Andy C.
Repent, Harlequin!
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"I.......I think I screwed up."
Days have passed since the breakout from the HIVE Facility, since Alfred found us and brought us back home. And needless to say, the past few days have been.....difficult.
Miss Cooper has been a wreck emotionally; apparently she blamed herself for me running away, thinking that I was acting out against her. Between Alfred and I, we concocted a cover story, involving kidnappers and an attempt to hold me for ransom. The story's frankly ridiculous, but she's been too distraught to really think it over.
And honestly, it's less ridiculous than why I actually left.
Now, I'm back in Mr. Wayne's private room in Gotham General, talking to my comatose legal guardian, hoping somehow he'd hear me.
Batman would have known what to do this whole time.
"Leaving Gotham, going along with Psimon--and worse, letting Rachel and Kori go too.....it was stupid. Worse than stupid. It was selfish. I was kidnapped and taken halfway around the world, brainwashed, tortured......all because I wanted to impress a girl."
Ever since Jinx had first approached us with the offer to join the HIVE, ever since Raven and Starfire said they wanted to go, I had been trying to rationalize it, to justify it to myself that I was coming along for their protection. To make sure they would be okay, and that I could help others escape if they were in the same situation.
But the night before the breakout, that moment when Rachel and I kissed....I couldn't lie to myself anymore. The trip to Bialya, the rebellion against Queen Bee, even changing my call sign from Redbird to Robin.....it's always been about her.
"The other Titans are getting adjusted well," I say. "Roy went back to the West Coast to meet back up with Green Arrow. Took most of the members of Cerberus Squad with him-- well, Artemis went off with Donna Troy, and Icicle kind of went his own way. The rest of them stuck together, changed their name to 'Titans West.' My Titans are, well....they're getting better."
There's a near-finished derelict building on one of the smaller islands not too far from the Gotham Harbor, which was originally built to be a contemporary luxury hotel. The hotel never opened, and Wayne Industries bought out the land for development. After getting us home, Alfred stumbled across the place when looking for a place to house the members of the Titans who had nowhere to go.....which turned out to be just about all of them.
Starfire isn't from this planet, so she has nowhere on Earth to call home.
Cyborg has been pretty tight-lipped about his past, other than that the people he used to work for weren't the best people, and that he'd rather not go back.
Changeling broke out of some kind of genetic weapons program, and like Cyborg, isn't in any hurry to go back. That little bit of common ground has made them pretty fast friends.
And then there's Raven.....
"She ran away," Rachel said, sitting next to me on the roof of Gotham Heights after our first day back to school. It's the first thing she's said to me all day. In fact, it's the first thing she's said to me since we kissed days ago.
"Who?"
"My mom," she said. She took a few deep breaths, her breath shaky like she's fighting back tears, before continuing. "The night Brother Blood attacked me, the night I found out what I am....when you took me home, I told my mom everything. I was so scared, I didn't know what to do. She said to stay calm, get some sleep, and talk about it in the morning."
For a second, I could swear I saw her shadow get darker, and larger.
"When I went to bed, she packed her bags, wrote a note saying how sorry she was, then got into her car and drove away. I couldn't sleep that night; I heard the whole thing."
"Oh my God," I said. "And you were living on your own the whole time?"
"I didn't want to deal with it," she said. "I didn't want to admit to myself that.....that she left me. All those years, my mom looked at me like a time bomb. She knew the kind of people she used to associate with, what my father was.....and what that made me. She tried to love me, she tried to care for me, but all along she knew that there was....something evil in me."
"Don't say that," I stopped her, putting a hand on her shoulder. "I know who you are, Rachel, and you're not a bad person."
"Dick....it doesn't matter who I am," she replied. "Because I can't change what I am. I'm half demon, which means the very nature of my existence is to hurt people. And worse, I'm supposed to be some kind of key to the apocalypse. So I may not be a bad person in your eyes, but it's the part of me that isn't a person at all that scares me....what scared my mom away."
She looked away, not able to look me in the eyes.
"And if you know what's good for you, it'll scare you away, too."
I shook my head.
"No," I said. "I don't scare easily. And whatever you're going through, I'm not going to let you go through it alone. I care about you, Rachel. A lot. I think I l--"
"Don't say it, Dick," she turned back to me. "Just....don't. If there's one thing I've learned in magic, it's that words have power. And that word.......just don't do it. It won't end well for either of us."
"I don't believe that. And I don't believe that you don't feel the same way. Not after everything we've been through together. Not after we kissed our last night in Bialya."
"You're not listening!" Rachel burst out, her shadow pulsing darker again. "When you were caught by Queen Bee, when I saw what she was doing to you.....I lost control. That evil in me, the demon side of me, took over, and I burned out Queen Bee's mind. I stripped her soul bare and left her a vegetable. And if I hadn't snapped out of it, I would have done so much worse. I can't let my emotions get the better of me, or next time....next time I might hurt a lot more people."
Rachel cupped her hand to my cheek, then turned away.
"It's not that I don't love you, Dick.......it's that I can't."
Before I could respond, she took to the air and flew away.
For just a second, she turned back to look. I could have sworn I saw tears welling up in her eyes.
I can't be sure, because my vision started to blur from tears of my own.
"So after everything we went through in Bialya, I've got a lot of new allies, but what I lost.......I don't know," I say with a sigh. "Demons and infernal planes are kind of out of my area. It's not like the world hadn't gone to hell enough while I was gone, too."
I saw the news when I came home, the reports of a super-powered war that spread across the entire globe. The superhuman terrorists called the Legion of Doom, attacking cities all over the world, and the world's militaries and even the Justice League unable to stop them. In the end, it was Lex Luthor and his allies in the Society that put Vandal Savage down.....
....though from the data we stole from the HIVE's databanks, I doubt that Luthor 'saving the world' was anything more than an elaborate parlor trick.
"I wish I could have helped," I say, looking at the thumb drive with the stolen HIVE data. "I managed to get data incriminating Luthor and his friends, connecting the Society with the Legion of Doom, but I don't know what good that'll do now. I wish I'd been here to fight them. Maybe I could have saved some lives. Instead, I nearly became one of the Society's soldiers."
I'm still not sure how much damage Queen Bee did to us mentally, how deep the programming went. Starfire apparently has limited psychic abilities, so she's been helping us undo the damage a little bit at a time. Her species can only connect minds when in direct contact with each other, and requires a high concentration of nerve endings to make a strong enough connection, so sessions with Kori have been......interesting.
"And I left Gotham in such a sorry state," I moan. "Tony Zucco's still out there. And there's apparently a new Batman running around-- I'm going to have to have a few words with that guy. And I haven't made any progress in finding the person who did this to you."
Hanging my head, I sigh heavily. I don't know what to do. If only Mister Wayne could hear me.....Batman would know what to do.....
......and the first thing Batman would say is to quit whining about the situation and go actually do something about it.
"First things first, then," I say, cracking my knuckles. "I'm going to find who put you here. I'll track them down if I have to go to the ends of the Earth. And I'll make him pay."
Standing up, I make my way to the window. The hospital staff never knew I came in. They don't need to know I'm leaving.
"I may have screwed up before," I say, "But I won't let you down ever again, Batman."
With that, I leap from the window and dive out into the night.
Vacation's over, Gotham. Time to get back to work.