Categories > Cartoons > Teen Titans > Hunter-Gatherer
"GO!"
Terra's cry brought the Titans into a serious battle for the first time in too long. The team rushed forward, geomancer in the lead, towards the Robin double who had only just appeared. When the five passed Beast Boy's battered and still body lying on the wooden planks of the warehouse floor, Terra left the formation to fight whoever or whatever was impersonating Robin and knelt by Beast Boy's side. None of the others looked back to see where she had gone, and she would have preferred it that way anyway.
"Beast Boy!" she said in a half-whisper, then raised her voice again once she heard Robin yelling orders to the other Titans. "Are you okay?"
He looked at Terra with eyes that were at once both relieved and savage. "Of cou--" A cough broke his sentence. "Of course I'm not okay!" he continued. "But it doesn't matter. He looks like he's given up for now." He knew Terra could not see the Robin he meant, so he had to trust her to take his word for it. "But I'll be fine. This is my fight. You don't need to get involved." His voice brimmed with confidence though his form did not seem to show it.
Terra was almost convinced that he would survive, but still wanted to help in any way she could. What she wouldn't give right now for Raven's healing powers! But Raven, she saw, was very much occupied, as were the others. But...wait. Occupied with what? Terra definitely saw Starfire and Cyborg fighting the Robin clone, but why weren't Robin and Raven fighting with them? She couldn't see what either of them was contending with, just that they each were contending with /something/.
"What's the matter? Still confused?" a darkly familiar voice hissed. Terra shut her eyes and shouted several thoughts at the voice in her head, hoping to force it to go away as she had done earlier. "That won't work this time, girl," the voice said in that same tone. The blonde girl cautiously left Beast Boy's side to stand up and hesitantly turned around. She saw standing behind her...herself. Her clothing looked very different -- it seemed to be made of tape and metal, both coloured a faded sort of blue and covering her entire body from neck to feet, and she had two square clamps of the same colour on either side of her head -- but from the hair, body shape, and voice, she knew it was herself that she now looked at. The one thing she never knew could have belonged to her were those eyes: cold, calculating. Heartless.
"Surprised to see me in the flesh?" the duplicate continued. "I thought you would be. You never know what's going on, do you?" The original Terra, not wanting to believe that there was now a body to her verbal abuse, shook her head and shut her eyes tightly, trying to block it out. "You can't get rid of me, Terra. I've always been here, and I always will be. I'm the part of you you want out of your life, but you've never been brave enough to get rid of." The clone took a step towards Terra and kept talking, her voice getting harsher and harsher to Terra's ears. "Right now, you know you should be helping Beast Boy, but you're just sitting here listening to me. Look at him." She smiled with a distinct air of schadenfreude, relishing in Terra's pain of knowing that her double was right.
Terra looked away from herself just long enough to see Beast Boy suffer another crack to the jaw from an invisible assailant. Past him, she saw Raven and Robin, but nothing of either Cyborg or Starfire -- not that she was paying much attention to anybody but Beast Boy in the first place. "Stop it," she whispered desperately when she turned back around to look at herself again. "Stop it."
"I can't stop it, little girl," the blue-clad Terra sneered. "Because I never started it. You did. The moment you walked into his life, you started everything that led to this. It's completely /your fault/."
Again Terra found herself screaming. "Shut UP!" She brought one arm up, tightened her hand into a fist, and swung at her impostor, who moved her shoulder back and evaded the punch easily. A second fist soon followed, but it was just as quickly and effortlessly dodged. Terra kept her attacks steady and gradually put more and more rage and strength into each punch, each consecutive miss only making her angrier.
Her double yawned. "I'm tired of you." She put out one blue-gloved hand and pushed Terra's forehead back, then balled her free hand into a fist and reared her arm back in preparation for delivering a savage blow to Terra's stomach. Terra knew it was coming and winced prematurely, but never stopped pumping her tired arms in futile attempts to hit her shadow.
But the debilitating punch never came.
-HG-
"Titans, go!" Robin yelled at himself, but before he and the other Titans could get to the duplicate of Robin, he yelled one word; it sounded like a name. Starfire and Cyborg kept barreling forward, but Robin saw Raven flinch, and it was not long before he heard a voice that made him stop in his tracks and retract his extended bo staff.
"Dick." The voice was deep and held special meaning for him, even in the one word it said. It was the voice of a man very close to him, a man without whom he would not be standing where he stood today. Robin turned around as soon as he heard the man behind him speak.
"What are you doing here?" Robin asked the man who had gotten significantly grayer since the two had last spoken.
"Dick, you disappoint me."
"What do you mean, I disappoint you? I've done my best ever since I joined the Titans!" Robin was bewildered that the man who stood several feet taller than he would ever figuratively look down on him.
"I doubt that." The man's voice was sincere. "If you really were doing your best, you'd have stopped this from happening."
"You think I could have fores--"
"I know you could have foreseen this, Dick. You could have foreseen this, and you could have prevented it." The man almost snarled. "But because you hesitated, your friends are suffering and there are supervillains threatening the country. You could have prevented both of those if you had only acted immediately, like I taught you."
"I acted as quickly as I could," Robin protested, but to no avail.
"You waited until information appeared on the news before you acted on anything. That is not what I taught you. I taught you to find all threats to the safety of your city and to act as soon as you found those threats. You disappoint me."
"That was a mistake, I'll admit," the Boy Wonder confessed, "but I didn't have a choice! I had to find out more about Slade than I did about a jailbreak!"
The man chuckled very slightly. "I will commend you for your devotion to a cause, but it stands that there was an immediate threat to the city that you didn't investigate. I bet you've already forgotten about Jinx and her accomplices in this whole fiasco with your friends and your teammates." Robin's eyes narrowed into a wince, which let the man know that he was right. "And now that the Titans are out of Jump City, who is defending it? Surely you knew better than to leave it undefended for any span of time." Again Robin flinched. "For all you know, the criminals could be running wild right now. And there's no one there to stop them."
Robin fell to his knees. The man was completely right. He'd been foolish enough to leave Jump City defenseless; he'd forgotten about the havoc that could be wrought by supposedly minor villains; he'd left spontaneously and had forgotten to plan...the list of what he had done that had gone against his training went on.
"You not only disappoint me," the man concluded his tirade, "Robin, you've failed me."
The Boy Wonder removed his own mask, knowing that he was no longer worthy of wearing it. His exposed eyes showed the pain of the man's last three words. "I'm sorry...Bruce."
No response.
"Bruce?"
-HG-
When Terra had knelt by Beast Boy's side, the Robin whom he had been fighting had relented his attack. However, as soon as Terra had left, Beast Boy's foe immediately sprung back into action without a single word of warning. The changeling barely had time to move to defend himself from Robin's handspring; Beast Boy narrowly avoided being kicked in the face with a steel-toed boot.
The way Robin landed, it appeared that Beast Boy would have some time to prepare an attack, but as Beast Boy, transformed into a tiger, pounced for Robin's exposed back, Robin extended his bo staff directly into Beast Boy's oversized nose, stunning him long enough for Robin to launch a birdarang around Beast Boy's body. When the birdarang clamped around the rope to secure itself, the two ends dug into the tiger's side and opened wounds that bled easily. Robin scoffed.
"You call yourself a Teen Titan? No Titan would fall for something like that."
Robin's taunt instilled Beast Boy with anger and, ignoring the pain, he transformed from a tiger to a lithe cheetah and escaped his binding with ease, then bared his claws and leapt again while Robin was busy taunting in an attempt to catch him off guard. Fortunately, his attempt worked and he managed to sink his tearing fangs deep into Robin's shoulder. The taste of his flesh was...nothing. There was no blood, no meat, nothing that would give him the satisfaction of actually attacking Robin to kill or maim. Robin didn't even appear to be injured.
"Surprise!" Robin jammed his elbow into Beast Boy's jaw again and followed up with a second bo staff hit to the same area. Beast Boy's teeth unlatched and he fell backwards as a human again, bleeding more severely from his mouth now and his strength very much failing him. But still he managed to stand up, apparently ready for even more.
"You still haven't learned, have you?" Robin asked. "I'm too strong for you."
"I don't care. We've got a score to settle," Beast Boy insisted. "I don't care if you're too strong. I'd rather die fighting you than live with you alive."
"Strong words from a little boy. Well, if you're ready for more, then--" Robin cut himself off and flung his bo staff at Beast Boy's head so quickly that it would more than likely fracture his skull if it connected. Beast Boy reached out to take it from the air and fling it back.
His hand clasped around nothing.
-HG-
Flash. A sea of fire.
Flash. A red demon.
Flash. Her friends. Gone.
The flashes ran through Raven's head as soon as Robin -- or whoever it was they were fighting -- had shouted the name "Phobia" upon being attacked. These visions...they couldn't be real. She knew it. But still, they struck her so vividly in her mind...
Flash. Terra. A statue, petrified for eternity.
No...no! She couldn't let those images take control of her.
Flash. Cyborg. Permanently deactivated.
The sight imprinted itself in her memory, but she forced herself to forget it and attempted to block it -- and whatever was causing these flashes -- out of her mind permanently. She muttered a familiar incantation and tried to fall into a meditative state so she could have greater control over her emotional range.
Flash. Starfire. Completely disemboweled, her organs everywhere.
She almost vomited at the reality of that image, but kept her meditation as steady as she could manage. And as she shut down her mind to outside invaders, she expanded her mind at the same time to try to find whatever was causing these images to appear. She felt telepathic waves coming from somewhere in the warehouse. Somewhere nearby. It would just take a few more...
Flash. Robin. Lying unmarked but very obviously dead in the hand of Trigon.
That shook her body to its very core. Her eyes snapped open and her meditation stopped immediately. But she knew where her target was. She levitated and brought herself around a stack of crates to find the source of her -- and, she assumed, her friends' -- agonies: A green-clad woman with her eyes closed, concentrating.
Raven decided that banter would wait; she had been put through far too much already, and being sarcastic was not on her list of priorities. Without a word, she telepathically flung one crate towards the woman to get her attention. Her eyes opened, but she was still clearly concentrating.
"Oh, it appears I've been found out. Too bad for you, little girl," the woman threatened and focused her glare on Raven's eyes.
The images no longer came in flashes; no, she was now seeing entire scenes. Trigon took Robin in his hands and instilled in him enough life to make him able to feel again. The gigantic red demon then grabbed one of Robin's arms in each hand and began pulling. And pulling. And pulling. Robin's scream rang through Raven's head long after she tried to block the influence, and even then the vision was still not completely gone. She heard the woman revel in her sinister ways, but the joyous cackle would not last for long. Raven screamed powerfully and toppled the entire wall of crates onto the woman with more energy than she ever recalled using in a single attack. And she didn't care whether or not the woman were killed by the falling objects; in fact, if she had it in her, she would have made sure that the woman was dead personally.
When the images finally faded from her mind, she knew that she was victorious.
-HG-
"Cyborg, why must we fight Robin alone?" Starfire asked a very occupied Cyborg between blasts of his sonic cannon. "Is this a plot of Slade? And what happened to the others?"
"I don't know who's messin' with us, Star," Cyborg responded quickly while dodging a flying kick from Robin, "but I know it's not Robin. He was with us the whole time. And Raven, Terra, and Robin look busy." He shot a glance over his shoulder, but could make out very little before Robin's foot came up out of the battle and connected with Cyborg's head, sending him spinning backwards.
"Then we still must fight?"
Even after righting himself, Cyborg still did not reply, instead opting to let another blue beam of sonic energy do the talking for him. Starfire assumed that to be a "yes" and attempted to call forth the necessary emotions to summon her Star Bolts, but found her hands not glowing with the familiar green energy of battle. "I fear it will not work, Cyborg."
"What's the matter, Star?" Robin took a break from fighting Starfire to ask her. "Can't fight your precious boyfr--" With a shot to the chest, though, Robin was knocked back by waves of sonic energy and could not complete his taunt.
"I'm tellin' you, Star, this isn't Robin." With their enemy temporarily incapacitated, Cyborg could take the time to look at Starfire. "And if you can't see that, then picture yourself fighting someone else. Someone it'd be easier to attack."
As soon as he said that, Starfire knew immediately whom she would rather be fighting instead of Robin, and her hands flared up and she let loose with a barrage of high-speed star bolts, only a few of which connected, but that was all she needed. Robin covered himself in his cape as defense, but it served little good; he was already weakened from the several sonic cannon attacks that he lost his grip on the cape and faced the star bolts full-force.
Still partially obscured by the fading smoke of the star bolt explosions, he reached for more smoke bombs in his belt so that he could escape, but found the pouch -- and, from a cursory feel of the other pouches, the entire belt -- completely empty. He swore and looked up to see Cyborg and Starfire joined by Terra, Raven, Beast Boy, and the original Robin.
He swore again.
"Those were all illusions," Raven said to the other three, who still looked very, very shaken up. "Of our greatest fears, from what I figured."
"I don't care what they were." Beast Boy snarled. "Let me at him."
"If you want me," the Robin clone said, "then come and get me." His bold threat's life was prolonged by the fact that he started changing as soon as he said it. The spiked hair of the Boy Wonder changed back into flowing black hair; the tacky combination of red, yellow, and green normalized into a blue that was anything but calm. The Boy Wonder's diminutive stature grew to that of a fully-grown man, and his form filled out into that of a mature woman.
"You." Beast Boy hissed the word.
"Plasmus! Mallah! Join me, and bring my rapier!" the woman who was once Robin shouted into the darkness. A blob of goo and a bipedal gorilla, the latter of whom was carrying a long and thin sword, joined the woman dressed in blue, who was now grinning evilly, from apparently out of nowhere.
Immediately as the trio assembled, Terra began barking orders frantically. "Robin! Raven! Get the monkey! Cyborg, Starfire, take the blob! Beast Boy, you and I can handle the shapesh--"
The other four Titans sprung into action when they heard their orders (though Robin looked very miffed by having his position as leader taken away), but one person protested.
"No," Beast Boy insisted.
"What?"
"You don't know what she did to me, Terra," he explained. "You don't know what she did to you, either. She's mine, and mine alone."
"At least let me be there for emotional supp--"
"/No/, Terra. Just...no. You don't.../no/. Fight with someone else. Don't fight with me. This is something she and I have to settle alone."
Terra looked at him with confusion but took his word for it, and left his side to join Cyborg and Starfire in fighting the strangely humanoid purple mass of ooze.
"/You/," Beast Boy repeated to the woman.
"Me," she confirmed sarcastically and dashed forward with her rapier at the ready.
Terra's cry brought the Titans into a serious battle for the first time in too long. The team rushed forward, geomancer in the lead, towards the Robin double who had only just appeared. When the five passed Beast Boy's battered and still body lying on the wooden planks of the warehouse floor, Terra left the formation to fight whoever or whatever was impersonating Robin and knelt by Beast Boy's side. None of the others looked back to see where she had gone, and she would have preferred it that way anyway.
"Beast Boy!" she said in a half-whisper, then raised her voice again once she heard Robin yelling orders to the other Titans. "Are you okay?"
He looked at Terra with eyes that were at once both relieved and savage. "Of cou--" A cough broke his sentence. "Of course I'm not okay!" he continued. "But it doesn't matter. He looks like he's given up for now." He knew Terra could not see the Robin he meant, so he had to trust her to take his word for it. "But I'll be fine. This is my fight. You don't need to get involved." His voice brimmed with confidence though his form did not seem to show it.
Terra was almost convinced that he would survive, but still wanted to help in any way she could. What she wouldn't give right now for Raven's healing powers! But Raven, she saw, was very much occupied, as were the others. But...wait. Occupied with what? Terra definitely saw Starfire and Cyborg fighting the Robin clone, but why weren't Robin and Raven fighting with them? She couldn't see what either of them was contending with, just that they each were contending with /something/.
"What's the matter? Still confused?" a darkly familiar voice hissed. Terra shut her eyes and shouted several thoughts at the voice in her head, hoping to force it to go away as she had done earlier. "That won't work this time, girl," the voice said in that same tone. The blonde girl cautiously left Beast Boy's side to stand up and hesitantly turned around. She saw standing behind her...herself. Her clothing looked very different -- it seemed to be made of tape and metal, both coloured a faded sort of blue and covering her entire body from neck to feet, and she had two square clamps of the same colour on either side of her head -- but from the hair, body shape, and voice, she knew it was herself that she now looked at. The one thing she never knew could have belonged to her were those eyes: cold, calculating. Heartless.
"Surprised to see me in the flesh?" the duplicate continued. "I thought you would be. You never know what's going on, do you?" The original Terra, not wanting to believe that there was now a body to her verbal abuse, shook her head and shut her eyes tightly, trying to block it out. "You can't get rid of me, Terra. I've always been here, and I always will be. I'm the part of you you want out of your life, but you've never been brave enough to get rid of." The clone took a step towards Terra and kept talking, her voice getting harsher and harsher to Terra's ears. "Right now, you know you should be helping Beast Boy, but you're just sitting here listening to me. Look at him." She smiled with a distinct air of schadenfreude, relishing in Terra's pain of knowing that her double was right.
Terra looked away from herself just long enough to see Beast Boy suffer another crack to the jaw from an invisible assailant. Past him, she saw Raven and Robin, but nothing of either Cyborg or Starfire -- not that she was paying much attention to anybody but Beast Boy in the first place. "Stop it," she whispered desperately when she turned back around to look at herself again. "Stop it."
"I can't stop it, little girl," the blue-clad Terra sneered. "Because I never started it. You did. The moment you walked into his life, you started everything that led to this. It's completely /your fault/."
Again Terra found herself screaming. "Shut UP!" She brought one arm up, tightened her hand into a fist, and swung at her impostor, who moved her shoulder back and evaded the punch easily. A second fist soon followed, but it was just as quickly and effortlessly dodged. Terra kept her attacks steady and gradually put more and more rage and strength into each punch, each consecutive miss only making her angrier.
Her double yawned. "I'm tired of you." She put out one blue-gloved hand and pushed Terra's forehead back, then balled her free hand into a fist and reared her arm back in preparation for delivering a savage blow to Terra's stomach. Terra knew it was coming and winced prematurely, but never stopped pumping her tired arms in futile attempts to hit her shadow.
But the debilitating punch never came.
-HG-
"Titans, go!" Robin yelled at himself, but before he and the other Titans could get to the duplicate of Robin, he yelled one word; it sounded like a name. Starfire and Cyborg kept barreling forward, but Robin saw Raven flinch, and it was not long before he heard a voice that made him stop in his tracks and retract his extended bo staff.
"Dick." The voice was deep and held special meaning for him, even in the one word it said. It was the voice of a man very close to him, a man without whom he would not be standing where he stood today. Robin turned around as soon as he heard the man behind him speak.
"What are you doing here?" Robin asked the man who had gotten significantly grayer since the two had last spoken.
"Dick, you disappoint me."
"What do you mean, I disappoint you? I've done my best ever since I joined the Titans!" Robin was bewildered that the man who stood several feet taller than he would ever figuratively look down on him.
"I doubt that." The man's voice was sincere. "If you really were doing your best, you'd have stopped this from happening."
"You think I could have fores--"
"I know you could have foreseen this, Dick. You could have foreseen this, and you could have prevented it." The man almost snarled. "But because you hesitated, your friends are suffering and there are supervillains threatening the country. You could have prevented both of those if you had only acted immediately, like I taught you."
"I acted as quickly as I could," Robin protested, but to no avail.
"You waited until information appeared on the news before you acted on anything. That is not what I taught you. I taught you to find all threats to the safety of your city and to act as soon as you found those threats. You disappoint me."
"That was a mistake, I'll admit," the Boy Wonder confessed, "but I didn't have a choice! I had to find out more about Slade than I did about a jailbreak!"
The man chuckled very slightly. "I will commend you for your devotion to a cause, but it stands that there was an immediate threat to the city that you didn't investigate. I bet you've already forgotten about Jinx and her accomplices in this whole fiasco with your friends and your teammates." Robin's eyes narrowed into a wince, which let the man know that he was right. "And now that the Titans are out of Jump City, who is defending it? Surely you knew better than to leave it undefended for any span of time." Again Robin flinched. "For all you know, the criminals could be running wild right now. And there's no one there to stop them."
Robin fell to his knees. The man was completely right. He'd been foolish enough to leave Jump City defenseless; he'd forgotten about the havoc that could be wrought by supposedly minor villains; he'd left spontaneously and had forgotten to plan...the list of what he had done that had gone against his training went on.
"You not only disappoint me," the man concluded his tirade, "Robin, you've failed me."
The Boy Wonder removed his own mask, knowing that he was no longer worthy of wearing it. His exposed eyes showed the pain of the man's last three words. "I'm sorry...Bruce."
No response.
"Bruce?"
-HG-
When Terra had knelt by Beast Boy's side, the Robin whom he had been fighting had relented his attack. However, as soon as Terra had left, Beast Boy's foe immediately sprung back into action without a single word of warning. The changeling barely had time to move to defend himself from Robin's handspring; Beast Boy narrowly avoided being kicked in the face with a steel-toed boot.
The way Robin landed, it appeared that Beast Boy would have some time to prepare an attack, but as Beast Boy, transformed into a tiger, pounced for Robin's exposed back, Robin extended his bo staff directly into Beast Boy's oversized nose, stunning him long enough for Robin to launch a birdarang around Beast Boy's body. When the birdarang clamped around the rope to secure itself, the two ends dug into the tiger's side and opened wounds that bled easily. Robin scoffed.
"You call yourself a Teen Titan? No Titan would fall for something like that."
Robin's taunt instilled Beast Boy with anger and, ignoring the pain, he transformed from a tiger to a lithe cheetah and escaped his binding with ease, then bared his claws and leapt again while Robin was busy taunting in an attempt to catch him off guard. Fortunately, his attempt worked and he managed to sink his tearing fangs deep into Robin's shoulder. The taste of his flesh was...nothing. There was no blood, no meat, nothing that would give him the satisfaction of actually attacking Robin to kill or maim. Robin didn't even appear to be injured.
"Surprise!" Robin jammed his elbow into Beast Boy's jaw again and followed up with a second bo staff hit to the same area. Beast Boy's teeth unlatched and he fell backwards as a human again, bleeding more severely from his mouth now and his strength very much failing him. But still he managed to stand up, apparently ready for even more.
"You still haven't learned, have you?" Robin asked. "I'm too strong for you."
"I don't care. We've got a score to settle," Beast Boy insisted. "I don't care if you're too strong. I'd rather die fighting you than live with you alive."
"Strong words from a little boy. Well, if you're ready for more, then--" Robin cut himself off and flung his bo staff at Beast Boy's head so quickly that it would more than likely fracture his skull if it connected. Beast Boy reached out to take it from the air and fling it back.
His hand clasped around nothing.
-HG-
Flash. A sea of fire.
Flash. A red demon.
Flash. Her friends. Gone.
The flashes ran through Raven's head as soon as Robin -- or whoever it was they were fighting -- had shouted the name "Phobia" upon being attacked. These visions...they couldn't be real. She knew it. But still, they struck her so vividly in her mind...
Flash. Terra. A statue, petrified for eternity.
No...no! She couldn't let those images take control of her.
Flash. Cyborg. Permanently deactivated.
The sight imprinted itself in her memory, but she forced herself to forget it and attempted to block it -- and whatever was causing these flashes -- out of her mind permanently. She muttered a familiar incantation and tried to fall into a meditative state so she could have greater control over her emotional range.
Flash. Starfire. Completely disemboweled, her organs everywhere.
She almost vomited at the reality of that image, but kept her meditation as steady as she could manage. And as she shut down her mind to outside invaders, she expanded her mind at the same time to try to find whatever was causing these images to appear. She felt telepathic waves coming from somewhere in the warehouse. Somewhere nearby. It would just take a few more...
Flash. Robin. Lying unmarked but very obviously dead in the hand of Trigon.
That shook her body to its very core. Her eyes snapped open and her meditation stopped immediately. But she knew where her target was. She levitated and brought herself around a stack of crates to find the source of her -- and, she assumed, her friends' -- agonies: A green-clad woman with her eyes closed, concentrating.
Raven decided that banter would wait; she had been put through far too much already, and being sarcastic was not on her list of priorities. Without a word, she telepathically flung one crate towards the woman to get her attention. Her eyes opened, but she was still clearly concentrating.
"Oh, it appears I've been found out. Too bad for you, little girl," the woman threatened and focused her glare on Raven's eyes.
The images no longer came in flashes; no, she was now seeing entire scenes. Trigon took Robin in his hands and instilled in him enough life to make him able to feel again. The gigantic red demon then grabbed one of Robin's arms in each hand and began pulling. And pulling. And pulling. Robin's scream rang through Raven's head long after she tried to block the influence, and even then the vision was still not completely gone. She heard the woman revel in her sinister ways, but the joyous cackle would not last for long. Raven screamed powerfully and toppled the entire wall of crates onto the woman with more energy than she ever recalled using in a single attack. And she didn't care whether or not the woman were killed by the falling objects; in fact, if she had it in her, she would have made sure that the woman was dead personally.
When the images finally faded from her mind, she knew that she was victorious.
-HG-
"Cyborg, why must we fight Robin alone?" Starfire asked a very occupied Cyborg between blasts of his sonic cannon. "Is this a plot of Slade? And what happened to the others?"
"I don't know who's messin' with us, Star," Cyborg responded quickly while dodging a flying kick from Robin, "but I know it's not Robin. He was with us the whole time. And Raven, Terra, and Robin look busy." He shot a glance over his shoulder, but could make out very little before Robin's foot came up out of the battle and connected with Cyborg's head, sending him spinning backwards.
"Then we still must fight?"
Even after righting himself, Cyborg still did not reply, instead opting to let another blue beam of sonic energy do the talking for him. Starfire assumed that to be a "yes" and attempted to call forth the necessary emotions to summon her Star Bolts, but found her hands not glowing with the familiar green energy of battle. "I fear it will not work, Cyborg."
"What's the matter, Star?" Robin took a break from fighting Starfire to ask her. "Can't fight your precious boyfr--" With a shot to the chest, though, Robin was knocked back by waves of sonic energy and could not complete his taunt.
"I'm tellin' you, Star, this isn't Robin." With their enemy temporarily incapacitated, Cyborg could take the time to look at Starfire. "And if you can't see that, then picture yourself fighting someone else. Someone it'd be easier to attack."
As soon as he said that, Starfire knew immediately whom she would rather be fighting instead of Robin, and her hands flared up and she let loose with a barrage of high-speed star bolts, only a few of which connected, but that was all she needed. Robin covered himself in his cape as defense, but it served little good; he was already weakened from the several sonic cannon attacks that he lost his grip on the cape and faced the star bolts full-force.
Still partially obscured by the fading smoke of the star bolt explosions, he reached for more smoke bombs in his belt so that he could escape, but found the pouch -- and, from a cursory feel of the other pouches, the entire belt -- completely empty. He swore and looked up to see Cyborg and Starfire joined by Terra, Raven, Beast Boy, and the original Robin.
He swore again.
"Those were all illusions," Raven said to the other three, who still looked very, very shaken up. "Of our greatest fears, from what I figured."
"I don't care what they were." Beast Boy snarled. "Let me at him."
"If you want me," the Robin clone said, "then come and get me." His bold threat's life was prolonged by the fact that he started changing as soon as he said it. The spiked hair of the Boy Wonder changed back into flowing black hair; the tacky combination of red, yellow, and green normalized into a blue that was anything but calm. The Boy Wonder's diminutive stature grew to that of a fully-grown man, and his form filled out into that of a mature woman.
"You." Beast Boy hissed the word.
"Plasmus! Mallah! Join me, and bring my rapier!" the woman who was once Robin shouted into the darkness. A blob of goo and a bipedal gorilla, the latter of whom was carrying a long and thin sword, joined the woman dressed in blue, who was now grinning evilly, from apparently out of nowhere.
Immediately as the trio assembled, Terra began barking orders frantically. "Robin! Raven! Get the monkey! Cyborg, Starfire, take the blob! Beast Boy, you and I can handle the shapesh--"
The other four Titans sprung into action when they heard their orders (though Robin looked very miffed by having his position as leader taken away), but one person protested.
"No," Beast Boy insisted.
"What?"
"You don't know what she did to me, Terra," he explained. "You don't know what she did to you, either. She's mine, and mine alone."
"At least let me be there for emotional supp--"
"/No/, Terra. Just...no. You don't.../no/. Fight with someone else. Don't fight with me. This is something she and I have to settle alone."
Terra looked at him with confusion but took his word for it, and left his side to join Cyborg and Starfire in fighting the strangely humanoid purple mass of ooze.
"/You/," Beast Boy repeated to the woman.
"Me," she confirmed sarcastically and dashed forward with her rapier at the ready.
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