Paulie Macarthur's parents lived in an old brick house in the suburbs. The street was a time capsule, compact homes built for an influx of immigrants from some earlier decade. The yard was meticulously kept, and as Robin and Raven went up the porch steps, Robin noticed a crucifix hanging on the front door. He reached up and rang the doorbell. The wooden saviour regarded him with sad, patient eyes, as if aware of the purpose of his visit.
It was Mrs Macarthur who greeted them. She was in her early sixties, with olive skin and a mane of striped silver and black hair. Her handsome eyes were shadowed with grief, and her face had the same dignified stamp of suffering as the wall-mounted messiah's. She led them through to a small, cluttered dining room, where her husband was waiting.
"I want to start by saying I'm sorry for your loss," said Robin. This was the worst part of his job. Batman never bothered with it. He hadn't wanted condolences as a child, having decided it was better to evoke fear rather than sympathy. He didn't hand them out either. Death was a fact of life.
"Well, you oughtta be," said Mr Macarthur. He looked pale and colourless beside his tanned wife. He had thinning silver hair and an unhappy expression. "Way I hear it, this is your fault."
"David!" said Mrs Macarthur.
Mr Macarthur turned to Raven. "What's the matter with you, lady? You don't take your hat off when you come into a man's house?"
Raven was still beneath her hood. "My religious beliefs enjoin me to cover my hair. But I can lower my hood if it would make you comfortable."
Mr Macarthur's face twisted into an expression of incredulity. "Religious beliefs? What are you, some kind of nun?"
"Not exactly."
Raven reached up and slid back her hood. The jewel on her forehead glowed blood-red and her dark-rimmed eyes stood out against her ashen skin. Maybe it was because she was unimpressed, or maybe it was the oddness of her appearance set against the religious paraphernalia in the room, but Robin saw her unearthliness with fresh eyes. Mr Macarthur muttered something about how maybe Raven should put her hood back up again. His wife elbowed him into silence.
"So you know what happened to Paulie?" Mrs Macarthur asked.
"I'm still looking into it," said Robin.
"Looking into it," scoffed Mr Macarthur. "You was the last one to see him."
"Mr Macarthur, do you know why I spoke to your son? He was connected to a murder case I'm investigating. He spent enough time with at least one of the victims to paint a whole series of portraits of her."
"Hey now, what are you sayin'?"
"I'm saying I don't think it's a coincidence that your son disappeared right after I met him. Either he made a break for it, which I don't think is the case. Or… the real killer knew I spoke to your son, and wanted to keep him quiet."
Mrs Macarthur gasped and clapped her hands to her mouth.
"Anything you can tell me about Paulie would be helpful. Did he have any close friends or associates?"
"Friends?" Mr Macarthur scoffed again. "He was always a loner. Always a weird kid." He turned to his wife. "How many times did I tell you to put him in sports, make him be social, push him to achieve something with his life? Christ, we're just lucky he made art, instead of writing a manifesto and going on a mass killing spree."
Robin's eyes roamed freely behind his mask. As well as religious imagery, the walls bore framed photos: a smiling boy with blonde hair, proudly displaying a finger painting; a slightly older boy seated at a keyboard, his body caught in a pose of musical abandon; a teenager with shadowed eyes, the smile gone from his secretive face.
Robin cleared his throat. "Mr Macarthur, I think your son was a victim here. He did have contact with one of the missing girls, but there's nothing implicating him yet. For all we know he was targeted because he knew the person responsible."
"You mean he was targeted because you put a target on his back," said Mr Macarthur.
Robin wondered what it would be like to have a father like Mr Macarthur. Maybe being orphaned was preferable. Maybe this was why Batman didn't bother getting emotional. Robin decided he didn't want to prolong this interview any more than necessary.
Mrs Macarthur showed him around Paulie's room, answered questions about her son's friends and movements. Robin tried to be gentle. People like this were the reason the Titans existed. Ordinary lives, unpleasant fathers, estranged children: the dramatis personae of a pantomime older than caped crusaders. The lifeblood of Jump City.
When they left the Macarthurs, Robin asked, "You doing okay? You were quiet back there."
"You're the PI, not me," Raven said. "I would've gotten in your way. And I was happy to leave Mr Macarthur to you. Are you doing okay?"
Robin looked up at the sky. It was early afternoon and the pale sun dragged the clouds in its wake. "Do you have a plan, Raven?" he asked. "For what happens after the Titans?"
"Why? Are you going somewhere?"
"Not anytime soon. I'm just starting to feel my age a little. I'm not sure I want to be fifty and still doing backflips off a skyscraper to beat up a giant glow worm. I don't have health insurance, for one thing."
Raven smiled. "Not even the Waynes could afford the premium on that policy." She grew sombre. "No, I don't have a plan. When you grow up believing that everything about you is already prophesied, you don't bother making plans. I wasn't even sure I'd be alive this long. I guess I assumed that destiny would take its course."
"Jeez," said Robin. "That's rough. But you're a free woman now. You don't have to live by other people's rules."
"Yeah," said Raven. "I guess not. But we're all controlled by our pasts, aren't we? And sometimes when we think we've escaped, they break into our lives again. Speaking of which…"
"You've been thinking about the victims?"
"Like I said, I don't know where the resemblance to me comes from. It could be coincidence. The monks always said I was the only child of Trigon to survive in this dimension. That's why my father needed me."
"Could he have had more?"
"I would have said no. The murder victims are the same age as me. Multiple siblings my age, running around on one planet? It doesn't fit with how obsessed my father was with me, how he called me his only heir. But anything's possible with him. I don't even fully understand what kind of being he is, even though part of his essence lives inside me. The monks never told me the full story."
"What about the other side of your family?" Robin asked gently.
"My mother?" Raven shook her head, curtains of dark hair swinging with the motion. "No. She did things to keep me safe, things she might not have done if she'd had other children. I was the only living thing she felt completely responsible for."
"Which brings us back to Trigon," said Robin. "The one lead my information-gathering skills can't help with. Raven, I know you hate going back to your homeworld…"
"It's not that I hate them. They exiled me when I turned my back on their teachings and came to Earth."
"Then maybe I shouldn't ask this."
"No!"
The intensity in Raven's voice pulled Robin up short. They were on an old, cracked sidewalk. Little dandelion stalks stretched up from cracks in the concrete. Marigolds and roses danced in one yard, a broken-down car sagged in from another. The brick houses and narrow lanes squeezed against them, the past compressing the present.
"You should ask this," Raven said. "You have a right to ask. I've tried running away from my past before. I put this team in danger because I couldn't tell you what was happening to me. Because I was too afraid to go back. You deserve more than that."
Robin held her gaze. "If you do go back to Azarath, remember that you're not their daughter-in-exile any more. Or Trigon's vessel. You're a Teen Titan. We've got your back."
"I dunno whose ass you kissed to get access to this guy," the first prison guard said. The three of them had just been waved through the final checkpoint.
Starfire felt uneasy being this far into the high security wing. Each time a massive door slammed shut behind her, she glanced upward, as though hoping to see open sky through the concrete roof.
"Yeah," said the second guard, a burly man with a paunch. "The governor ain't too keen on you vigilante types messing with the inmates. Especially the psycho ones."
"He's not officially a psycho," said the first guard. "The docs could never decide with him. Say, what did you want with him, anyway?"
"I was attacked by two of his followers," said Starfire. "I wish to know if he was involved."
"That big attack down by the mall? Those goons were working with this guy?"
"They claim to be."
"I read where their trial ain't for another six months."
"Yes. Earth justice moves slowly. On Tamaran, if a ra'akfar attacked innocent people repeatedly, a champion of the peace would slay him in single combat."
"Yeah, well, we can't do that any more. We got body cams now. Say, do you Titans wear body cams? 'Cos if you don't, there's a couple of convicts in here I wouldn't mind leaving you alone with."
"I am here for Mad Mod only," Starfire said firmly.
The guards showed her into the cell. At her request they left the room, exchanging knowing glances.
Mad Mod was bent over a desk, his gnarled and spotted hands running over a piece of fabric. A battered transmitter in the corner cranked out some old Earth music, its chords sounding tinny and distorted. He straightened and turned to face her, an inscrutable look on his weathered face. His arms trembled as they swept to indicate the piles of material, the transmitter in the corner, the vintage posters plastered on the walls.
"Therapeutic purposes," he said. "They think it's good for me. An old man reliving a past he can never recapture. They lock me in a cage and let me decorate it with meaningless mass produced pop culture. They don't care what I do as long as I consume. An apt metaphor for society, don't you think?"
"Mr… Richards," Starfire began, but she was cut off.
"Mod Mod'll do. Can't stand the name Richards. Or Neil. My dad's names, you see. He wouldn't let my mum have anything in 'er name, not even 'er own children. He was a patriot. Swore by the queen, worked in a factory, got drunk at the pub, came home and beat his wife. Classic story of my generation. Heartwarming. Caught me wearing platform shoes and tapered trousers one night, and almost broke my ribs."
He stared blankly at Starfire after this monologue. She waited for him to continue. He didn't.
"Mr… Mad Mod. I wish to speak with you about two of your followers."
"I 'eard about the attack. I'm sorry it was you. Mind you, I knew they couldn't do you any real damage." He held up his hands, forming an imaginary camera frame around Starfire's face. The frame swept down her body, then back up again. "Anyone told you you could be a mannequin? You 'ave interesting proportions. I bet you get that a lot."
"A mannequin?"
"A model. Someone who, you know, wears clothes, gets pictures taken of them. A blank canvas, waiting to be remade by the corporate symbols of our age. Or you could do something indie, I suppose. You 'ave the exposure already."
"I did not come here to speak of fashion! You speak of trivialities–"
"But everything is fashion, my ducky!" said Mad Mod, his beady eyes flashing. "When you get to my age you'll have seen entire societies crumble and new institutions rise to take their place. You'll have witnessed the world you grew up in cast off its values each season like last year's bell-bottom trousers, and replace them with new fads, each more pointless than the last. Costumed superheroes, flag-waving patriotism, liberal democracy, counter-culture, drug-fuelled epiphanies, religious conservatism–it all comes and goes. I've seen your kind before, many times. And you have the audacity to stand there and judge me, as if your moral code is more profound than a teenage girl judging me for the length of my socks–"
"Enough!" said Starfire. "You speak like the Cynic-philosophers of Sirius Beta. I too have met people like you before. Beings whose souls were so empty they subscribed to any absurdity in order to justify their evil actions. Do you think that you alone watched the world burn around you? That Earth alone was brutalised in her history? Ask me what remains when the Gordanians have taken your children into captivity, when your people have lived under occupation for centuries. Ask me what remains when your cities have been reduced to ash, your once-proud monarchy is made a puppet of hostile aliens, when soulless husks like the Psions slice your people apart like meat for their grinders."
Starfire held up her right hand, balled it into a fist. Flames burst into life and fused into a shimmering green orb.
"On my planet our fashion is to struggle harder the more that is taken from us. Remember that before you set your followers on me again.
"Now, you will tell me what I wish to know."
Starfire stood outside Jump City Penitentiary, relishing the feel of the wind against her skin. Once the air of Earth had felt thin to her, its sunlight pale and watery, its vegetation bland. Everything on this world had seemed sapped of life, from its flighty animals to its quiet, colourless people. Yet now she was more at home here than anywhere else in the universe. She had grown accustomed to this timid, domesticated planet. Was that a good thing?
She tapped her earpiece. "Starfire to the Tower. I have an update regarding the attack upon me. The attack occurred at the same time that Robin was interviewing his suspect, and caused Robin to be lured away. For that reason Robin asked me to pursue this lead further.
"I have spoken to the Mad Mod. He claims he did not order the attack, but his followers may have been acting for a third party. He gave me a location within the Offworld Market district. I am headed there now. Sending coordinates."
Robin's voice crackled back: "Understood. I'll meet you there. Robin out."
Starfire rose swiftly into the air. As she cleared the heights of the nearest buildings she picked up speed, inscribing an arc of light on the afternoon sky.