FicWad

Five kilometres east and eight hundred metres below the surface...

"Slade!"

The yellow-haired girl, as soon as she regained use of her mouth and throat, said the name as if it were a curse. A blue laser was tracing her petrified body; every place it passed soon after reformed to flesh and blood: Slate gray into blonde and beige, into blue and steel. The laser stemmed from a miniscule module held by a silver-gloved hand. The armour of the hand's owner reflected a tamer cobalt than that of the laser, but the half-mask's colour never wavered.

"My apprentice," came the eerily calm voice. Terra, now completely reformed and full of hatred, spat in his face. There was a soft splat and his gauntlet rose without noise to wipe his face clean. At the last moment, though, he compressed his fingers into a truncheon and brought his fist to her face with superhuman force.

The geomancer reeled, spat blood onto the ground, and looked down, wondering why she couldn't dodge his blow. She discovered that it was because - and why else? - her feet were still fused to the earth. "Slade," she responded, still getting used to being able to talk again as shown by the wear in her disgust-laden voice. "I think you forgot something." A yellow glow surrounded both her hands and makeshift pedestal. Bringing her hands up above her head, she split the earth holding her in place and tore her altar from the ground.

Slade, watching her hover before him, replied simply, coolly, "Now, now." Electricity streaked about his right hand, still twisted into a fist, as he brought it up in a similar fashion. Identical bolts raced along Terra's right arm, and she could just tell that behind his mask, Slade was smiling with confidence. "I still control you."

-T-

Eight hundred metres north...

"You're pretty brave, to come back here alone in the middle of the night," Raven spoke to Beast Boy, who was clearing out rubble as a gorilla. "It's not like you." Her comments got her a hard, stern glare. The primate threw away the boulder he was carrying and morphed back into his human form. It was his turn to be frighteningly cold and emotionless.

"Have you ever been in love, Raven? It changes you." He said it in a way that asked no response, and for a while not even the purple-haired girl, in her infinite causticity, could think of one. Noting her silence, he filled the gap with something he hoped to be humourous, but turned out bitter. "It wouldn't kill you to help move these rocks, either."

"Yes, it would," she finally grasped the words. "Just because I miss her doesn't mean I'm eager to get her back." Her emotionless voice paused to let Beast Boy take it in, though she didn't think it was that big of a shock to his system. "The only reason I came here," Raven started again with brutal honesty, "was to make sure that you were okay. And now that I see that you are..."

"I see where you're going," the changeling admitted with rising anger. "Fine! Go! I don't need you here anyway!" He didn't wait for a reply or any sort of defense; instead, he transformed into a mammoth and began lifting some of the larger rocks with his great trunk. Most of those rocks were placed so that his back would be to his company.

Raven was actually hurt - only very slightly, just enough to bother her; it was still there, though. Beast Boy had never said or acted anything like that to her before. Without even saying "goodbye" or casting any glances, she lifted off the ground and began her long return to the tower alone.

-T-

In the skies of Jump City...

"Stupid stubborn Beast Boy. Can't he see what I see? By Azar, she betrayed us! No amount of anything is going to change that. She took our trust and made it her plaything! ...And anyway, she'll just hurt him if he sees her again. He'll wonder what could have been, and he'll be destroyed - again - and he'll be moping for days.

"He's bound to hurt himself through this." The cloaked girl, practically invisible against the blues and purples of the very near dawn, sighed with exasperation. "I just hope he'll be able to deal with it."

-T-

Below the surface...

"I broke free of you once; I can do it again!" Terra cried with triumph as she fought against Slade's vicarious grip on her. The masked man chuckled at his ignorant captive as he fingered the beam device he held. He aimed it at Terra's resisting hand and pressed a button; a garnet laser connected with her hand and returned it to the stone from which it had been transformed. The geomancer didn't look quite surprised, but rather...well, it would have been difficult to place her emotions at that particular time.

"You will obey me, apprentice, or I will return you to your pedestal and leave you to erode," came Slade's sinister proclamation. Terra simply smirked.

"You expect me to obey that? I'm no use to you as a statue, and it's pretty clear to me that you want me back. Using that little device isn't going to help you much if you're planning to get me back into the apprenticeship. Except for Cinderblock, stone isn't very obedient."

"Whether or not you live," he reminded her harshly, "is of no consequence to me."

"Oh, but I think it is. You're running out of people gullible enough to trick into being your apprentice and tough enough that the Titans couldn't defeat them. I'm your last resort, from where I'm standing." Her eyes flashed yellow as her volume escalated. "And I'm not going to serve you any more!" With disregard to the stability of the cavern, she threw down great chunks of the ceiling on top of Slade with her one human hand.

He, as usual, dodged the earthen deluge with little more than a few scratches. As he watched his former apprentice maneouvre through the air on her platform, his hands clambered for the matter-altering device on which he was certain he had had an excellent grip; to no avail, though. "No matter," he said quietly while avoiding a second partial cave-in.

In a flash, Slade was in front of her. She gasped slightly at his speed, still shocked even though she had experienced it before, and put up her one good hand as an almost automatic attempt to defend herself. With it came a slab of rock from below her, which the man of colossal strength punched through easily. Luck was on her side, though, as her defense did appear to surprise him: this gave her ample opportunity to rise above him and prepare what she hoped would be the final strike. Her arms rose like the thumb of Caesar, considering and determining Slade's fate all within a second's time, and fell with the earth above her, sealing it.

However, she was not quick enough. During Terra's theatrics, Slade had broken free of his slight state of delirium and noticed the rapidly lowering ceiling coming down on top of him. Seeming to never tire, he quickly appeared behind the impudent girl. "You disappoint me. My apprentice should not be so easy to fool." He had, apparently, only been acting surprised so as to see what she would do.

All of the sudden, though, a wall of rock slammed Slade from the side: the same wall of rock, in fact, that had once been the ceiling. He grunted; she grinned. If anything, it was proof to her that even he was not infallible. "Neither should you," Terra smugly returned, rotating in the air to face where he had landed.

The only problem was that he was not there.

-T-

Above ground...

Beast Boy was frantically casting rocks everywhere, trying to find some way through to where he knew she was. Some rocks had been there; some, he had created on his own. He couldn't remember the location of the original passage, which prompted him to start his own - but it didn't really matter to him any more. Some part of him felt it: Someone, whom he believed to be Terra, was in danger.

The sun had since risen, but the cavern into which the lover had dug himself showed nothing but shadows. Though time was the last thing on his mind, he realised that he had been at this endeavour for too long. He was tiring out and his body screamed for rest. All he could do was force himself to believe that she would be behind this next shelf, past these next boulders, right there waiting for him.

However, one can only run on emotion for so long; Beast Boy was no exception. His transformations from monkey to mammoth to man began slowing down; his shattering punches and rams grew less mighty; he eventually considered just going home and forgetting about this situation for right now. The shaft would still be here when he returned, after all. He put down the boulder of moderate size he was holding, turned back into the helpless boy he was, and sighed deeply.

Quite unexpectedly and rather quickly, the ground started sliding from below him. He scrabbled backwards to save himself, then peered down the resulting hole.

"It can't be."

He wanted to scream her name, and he almost did, until he saw the reason for her to be moving the earth once again. He saw her reason for fighting dash around and get hit by what had almost been Beast Boy's quite literal downfall.

And he saw Slade recover too quickly from that hit. He saw clearly how Slade had again moved behind Terra. He saw her turn around in confusion. And he watched with absolutely terrifying detail as the fiend in the half-mask raised a fist to her innocent body and thrust it forward. And he heard the sounds of bones breaking.

And he jumped down.

-T-

On the roof of Titans Tower...

Raven, deep in meditation, felt the second-strongest spike of emotion she had ever felt. It was utter and complete despair - the kind someone would feel after a death. It was not hers, though; she knew it to be Beast Boy's, but to be so strong as to be able to feel it from five kilometres away must have meant that...

"Good, then," Jealousy cut. "Less competition for the spot of the telekinetic one."

"How can you say that? Beast Boy's clearly destroyed!" Compassion argued heatedly.

"We said he would be like that anyway," Raven told herself. It seemed to quell certain emotions, which was exactly what she needed to continue meditating properly, which she did.

However, there was a reason that the despair was only the second/-strongest: The next assault - the only thing it could be called - was even more powerful and not only broke her trance but caused her to stagger in midair. "This anger! It can't be..." She gasped in disbelief. "It can't be Beast Boy...but it is..."/

Though she had vowed to leave him be, again she found herself almost unconsciously rising from her stance and floating off to where she had been not hours before.

-T-

Later, underground...

She arrived at the scene of a fierce battle long since decided. The small chamber of earth was close to collapsing, supported only by a few arbitrarily placed pillars that had sprung from the ground. Boulders had been smashed into dust. But the chamber was not Raven's main concern. What lay in the centre was.

Beast Boy was on his back, struggling to breathe, with too great a number of cuts, bruises, and abrasions on his exposed skin. Several triangular orange shards had fallen in a halo around his head, and it was clear that his left fist was bleeding.

Kneeling beside him was the girl whom Raven believed to be dead. She was clutching her chest and crying; crying from the pain of what had happened to Beast Boy, not from the physical pain. She held a small silver rod between two fingers of her other hand, the purpose of which was unclear. Raven heard the blonde girl say something through choking tears.

"He fought until the end..."

At that, Raven finally stepped forward to embrace her nightmare and attempt to ward it off. "He won't die."

Terra jerked her head up as quickly as she could comfortably do upon hearing the familiar voice. "Go away," she insisted. "You can't help him."

"Yes, I can," Raven insisted back while walking to Beast Boy's body and kneeling over it the same way. "He won't die, because I can heal him."

Though, so near Terra, she noticed that the reason she was fighting for breath was not because of her tears. She was injured at least as badly as Beast Boy, if not worse. Raven debated healing the traitor with herself, until Reason worked out, "If you don't heal her, you'll be as bad as she was." That was enough to convince her.

"Do you trust me, Terra?" she asked. The girl's silent nod came after Raven had already begun the healing process. She placed one hand on each of her friends' chests and began her chant.

-T-

Later still...

Beast Boy's eyes opened.

The purple witch had kept trying to heal him long after she had finished with his love interest. The only sounds had been her steady drone and Terra's quiet sobs. But, as Raven had predicted, Beast Boy did not die, and she did heal him.

When he sat up, Terra wrapped her arms around him. Beast Boy raised no protest and returned the embrace. Raven just smiled.

There was no drone. There were no sobs.

Everything was finally silent.