#teen titans vol3

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

If you know you know…

[aalghul]

this is like a shot of happiness juice for me

[canthandlethishit]

first time tryna read comics for a fic and losing it cuz tf you mean Teen Titans vol3 #29 (2003) js the Titans Tower incident but issue vol3 #30 ISNT the continuation im losing my mind where to find the aftermath or connecting timeline for that

[wond-las]

Yes hello I do actually want to know about why you added Two Slow Dancers to your bbrae playlist (I just want you to be okay)? I have a thing with that song where I love it and I Can’t Listen to it because it makes me too sad. So I’m actually scared to ask, but I still want to know what you’re picturing with it and whether it will destroy me :)

ok, so, to me, two slow dancers is about two people who are in love and want to be together, but they won't let themselves be together for some reason or another. But every once in a while, they have moments alone where they can pretend to be together and happy again.

That specific interpretation of the song reminds me of Gar and Raven's relationship from about post Infinite Crisis to the last issue of Teen Titans vol3. They kept going back and forth between beeing mad at each other and mad at themselves but all the while they still cared about each other and they would have moments that i feel are kind of similar to what's described in the song (the "not date" from Titans '08 and the issue where they hook up near the end of ttv3 come to mind).

[sepiablues-blog]

im rereading teen titans vol3 and kon and cassie are all like “we gotta go get payback!!” while tim is just like “yeah ok im gonna go surf the web”

[vampykitty-kun]

Hi! I'm really interested in reading comics/graphic novels about or featuring the Batkids, and you seem like you know about that kind of thing (or at least more than I do, although it's a low bar), so do you think you could give me some suggestions to get started with? Also, I've seen some DC stuff at the library with "Death of the Family" on it but some is Batman and some is Batgirl and I think I saw a Teen Titans one and are they all connected or something? I'm confused. Thanks!

Yes! I do know quite a bit about comicsin the BatFam area, I just unfortunately can’t recommend anythingthat came out in the last 2 years as I’ve not read it. But 1989-2015I can give LOTS of recommendations.

For the most part any title can be astandalone, but titles do unfortunately get wrapped up in companywide events at times. But if you read the GN rather than theindividual comics they try and keep events to their own combo storybooks and character titles to their own.

This is such a huge list that I’mputting it under the cut so you click to read it instead of everyonegetting spammed with a HUGE list of things…

Here is what I’d recommend:

-Jason Todd as Robin II (Later known asRed Hood): It seems as though the majority of Jason writers presentday neglected to actually read his original issues, because they basetheir knowledge and opinion of him on what readers in the 80’sTHOUGHT of him, and unfortunately at the time many people hatedJason. Much of the hate was for a Robin in general as at the timeplenty of people thought Bruce should be on his own. No Batgirl (seethe Killing Joke) and no Robin. So the hate was for the role ingeneral. And then you had Robin fans that hated him just because theydidn’t want anyone trying to replace Dick’s role even though Dick hadmoved on to Nightwing. Jason as Robin issues are Batman #408-428, andNew Teen Titans Vol2 #19-21, 24, 28-31. I’m sure there were issues ofDetective Comics, but I have no idea which. In recent years much ofthese issues are in GNs but some of the issues are not, so you mayhave to look those up individually to read online or buy them instores with older issues. These GN are- Batman: Second Chances(Batman Issues #402-403, 408-416, and Annual #11), Batman Ten NightsOf The Beast (Batman Issues #417-420), DC Comics Classics Library:Batman- A Death In The Family, Hard Cover (Batman Issues #426-429,440-442, New Teen Titans Vol2 #60-61). this edition of “A Death InThe Family” contains both the death of Jason and the introductionof Tim, which was a story focused around Jason. So it’s a 2-for-1deal. There’s also a GN called Batman: The Cult and Jason’s the Robinwith Bruce in that story as well though I’m not sure where to placethat in the chronology.

-Tim as Robin III (Later known as RedRobin): Tim had an excellent run as Robin. He had 3 mini-seriesbefore he had an entire run of his own that spanned 183 main issues,not counting team ups or annuals. All while also appearing in theother Batman, Nightwing, and Batgirl titles. Plenty of issues werecompany wide tie-in issues but the rest were all put into their ownGNs. Robin: A Hero Reborn (Batman #455-457, Robin Mini-series1 #1-5),Robin: Tragedy & Triumph (Detective Comics #618-621, RobinMini-series2 #1-4), Robin Mini-series3: Cry Of the Huntress #1-6 isnot in a GN that I know of, then the rest of his main run in FlyingSolo, Unmasked!, Fresh Blood, To Kill a Bird, Days of Fire andMadness, The Virtual Cell, Wanted, Teenage Wasteland, The BigLeagues, Violent Tendencies, and Search for a Hero.

Likewise…

-Dick as Nightwing in his solo title(Vol2): 153 issues not counting team ups or annuals. Like with Robinmany of these issues are tied in with company wide events, and therest are in their own GNs. I recommend the 2014-present editions asthey have a bit more in them, better paper/graphics, and are wayeasier to find, but they haven’t remade all of them yet. Nightwing:Blüdhaven, Nightwing: Rough Justice, Nightwing: False Starts,Nightwing: Love and Bullets, Nightwing: The Hunt For Oracle are thenew editions. Continuing from there the older editions are:Nightwing: Big Guns, Nightwing: On the Razor’s Edge, Nightwing: YearOne, Nightwing: Mobbed Up, Nightwing: Renegade, Nightwing: Brothersin Blood, Nightwing: Love and War, Nightwing: The Lost Year,Nightwing: Freefall.

-Batman Knightfall: One of the classicBatman stories, in which the main bad is the villain Bane, whoseriously injures Bruce. This story spans three GNs: Broken Bat, WhoRules The Night, and Knightsend

-Batman Cataclysm: Another classic. Amassive earthquake hits Gotham and decimates the city. This can befound in one GN, thought look for what I think is the 2012 edition ofthe book not the one one as they included a lot of previous cut storyin the newer edition.

-Batman No Man’s Land: FollowsCataclysm. Essentially Gotham is covered in rubble and a massiveterritory war breaks out between BatFam, GSPD, and several separategroups of Gotham’s baddies. It spans 4 super thick GNs in the 2012newer edition (don’t bother with the older editions) but also has areally enjoyable novelization if you would prefer to read it inwritten format!

-Batman Hush: Essentially Bruce vs Hushand sometimes Clayface, and a story that unintentionally set up JuddWinick to bring Jason back to life lol…one GN in more recenteditions but was previously 2 smaller GNs. I do not know if there isa difference but generally larger book versions have a bit extra inthem.

-Batman Under the Red Hood: Jasonreturns as the Red Hood, sending Bruce on an emotional rollercoaster, while Joker and Black Mask end up roped in. Lots of peopleinvolved. Like Hush this come in one or two book format. I have thesingle book format. This story was adapted into an animated movie,one that also takes a few moments from “A Death In The Family”,but the beginning part was highly modified to make it a stand alonefilm, so several key details are removed. I do recommend watching themovie, but after reading both “A Death In The Family” and thecomic version of “Under The Red Hood”, so you get the fullexperience.

-Batman War Crimes, War Drums, and WarGames (WG is three GNs long): this connects into both Robin and RedHood. This is unfortunately where Stephanie (Spoiler, brief Robin IV,Batgirl) “dies” and there’s a massive war against Black mask.It’s five GNs total.

I pretty much have to recommend anyBatman Titled GN that comes after that as it goes more into Hush,Damian comes in and there’s a lot of plot to cover there, Bruce“dies” and the mantle is picked up by Dick, and it was a heck ofride until the reboot happened.

Outside of main Batman titles aroundthat time I have to HIGHLY recommend the following:-Batmanand Robin: Basically Dick and Damian’s team-up book series. Itspanned three GN with Morrison, and one after him totaling four. Wealso got more Jason here, and his sorta Batgirl type sidekickSasha/Scarlet. Admittedly it was weird because Morrison thought itwould be fun to give Jason red hair (something the main version ofJason never had, but had in issues for another version of Jason thatwas scrapped before any issues I mentioned in this post) and bulk himup. But if you can gt around that the actual plot on the Jason endwasn’t too bad and had some gems. But the Dick and Damian interactionand banter is the treasure here.

-Batman Streets Of Gotham: Again moreof Dick and Damian as Batman and Robin. But here we get Thomas Elliot(Hush) who surgically had his face changed to look like Bruce, and hefill Bruce’s public role under very close watch. We also get Damian’slittle friend Colin Wilkes (Abuse) who ends up close to him. He turnsinto a giant bulky rage man good guy :)

-Red Robin: Tim’s new solo series thatstarted after Damian took up being Robin and Dick went from Nightwingto being Batman. It’s 4 GNs long and was amazing. I can’t stress thatenough. I still mourn it ending. You get Tim on his own, you get himgoing up against/working with/outsmarting/impressing Ra’s al Ghul.You get Prudence Wood, one of Ra’s assassins that ends up liking andworking with Tim. You get Tam Fox, and Stephanie, and Conner Kent.

-Batgirl Vol3 (Stephanie Brown asBatgirl): Stephanie came back from faking her death, took back upSpoiler, only for Tim to demand she stop being Spoiler. He shouldhave been more specific, and she DOES drop Spoiler but then becomesBatgirl with previous Batgirl’s (Casandra) blessing lol. Spanned 24issues in three GNs but they are hard to find. Obviously there isCasandra’s run as Batgirl but i’ve never actually read it so I findit wrong of me to suggest it before I have so it’s up to you if youwant to hunt those down as well. But Casandra’s run was 73 issuesVol-1 (7 GN) sand 6 issues Vol-2 (which is in a single GN)

-Teen Titans Vol3 (Tim, Conner, Bart,etc) spans twelve GNs and had its ups and downs, but if you’re a teamfan this is a good series to read.

-Catwoman: A few different runs, andsome stand alone books. They’re all good pre-reboot. Read them ifyou’re a Catwoman fan :)

Now as far as books NOT in the main runof pre-reboot comics I also REALLY need to recommend the following:

Batman Year One: Bruce’s first year asBatman. Also Gordon’s first year on the job. One GN. Awesome and alsoadapted into an animated movie.

-Robin Year One & Batgirl Year One:These come in separate books or both in one big book. The Robin inmention is Dick and the Batgirl is Barbara. Both are fantasticstories.

-Huntress Year One: Huntress’ originstory. This is the Huntress that is NOT Bruce’s daughter from anotherEarth, this is the Mob associated one that was also featured in theTV series Arrow.

Superboy / Robin World’s Finest Three:two tiny GNs that tell the story of Tim and Conner’s first meeting.They end up going against Metallo and Poison Ivy.

JLA: World Without Grown-ups: This is astory spanning again two tiny GNs. Where Tim (Robin), Conner(Superboy), and Bart (Impulse, later known as Kid Flash) team up whensuddenly all the adults are in one dimension and all the underagepeople are in another.

Red Hood: The Lost Days: the story ofwhat happened between Jason’s resurrection and when he came back toGotham in Under The Red Hood. It’s one GN.

There are also some alternate universe stories that came out pre-reboot called Elseworld’s stories. Here are some good ones:

Batman:Brotherhood of the Bat: Alternate Universe what-if type story. Thisstory is if Talia had joined Bruce in Gotham and abandoned her fatherRa’s and his ways. The story is centered around their son, TallantWayne. This was an AU created before Damian entered the comics andthus one of many stories where Bruce and Talia’s son had a differentname. Bruce is dead and Tallant has to face his grandfather. This wasone thin GN but did have a sequel…

Batman: League ofBatmen: takes place after the above and spans two GNs to finish thestory.

Thrillkiller Batgirl & Robin: 3 issue AU where Barbara and Dick are the first vigilantes in Gotham in the 1960′s and go up against a FEMALE Joker. Bruce is a legit Detective. Every bit of this story is PAINTED and it’s amazing. It is followed up by a sequel.

Thrillkiller ‘62: Takes place where the above left off. But now Bruce is Batman alongside ‘Batgirl’. I won’t spoil the events of the above to give goo detail here lol.

Superman: Speeding Bullets: AU where Baby Kal-El crashes into Earth, where he is discovered by Thomas and Martha Wayne. The couple decide to adopt Kal-El, and name him Bruce. Fuses the two characters together. Thomas and Martha still die. “Bruce” becomes a flying Batman and later Superman.Batman: The Dark Knight Returns: Pretty much the most popular and longest AU that DC did. Spans 1 thick GN or multiple tiny ones. Not the greatest of art/setup but still good. Think of this as an AU Future Fic taking place after Jason died and Bruce retired instead of Tim coming along. Then he comes out of retirement to be a total badass. I do NOT however recommend any of the sequels or prequels because they are just BAD. This was adapted into TWO animated films which I honestly think I recommend more than the GNs due to the art.Post Reboot we hit the New 52. It had its up and downs. Nothing BatFam was particularly terrible but very little was amazing. personally the first 4-6 volumes of GNs for any given series was worth a read but not necessarily a buy. I read all the BatFam titles and the only ones that were MEH for me were Catwoman and Teen Titans. Red Hood and the Outlaws wasn’t for everyone, but I personally enjoyed it other than some details like Jason suddenly having magic??? and Kori having some personality issues but I was glas she wasn’t ditzy if that makes sense, and I really loved her character design even if I wish she at least had a touch more clothing on (once she was in a space suit and it was amazing). Suicide Squad isn’t technically BatFam but it had Harley in it in the New 52 and it was amazing even if I hated her visual re-design. Talon was a branch off of a Batman story line, and a specific character got his own title that spanned 2 GNs and was enjoyable.

Past that any Gns involving Batman The Animated Series are great, so are the Young Justice GNs.

I also have a huge love for the Batman Beyond show and Comics, but after the reboot they messed that up too.

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

Joey’s never liked the cabin.

He doesn’t hate it, not like Rose does, but he’s never liked it. Never. No matter how much Slade and Grant called him a wuss for it, Joey never quite warmed up to the concept of living in a cabin in the middle of nowhere, isolated and with no one around for miles, for large periods of time with only his fucked-up family for company. And if he didn’t like the idea of it, he disliked the execution even more—disliked the animal heads Slade mounts on the walls, disliked the deerskin rugs that decorate the floors, disliked the pretentious mythological artwork hung up in the bedrooms (Slade liked Achilles, even though he didn’t understand him), and specially disliked the way it felt like his Pop’s domain, like the rest of them were just guests in someone else’s house despite the fact he had supposedly built the cabin for them.

The things he disliked most about the cabin, however, were also the things that had brought him the most joy as a child: the statuettes.

Slade had never liked art, and he had called Joey a garden variety of words that would now be considered slurs for not being made of the same stuff as him and Grant more that once, but he had never begrudged his son his love for art or his gentle nature. Rather, he had prized it, encouraged it even, holding it up for anyone who would listen as irrefutable proof of the fact that he was capable of making something good, that Slade Joseph Wilson’s only legacy wouldn’t be violence and death and broken things. The statuettes had been part of that.

It had been Joey idea, of course. Slade had no mind for painting, but his hands were steady and his fingers precise—too precise, far too precise, even hiding it, specially hiding it—and he had taken to woodcarving like he had been born to it. The two of them had developed a system, eventually: every time Slade went on one of his “safari trips”, he would carve a statuette of the biggest animal he had managed to hunt on that trip and bring it back with him when he returned home so Joey could hee and haw over it for a little while before moving on to something else. Sometimes the statuettes were normal things, like deer (antelope, his father would correct him sometimes, or moose, or gazelle, but to Joey they were all deer), but other times they were stranger animals, fiercer animals, things people weren’t supposed to hunt in the way Joey understood the word, like sharks or elephants or even bears. He would ask his mom about it often, while his father was gone, but Adeline would only laugh and say Slade made those hunts up so he wouldn’t get bored of the statuettes… if she was feeling particularly kind that day. Otherwise, she would scoff and reply that Slade “had an active imagination” for achievements he felt he was owed regardless of whether he had earned them or not. Joey had always gotten the feeling she wasn’t talking about the statuettes anymore when she would say that and would quickly extricate himself from the conversation as soon as he could, leaving his mother to her mutterings, which would often continue long after he had left the kitchen.

Joey hadn’t believed the statuettes were fake valor then and he still doesn’t believe it now, even knowing what he now knows about his father’s “safari trips”. The stuffed shark head that once sat in the closet but now hangs above the fireplace is proof enough that not all of his father’s hunting trips were invented, if indeed any of them ever were. More likely he took the opportunity to indulge in both his hobby and his actual occupation while he was away from home, leaving his wife and two kids alone in a world in which he had painted a target on their backs. It would certainly fit with his actions up until that point.

One day, Joey had gotten the bright idea to try and replicate his father’s work while the man himself was away, just for the fun of it, and that had been incorporated into the system as well when he came back: Joey’s replica would stay in the family home in Vermont from now, and Slade’s original would have a place of honor on the mantelpiece of the cabin. It was a perfect arrangement, and it suited the imperfect father just as perfectly, so much so that Slade had once joked that he would have to go on safari trips more often, so eager was he to witness his son’s often superior replicas of his work. They had all laughed, then. Now, just the thought of that makes Joey feel likes he’s going to be violently sick.

Had he—had his innocent wish to impress his father by creating better replicas of whatever he had carved on his trips—been responsible for someone’s death? How many people had Joey indirectly killed by giving Slade Wilson a reason to hurry home every time he left? One? None? Many?

Joey doesn’t know, and it makes him want to take a knife to his own arm whenever he thinks about it, so he pushes the rogue thought aside and concentrates on navigating his vehicle through the trees ahead of him. He’s wearing long sleeves, as always, but Rose isn’t stupid: if his knife is even a centimeter off and his cut begins to bleed, she will notice, and there is no way in hell he can play off preferring to keep his sleeves rolled down when there’s an open cut on his arm. Joey has kept his cutting a secret from the rest of his family for a good decade, he isn’t about to be discovered on the one day that should only be about her little sister and her mental health.

Speaking of his little sister…

Rose is leaning against the cabin wall with her arms crossed, clad hair to toe in motorcycle leathers next to the sleek shape of her Harley. She looks up as his beat-up van struggles into the clearing, and Joey exhales in disappointment when he sees the cigarette wedged between her bottom and top lip trailing smoke into the air. He really did think she’d quit for good this time when he’d suggested she keep an unlit cigarette in her mouth whenever she felt stressed just to ward off the temptation. He had read about it in a book somewhere, how it apparently helped smokers in the process of quitting feel at ease without giving them the temptation to actually smoke. Evidently, he needed to read better books.

Shaking his head, he shifts the stick into its ‘park’ setting and climbs out of the van, nodding at Rose when she flicks her gaze over to him and raising his hands to sign. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Rose mutters, taking one final puff of her cigarette and leaning her head back against the wooden wall of the cabin with a sigh, closing her one eye a moment after as if in indifference.

Joey knows better, though, is maybe the only person in the whole wide world who knows better, so he simply waits until Rose is done gathering herself before speaking again, his lips curling into a smile. He knows Rose is wearing her motorcycle leathers instead of the sweater and beanie combo she would usually wear to an excursion such as this one because they feel more familiar on her skin than the alternative, but he can’t resist to urge to tease his sister a little over it. “Nice outfit.”

“Shut up,” she retorts, opening her eye and letting the cigarette drop onto the porch, stomping on it a moment after to ensure she doesn’t accidentally ruin their plans for the day. She pushes away from the wooden wall and walks up to the back of the van, quirking an eyebrow at him when he walks around to stand beside her. “Slade?”

Joey raises his hands to sign… before lowering them when he remembers that full conversations are still past his sister’s understanding of ASL and turning on his subvocal transmitter on instead. He doesn’t like using it much on account of the excessively robotic tone it assigns his voice, but… well, this is a special occasion, after all.

“He thinks we’re gonna have a picnic.” Joey dips his hand into his pocket and pulls out a keyring, twirling it around his finger with a smug smile. He doesn’t hate the cabin, but he does hate Pops a little, and that’s reason enough for him to smile about what’s about to happen. “Even gave me the emergency keys so we wouldn’t have to bother him about setting up the new biometrics.”

“Of course he did,” Rose snorts, shaking her head at their father’s complete lack of awareness regarding his children before looking back at Joey and putting a hand on her hip. “You got the stuff?”

Joey rolls his eyes at the dramatic, tv-like phrasing and walks forward, unlatching the van’s safety mechanisms and pulling open the door to reveal several gasoline containers in sizes that have been illegal since the 60’s. Joey still thinks it’s overkill, but if Rose wants this place gone from the map, who is he to object? “Yep. You owe me, like, half a grand, by the way.”

The gasoline had actually been nearly three and a half grand, but Joey is the Vice President of a large company and Rose hasn’t actually charged her clients anything for her “mercenary work”—which, these days, just seems like normal vigilante work with extra steps—in months, so he doesn’t mind footing the bill a bit just this once, even though his sister would probably find his little white lie condescending in the extreme.

“Ask Slade to cover it,” Rose replies flatly as she walks forward and grabs up a container one-handed, pulling it out of the vehicle like it weighed nothing and bringing her knee up momentarily so she can hold it against something as she unscrews the cap. “It’s his fault we’re doing this in the first place.”

Joey can’t argue with that. “Fair enough.”

Rose holds the gasoline up to her nose and takes a sniff, grimacing when it does, in fact, turn out to be gasoline—way to trust a guy, little sis!—before looking up at him with a frown. “You sure you don’t want in on the action? D-Slade messed with you even more than he messed with me.”

Joey shakes his head and leans forward to grab a thick plastic bag from the van, noting Rose’s slip-up somewhere in the back of his mind. “I don’t think competing with each other about who Pops hurt the worst this time is something we should be doing in the first place, for the record, but no thanks. You have fun, though.”

“Oh, I will,” Rose says, eyeing the gasoline container with something like hunger in her eyes. Joey briefly wonders if he made a mistake by agreeing to this before dismissing the thought as too self-righteous by half and giving her a competitive check on the shoulder as he walks past her and climbs up the stairs to the porch, laughing when Rose scoffs in amusement and follows after him, tilting the containers so that she leaves a trail of gasoline in her wake.

As he and Rose walk up to the front door, a panel on either side of it retracts, revealing a square hole with a brand-new biometrics scanner inside of it on the lefthand side of the door and a hollow cylinder on the right. Joey grins and tosses the keyring into the air, catching it by the single jagged, cone-shaped key it contains when it comes down and inserting the key into the cylinder. There’s a buzz, and Joey moves the key around in the cylinder before two sharp beeps ring out and the door unlocks. He turns to look at Rose and grins, making a show of pulling the door open for her with a stiff sweep of his hand reminiscent of Wintergreen’s excessively British mannerisms. Rose rolls her eyes at the bad impression and walks forward, pausing only to stand on her tiptoes and kiss his cheek before walking inside the cabin.

“Come on!” Joey calls after her, his grin widening. “Not even a snort?”

There’s no answer, so Joey sighs and follows after her, stumbling halfway through the doorway when the living room rises up to meet his eyes like a fuzzy, half-remembered memory. It’s a simple space, made entirely of wood, with six windows, a table for four, and a small fireplace above which hang the heads of half a dozen different animals with plaques underneath detailing the exact time and means of their deaths. Everything looks exactly as it should.

Shaking off his sudden disorientation, Joey turns to look at Rose and finds her gaze lingering on the far corner a beat longer than is necessary before looking away. He resolves not to ask, though he has a feeling he knows what happened there.

“Well,” Rose says eventually, giving him a glance out of the corner of her one eye. “What are we waiting for?”

Joey doesn’t need to be told twice.

They go room to room, Joey grabbing anything that stands out to him and stuffing it in the bag while Rose drenches every last inch of the floor in gasoline, making several trips on account of how overboard she’s going. There is a tightness to her face, a viciousness, a kind of hunger in her eyes that she’s doing a bad job of suppressing. She knows exactly how much this place means to their father, knows it is the one place he still considers his beyond its usefulness as a safe house, and not only does she not care, the thought excites her. Look at me, Slade Wilson, Joey can’t help but think she’s saying in her head. Look at me as I take something from you for a change.

Joey doesn’t hate the cabin, but he doesn’t love it either, so all he does is shoot her a thumbs-up and a smile when she turns to look at him. It doesn’t make her laugh, doesn’t even make her smile, though her lips do quirk up slightly when she responds by sending him an eyeroll and walking out of the room, and maybe that’s enough of a victory to still count under the circumstances.

~~

“Hey, Joey!” he heard Rose’s voice call out from outside the cabin. “You coming or what?”

Joey doesn’t answer, focused as he is on the statuettes on the mantelpiece. Should he save them, the way he saved the few family pictures that hadn’t been looted by either Slade or Adeline in the years following Grant’s death? Should he leave them to burn in the coming inferno?

What do they mean to him, really? Does he—

“I’m freezing out here, Joey!” Rose’s voice, again.

“I’m coming, hold on!” Joey responds, quickly throwing the statuettes into the bag and heaving it over his shoulder as he walks out to find the sun already long gone from the sky and Rose waiting for him with her hands in her pockets next to the very last container, which is open and dripping down gasoline even now. It’s an oddly beautiful sight, all things considered, thanks to the way Rose’s milk white hair is backlit by the moon and the peculiar silvery sheen that comes from the thick, oily gasoline doing its very best to reflect the starlight. It would make a good painting, Joey suddenly thinks, digging his phone out of his pocket and taking a picture before putting it away and walking over to Rose, who eyes him and specially the bag over his shoulder dubiously but says nothing.

She looks so much like their dad even in the dark.

“You wanna do the honors?” she offers, pulling out her lighter and tilting it towards him.

“It’s your day,” Joey says, putting the bag down on the ground. “You do it.”

Rose shrugs, her other hand emerging from her pocket with a cigarette. She sticks it in her mouth, lights it, takes a single puff from it, and then tosses it at the ground.

Flame leaps up in front of them and rushes towards the house, and soon Joey’s vision is entirely consumed by flames. He and Rose just stare for a while, before his gaze slides down to the bag still clutched tightly in his left hand by his feet.

He thinks about a lot of things, in that moment. He thinks about the good times. About Grant. About those few times his Pops came home to a happy house that was as happy to see him as he was to see them.

He also thinks about everything else. The way Grant died. The way his mom and dad hit each other all the time and he just had to listen to it happening. How Slade slept with his fiancée. How Slade turned his boyfriend into a monster. And he makes his decision.

He hands a bemused Rose the bag with a smile that looks just a bit too wide to fool anyone this time. “Ten bucks if you manage to get it unto the terrace before it collapses.”

Rose looks down at the bag, then up at him. “You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

She shrugs and extends her leg, the ghost of a grin coming onto her face at the prospect of some fun to wrap up this depressing, horrible night. “Fine, have it your way. Just don’t come crying back to me when you’re short ten bucks.”

“I didn’t know trash talk improved your performance,” he quips, and there is definitely a glint in Rose’s eye now.

“Oh, you’re on.” Rose tenses her back leg, muscles straining as she rapidly turns and lobs the bag in an arc that goes a good ten meters in the air before ending atop the burning terrace, as Joey knew it would. She grins—actually grins, wide and happy and smug and brilliant, and maybe none of this even matters as long as he can make his sister grin like that. “Ha! In your face, Joey!”

Joey’s smile is soft as he shakes his head. “Don’t get an ego over it, sis.”

She grins wider, more giddy than she’s been in a while. “What? Butthurt I beat your challenge fair and square?”

“Yeah, yeah.” Joey opens his arms, and for once his sister accepts without an eyeroll, squeezing his waist in a quick hug before shifting over to lay her head on his shoulder. He presses a kiss to the top of her head and turns to look at the burning cabin. “It’s kinda pretty, isn’t it? The way the colors…”

“Joey?”

“Yeah?”

“Shut up.”

“Fine.” He lays his head on top of hers and smiles. “Happy birthday, Rose.”

“…Thanks, Joey.”

They stay like that for some time, watching the cabin burn.

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

“What are the major blood vessels that run through the neck called?” Slade asks, his back to Rose, his hands busy with operating the makeshift laboratory’s equipment. He did this sometimes, quizzed her on things she had already learnt, on the rare occasion that he runs out of super-soldier serum and doesn’t have the next batch ready yet. He says it’s to make sure her memories while on the serum and her memories while not on it don’t get jumbled; Rose suspects he just likes to make her obey him even when she isn’t chemically forced to.

Rose lifts her head, curtains of white hair falling over her face as she does so, and says nothing.

(A man had stood over her like this, once, and had screamed at her to cry. She hadn’t obeyed then. She’s not going to obey now).

Slade doesn’t quite turn around, but he does turn his head to the side so that he can look at her over his shoulder. “Don’t make me ask again.”

Her lips betray her before her conscious mind can stop them. “Carotids.”

Slade lets out a pleased hum. Rose tries not to retch and mostly fails, a flood of bile overflowing through the gap between her lips and running down the sides of her face to stain her bodysuit.

She can’t even wipe it away.

“How many are there?”

Not for the first time, Rose wishes that her hands were free so that she could rip out her own vocal chords before they betrayed her again. As it is, she closes her eyes—or rather, eye, singular, now—and slumps back against the radiator she is chained to, taking comfort in the way the sharp metal edges of the device dig into her back in a way that is uniquely real, and prepares for her body to betray her once again. “Two.”

“Where?”

“On either side.”

“Either side of what?”

“The neck.”

“Good girl.”

~~~

Unlike most people, Rose Wilson disliked late mornings.

It wasn’t that she thought there was anything wrong with waking up late—she wasn’t her father, she didn’t share the same gung ho military outlook on life that led him to live his life like a wannabe Spartan—it’s just that she liked the solitude early morning would bring. Those precious few hours in which everyone was asleep and she was unaccounted for were more precious to her than any of her meager belongings. Usually, she’d spend those precious hours on the roof, either going for an early morning swim in the rooftop pool or taking the opportunity to lounge about in the early morning California sunlight, but today she’d slept in a little longer than usual and didn’t have enough time to do either of those things before her teammates wake up, so she decides to just get herself a coffee and spend the time she does have scrolling mindlessly on her phone.

She would have done just that if she hadn’t walked into the kitchen to find her teammates sitting around the table, clear-eyed and awake and evidently waiting for her. The back of Rose’s palms starts itching, but she pushes her instinctual paranoia aside and leans against the doorframe, letting her one-eyed gaze sweep over the assembled heroes questioningly. None of them meet her gaze. Some rub their arms or scratch the back of their necks, but not one of them looks at Rose.

Ah, she thinks, feeling bitterness roil up from her stomach. This is it, then. The moment they finally kick her off the team for good. She’d been wondering when they would finally muster up the courage to just get it over with.

In any case, Rose isn’t about to make it easy for them by taking the hint and packing up her stuff like a good little bunny. If they want her off the team, they’re gonna have to look her in the eye and say that, she decides, doing her best to pretend her mouth doesn’t suddenly taste of bile.

With that in mind, she pushes away from the doorframe and walks up to the table, putting her hands on her hips and looking down at her teammates with narrowed eyes. “There a team meeting no one bothered to tell me about or something?”

Her teammates shy away from her gaze, all save for Tim, who is the only one with the courage to at least turn his head and look her in the eye. She thinks she could respect him for that, if he was anyone else, if this situation was anything but what it was.

Rose’s lip curls. “Well?”

Tim’s eyes slide to the empty chair to his left. “Sit down, Rose.”

She doesn’t move. “I’ll pass.”

Tim sighs, long and weary, like a suffering parent talking to a particularly obstinate teenager, and Rose think she’s never wanted to punch someone in the face as much as wants to punch him now. 

Perhaps sensing her rising hostility, Conner stands up and places a hand on her shoulder in a way that doesn’t feel placating at all.

“No one wants to make this any harder than it needs to be, Rose,” he says, his voice hard, and Rose wonders when he began to use his super-strength as an implicit threat. She shrugs her shoulder, trying to shake off his hand, but his grip simply tightens, his invulnerable fingers denting the scales of her armor under them. Rose exhales in pain and surprise and tries to shove him away, but he simply catches her hand and twists it behind her back painfully, forcing a pained grunt past her lips. Her free hand drops down to reach for a weapon, a flashbang, anything, but Conner grabs that arm as well and twists it behind her back next to its neighbor.

“What the—ow, fuck, let go of me!” Rose snarls, straining against his hold. “What the hell is the matter with you?!”

“I’m sorry, Rose,” Tim says, his face like stone. “But you forced us into this.”

Rose doesn’t understands until he reaches into his utility belt and pulls out a syringe dripping with a very familiar yellow liquid. Her eye widens in horror.

“You wouldn’t,” she says, her voice half gasp, half whisper.

“We invited you back because we needed your skillset, Rose.” Tim takes a step forward, and Rose almost dislocates her own shoulder trying to pull herself away. “But we don’t need you.”

Rose’s one eye sweeps desperately over the room, looking first at Eddie, who disappears in a puff of smoke without even looking at her once, and afterwards at Cassie. To her shock, the demigoddess keeps her gaze on the wooden wall of the cabin, shame coloring her face. She nods, even though Tim isn’t even looking in her direction. “Do it.”

Rose doesn’t even have time to feel the cold sting of betrayal before the syringe plunges down towards her neck. The last thing she sees before everything goes dark are the blurry faces of her teammates flitting around the edges of her vision, faces and mouths stretched into unnatural grins, her father’s laughter ringing in her ears as the cabin burns.

“Good girl,” he says, again and again, in between bouts of cackling. “Good girl. Good girl. Good girl. Good girl…”

Rose doesn’t exactly wake up screaming, but she does find herself sitting up in bed, breathing heavily, once her enhanced mind chases away the petrifying fog of terror that’s enveloped her senses. Pushing down the panic worming its way into her heart, she reaches for her phone and swipes a thumb across its surface to unlock it, quickly selecting the camera app and taking a picture of her own neck. She holds it up in the darkness of the room and tries to focus on her breathing. No marks. No bulging yellow veins, no round patch of dead skin, no pulsing muscles. Nothing.

Not that that means anything, Rose reminds herself sharply. After all, the first time her father drugged her the effects lasted for well over a week, more than enough time for the marks to disappear. She needs to go through her checks, needs to reestablish what reality is and isn’t, needs to-

“Rose?” She feels a hand settle on her shoulder, invisible thanks to her blind spot. “What’s wrong?”

Rose’s breath hitches and she blindly shoves away the person the hand belongs to, registering the shocked yelp she makes as she falls out of bed. Rose scoots backwards and turns her head so she can look at Cassie—Cassie who turned away, Cassie who let it happen—as looks up at her from where she’s fallen, tangled in a nest of sheets. “Hey, what the hell!?”

“Don’t touch me,” Rose snarls, kicking the covers away and scrambling to her feet, breathing hard, her mind whirling as it tries to separate nightmare from reality. Was she dosed with the serum and is only now snapping out of it? Was it all a horrible nightmare? Do they want her to think it was all just a horrible nightmare because they did drug her but ran out of serum halfway?

She’s being stupid (is she?).

Tim would never have done that (wouldn’t he?).

The team would never have let him (does she know that for sure?).

Cassie would stop it (what if she didn’t?).

Or… could this be the dream?

Maybe she’s back with her father. Maybe she never escaped. Maybe all of this is just an induced hallucination, created to ensure her mind remains dormant while her father uses her—uses her body— as he sees fit. He knows people who could do it. Telepaths, supervillains who specialize in mind control, scientists, hypnotists…

Maybe she imagined Dick. Maybe there were never any Titans. Maybe the real Cassie has never even met her. Maybe the past years have all been a figment of her imagination. Maybe she’s alone in that stupid cabin in the middle of fucking nowhere with only him for company and she doesn’t even know it.

“… Babe, what’s wrong?”

Rose blinks. Cassie is standing in front of her now, her gaze having softened, her hand hanging in the air as if she’d reached for Rose again but thought better of it. And Rose…

She wants this to be real. She wants it to be over.

“Babe?” Cassie asks again, moving her hand forward but stopping just before palming her cheek. Asking for permission.

Rose turns her head and takes a shaky breath, trying not to think about the fact that her father never asked for permission for anything. No, she says without saying anything, and half expects the world to collapse then and there.

It doesn’t.

“Okay.” Cassie lowers her hand and takes a step back. “Sure. Whatever you want.”

Rose takes another heavy breath and moves to sit down on the edge of the bed, pushing her hair back with one hand and sighing. Cassie sits down as well, and Rose finds herself leaning into her without really meaning to. Cassie, taking that as assent, begins rubbing calming circles into the small of her back.

“I get it,” Cassie says after some time.

“No, you don’t,” Rose says, but doesn’t move away. “None of you ever did.”

They stay like that for some time, neither saying a word. The only sound Rose hears by the time they both go back to sleep is the sound of her father’s laughter still ringing in her ears.

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

“I want you to stay away from my daughter,” is the first thing out of Slade’s mouth the moment Dick enters the apartment.

To his credit, Grayson barely startles, even though the only sane reaction to finding Deathstroke the Terminator sitting in your living room when you come home would be to run screaming from the room and swan dive off the nearest window. It’s almost like he’s been expecting him—more evidence of his daughter’s betrayal of her own blood, maybe. “What?”

“You heard me.”

“I’m pretty sure I didn’t,” Grayson shoots back, tongue sharp as always, though he doesn’t move. Maybe he’s seen the silenced pistol Slade’s holding, or maybe he’s just not in the right state of mind to pick a fight. Slade should know, but he doesn’t, not really. Grayson’s been a stranger to him since Bludhaven. “Because I could have sworn the guy who asked me to train Rose in the first place just asked me to stay away from her, and that just doesn’t seem right to me.”

Slade doesn’t know how to reply to that. He should, but he doesn’t. “Situation’s changed,” is all he can muster, and it sounds lackluster even to his own ears. Hadn’t he once delighted in matching wits against Grayson, gruff barbs against his pointed quips? Hadn’t he once enjoyed this, the familiarity of being hated and respected in equal measure, the thrill of being feared, the freedom that came with his profession? Hadn’t he been good at this? Hadn’t he liked it? Slade isn’t sure he’s liked anything in a while, and that, more than anything, medio him uneasy. Not even the Herculean task of keeping the monster of his own enhanced mind chained and in its place every hour of every day compared with the sheer discomfort Slade felt whenever he was cursed with melancholy. “You’re to stay away from her from now on.”

“And if I don’t?” Grayson retorts, too quickly to disguise the genuine anger in his voice behind a curtain of empty wit. “What are you going to do about it, Slade?”

“That a trick question, kid?” Slade waves the gun in his hand. “I’ll kill you, and I’ll send your bones to the reconstruction effort so they can make a mausoleum for you next to the mayor’s.”

Grayson’s jaw tenses. Bludhaven’s newly-elected mayor had been a much-beloved figure with an anti-corruption platform that experts had theorized could reduce theft of public funds by nearly half. She had, of course, perished in the chemo bombings, but people sworn up and down to have seen the mayor personally rush into a scorched building to save a family trapped inside before it collapsed under its own weight. It was probably bullshit, but people needed heroes that weren’t mighty superheroes or genius vigilantes, and the remaining Havenites had eagerly taken the mayor on as a symbol of the city’s eventual rebirth. “You’re going to die screaming for what you did.”

Slade feels amused. “That no-killing rule of yours getting tiresome, kid?”

“Never said it was going to be me who kills you, Slade.” Of course. “But sooner or later, someone will. It’s only a matter of time before everything you’ve done catches up to you.”

“I’m sure it is, kid.” Grayson always got off-track whenever Bludhaven came up. “But as fun as arguing about by imminent demise is, it’s not what I’m here for. Are you going to promise to stay away from my daughter from now on or not?”

Grayson starts moving. “Depends. Are you going to promise to stuff that gun of yours down your neck and pull the trigger if I do?”

Slade’s gun follows Grayson as he circles around the couch. “I think you know the answer to that question.”

“Then, no, I’m not going to.”

A muffled shot rings out and a crater appears on the wall to Grayson’s head, causing the younger man to die to still. “Not even if I ask you nicely?”

Grayson’s hands very obviously go behind his back. “Nope.”

Slade stands up, keeping the gun trained on Grayson’s head. He should shoot, but he doesn’t. “Why the hell not?”

“You lost the right to have a say in her life when you drugged her,” Grayson says, confirming Slade’s suspicions about his daughter’s loose tongue, “and I’m not a big fan of people telling me what to do, anyway.”

“That’s news to me.” Slade’s lip curls into a sneer. “Or does daddy bats write his commands down now?”

Grayson’s eyes narrow. There’s a pause. And then he moves.

There’s always a grace to the way Nightwing fights, but it isn’t Nightwing who leaps at Slade in that moment, but Grayson, who had once found a home in the walled-off ruin that could still be seen from Gotham harbor and desperately loved each and every one of its inhabitants. There’s no agility in his tackle, only the hateful strength of a grieving man, and Slade had thought Grayson was smarter than that because Slade would always win a strength match, but then his back hits the floor and Slade grunts in surprise, and he keeps grunting as hit after hit after hit hits his face, and for a moment—

Yeah, no. Slade’s fist crashes into Grayson’s face and his head snaps back, then forward, then back again, blood spurting from his mangled nose, and Slade almost thinks he dented Grayson’s face in before he realizes it doesn’t matter and he throws Grayson off him, leaping on him before he can recover. They roll along the floor, Slade on top, then Grayson, then Slade, then Grayson, before Grayson manages to get his legs underneath Slade and he feels himself being launched into the air. His back hits the wall, hard, at an angle that takes the breath from his lungs, but he manages to turn so that he can roll to his feet as soon as he hits the ground only to finds Grayson on his feet as well, a pair of escrima sticks in his hands.

“Not bad.” Slade wipes at his mouth and begins circling again, cursing himself for his sloppiness. This is not going how it should be going. He’s being slow, impatient… he’s letting his emotions get the best of him, and it’s costing him the fight. Maybe it’s time to change tactics. “But tell me something, Grayson—have you ever considered that maybe Rose doesn’t deserve you sticking up for her?”

Grayson’s brows lower into a frown. “What the hell are you on about now, Slade?”

“Think about it,” Slade says, his tone painfully condescending. Condescension had always worked like a charm on the acrobat—like any son of Batman, Grayson hated not knowing all the facts, and pretending he had missed an obvious conclusion planted seeds of doubt in him like nothing else did. “Did you see me drugging her? Even once?”

“What are you—”

“Did she seem drugged while you were training her?” Slade presses, his one eye observing every little twitch Grayson’s face makes as Slade speaks so his enhanced mind knows where to take this based on his reactions. There was nothing more important to his craft than knowing where to push and where to withdraw—every human had things they were sure of and things they weren’t sure of, and drawing attention to the wrong thing was a surefire way to get your statements thrown back in your face. “Did anything about her behavior even suggest it?”

“Are you seriously trying to… what, imply that Rose made the whole thing up?” Grayson asks, not so much skeptical as wholly incredulous, but Slade can swear he hears the tiniest hint of doubt in his voice.

“I’m not ‘implying’ anything, kid,” Slade retorts, I’m saying that’s exactly what happened.”

“Do you think I’m an idiot, Slade?” Grayson asks, scowling. “Putting everything else aside for a moment, you realize that it wasn’t just Rose you drugged, right? Cassandra says you drugged her too, and they can’t both be making it up.”

“I did drug Cassandra,” Slade admits, because he senses pressing in that direction would be the wrong move, “but I didn’t drug Rose. Why would I? She came to me willingly.”

“That’s not what she says.” Grayson’s hands are tight on his escrima sticks. “You kidnapped her after her foster parents were killed. The Titans confirmed it.”

“She stayed with me willingly, then.”

“Not the same thing.”

“It might as well be.” Slade senses he’s getting closer. “Try to use that brain of yours for a moment, Grayson. What’s more plausible to you… that I drugged my own daughter for months on end for no benefit to myself and that no one ever figured it out… or that Rose felt ashamed of what she’d done after she had a change of heart and made the whole thing up to try to exonerate herself in the eyes of those around her?”

Grayson is silent for a moment. Then: “What about the eye?”

Shit. He hadn’t thought about that. How was he possibly going to justify what Rose did to her own eye if she wasn’t being drugged?

Grayson scoffs after three seconds pass with Slade saying nothing. “Thought so,” he says, and leaps… only to grunt as Slade catches him in the air and throws him to the ground.

“Mistake,” Slade growls, delivering a brutal kick to Grayson’s face before jumping back as Grayson’s leg sweeps the bit of floor he was standing.

“You wanna know what I think, Slade?” Grayson sneers, spitting out a mouthful of blood and swinging his legs around behind him, arching with the motion and getting to his feet. He raises the escrima sticks, his lips curling into an expression that is not at all like a grin. “I think you’re jealous.”

Strike one. “Jealous?”

“Yeah, jealous.” Grayson advances, escrima sticks crackling with electricity. “Jealous of little old me. That must be so embarrassing for you.”

“Did I hit you in the head too hard, kid?” he growls, stepping back despite himself. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Come on, Slade, don’t pretend that’s not what this is about,” Grayson says, turning sideways as Slade flings a chair at him and smashing the vase that flies at his head next in midair without breaking his pace. Slade heard the sound of the chair smashing through the floor-to-wall window behind Grayson a moment later. “I mean, seriously, it’s a little pathetic, don’t you think? Trying to kill me just because your daughter likes spending time with me and Joey more than with you?”

Strike two. Slade’s lips curl into a scowl. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You wanna know what the worst part is?” Grayson continues, his tone turning conspiratorial, the crackle of electricity growing louder as he gets closer. “I wouldn’t even have met Rose if you hadn’t asked me to train her. Hell, I only came for her after you blew up Bludhaven. She might still be with you if it hadn’t been for you messing with people I care about.”

Strike three. Out.

Slade suddenly grins. “You stupid idiot.”

Grayson blinks, lowering the escrima sticks in bemusement. “Huh?”

Slade clicks his earpiece, and the dark room suddenly floods with light as the television screen turns on by itself. Grayson slowly turns around to see Rose there, eyes wide, lips slightly parted in shock.

“You got all that, honey?” Slade asks, even though he knows she did. He has to give his tech guy a raise. Guy had some seriously good ideas.

Rose doesn’t reply. Slade can hear Dick’s breath catching in his throat as he realizes whats just happened.

“Rose, that’s not… that wasn’t… I didn’t…” he tries, but the damage is done. Rose furiously stabs the monitor on her end and the transmission ends, bathing the room in darkness once more. Slade is pretty sure he saw tears in her eyes before the screen went dark.

There’s silence for a long moment, before a small chuckle escapes from Slade’s mouth, and then another, longer one. He’s won. He’s won in a way he couldn’t have imagined even in his wildest dreams. His chuckles rise into a scathing laugh as Grayson stands there, staring stupidly at the dark screen like he could will it to turn back on so he could explain himself if he stared hard enough.

“You… you…” he whispers once he’s gotten over his shock, turning to Slade with wide eyes.

“Me, me, me,” Slade mocks, the final vestiges of his laugh slipping from his mouth. “Not so clever now, are you?”

“I… that’s not what I meant,” Grayson says desperately, his own words clearly replaying in his head. “I would’ve come back for her eventually. I just didn’t think… I… that’s not what I meant at all.”

“I know that.” He nods at the screen, his grin growing larger. “She didn’t.”

Just then, the sound of rushing wind fills their ears through the broken window, and Slade’s grin widens even further as he walks towards it, clapping a still-stupefied Grayson on the shoulder as he walks past. “And that’s my ride. Thank you for being such a great sport about this, Grayson, I really do appreciate it.”

“Slade… you… this doesn’t mean anything,” he snarls, turning towards him. “Rose will understand if she just lets me explain.”

Slade steps out into the open void, grabbing hold of an unseen rope ladder and hooking his feet around one it’s rungs. “And here I thought you’d know your own so-called protege.” He can’t help his smugness. He’s won. Completely and utterly. And he didn’t even have to falsify something to do it—Grayson just said everything Slade needed him to say with his own damn mouth. “My daughter isn’t a very understanding person, Grayson. In fact, I’d say you can go ahead and lose her number now… I have a feeling she won’t be picking up any of your calls anytime soon.”

Grayson’s hands bunch into fists. “Slade, you… you bastard.”

“No, that’s her,” he grins, pulling on the ladder. It begins to retract even as the helicopter begins rising into the sky. “So long, kid. I’ll tell Rose you said hello.”

He laughs all the way to his safe house. Who knew that cutting Rose off from the people she cared about would be so easy?

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

BEEP… BEEP… BEEP

Jaime Reyes, the superhero known the world as Blue Beetle, lazily throws an arm over his face as the alarm continues to go off next to his ear. He doesn’t wanna get up. It’s still so early…

“Jaime Reyes,” his Scarab chides, its flat machine-like voice perfectly audible even with the loud, insistent beeping in the background—which makes sense, given that’s its not actually speaking, but rather communicating directly with his mind. “It is almost—”

“I’m going, I’m going,” Jaime groans out loud, sitting up and rubbing the bleariness out of his eyes. He looks at his alarm clock, and his eyes widen. 3:15 in the afternoon. Damn.

“Tres y quince,” he mutters out loud, kicking the blankets away and leaning over to turn off his alarm clock. He missed breakfast, he knows, and is about to miss lunch too if he doesn’t hurry. “Conchale, Khaji, y porque no me despiertas?”

If it was possible for sentient alien WMDs to be irritable, he’s certain Scarab would be shorter-tempered than even Cassie is these days. “Jaime Reyes—”

“Ya, ya, ya,” he interrupts impatiently, waving Scarab off with a sweep of his hand and getting up to walk towards the closet. “Olvidalo, da igual, me visto y ya. Hormiga de miercoles…”

The Scarab mercifully doesn’t bother correcting him, and before long Jaime is sitting down in the living room across from Cassie and Tim, neither of whom spare him a glance, with Tim too busy with his tablet to even bother looking up and Cassie just melancholically glaring down at her food like it is the reason for the mess they’re all in. Jaime isn’t really surprised—no one on the team really spoke to each other all that much anymore after the incident down at the docks two months ago, but it still rankles him for reasons he can’t fully verbalize. Cassie killed someone. They should be trying to figure out what that meant, together, as a team, not closing themselves off in their own little worlds to process what happened by themselves.

He tries to just keep his head down and get with the program, he really does, but after ten long minutes in complete silence the awkwardness becomes too unbearable.

“Soo,” he tries, absentmindedly picking at his food with his fork. “Nice weather we’re having, huh?”

Great start, Jaime.

Cassie completely ignores him, which isn’t a surprise, but he does succeed in making Tim at least raise his head. “Do you need something, Jaime?” he asks neutrally, his eyes cool in a way they really shouldn’t be.

“I… no, I guess not,” he says uncertainly, off-put by the sudden coldness that came over Tim’s demeanor over such a bland, inoffensive statement as the one he just uttered. “Just…”

“Just what?” he asks.

It’s not aggressive.

It’s not Tim, either.

“Nothing,” he replies, swallowing thickly before getting up from the table. “I think I lost my appetite.”

“Did you?” He sounds so… bored. With Jaime. With everything. “That’s too bad.”

Jaime gathers up his plate and half-turns to the kitchen, getting more and more creeped out by the moment. “Right. I, um, I’m just gonna go, if that’s alright with the two of you.”

“Fine by me,” Tim says simply, lowering his gaze back to the tablet. “Just clean your plate before you put it in the dishwasher. We don’t want a repeat of the Bart incident.”

“Sure thing,” Jaime mutters absently as he turns and walking away, feeling Tim’s gaze burn into his back despite the fact he’s not even looking at him. “I’ll get right on it.”

He shakes his head as soon as he’s out of the room. What the hell was up with everyone lately?

~~

“And don’t do it again!” Eddie roars in a strangely deep voice, slamming the door in their faces. They hear it lock a moment later, and an awkward silence engulfs the hallway for a good ten seconds as he and Bart try to process the fact that Eddie Bloomberg just screamed at them over them knocking on his door to invite him to play video games.

“He’s…” Bart tries, before falling silent. Jaime doesn’t know what he was gonna say. Stressed? In a bad mood?

“Yeah, I bet he is,” Jaime mutters, not even completely sure of what he means by that, before tapping his fist against Bart’s shoulder and walking away. “Sorry, hermano. Another day.”

“Yeah,” Bart says quietly, still standing there staring at Eddie’s locked door like it held the keys to some great puzzle. “Another day.”

~~

Jaime holds a fist to his mouth in an attempt to stifle his chuckling as he walks towards M’gann room. In his hand he holds a long, rambling letter from his conspiracy nut uncle warning him about some supposed behind-the-curtain happenings in the military—generals being quietly sacked and replaced with no justification overnight or going missing outright, whole weapon caches disappearing from the official logs, tanks and airplanes being found irreparably damaged from one day to the next, that sort of thing. It’s nonsense, and it reads like the sort of thing a QAnonist might come up with. Jaime wants to do a dramatic reading of it in front of M’gann—he has a feeling they both need more reasons to smile these days, and the last time he read out one of his uncle’s fiery letters the sound of her helpless giggling made him unable to stop smiling for a whole week. Goofing off like that again will do them both good, he decides.

“Hey, chica, come look at this!” he calls out, knocking on her door twice in quick succession.

There’s no answer.

Jaime’s brows knit together in concern. “M’gann?”

Nothing.

“M’gann, come on!” he calls out, knocking frantically on her door, despite the fact that he knows he has to be in there—no one has seen her leave her room in days. “This isn’t funny!”

No answer. He tries the door. Locked.

She’d been burnt after the crisis, Jaime remembers. She’d said she’d be fine. She’d promised.

Please, not another one. We can’t take another one.

“Jaime Reyes,” the Scarab says, and he extends his arm as the left side of his suit materializes over his body. Thanks, Khaji, he thinks, flexing his fingers before curling them into a fist and smashing through the door with a single punch. He gropes blindly for the handle on the other side before his fingers settle around it. He twists, opening the door and walking inside.

The room beyond is empty and devoid of color, completely unlike what it had been the last time Jaime was here. All of M’gann’s belongings are gone, taken. There’s no body, no evidence whatsoever of a fight or of a wound gone bad. It’s as if she simply… vanished.

“M’gann?” Jaime whispers.

The curtains flap in the wind through the open window, the only movement in the lifeless room. It is his only answer.

~~

“Hey,” he greets Rose as he passes her in the hallway, handing her the coffee in his left hand but keeping the one in his right for himself. “Sleep well?”

“Not really,” she admits, taking it from his hands with a grateful nod. “You?”

Jaime sighs. “Not really.”

Nothing more needs to be said—what happened last night was horrible enough without needing to discuss it.

And still… he feels the urge to cover for his kind-of friend, even if what he did was seriously shitty, accident or not. “Listen, I’m sure Eddie thought he was being sweet when he… you know. Are you sure you want to drop him over it? You two were like best friends, right? Maybe if you ju—”

“If the next words out of your mouth are anything like what I think they’re about to be, it’s gonna be you that gets a broken nose next,” Rose warns, closing herself off so fast Jaime has to swallow hard to vanish the sudden dryness in her throat. “Drop it.”

“Fine, okay, sorry,” he says quickly, holding up his hands in surrender. “I won’t bring it up again.”

“Good.”

There’s a long silence, and then, “What are you going to do, then?” Jaime asks, biting his lip. “About Eddie, I mean.”

Rose snorts. “Whatever the hell that thing is, it sure as hell isn’t Eddie anymore.”

Jaime’s eyebrows rise his hairline. “The heck’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing, nevermind,” she says, moving on before Jaime can press the topic. “I… probably punch someone who cares about me really hard, knowing me.” She pushes her hair back with one hand and sighs, a little bitterly. “It’s what I do best, it seems like.”

Jaime doesn’t dare touch that last part with a five foot pole. “You mean Cassie?”

“Might be best,” Rose agrees, taking a long sip from her coffee cup and licking her lips afterwards… before suddenly grinning widely at him. “Mmh, this is good. Thanks for making the trip, by the way. I know it wasn’t a short one.”

“I was going there anyway,” Jaime lies, wondering why Rose was acting so nice to him all of a sudden. Maybe it was the coffee? He might need to fetch her a cup more often if it meant she’d be nicer to him in the future.

“Uh huh,” she snorts, turning to walk away. “See you around, Jaime.”

“You too, Rose,” he replies, before something suddenly occurs to him. “Hey, wait a moment, actually.”

Rose stops, turning her head to look back at him. “Yeah?”

“Are you sure it’s a good idea to spar with Cassie right now?” The image of her glaring furiously down at her plate for no reason at all flashes through his mind. “I don’t think she’s in a good mood today.”

“Worried about little old me now?” Her tone turns bitter again all of a sudden, so fast Jaime’s head spins trying to keep up with her sudden mood shifts. “And here I thought I ‘scared the poop out of you’.”

Jaime has the decency to look sheepish. “You… heard that, huh?”

“I did. So why don’t you keep your advice to yourself and let me worry about my own girlfriend, huh?” she sneers, walking away before Jaime can come up with a reply.

“Oh, come on, I didn’t even…” Jaime trails off. Wait. Girlfriend?

Huh.

That’s new.

Guess they finally got it over with.

And yet… hadn’t Rose told Cassie to never lay a hand on her again after they’d pulled her out of that vision? What was that about? Did they…

Oh, whatever, he thinks, mentally cutting himself off. It’s none of my business anyway.

He doesn’t think much of it until later, when he walks into the unisex bathroom on the fifth floor and sees Rose standing in front of the mirror dabbin at her face with a makeup stick in the dark.

“Uh,” he coughs, taking a step back towards the door. I didn’t even know Rose wore makeup. “Sorry, I didn’t know you were in here. I’ll, just, um—”

“Go in the stall,” she cuts him off, not turning to look at him. “I’m just using the mirror.”

“Uh, okay,” he says, too taken aback to argue. He turns towards the stall, but as he does so, he catches sight of Rose’s reflection in the mirror—and pauses misstep, his eyes widening.

Rose’s one good eye was encircled by the blackest, nastiest bruise he’d ever seen, so large and ugly the eye itself was nearly swelled shut. Jaime starts—he didn’t even know Rose could get bruised, had always assumed her healing factor would take care of any minor injuries like that before they became notable. He’s certainly never seen her with a bruise. Cuts, yeah. But bruises? Nope. Not once.

“Are you…” Jaime starts, his voice trailing away when Rose makes an annoyed noise in the back of her throat.

“Sparring injury. Don’t worry about it.”

“Sparing’s not supposed to leave injuries.”

“Well, it did this time,” Rose says impatiently, turning her head to glare at him. “Do you mind? I’m trying to do something here.”

Her words from earlier run through his mind. “Did Cassie…?”

Every muscle in Rose’s body tenses so suddenly he visibly flinches. “Did Cassie what?” she grinds out, her tone the angriest he’s ever heard from her.

Holy poop, I’m gonna die, he thinks first, quickly followed by, no, wait, Khaji, I’m fine, don’t deploy the suit.

“Well, did she, uh…” he starts, trailing off. It’s such a ridiculous thought he can’t even bring himself to voice it. Cassie can be pretty intense at times, sure, passionate, yeah, stubborn, absolutely, angry, definitely… but she wouldn’t let herself seriously hurt fellow Titans no matter how on edge she was. He quickly change tracks. “Y’know, go overboard a bit by accident?”

Rose relaxes so quickly it gives him whiplash. Her shoulders loosen, her features soften, her fists unclench… it’s like some higher entity flicked her anger switch off and reset her to an earlier mood. Before he can comment on this, she turns her face back to the mirror and goes back to dabbing at it with the stick. “It’s nothing I couldn’t take.”

That’s… not reassuring, either.

“You know you don’t have to ‘take’ anything from a teammate, right?” Jaime asks slowly, not only kind of alarmed now but quite frankly disturbed. A nagging voice in the back of his head keeps telling him something about this just… isn’t right. Rose has been so… off lately. It’s like someone crawled under her skin and found it a too-snug fit, like someone was sat down and told to study a list of all of Rose’s mannerisms and speech-isms without bothering to provide them with the context to them. “Much less from someone who’s supposed to be your partner in… well, everything.”

“Uh huh,” Rose says disinterestedly, turning her face this way and that to observe herself. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

There’s something strangely familiar in the way she’s…

A memory flashes in his mind’s eye. He had once walked in on Traci standing in front of the mirror, dabbing at a spot on her cheek with a stick just like the one Rose is using now.

“What’s that?” he had asked, pointing at it.

“Oh, this?” She had held it up. “It’s…”

Concealer.

It’s not makeup, he realizes with a start. It’s concealer!

Rose isn’t giving herself a foundation, she’s trying to cover up the bruise!

He… he shouldn’t point this out. He shouldn’t. He knows he shouldn’t, after how Rose just reacted to him even vaguely implying Cassie might have hurt her on purpose.

And yet…

“If it’s really just a sparring injury,” he says, very carefully, “why are you trying to cover it up?”

Rose stiffens. Very slowly, she drops the stick into the sink—Jaime can hear it clank against the marble—and grabs the edges of it. Then she just… stays like that, staring down at the sink like it was a divination pool in one of those shitty mmos people swore were supposed to be fun. Jaime waits, and waits, and waits, and just when he has given up on her ever answering and turned towards the door she speaks again, her voice quiet. “It made daddy feel guilty.”

His hand freezes on the doorknob. “What?”

“Looking at it,” she elaborates, like that explained anything. Jaime hears the creak of her gloves as her fingers tighten on the sink. “She… she didn’t mean to. She told me so.”

There’s a very long pause as Jaime turns around and just… stares at Rose.

“What did you just say?” he finally asks, just to make sure it wasn’t his imagination.

For a moment, nothing happens, and then Rose slightly turns her face, her one eye piercing Jaime with its intensity. He can’t move. He’s pinned in place, speared through the heart by the cold blue ice swimming in its depths. “What do you mean?”

“I… what you just said, it was…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rose says cooly. “I never said anything to you.”

“I…”

“Did you hear something, Jaime?” she asks slowly, and something about her voice makes Jaime feel like the bug his persona is named after.

“I…uh, I…”

“Did you?” she insists, her gloves creaking again, and suddenly Khaji Da is screeching alerts into his mind, demanding he summon the suit, threatening him with assuming direct control if he doesn’t comply. He forces his alien ride-along back as harshly as he can and takes a step back, then two.

“No,” he says, his voice almost a whisper, but he can’t for the life of him make it louder. His throat is so dry…

She looks amused. “No?”

“No, I didn’t,” he breathes. “I never heard you say anything.”

“I thought not.” Her lips slowly curl into a half-smirk, and like a switch, it’s Rose again. “See you later, Jaime.”

“I… see you later, Rose,” he breathes, blindly groping for the door knob, unwilling to turn his back to her after whatever the heck that was about. His fingers close around it and he hails it open, harder than he meant to, and he has to consciously slow down to cover up the terrified action before Rose is tipped off to his rapidly rising terror. He holds the door open with his foot and slowly starts exiting the room, keeping his eyes on Rose the entire time, like she’d change again if he looked away.

He waits until he hears the door shut behind him to breathe again, only now feeling the way his heart is pumping a mile a minute.

What the actual duck?

~~

He’s fully convinced himself the entire thing in the bathroom was some kind of cuckoo hallucination by the next day, despite Khaji doggedly insisting it wasn’t and requesting permission to label Rose as an enemy in his systems.

“For the last time, Khaji,” he says out loud as he pushes open the door to the gym—Cassie had gotten rid of the automatic doors some days ago, for reasons Jaime couldn’t really understand—something about buying newer, more reinforced models. “Rose isn’t…” he trails off, catching sight of the titular ex-mercenary running on her personal treadmill near the back wall, her hair pulled back, a towel slung around her bare shoulders. He smiles, reassured by such a normal sight; he’s scared poopless of Rose by his own admission, but just because he knows she could totally crack his skull like a watermelon if he put his head under her foot while she was running doesn’t mean he’s not still glad to see someone acting normally around here for once.

“Jaime Reyes, nothing about this situation is normal,” the Scarab warns, it’s robotic voice sounding actually frustrated. “Do not go near her. I repeat, do not—”

“Hey, Rose,” he calls out as he walks past her, receiving only a grunt in response. “What’s up?”

Khaji Da screeches it’s displeasure into his mind, but he pointedly ignores it.

“Nothing much,” Rose replies in between bouts of heavy breathing. Jaime looks at her machine’s display and sees she’s running at an average speed nearly twice that of Usain Bolt at his prime. “You?”

“Nothing much,” he says, reassured by how normal she’s acting that the whole thing in the bathroom was just his imagination. “I just felt like doing some weights today.

“Good for you,” Rose pants, a grin in her voice. “You could use some bulki—augh!”

Jaime turns to see something impossible—Rose Wilson collapsed on the ground, clutching her leg, having fallen off the treadmill like an amateur.

“Uh, you okay?” he asks hesitantly, more confused than concerned—he’d been pretty sure Rose was biologically incapable of being clumsy up until now.

“Fuck… off,” Rose spits, gritting her teeth and trying to stand… only to fall on her ass a second time with a pained grunt. It’s kind of embarrassing, actually.

“Hey, I’m just wondering if you’re okay,” Jaime protests, instead of voicing that particular out loud, because he’s not in fact suicidal.

“Well, stop wondering—I’m fine,” she snarls, trying to stand up again and failing for the third time. “Just… tripped. I…”

“Jaime Reyes,” Khaji Da says in his mind, making Rose’s voice fade into the background. “I have detected information you might want to hear.”

“Spill,” he says out loud, cutting Rose off mid-sentence and earning himself “The Look”—his name for the weird looks people always gave him when he started seemingly talking to himself.

“Subject Rose “Ravager” Wilson has a severely torn muscle in her lower left calf,” it reports, “likely due to to significant overtaxing over a very short period of time.”

“That’s…”

“Not all,” the Scarab interrupts. “She also has several slightly older injuries that would typically require medical attention, including two cracked ribs, a bruised pelvis, and a fractured leg.”

Jaime rounds on Rose, incredulous. “You were running forty two miles an hour on a broken leg?!”

Rose scowls up at him. “How did you…?”

“Nevermind that,” Jaime interrupts, kneeling down in front to Rose and offering her his hand. “Are you insane or what?”

Rose slaps aside his hand and slowly, painfully, gets up on her own. “You don’t understand,” she grinds out, teeth gritted against the pain.

“Then help me understand,” he demands, reaching out to steady her as she stumbles. “You’re gonna kill yourself at this rate.”

“She needs me,” Rose snarls, pushing him away. “That’s worth a little pain.”

“Who, Rose?” he retorts, exasperated, feeling like he’s going insane. What the hell was up with everyone? “Who needs you so badly you’d kill yourself to help them?”

“Hey,” a familiar voice says, and he turns to see Cassie standing in the doorway. “Everything okay in here?

He doesn’t miss the way her eyes jealously linger on the closeness between him and Rose for a moment longer than excusable.

Jaime opens his mouth to say something like, “Did you do this to her?”, but Rose beats him to the punch.

“Everything’s fine, da—dear,” Rose assures her, and it’s so obviously such a not-Rose thing to say that Jaime seriously contemplates whether he’s actually still asleep and this isn’t some really weird dream.

“Good,” Cassie says, her eyes flickering again to Jaime before they round on Rose, “cause I was wondering if you wanted to spar again today.”

A flash of dread crosses Rose’s face, so obvious and unveiled even Cassie must have plainly caught it. “I’d love to.”

“Great!” Cassie beams, and the world’s not only gone off its axis, it’s detached completely and is currently heading towards a black hole. “Training room 3A?”

Rose gives a pained grin. “It’s a date.”

Cassie’s smile widens, and she turns and walks out of the room. Jaime turns to Rose, aiming to silently implore her not to go… only to find her already following after Cassie, trotting a bit—fractured leg notwithstanding—to keep up.

I’m in a freaking madhouse, Jaime realizes.

~~

Jaime taps his fingers against his leg, carefully not looking at either Conner or Bart, who are seated on the floor in front of him playing a fighting game. It’s his turn next, but try as he might, he finds he just can’t concentrate on that with everything that’s happened.

He tries to dismiss the urge to ask the others about it, but it eventually it grows too strong for him, and he concedes to it. “So… Rose has been acting pretty weird lately.”

There’s a long, pregnant pause.

“Has she?” says Conner, too curiously for it to be genuine. “I haven’t noticed.”

His heart skips a beat for reasons he can’t entirely articulate. Conner probably notices. He tries not to think about that.

“Hmm,” he says noncomitally, his eyes flickering over to the other boy. “What about you, Bart? Have you noticed anything?”

There’s an even longer pause.

“Nope,” Bart says slowly “Can’t say I have.”

~~

“She’s just stressed,” Rose tells him later, as they both sit on the roof looking at the stars. It had been her and Eddie’s favorite spot once, he knows, but Eddie never comes out of his room anymore. “Fighting me helps her, lets her gauge how hard she can go on normal opponents now that she’s not holding back as much anymore. She’s been doing a pretty good job of pulling her punches back so far.”

He’d be more inclined to believe her if it wasn’t for the brand-new cast over her wrist, the sheer white of it at a stark contrast to the thin strings of Rose’s blue bikini. “If you say so .”

“I do,” she says plainly, taking a long puff from her cigarette with her free hand. When she exhales, she blows out the smoke in a perfect ring. She watches it rise high up in the air for a moment, before wrestling a small stone free from the railing and handing it to him. “Throw it.”

“Huh?” Jaime says intelligently.

“Throw it. Through the ring. It should be pretty easy for you…” She grins. “…unless it’s actually the suit that does all the aiming for you.”

Jaime’s feels his lip curl into a smile. “What do I get if I do get it through?” he asks, cocking his arm back.

“You’ll see. Throw it.”

He does. It gets through. His smile widens.

“What’s my prize?” he asks, turning to Rose… before his smile fades at the look of dread on her face. “Rose?”

“I thought… I thought it was just a dream,” she murmurs, more to herself than to Jaime. “That…”

“Thought what was just a dream?” Jaime asks, frowning.

Rose turns her head to look at him. There’s something in her eyes he can’t quite place. She doesn’t say anything for a long moment, but just when Jaime opens his mouth to speak again, she says, “Don’t do it tomorrow.”

“Do what?”

“You know what. Don’t do it tomorrow,” she says, before standing up and walking away without another word.

Jaime blinks. “Rose?”

She does not look back, but Jaime swears he can hear her mutter, “Trust me.”

~~

“Ok, let’s see what you’ve been hiding,” Jaime says, cracking his fingers and getting to work on cracking Tim’s encryption.

I took a hacking class in high school. How hard could it be?

Very hard, as it turns out. Jaime’s on the verge of giving up when he finds a note taped to the bottom of the desk that reads, “New password is SpoilerAlert. Don’t forget this time. You owe at least that to her, you utter failure.”

It’s written in Tim’s hand. Jaime decides not to think too hard about it.

“Ok, let’s see what the hell is going on here…”

As he logs into Tim’s private files, the grandfather clock set against the far wall of Tim’s office chimes with the coming of the hour.

Tick

“—this is mercy!”

He shuts his eyes when Eddie starts screaming. Goddamn it. They should’ve realized…

Tock

“You made me do it. You made me.”

Tick

There’s a horrible squelching noise as the thief’s head yields beneath the force of Cassie’s fist, spraying pink matter and bits of flesh everywhere. The video wobbles as the person holding the phone steps back in shock, an action mirrored by everyone in the small crowd of criminals… until the screams begin.

“No, wait!” Cassie yells as everyone in the crowd save for the mysterious recorder starts to run, holding her hands out in a gesture of peace—which might be more effective if the dead thief’s brains weren’t still dripping from them. “I didn’t mean to! I…” she trails off, looking down at her hands like she’s never seen them before, like they belong to someone else. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to.”

Tock

The clock chimes again by the time Jaime stops vomiting.

Tick

“If you’re seeing this, it means I’m leaving,” M’gann says into the security camera. “Please, Tim, show this tape to the others. I don’t want… I can’t say goodbye in person after what I just saw in your mind, but…”

Tock

“Ravager, huh?” The thing that wasn’t Eddie asked, grinning at the picture on his phone, which is pincered carefully between two massive red fingers. “Mmmh, I’d like to ravage her. I think she’d make a wonderfully feisty bride, wouldn’t you agree?”

“What, uh, makes you think that?” asks Tim, who is clearly uncomfortable with the situation… though not uncomfortable enough to leave it, clearly.

“Call it a feeling,” Not-Eddie says, his grin widening. “I have several, you know. I know these things.”

“Several…?”

“Brides,” the demon clarifies, his eyes literally blazing with mirth. “All of them beautiful and very happy with their place in life, I’ll have it said. I’m nothing if not a sensitive and attentive husband.”

“Right…”

“How much for the Ravager?” he asks, leaning forward and placing his palms on the desk, unaware or uncaring how his fiery hands singe the wood black underneath them. “You mortals do still like gold, don’t you?”

“Uh…”

“Or perhaps… it is power you seek?” Not-Eddie presses, his grin widening. “I can see your desires… you think yourself intelligent, little boy, but I can give you a mind that would dwarf all others. Would you like that?”

Jaime wishes he couldn’t tell Tim was tempted.

“I… no,” he says finally, swallowing thickly, as if mourning the opportunity he’s just rejected.

“No?” The demon raises an eyebrow, then shrugs. “Hmm… perhaps I misjudged you. It happens sometimes, it must be said. Very well, I could also offer you…”

“No, I meant…” he trails off, and for a moment Jaime thinks it’s because he’s struggling to think of a way to explain the concept of women having rights to a demon before Tim’s next words smash that optimistic hope to bits. “I meant, she’s really not mine to sell in the first place. She’s Cassie’s thing, not mine.”

Jaime’s breath stutters in disbelief. What the actual…?

“Oh?”

“Yeah, and even if she knew about your, uh, transformation, she’d never give Rose up after all the trouble she went to keep her around, even though it’s obviously the pragmatic thing to do. Sorry.”

“I see.”

But, um,” Tim starts, licking his lips. “That doesn’t mean I couldn’t get you… other things, if you made it worth my while… and didn’t tell Cassie.”

The demon looks intrigued. “Go on.”

Tim leans forward, a greedy glint coming over his eyes. “Well, you demons like making deals with desperate people, right?”

“You could say that.”

Tim’s lips slowly curl into a smile, and something about it makes Jaime’s mouth go dry. “How would you like to get your hands on a few supervillains?”

Tick

“Oh, G-God, Tim, I-I actually d-did it,” Cassie sobs into Tim’s shoulder, nearly incoherent with regret. “I-I did it, and… she… she didn’t even wake up! She… she trusted me, subconsciously, and I… I…”

“Hey, hey, don’t do that,” Tim says softly, rubbing soothing circles into Cassie’s back. “You had to. She left you no other choice.”

“That’s b-bullshit, and you know it!” Cassie yells, pushing away from Tim and wiping furiously at her eyes. “Great Hera, what have I done? I… I… I’m worse than Slade.”

Tim rolls his eyes. “Oh come on, even you don’t believe that.”

“And why not?” Cassie snaps, furiously rounding on Tim, tears running down her cheeks. “At least Slade had the decency to look her in the eyes when he did it! I snuck up on her while she was sleeping! Like some… some coward!”

Tim sighs. “Look, we both know we couldn’t just let someone with as much intel on us as Rose just walk out of here weeks before the operation… and if it makes you feel better, I condensed the formula so that you would only have to do it once instead of every weeks, like Slade.”

Cassie sniffs, wiping away a tear in the corner of her eye with her finger. “I… I need to tell her.”

Tim’s face visibly twitches in a way that makes Jaime’s heart fearfully skip a beat. “You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not,” she says fiercely, blinking to clear the moisture in her eyes. “This is wrong, Tim. What I did was… horrible. I knew how scared she was of being controlled like that again… and I still did it!” She wipes at her eyes and turns towards the door, and for a moment it seems everything is gonna work out okay. “I can’t stand it a moment longer. I have to tell her.”

His eyes flicker to the date of the recording. It’s nearly a month old.

Rose had still been acting weird less than a day ago.

Dammit, he thinks, squeezing his eyes shut. Goddamn all you people, you’ve all gone insane.

He suddenly wants nothing more than to be at home with his sister, and his parents, in that place he grew up in, where everyone speaks Spanish and there are barbecues every Sunday and things are simply and easy and people he used to care about don’t turn out to secretly be massive douchebags, and—

“Do what you want,” he hears Tim say, seemingly uncaring. “I’m just wondering if you’ve thought the consequences through.”

Don’t stop, he feels himself thinking, even though he knows full well she is going to stop. Don’t listen to him. Keep going. Tell Rose. Make it make sense again.

“What do you mean?” Cassie’s voice asks hesitantly, and he doesn’t need to open his eyes again to know that she’s stopped. He still does it anyway.

“I mean, what do you think is gonna happen when you tell her you drugged her?” Tim asks sardonically, chuckling a little when Cassie’s expression tightens. “See, even you know I’m right. Remind me, how many times has she tried to kill Slade by now…?”

“I…”

“Four? Five?” He grins. “And like you said, at least Slade had the decency to look her in the eye when he did it. You… not so much.”

“I… what are you saying?”

“I’m saying, if you tell Rose what you did, you lose her forever,” Tim says, a bit more gently. “I mean, she was gearing up to leave even before you drugged her. She’s not ever going to forgive you if you tell her. You know that, right?”

“That… that doesn’t matter,” Cassie says, too firmly, like she’s trying to convince not only Tim but herself too. “What I did to her was wrong. I have to make up for it.”

Tim looks at her, then sighs, standing up and walking towards the medical cabinet in the back of the lab. “Okay.”

“I… really?”

“Yeah,” Tim says, pulling open one of the drawers and pulling out a long, thin syringe filled with an unfamiliar green liquid. “This is the antidote. You give this to Rose, she’ll be back to normal within the hour.”

He turns around and holds it out for Cassie to grab. “Take it.”

Do it. Come on. Please. It’s right there. You can fix everything if you just take it. It’s right there.

Cassie hesitates. “The serum… it’s not really mind control, is it?”

Jaime can Tim’s lips quirk up slightly. He’s just won, he realizes. “Nope. It just enhances feelings that are already there.”

By which he means it sends all of her emotions into overdrive and makes her extremely unstable. Goddamn it. How are you falling for this? You’re Wonder Girl. Use your freaking brain.

“Maybe… maybe it would be best to wait a bit before giving her the antidote,” Cassie says slowly, looking like she herself doesn’t believe what is saying. “Just to make sure the whole… thing is not as raw as it would be right now. Besides… since it’s a new version, it could have side effects we don’t know about, right? Maybe it would be best to stand back and study her case for a bit to make sure we don’t accidentally put her in distress by ‘curing’ her.”

Tim’s lips curl into an open smile. “I knew you’d come around.”

Tock

Operation Titanomachy.

It’s a strange name for a file.

Jaime clicks on it, more by curiosity than anything else, and his eyes widen at what he sees inside. There are plans for a full takeover of the government, graphs showcasing “military infiltration levels”, monthly political pie charts that are steady turning more and more extremist with every month, blueprints for state-run super-weapons, everything and anything an up-and-coming supervillain would need to—

An alarm suddenly blares in his head, and he turns, his suit materializing around him as the smoke pellets roll along the floor and hiss open, expelling what Khaji labels a deadly neurotoxin into the air. It’s about as dangerous to his suit’s air filtration system as a pebble and about as useful, though, so Jaime simply switches his vision settings to thermal and blasts Tim straight in the chest with his hand cannon. He flies back, out of the cloud of smoke and into the far wall, which he collapses against with a pained moan. Jaime marches right over to him and grabs him by the cape before he can recover, dragging him along the floor as he marches straight to the conference room.

One way or another, this insanity ends now.

“Jaime Reyes, this course is I’ll-advised,” the Scarab warns him, but he doesn’t care anymore. Six months. Six months of sitting there like a lamp, watching his friends turn into murders, and for what? For them to plot to take over the government? For Tim to sell incarcerated supervillains to a demon—and not just any demon, but the one that had killed Eddie? For Cassie to drug Rose the exact same way her father drugged her? No. He’s not stopping to consider a better option. He’d already let this go too far.

“J-Jaime,” Tim gasps, but it isn’t Jaime he’s speaking to anymore, it’s Blue Beetle. He has just enough time to squawk out a “w-wait!” before he founds himself picked up and lobbed through the door, which breaks under his weight and deposits him on the floor amidst a pile of broken wood.

“Nobody moves!” Blue Beetle snarls, his arm cannon raised and pointed at the room’s inhabitants, who look up in shock at his entrance. “I’ve had just about enough of this!”

The conference room is a little different from how it was the last time he was in here. The table is new, a holographic map of the world with several places outlined in red. At the back, Wonder Girl’s chair, recognizable by the ‘W’ symbol on the back of it, has been placed on a slight dais, all the better to look out over the contents of the map… and, perhaps unintentionally, down on the people around it.

Looks like they’ve already gotten started on all the fascist imagery. Figures.

Not that there were all that many people around the table—for whatever reason, only Wonder Girl, Superboy, and now Red Robin were in the room with him, with Rose obviously absent and Impulse nowhere to be found. As for Superboy and Wonder Girl, they were both seated some distance apart, but jumped to their feet at his entrance.

“Jaime, wh—” Wonder Girl cries, before she is cut off by an energy blast hitting the wall an inch from her ear. “Hey!”

“I know. I know what you’re plotting,” he reveals, taking a step forward, his helmet retracting rom his head so he can look her in the eyes. “And I know what you did.”

Wonder Girl visibly swallows. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Liar,” he accuses, lips twisting into a scowl. “How does it feel knowing you betrayed everything you stood for? That you betrayed the one person who’s never going to forgive you for it?”

Wonder Girl looks stricken for a moment, before her eyes flicker to his cannon hand.

“Jaime, think about this,” she warns, in a tone usually reserved for stupid, misbehaving children. “We’re your friends. We don’t wanna…”

“Lady, I don’t know who the hell you people are anymore,” Blue Beetle interrupts, priming his cannon, “but you’re sure as hell not my friends.”

Wonder Girl’s eyes flicker again, this time to something behind him, and by the time Blue Beetle thinks to turn two fiery-hot hands have clamped tightly onto his face from behind. A sizzling noise fills his ears, and it takes him a moment to register its his own flesh that’s burning. He screams, feeling his face boil beneath his assailant’s fingertips, and turns, shoving away the thing that wasn’t Eddie and then sending him crashing back with an energy blast. The massive demon—for, it seems, Red Devil had been metamorphosing somehow in his room and has now emerged as a muscular, eight feet tall version of himself—lets out a grunt and lies still as its back hits the wall, but Blue Beetle doesn’t let his guard down; he turns and transforms his left hand into a blade just in time to block Wonder Girl’s descending fist. Sparks fly as the alien metal clashes against her steel bracelet, but Blue Beetle doesn’t lean into the lock, knowing Wonder Girl is much stronger than he is, instead choosing to send a kick quick to her stomach to get some distance in between them and turn to face his other opponent—not fast enough, though. Superboy tackles him around the waist and flies them both into the wall, prompting a pained gasp from Blue Beetle as all the air is forced out of his ribs, and he doesn’t stop there: hits start raining down on his head, one after the other, so hard his helmet starts cracking, unable to protect his head from the powerful blows until… now, Khaji! His chest opens up, expelling a highly concentrated beam of energy that sends Superboy crashing into and through the ceiling, going up and up and up at an angle until he is blasted well out of the Tower. There’s no time to catch his breath, however, as Wonder Girl’s lasso suddenly snaps taut around his wrist and pulls him, first into the wall, then, as he crashes down, into a punch that completely shatters his helmet and leaves him seeing stars on the ground.

Ouch. He needs to—

He rolls back, jumping to his feet and into the air as bomb pellets explode on the ground beneath him, summoning his wings and manifesting an energy shield to protect himself from the blast. The force of it crashes against his shield, and he can feel the searing heat ford around him like a stone in a river, but he is unharmed, and a moment later he makes Red Robin pay for getting up by strafing him with his energy cannon. He dodges the first, the second, but not the third blast, and Blue Beetle lands on the ground to finish him off… only to find his cannon hand pulled away by Wonder’s Girl lasso at the last moment, directing his blast into the floor instead. He turns and yanks on the lariat with his free hand, aiming to pull her off her feet in a move he once saw Rose use in one of her and Wonder Girl’s sparring matches, but he isn’t Rose, and this isn’t sparring; Wonder Girl not only keeps her feet, but pulls back, and the short tug of war ends the only way it could—with Blue Beetle speeding through the air straight into Wonder Girl’s grip. She wastes no time raising him high into the air before turning and smashing him down into the fancy new holographic conference table, which breaks under his weight, leaving him dazed in a pile of broken glass.

Okay, might have beaten bitten off a bit more than I could chew here, he thinks, shaking off his discombobulation and dodging just in time for Wonder Girl’s fist to leave a crater where his head had been a moment prior.

Looks like Rose was right, she really is pulling her punches. Not.

Cassie doesn’t let up, her fists surging towards him with the speed and accuracy of homing missiles, and he—he—

He feels his neck be seized from behind, and knows in that moment it’s about to be snapped.

No, that can’t be, he thinks inanely in his last moments of life, reaching up to grab futilely at the arm around his neck. Rose said don’t do it tomorrow, and I didn’t, unless… he focuses his gaze on the window. There is light coming from underneath the curtains.

It’s morning.

“Oh, he breathes, and he hears the crunch long before he feels it.

~~

There is a very long silence as Eddie stands over Jaime, panting.

“Eddie,” Cassie breathes, feeling a pit open in her stomach. “Eddie, what did you do?”

Eddie looks up… and slowly smiles.

“Doomed boy,” the wind whispers in their ears as it fled them, like the crowd had fled Cassie after what she did. “Doomed, doomed, doomed.”

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

The streets of San Francisco are loud even at night. Rose can hear them beyond the wall-to-ceiling glass windows that cover the left side of the hallway thanks to her enhanced hearing—the low buzz of cars racing each other on the freeway, the insistent honk honk of impatient trucks, the screech of cop cars and ambulances as they whizz past; all of it is clearly audible to her ears, even though they may register only as an indistinguible din to a normal human. And if the sounds are so vivid, the view is even more thanks to her equally enhanced sight—lack of a left eye notwithstanding—but she pays it no mind; she’s not here, in the last-to-top level of Titans Tower, to admire the view, but to respond to a supposed emergency in her team leader’s room.

“Okay, I’m here,” Rose announces irritably, opening the door to Cassie’s room all up in a huff, as she’s done a million times before. “What’s so important you had me drag myself out of bed at three in the fucking morning fo—oh, God.”

Cassie looks tearily up at her from where she’s seated on the bed, having seemingly gone through something of a makeover since Rose saw her last—the remains of her formerly long hair are strewn about her on the bed in disorganized clumps, her scalp conserving nothing but an unruly mass of tufts that Rose might have audibly compared to a dead ferret if she was just the slightest bit more in a merciless mood.

As it is, she just stares. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Look, can you fix it, or not?” Cassie demands, her tone bordering on the edge of hysterical. “Cause I’m really not in the mood for your whole routine right now.”

“Hmm… I guess I could,” Rose says very slowly, her lips curling into a smirk at the urgency in Cassie’s tone. Her mind flashes back to that one time Jason asked her to cut and dye his hair in a motel bathroom. She had done it for free then, no questions asked, but Jason was a friend, and the woman in front of her was anything but. “But why should I?”

Cassie looks torn on whether to wring her neck or break out in hysterics. “Rose.”

“Cassie,” Rose drawls mockingly, already planning ways on how to use her rival’s desperation to her advantage.

The two stare each other down, before Rose decides to take pity on the demigoddess and spit out her demands.

“I’ll do it,” she says, smirking wider at the glimmer of hope that appears in Cassie’s eyes before her next words throughly dash it, “for a price.”

Cassie looks at her warily. “What price?”

“You know that minigolf place in the south side?”

“The fancy one, that you need tickets to enter?”

“Yeah,” Rose nods. “I want you to get tickets for tomorrow.”

Cassie blinks. “Really?”

“Yeah,” Rose nods, raising an eyebrow at the bemused look on Cassie’s face. “What, am I not allowed to enjoy things that aren’t fighting-related now?”

“Well… no, obviously, it’s just…” Cassie starts, before trailing off, apparently giving up on whatever she was about to say. “Nevermind. Buy why minigolf?”

Rose shrugs. “Why not?”

Cassie doesn’t look convinced. “It’s just…”

Her other eyebrow rises to meet the first, slightly annoyed now. “It’s just what?”

“It just doesn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d be into, that’s all,” Cassie says defensively. “I’m not saying it’s a bad idea, I’m just…”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, I like our usual language of moans and grunts and the occasional scream just fine,” Rose teases, making Cassie’s cheeks flush slightly, “… but no one has ever me taking mini golfing before.” Her smirk widens flirtatiously. “I thought it could be a new experience.”

“I…” Cassie throws her hands up in h the air. “Sure, okay. I don’t think there’s anyone alive that’s super into mini golf, but if you help me with—” She gestures broadly at the flu-infested raccoon that went and died on top of her scalp— “this, I’ll buy you as many tickets as you want.”

Rose bites her lip, somewhat confused—and annoyed—by Cassie’s wording. She didn’t need ‘as many tickets as she wanted’, she needed only two, because she was trying to get Cassie to invite her out on a date. Was Cassie turning her down? Did she just not catch the obvious flirtation? Was Rose…

“Well?” Cassie says impatiently, holding out a pair of scissors towards Rose. “Are you going to help me or what?”

Oh, okay, you wanna play it like that, huh?

“Not so fast,” Rose says, resisting the urge to sneer. “Tickets first, then I help you.”

“Fine,” Cassie huffs, fishing her phone out of her pocket and typing the url into it, muttering under her breath the whole time. Rose stands there and waits, tapping her foot impatiently, until Cassie puts the phone on the bedside table and looks back up at her. “There. Done. Tickets bought.”

“Took you long enough,” Rose huffs, marching forward and coaxing Cassie to her feet before sweeping all of the clumps of hair off the bed and onto the floor with her hand, ignoring Cassie’s protests that’s she’s gonna have to clean that later. She sits down on the now-empty bed and points down at the floor. “Kneel here, between my legs, with your back to me. That way I can actually reach you.”

“Fine,” Cassie says again, handing her the scissors and doing as Rose says, coughing awkwardly when Rose shifts herself so that her legs are slung over Cassie’s shoulders. “You’re not gonna, um, strangle me with your legs, are you?”

“Not unless you want me to,” Rose jokes, tightening her legs for one brief moment before letting go. “Do you want me to?”

“I’m good, thanks,” Cassie says, flushing slightly. “Just fix my hair, please.”

“Right away, your highness,” Rose says, rolling her eye. Talk about a boring midnight rendezvous. “Hold still…”

Some people still acted surprised when they found this out, but Rose wasn’t the nicest person, and she was categorically not in the best of moods right now. It was with that in mind that she decided right then and there to make Cassie’s morning even worse than hers.

Rose leans forward and gets started on cutting away at Cassie’s hair, not to fix it as she had promised, but to make it even worse on purpose—serves little miss prom queen right for having her drag herself out of bed at three in the morning and then treating her like an errand girl.

“Cassie,” it doesn’t occur to her to ask until she’s halfway through the procedure. “How many tickets did you buy?”

“Well, two, obviously,” Cassie says, turning her head slightly to look at her with a confused look on her face. “Wasn’t it supposed to be like, y’know, a date thing?”

Ah, jeez. So she did get what I was saying.

“It was,” Rose says, looking down at her handiwork and deciding it was too late to start actually making an effort at this point. Her smirk comes back in full force—if she doesn’t actually have a reason to be upset at Cassie, she’ll still do it for the fun of it. She makes a note somewhere in the back of her head to finally talk someone about her Slade-delivered abandonment issues despite knowing full well she’ll never actually do it and continues with her work. “Just checking.”

“Right…”

A few more minutes pass by in silence, the quiet in the room only broken by the snip snip of Rose’s scissors cutting away at Cassie’s hair until it no longer resembled a savaged rodent. Instead, Cassie now boasted a large round bald spot on the top of her head, complete with a jutting widow’s peak and a triangular vertical undercut on both sides of her head. Rose looks at it for a few long seconds, biting her tongue to keep from laughing out loud, and decides it still isn’t enough, so she goes ahead and shaves the word ‘dyke’ into the back of Cassie’s head before stepping back to admire her work.

“I’m done,” she says gleefully. “You can look in the mirror now.”

Cassie gets to her feet and walks over to her mirror. There’s a short pause as her brain takes in the sight of her new self before she starts screaming.

“So,” Rose says, grinning, “we still on for minigolf tomorrow?”

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

New Eddie and Rose headcanon

One of the few personalized items in Rose’s room in Titans Tower is a flower pot with a single white rose in it because Eddie thought he was being slick by gifting Rose a white rose and Rose was amused by the pun too much to throw it out. She chuckled when she caught sight of it, every time.

When she left, Eddie took on the responsibility of keeping it watered. It wasn’t hard, it was a potted plant. It still died with him, though.

Rose left it in front of his statue when she came back.

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

Rose’s type is boys whose heads she could crush between her biceps and girls who could kill her.

[dc-said-bi-robin-rights]

Chapter 2 of This Is Halloween

Rose tilts her head back against the wall and closes her eyes, a smile curling her lips as the beat of the music and the sounds of the party flood her senses. All this was her doing, even if few people knew it and fewer still truly appreciated the lengths she had gone to in order to reintroduce fun to Titans Tower.

Joey had always told her Titans Tower had been the place to be for young heroes who wanted to unwind during the holidays in his time, but she had never quite believed him. The Titans, being party animals? Please. It just seemed so unbelievable, even knowing that his generation of Titans and her generation had been vastly different. More likely he just had a rosy recollection of his time with his Titans and remembered them being way more fun than they actually were. After all, they included people like Dick, who had a tendency to sigh wearily whenever she did anything fun, and Roy, who had tried to baby her so much she’d gone hunting for muggers at the ripe old age of fourteen just to get all the discontent out of her system. There was no way those two busybodies had been sought-after partygoers back in the day. There just wasn’t.

Still, she allows, her smile growing wider as she hears a group of people somewhere to her left suddenly erupt into a chorus of whoops and happy yells, she can kind of see it. After all, hadn’t her generation of Titans been broody busybodies before she came along too? And now look at them. Partying like… well, people who knew what fun was. It was nothing short of a miracle. And it was all Rose’s doing, even if most people didn’t know it. Sure, someone else may have actually changed the rules, but it had been Rose who had convinced her to do so.

Rose hears that someone else let out a cheer that is quickly taken up by several familiar and unfamiliar voices, and her smile takes on an amused quality as she lazily opens her eyes and looks around for the source of the noise. Her eyes settle on a group of former and current Titans huddled in a circle off to the side, their bodies obscuring whatever it is they are doing, and she smile wider with curiosity as she pushes away from the wall and begins walking towards it, weaving and shoving her way through a throng of spectators to behold the glorious sight before her.

Cassandra Sandsmark stands in the center of the crowd, bent over with her elbows resting on a table and dressed head to toe in store-bought cowgirl getup. Standing opposite her is the familiar shape of Static, who is leaning forward and gripping the table with a look of concentration on his face.

As Rose watches, Cassie slides a pair of dice off the table and into her waiting hand before clasping her hands together and raising them into the air. She lets out a deep breath, shakes her hands, and throws. Everyone holds their breath as the dice bounce on the table, but Rose’s view of the throw is obscured when the tall guy in front of her is shuffled back by the press of the crowd, and by the time Rose shoves him aside the dice have already landed… though judging by the loud, coordinated groan her side of the crowd lets out and the loud cheer that erupts from the other side, it probably didn’t go well for Cassie in a throw where it should have. Her suspicions are confirmed when she sees Cassie’s face shift into a confused pout, and Rose feels her smile quirk into a smirk. Looks like little miss demigoddess’ divine excellence doesn’t extend to shooting dice.

Taking pity on her drunken rival, Rose elbows her way forward and presses herself against Cassie’s back, registering the way she stiffens momentarily before easily relaxing into her with some smugness. And Cassie says she isn’t wrapped around Rose’s little finger. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Cassie says grumpily, turning her head to the side and briefly kissing Rose on the lips, oblivious or uncaring of the good-natured jeers the crowd erupts into. “I’m losing.“

“I noticed.” Rose leans in close to Cassie’s ear, husky amusement in her voice. “Need someone to blow you?”

“W-What?” Cassie gasps loudly, pushing Rose away and whirling around, a furious blush on her cheeks. “B-Blow me? Like, here? Are you seriously offering to… in front of…?”

“Don’t look so excited, blondie. I meant your dice.” There’s a wicked edge to her smirk now. “You know, for luck.”

“O-Oh.” Cassie coughs, turning away and picking up her dice as everyone in the crowd descends into uproarious laughter. She extends her hand out to Rose, unable to even look at her. “Right, um, yeah, that makes more sense. Go ahead.”

Rose’s smirk widens and she bends low over Cassie’s arm, pressing feather-light kisses all the way from her elbow to her hand without breaking eye contact before finally blowing softly on the dice in her hand and stepping back with a gleam in her eye. “Good luck.”

Cassie visibly swallows, turning back to the table and scratching her cheek nervously in an attempt to get her head back in the game. It doesn’t look like it’s working. “Yeah, okay, um… here goes.”

She shakes her dice in her hand and throws… and falls short of the point requirement by a mile. Everyone around them, including the portion of the crowd seemingly on Static’s side and even Static himself, lets out a groan and begins to disperse. Whoops.

“That was your fault,” Cassie accuses immediately, turning to Rose with a scowl.

Rose seems more amused than anything. “Oh yeah? What makes you say that?”

“You obviously gave me bad luck with… whatever the hell it is you were doing,” Cassie says, before her cheeks suddenly turn pink as she gets a good look at the pirate costume Rose is wearing. “I… wow. You look gorgeous, by the way.”

Rose raises an eyebrow, a gleam in her one eye. Apparently, drunk Cassie changed gears quickly. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” Cassie takes a step forward and immediately stumbles, falling into Rose’s arms with a giggle. “You’re like… a pirate and stuff, babe. It’s super cute.”

Rose blinks. “Did you just call me…?”

“I… I guess I did,” Cassie says, very slowly, suddenly frowning. “Is that… okay?”

“I… uh… how much have you drunk, anyway?” Rose asks, changing the subject like a coward.

“Oh, I don’t know that,” Cassie complains, a hand coming up to play around with Rose’s braids. “Hey, I kinda like these. Are you going to keep them?”

“What, the pirate braids?”

“No, stupid, the eyepatch,” Cassie shoots back immediately, giggling at Rose’s expression. “Yes, the pirate braids. Obviously.”

“…You know I’m not actually a pirate, right?”

“Could’ve fooled me,” Cassie snorts, giggling again when Rose’s expression turns even more incredulous. “Okay, okay, no more eyepatch jokes, I swear. Don’t shout at me!”

“I’m not… nevermind.” She has feeling she’s wasting her breath. “You wanna sit down?”

“I… ugh, I probably should,” Cassie admits, putting a hand to her brow and Rose dutifully wraps an arm around her shoulder and starts leading her to a couch. “I feel like the room is spinning right now.”

///

“… so then we—well, I should say she, but I was there too, y’know?—found this Ancient Greek statue buried in the volcanic rock, right, an original, right, and that’s very wow, right, because like,” Cassie babbles happily, gesticulating wildly with her hands up at Rose, “y’know?”

“…Sure,” says Rose, who does not know and could literally not care less. “And then what happened?”

“And then… and then… eeeugh.” Cassie makes a weird noise in the back of her throat for no reason Rose can think of and lets her head flop back down onto Rose’s lap, sighing pleasantly and snuggling into her leg. “You’re… you’re really good to me, you know that?”

Rose hears alarm bells ringing in her head. “Good to you how?”

Cassie’s face scrunches up pensively. “You know… like… like, ugh, I don’t remember the phrase. Um… y’know, you’re like chocolate, or something.”

Rose lets out a breath she didn’t know she was holding and smirks. Looks like things can remain uncomplicated a little while longer. “Why, cause I’m so sweet?”

“You’re the furthest thing from sweet there is, cyclops,” Cassie snorts, grinning, before her expression turns serious once again. “No, I guess it’s cause you’re… you know, something I know I shouldn’t indulge in but can’t keep myself away from.” And then she smiles and reaches up to palm Rose’s cheek, like she hasn’t just opened a pit in Rose’s stomach. “You know. Like chocolate.”

You know. Like chocolate.

You know. Like chocolate.

“So I’m a guilty pleasure, huh?” Rose’s one eye is dark in the shadows of the room. “Is that it?”

“Yeah, exactly,” Cassie says happily, snapping her fingers together. “That’s the phrase I was looking for! Guilty pleasure. You’re so smart Rose, thank you.”

Rose just… looks at Cassie for a long moment.

Cassie’s smile fades. “Rose?”

Rose doesn’t scream. She doesn’t freak out. She doesn’t shove Cassie off of her or hit her in the face or do any of the things people assumed she did when she was upset.

She does something far more terrible instead.

She takes a deep breath, brushes Cassie’s hand off her cheek, shuffles to the side so that Cassie’s head flops down onto the couch, and stands up, walking towards the bathroom without saying another word to Cassie. She hears the demigoddess calling out her name in drunken confusion, but she doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow down, swiping at her one eye in an attempt to stop the sudden wetness in it from coalescing into tears.

Rose isn’t smart. Rose is the dumbest person alive. Because she had actually believed all this bullshit meant something.

How stupid can you be?