This is Brother Blood's sword, isn't it? The one you and Raven brought back from the cave?"
"He called it The Hand," Beast Boy said. He still stared through the space where Raven's message had preached their only hope. "I've seen it cut through everything that got in its way, including demon stuff, like what Dominic was throwing when he attacked us."
"…then we're okay," Tek said, and searched her friends' faces for the cautious optimism she felt. "I mean, it's just like Ry and Raven said. We, uh…we kill him. We kill him. …can we kill him? Do we kill people now?" she squeaked.
"What I saw was no person," Starfire uttered. "We must listen to Raven. This creature must be destroyed."
Robin crossed his arms. "Five of us against Armageddon? It would be long odds even if we had twice as much information to plan with. I think we need to look at feasibility before we delve into the morality and theology of the matter."
Cyberion straightened from the table. The simple gesture drew everyone's attention, and silenced the discussion. He stood silent for a moment, considering the faces around the table.
"This isn't the time to be proud," said Cyberion. "We gotta know when we're outmatched. If Raven's right, and the whole universe is on the line, then we need to hit him with everything we have."
"Um," said Tek, "I think Robin said that already. The five of use is all we have left."
Cyberion shook his head. "Not the Titans, kid. Everybody. If this Trigon guy wants the whole damn planet, then he should have to fight the whole damn planet to get it."
Understanding glinted in Robin's eye. "You're talking about a team-up," he said.
"Team-up of the goddamn century," Cyberion told him. "I want you on the horn with the Justice League. Hell, call Cadmus too. See if you can't convince them to save the world instead of dick with us, for once. Starfire, shake the dust off some of those old fossils in the Justice Society. Beast Boy, call home. I want to see the Doom Patrol on the front line of this weirdness. And Tek, you call in all of our irregulars. Tell Herald to round them up and poof them here five minutes ago. I'll get in touch with Wonder Girl to getthe East-Coasters up and moving."
Communicators flipped open, chirping in anticipation. Tek tried to make sense of the device's controls, her mind awhirl with the magnitude of what Cyberion wanted. "Vic, this is going to be huge. This is epic! Do…Do you really think they'll believe us?"
"Make them believe us," Cyberion said. "This is Raven we're talking about. She doesn't have an exaggerating bone in her body. She says the world's ending, it's gonna end. So when her dad shows his ugly face in our dimension again, looking to start something, I want him staring down the barrel of a super hero army that'll make him wet his pants. We're gonna beat him down, get Raven back, and kick his sorry red ass from here to the Fifth Dimen…sion…"
Cyberion's words dried in his mouth as the white of Tek's uniform became a shimmering red color. She stared back at him with widening eyes, unaware of her own color change. He understood why when he glanced down, and saw that the ivory tone of his jumpsuit had turned red as well.
Sickly scarlet light consumed Ops. Looking up, Cyberion found the culprit, and stared out the darkened skylight. Moments ago, the cheery window in the ceiling had been their only source of illumination. But a red pall had been dragged across the skylight. It was only when Cyberion saw a black cloud floating in the distance that he realized that it was no trick of the skylight's glass.
The sky bled.
The Compound bucked underneath the Titans. Crisscrossing fractures leapt through the walls and the floors. Glass shards rained from the skylights to powder on the floor of Sector Prime far below. The world around them roared with the clamor of collapse, as though a thousand cannons belched black, smoking sound directly into the Titans' ears. They could scarcely hear their own screams as the tremors shook them onto their backs.
As the quaking subsided, the plaster hail from the walls slowed to a trickle. The rumbling quieted. With a long, despondent moan, the Compound's broken frame settled, unleashing a storm of dust that made the red air shimmer.
Groaning, Beast Boy scraped his head from the cracked floor. He felt something cutting into his palms, and saw the hilt of The Hand clutched tight in his grasp. Around him, he heard four other soft moans, and four bodies stirring on the tilted balcony.
And beyond them, he heard nothing. Outside of the Compound, he heard total, absolute nothing. There were no cars or trains. There were no voices, or footsteps, or heartbeats. The distant ocean sat perfectly still. Not a stirring of wind remained.
He drew a gasp. A hideous stench flooded his nose, one so foul that it emptied his stomach down the slope of Ops with thunderous vomiting. An entire world of scents had become a single smell so hideously wrong that it made Beast Boy sick. It was the same stench of the creature from Sickbay.
"X'Hal," Starfire swore, and stared at the red sky through the broken ceiling. "What has happened?"
Cyberion tapped the side of his head. His eyes became electric blue slits. "I can't raise anything. Wi-Fi, satellite…everything's gone."
"The communicators still function," Robin said, and smacked the side of the canary yellow device. "It's like there's no network to connect to."
As Beast Boy heaved, he heard a lone sound emerge to fill the silence outside. Even as he drew a shuddering gasp, the sound grew, becoming loud enough for the others to hear it too. It was a long, slow, resonant laugh, which reached inside all of them to shake their very bones.
"Outside," Cyberion murmured.
"Hey! Hey!"
Shimmer shrieked, throwing herself against the lifeless bars of her cell. The Compound's emergency backups had failed the moment of the great tremor, leaving her and the other Tyrants incarcerated only by thick shafts of steel.
Jinx lay sprawled behind her, staring at the ceiling. Beneath the bruising and the aches, the witch's skin buzzed with a silent scream. The living chaos that dwelled within her whipped into madness at the introduction of some new, unknown factor of entropy.
"He saved me," Jinx murmured over and over, her voice barely a whisper. The mantra protected her from the insanity of her own power. "He saved me."
Next to Jinx on the floor, a statue lay, twisted in frozen agony. Its mouth hung open in a frozen cry, its eyes screwed shut. Delicate stone hands protected the otherworldly beauty of its face. And from its skin, a mural of swirling color spilled forth, drifting up to the ceiling to disappear through the alloy of the cell.
Glancing back at the petrified, fossilized visage of Blackfire, Shimmer redoubled her efforts against the bars. If she had been able to muster a moment of clarity, she could have melted her cage with a wave of her hands. Instead, she grasped the bars, rattling them with her whole weight, and screamed at the top of her lungs.
"Hey! Hey, what's going on? Let us out! We're turning to stone down here! Let us out! Let us out!"
Cyberion's boots skittered on the fresh blacktop as he stopped on the dead street. "Jesus, no," he said.
The quake had robbed every window and door of its glass as far as he could see. Glimmering shards lay everywhere, reflecting the sky, turning sidewalks into red carpets. Older buildings had collapsed into rubble. Newer buildings stood cracked, pieces torn from their sides by the upheaval of the earth.
But the dumbstruck Titans didn't see the collateral damage around them. Everywhere they looked, they saw a single moment of terror sculpted in everything that had once lived.
Stone birds dotted the brown grass of the lawn, their wings spread as if to fly away. Gray, petrified trees lined the streets with thousands of razor-thin leaves clinging to their boughs. Cars were wrecked in buildings and against each other in the street. Their drivers had been turned to stone, just like the pedestrians frozen on the sidewalks.
Tek approached one of the statuesque people. Hands trembling, she touched the woman's cold rock face. The woman teetered, making Tek jerk her hands back with a yelp. "What's happening?" Tek stammered. "What happened? What happened to all of these people?"
The resonant laughter came again, drawing their eyes past the skyline of the city.
Robin had to look again. Upon first glance, his eyes had seen a tall, dark shape looming above the water, and had mistaken it for another building. But it was no building overshadowing the bay. "There," he deadpanned, and nodded toward the ocean.
Red-black beneath the swirling charcoal clouds, a giant stood upon still waters. The soles of his bare feet pressed against the flat surf as though it were land. The crown of his long, flowing white hair topped every one of the city's skyscrapers, and his shadow trailed across the water for miles. Four malevolent eyes blazed in his face. The nubs of his forehead had sprouted into gnarled antlers, from which black lightning blazed across the sky.
With eagle eyes, Beast Boy spied a small, fluttering shape orbiting the red giant. Through the horrid stench, he caught a fleeting wisp of something familiar. His heart leapt into his throat.
The giant smiled upon the statuesque city. His lips parted for a single word.
"Mine."
From the streets and the buildings and from below and between, the most beautiful colors leapt into the air. Light of every shade twisted out of the statues around the Titans. A living nexus of color formed high above their heads, growing larger by the second.
Awash in the light, the Titans stood aghast, and witnessed the end of the world.
To Be Continued