Steps to Enlightenment Part I—The Longing Ignorance

I think I knew the days of eating peanut butter squares with Beast Boy on the curb outside the downtown candy store or fighting over the last burger with Cyborg, reading in the grass with Raven or blushing as Starfire tucked dandelions into my hair and said I looked like one of the princes of her planet, were over the day Slade once again returned back into our lives; and I think that, from that moment on, things were never the same. These instances of friendship with my team were shrouded in warm light that made my nostalgia wonderful but somehow so painful all at once, upon remembering all the times we had shared in places that were now demolished or being replaced by office buildings, as if to defy the idea that these instances had ever actually taken place; and in being so they seemed so amazingly far away that I began to question myself—because when it came down to it, the era of things that were brighter seemed all too beautiful and naïve to have allowed to a future like this, let alone a future at all. And it seemed, sadly, that that innocence could never be regained as too much was learned and brooded upon, when new connections made terrible while somehow beautiful ties bind unlikely souls together; and my longing for times that were simply, again, just the five of us—as terrible as that sounds—fighting crime together, laughing as we chased Mumbo out of the bank to regain stolen money, and realizing how much fun we'd actually had escaping Mad Mod's funhouse (and he was just called Mad Mod then, not Carnaby-Neil Richards, the outright fashion designer who crossed Slade in the most unnerving way to me). We were young and so was everyone else; it seemed that there was not a villain we couldn't defeat or a task we couldn't overcome together—and we were sure, more than anything, that things would always be that way. There would always be the candy store for Beast Boy and I, and there would always be a warm field that five of us could sit in together in the park and be kids like we were meant to be.

Before the end of the world, which would bring about an era of darkness. The Brotherhood of Evil.

The truth was—we had grown up.

I can easily remember the first time Slade ever came into my life. The first time in our star-crossed being when the Hive-Five, then only three, Jinx, Gizmo, and Mammoth, sent to us to deliver that very thing that would become the very epicenter of my life: never-ending consumption of my mind by Slade. It is very strange, actually, to think that so many of the people who had once enveloped our lives with their presence in their crime were now what we might regard best friends, trusted, really, friends, even now after this new development of my life, because even now I know that they had nothing to do with what happened to me and that, above all else, just like us, they were just a sad group of kids looking for answers in a world which could never provide them; they were kids who all understood the world and life and yet seemed not to know they did and cloaked it in the very thing they would never have again, innocence. Billy was a fun kid, even knowing him for the short period of time I did; like Thunder, Lighting, but mostly Gizmo, Billy just seemed to want to have fun, and I could tell, even in those few days, that like Thunder and Lighting, crime was not something he wanted, but something which would take him from the reality of the world, and he seemed to get mixed up in the wrong group like the rest of them. Like everyone else, he started to fear the Brotherhood of Evil especially because he had escaped from the freezer unlike them, and in his sureness that they would come after him I knew he was not a threat, and knew that, like everyone else, he put on a face that would convey his acceptance of the new life—an attempt to convey that, like me, he was amazed at where he had ended up but did not miss the old days and strove to cloak the reality in fun, pointlessness that would inevitably remove him from the present and into somewhere brighter if only in thoughts. He didn't realize, I don't think; in fact, I don't think any of them really realized it, as Beast Boy, Kid Flash (a.k.a WW, or "Double-U"), Más and Menos, Hotspot, Harold, Thunder and Lightning, Gizmo, Billy and I tried to build a really big fort out of pillows (something, for some reason, the cloaking of life, probably, Gizmo and he really liked to do, which I found really funny), while Jinx and Raven scoffed at how stupid we were but then finally joined in later on when we told them they couldn't come in when we were done.

We had spent our lives doing things the same way, and when they changed we couldn't handle it, really, basically. We were all pretending that things were okay; we were discussing the eviction of Kyd Wykkyd, Seymore, and Mammoth, which I would inevitably agree upon because we all had the understanding that even if they were, in fact, planning to simply betray us, they most likely wouldn't fare very well against the twenty-so of us, and so they were to be removed from the freezer a few days after I was captured. I didn't know if they were free or still frozen because of the interference and problems with me being gone; though with an understanding of their inner-workings, and my own situation, I wasn't too worried—because when it all came down to it, in the end, they were kids just like us, and there was the living examples of Thunder and Lightning, now some of my best friends in the world, to make me constantly question the real evilness of someone and force me to walk in their shoes, if only briefly to understand. I knew, frankly, that they had nothing to do with my capture, or Slade—in fact, it was something I felt, surely, and I would never doubt them; because things had changed and the truth of the matter was that none of us had the courage to do anything about it; things had changed and we didn't know any longer what was right and wrong or where we should be, so we faded to anonymity and tried to lead the lives of normal teenagers we had previously been denied in our crime fighting, and to assist an enemy was too bold a feat for any of the poor, broken Hive Five, who seemed to realize where they really stood, after being defeated by us, in the world. They were using their brains more than their muscles and they lapsed into quiet passiveness; and, at first if just to ensure we wouldn't go after them, they quickly became a part of our lives which was more than just a search for protection—

Those odd connections were established, and we were all bonded, so strangely.

Of course I would not see the last of them—and Slade knew it, too.

Sometimes I would wonder whether or not this event that had changed our being and shrouded it in darkness had, too, effected our new friends—sometimes, I would sit and wonder where people like Jinx and the Hive Five were when Trigon returned and the world turned to stone; and I would speculate tiredly whether or not they, too, had been shrouded by that darkness when stone became them, if it did. I wondered if the change had come for them as it had come for us, but I was almost certain that, ultimately, there was a shift in mood in everyone after the occurrence of the end of the world, and a looming knowledge that things after something like that would never, really, be the same again; that the days of harmless sparring and throwing them in jail only to have them escape and repeat it all over again were over; and I began to wonder if it was that darkness that encouraged those enemies lurking ever in the shadows to rebel and join the Brotherhood of Evil, which, of course, the epitome of darkness and shadow. I wondered if significance of this day, the day of Raven's birth and what she, Slade, and I had done on that day, had bleed into the lives of everyone who we'd so previously regarded lightly and stirred within them something that was never there, a darkness driving a need for completion of their goal and destroying the desire within them to tease and toy and keep the game forever going. I wondered if there was more to what we did there than we had realized and wondered if darkness was not limited solely to us and encompassed the earth on a much larger scale—

If, ultimately, the change had taken everyone.

Things would never be the same again. People watched passively as the candy store was demolished and sat idly as the grass of the park was torn up.

Terra knew it, too. Things changed. She couldn't be with Beast Boy after that day; not the day that she betrayed him, not the day that Slade died, but the day that Slade came back to earth and set out to destroy it in exchange for his life. This day held significance, and I knew it. We all did.

Like my first encounter with Slade, this "last" would stand out in my mind as being one of the most frightening and suffocating, perplexing in every aspect, more than any other, even when considering the odd apprentice arch or Slade's constant sparing of my life when it came to our light and almost friendly "sparring," where there seemed truthfully to be so little on the line that there was room for experimentation. This was perplexing to me at the time, of course, but looking back upon it this was so much straightforward and full of that light we would quickly lose that it seemed impossible to conceive such a shift in attitudes as we'd had it. That is, it's hard to understand how Slade could go from taking my arm as I almost tumbled to my death off the edge of a building to having an eagerness to sacrifice my life for his own—only later to profess another eagerness to rekindle our relationship if we survived our ordeal. It was so strange, and it was different, not knowing, for the first time, what Slade was really, totally thinking—not knowing if he really meant to kill me, if it mattered, or if it was just another part of his ever-lasting conquest of my apprenticeship to him. It was the first time he had become mysterious to me and it was not the last, of course; because though I'd like to think he wasn't so, I think I knew all along that when things were brighter, Slade cared for me and all revolved around this, and things were benign enough to give into his obsessions but to wonder and inquire. It seems like my naivety made it so that foreseeing something like this was impossible—and maybe secretly I believed, maybe hopefully and desperately, that no matter what I did, Slade would never kill me, and would always hold me in this positive light and continue to coddle me even when I pushed and prodded; and I will admit that though maybe in the front of my mind I tell myself Terra was a true apprentice to him, I know concretely that he was not surprised when we returned and attribute it to his conquest still raging, no questions turning my mind forever and hopelessly—because Terra was a pawn and nothing more, and both of us knew it, ultimately, though like everyone else, however in a different and much brighter light as we still lingered, we pretended not to. But when darkness took hold, "no question" became ultimately a fear cultivated inside me that rose up strongly every time I saw Slade loom menacingly over me, his eyes glowing red with that fire Trigon had given him and his hands emanating the same rage and fury and power. I wondered, each time I saw this dead man walking, whether or not this would be some of the last moments I had on this earth, and wondered subsequently what Raven and Slade would do when I was gone and dead or turned to stone, wondered darkly whether or not the two of them would live together as the only mortals in the world. Because darkness took my mind and projected what it wanted—

And Slade was darker; if only in the sense that I could not understand what he wanted, really, he was darker, and ominous, and his new powers could only serve to heighten that.

I remember that this feeling was never so profound as it had been when we had journeyed to the depths of the catacombs of the library Slade left standing amongst the block which, like our brighter past, was to be demolished; strangely, there was a hesitant quality nothing like the previous battles in which he had thrown everything at me almost carelessly, again, a stark, polar opposite of his previous morale, when it had been almost like walking on eggshells around me, a practiced and carful, almost loving thing. I would notice for the first time that he seemed to avoid, in a calculated fashion, contact with me as to prevent himself from engaging in a fight with me, as if if he did, he would be forced to harm me with these new and hateful, dark powers. I think if it weren't for Raven stepping in, and weren't for my own interference, I probably would have lived at least a little longer than the others, who he seemed intent to kill and whose lives would have undoubtedly ended there; but I think what comes down to it is the fact that, upon speculation, it might be easy to say he was simply putting us out of our misery because he knew we were going to die anyway, and not yet had that rebellion been stirred within him—but what was really perplexing to me, and would be, even as Lady Red sprung into our lives and pushed us further into the darkened realm, was the fact that Slade's true intentions seemed to fluctuate even when things should have been clear cut:

Slade would save me from one of the flame monsters we fought, one moment, and the next he would step out of the way, as if hoping it would catch me off guard enough that I might tumble into the lava and nevermore be seen. Similarly he would almost uncaringly abandon me at the fork in the road, only to return, later, as we faced Trigon, to save me when I had almost died in the wake of the devil's power. What has stood out in my mind since then is our last real transaction, the last time we would talk before the present moment, at the fork in the road, before we had parted ways. And I don't think I'll ever forget how strange everything became, how, as it is now, darkness had so far encompassed us we seemed to work emotionlessly and almost robotically, uncaringly, so far removed from one another because we were trying to get out alive while we realized that ultimately there was so little that resembled our bright past together that it really didn't matter what we did, exactly, in the wake of the events of that day. When he tumbled from the cliff we walked on, weakened by his state of death as his mind seemed to slowly descend into the insanity that was the world, and as I would learn today, heightened by Trigon's strange powers, I would slide down and, before I could stop myself, would offer my hand like I might have done to any of my companions had they fallen and needed assistance and support. I did not, and still do not, know what to think in regards to his own actions, as he reached up and gripped the hand I offered, firmly, and used it to hoist himself up; and almost automatically did I support his weight, which was considerable despite the fact that there was not much left of him but a flesh-eaten skeleton. I felt the bones briefly caress my hand, skeleton fingers digging into the flesh with a kind of desperate but somehow totally knowing and practiced, vehement, is probably the best word for it, force which I can still feel, and suppose I will never forget the exact feeling of this, like anything else memorable, though I still can't understand why it so much stood out in my mind. Arguably it was not the most disturbing thing I had ever experienced, of course—and yet I would dream about this moment in the following years so that I woke in cold sweats, panting. I would remember the way he had looked at me as he rose up, with this certainty gleaming in the one live part of him, the eye, narrowed and looking more than anything to be filled with undeniable rage, and seemed to burn in the emotions of this. But what struck me was not this, but rather the fact that mingled in this was something else far more disturbing than the solemn but passionate glare. I saw admiration and something that was, against what I wanted so badly to believe, so loving and so much like the Slade I had known when things were brighter that it seemed to overload the entire cavern, and our presences and what was being exchanged between us seemed to shake the very structure of the world and the way Trigon had changed it. As if he had just then regained the life he had lost because of what I had done, he looked at me and did not, for the first time, try to hide what he truly felt in the wake of this darkness; and what power it had had, really. Things were not the same, but I think what those skeleton hands and that lively eye did for me in that moment was remind me of our past to make me strive for what it had been, to contrast horrid darkness of our lives but mostly, set Slade prominently in my mind. To be covered my discontent, Slade was the only one strong enough to come through where it would bother me enough that I noticed. A frustration in this way—because there was something there and I knew it, and yet, no matter how I tried, I could not get to it.

Like a popcorn kernel stuck in your teeth, or a phantom hair lingering in your throat. There but unable to be fully realized.

As with the moment with the skeleton hands, I had nightmares of my experience with Slade in the later stages of our relationship before the Brotherhood of Evil, mostly engulfing the idea of his powers and how he had used them against us. To be honest, I was very frightened by them, and found myself constantly having the image of the mark of Scath burning before my eyes like an impression from some bright light. I felt the pain of those powers and, especially in the immediate aftermath of the supposed end, I woke up not only in cold sweats but with pain in my heart and stomach, as well as aches about my body and searing sensations, as if my body was burning, being pressed against hot concrete like in brighter days when a pool had been near the park, where I have strong memories of sitting outside of it with Cyborg because he couldn't swim, drinking sodas and eating nachos while watching Starfire and Beast Boy tackling one another in a failed game of marco pollo. I stayed dry for him and, on the slotted chairs, often acquired quite a burn but was never so pained as I was by the aftermath of these night terrors, and again I would realize that it all related back, in some way, to the concept of light and dark and how my mind had been divided in that way; where those burns were the result of something nice I had done to further establish connections with one of my best friends, and therefore was made worth it, these "dream burns" were foreign and totally invasive, painful, and disturbing in their nature. The morning after these sensations, I often found odd shaped rashes which were perhaps the result of these, but I did not know and never confronted Cyborg about, who could have done a diagnostic for me to find out what had caused it to appear, and instead for a few days wore a long sleeved shirt, thicker gloves, and kept my cape pinned shut over my chest where the rash prominently was. This happened three times, exactly, and stopped exactly three weeks out from the day Raven expelled her father from the world and Slade regained his body. I had the dream the third day of the week, on Tuesday night, each time; every time, I woke up at three-thirty three on the dot from the same dream, and by the third week I became increasingly horrified at pattern and similarity of each occurrence; I wondered how, if anything, I could have woken up at the same time with the same dream every Tuesday for three weeks, which seemed not to be plausible in a sensible world. And yet I seemed to skirt around the idea of the dream itself, again, the same each of the three times, perhaps because it was so terrifying in itself and shrouded by that darkness begged to be set aside in the world where I was similarly surrounded by denial, even lasting into the realization that, had I done something, my fate may have been different;

But ultimately it was not a dream I would have wanted to do much with, because of its disturbing nature—not even regarding the extra reassurances for fear that came with it, ultimately.

I had never been in a morgue before. I know that sounds odd, because I'm a crime fighter and supposedly, theoretically, most crime fighters have been at the side of a wounded victim to wish them away or a criminal who they pray will just hang on enough for them to prosecute—but ultimately to project their disappointment, regrets, wishing and beating up upon themselves that they should have done better; perhaps crime fighters circulated morgues for evidence and hung about coroners like Plummer's apprentice (a legend that Raven shared by candle light with us after we had watched an offshoot of Wicked Scary and could not go to sleep), hoping for truth above all. But I was a vigilante, and I actually cared very little about the prosecution, sentencing, or evidence of any of it—but more accurately, in keeping with the theme of avoiding the truth, I think what drove me from the morgues was so clearly the experiences early on with death, witnessing my parents laid out in wood coffins and decorated with these horrid, morbid dead-flower wreaths, under a gray sky but bright green turf grass. I stayed not long; the man who became my father would end up having to chase me as I ran away from the scene, away from the preacher's echoing words of God and heaven and His mercy, though as I ran down the gradual incline at the top of which they were to be buried, I saw none of this, but those dead funeral flowers and the wood of the coffins. I did not dabble in death since that day and wouldn't until my initial bond with Raven, after she'd been inside my mind and had offered to help me to expel some of the negativity that surrounded my idea of death. She told me there were not dead flowers and gray skies, which she had seen in mind, making me almost begin to cry, for whatever it was worth, but rather a warmth that succeeded anything I could imagine here in this world. She said she had been there and wanted to take me there—and before Slade's return, I thought I was ready.

Yet what would come before this warmth could come was of course the end and inevitably the dream—a morgue which I shouldn't have been able to see as clearly as I did, because I had not dabbled in death since the day of the funeral, but there it was. Gleaming in its sterile harsh and coldness, the place was so void of warmth and anything living that there seemed to be a white yet oppressive emptiness about it, like standing in a riff somewhere where life was drained so easily that the mind was too so easily made to collapse into insanity. The metal tables and the body cabinet glinted in the white light, mimicking the eye which seemed to reign so thoroughly even in this realm. On the tables, of which there were three in the room, lay three different bodies, beneath thick white sheets which encompassed their entirety and made it almost impossible to tell who lay beneath each. Their contours still defined, one had visible breasts and a small, pointy nose, a delicate waist with legs of similar deftness and arms that were long and now limp, like silk laying on a table; one had a very slender frame, but was otherwise indistinguishable to me as to who it might be; the last had a large build, and was muscular especially in the chest but slender like the second figure. The nose was similarly pointy but there was a strangeness about the eye on the right (to my left), which seemed not to exist as the sheet somehow seemed to be pulled into it, as if, similarly to the girl's arms, draped within it like rope into a black cavern. Their only visible features were feet; nude each, they sported toe-tags which were always blurred so that I could not see the name, expect that each tag was signed by the coroner—a mark which was the burning mark—the mark of Scath. And they were cold and unmoving; the only breath about the room was my own, but it was short and clearly to be dying, and in the frigid air my breath rose from me in now familiar smoke rings, as I stood over them and watched the bodies lie there, unable to move. Then from the door, a looming, metal thing which seemed likely that any minute, in its ominousness, it would simply be thrown open, or perhaps would seem to grow closer until it held me in forever, three knocks were heard. I would hear a series of three knocks about the room, repeating and echoing about the empty and lifeless place and seeming to drive me mad until my own screams echoed with them. A girl with four eyes would then rise from one of the drawers meant for bodies, shrouded in darkness, a shadow figure; she was a doll and had long, limp arms which hung down at her sides and stayed there flat when she began to slither towards me like a snake. Her glass eyes rolled until they looked at me and she said, always, three times, in a mutated voice of Raven, once so beautiful but not possessing untold depths of evil as it seemed to now, "تذكرني كما مررت بها، كما أنت الآن كان ذلك مرة واحدة وأنا، وأنا الآن لذلك سوف يكون، والاستعداد للموت ويتبعني.!" and simultaneously the chanting, like the three knocks repeated in sets, the words, "لك، الطيور!" were too repeated in sets by a similarly morphed voice, deep and brooding but light and in that manner suspicious and frightening, eerie, and I saw symbols appear upon my body as my clothes fell away and I was turned to stone; and silence would come except for the repetition of three consecutive taps against phantom walls.

At first, I thought Slade was absent from the dream upon my first few speculations after the first time I dreamt it on a cold, Tuesday night that past spring. And yet it was not until tonight that I would realize Slade had been in that dream all along—

Beneath the sheet.

Because when it came down to it, Slade was still tethered to Trigon, as I would learn. And when it came down to it, he was still just as helpless as he had been in those final days to do anything about it, more so than I could have ever guessed.

Weak like a corpse on a drainage table.

0~0 0~0

Despite the cold of the place, I was beginning to warm up. My shivering had stopped as I sat in the throne-chair where I vaguely could recall trying to pull a sneak attack on him when things were brighter and this darkness hadn't enveloped us; he had gotten me another blanket which I took without much caring how it made me look to him—because of course if it had been in the aftermath of any other happening, the last thing I would have done around Slade would be to show any kind of weakness, but I was buzzing with the knowledge that threw me into dim passiveness that it really did not matter any longer, because there were already so many things we could have used against one another—and I kept myself wrapped up as tightly as I could manage without making my arms sore. The tea he had brought me was really good, too, and also managed to warm me up quite a bit; not that I might have needed it, because I think after having shut down my emotions after once again for the first time in years dabbling in cold death, because that, of course, was in keeping with the theme of ignorance the key to at least something like bliss, what I could gain, I was calmer than he himself was, though perhaps only outwardly, and probably wouldn't have needed it. But my throat had dried from my screaming, and it felt very good to drink it, even if, most likely, it had some kind of drug to lull me to sleep put in it and taking affect, perhaps calming me further. I did feel kind of sleepy but was not, by any means, ready to go back to bed just yet.

In fact—if I didn't get some answers from him, I wouldn't. Like back in the cave with the fire-demons.

"Do you know how long it's been?" he would ask me.

"I don't know," I said, removed, sipping the tea slowly and inhaling its aroma, fully enjoying it. I didn't need to be told it was drugged, because the first few sips had already alerted me to the fact that a normal tea couldn't make me feel the way this did. And to be honest, I really didn't care; I figured I would pass out soon but as long as I heard what I needed, it didn't matter, because in the end, I was not worried at all for my own health—not even so much because I trusted Slade but because I seemed not to really care any longer what happened to me, because I of course had a looming knowledge of the truth I had tried so long to put off but seemed so totally inevitable now as I looked at the list of all my best friends staring hatefully back at me, that, ultimately, they would all be better off if I was not there to potentially hurt them; and unlike what Slade thought, I did remember the rules and didn't need to be reminded when the real question was how could I forget? "It's been a few years, I think. We've been fighting the Brotherhood of Evil so long I don't even really know anymore."

He nodded, slowly, looking at me. "Yes, I know. I was worried, you know."

"Worried?" I downed the rest of the tea.

He nodded again. "Yes, Robin, I was. The four of them are some very terrible people, but you know that. They're persistent little fuckers and worse than the Viet Cong in their slyness."

"Yeah." Considering I hadn't actually fought in that war, I was surprised I gave him that much credit—but my removed, cold and sarcastic way of thinking probably says enough itself.

"Do you want some more, Robin? I bet you're thirsty," he said, and took the cup out of my hands without waiting for an answer.

"Thanks," I said slowly, watching without much interest as he poured more tea into the cup. Still in the beginning of our new relationship, I wondered very vaguely how things would work now, in the back of my mind debating whether or not it would be like the way my dad had treated me or something else—though again, it little mattered, especially in consideration to everything else I was now learning, with its subsidiary knowledge also tacked on to the growing pile of things to consider. Ignoring the fact that he said he was worried for me—which of course implied that he had probably been watching as I fought the BHE, and a host of other things like, why was he watching in the first place, or, how did he know to watch?—I wondered dimly his relation to the BHE and ended up getting him and myself sidetracked from the real issue at hand—that of, um, how in hell did he open up a riff in space and use some demon hands to drag me down into a black and white coffin like freakin' Harold while a bunch of flames shot out from his body?!—when I voiced it almost automatically as I took again the cup of tea, now full and again tempting. "How do you know them?"

I heard a soft chuckle arise from the mask, though I noticed it was weaker now than it had been. "They offered me membership, Robin."

"Membership," I repeated, a statement because somehow I wasn't surprised, and said, again with the same almost automations, "So why didn't you take it?"

He paused for a minute, seeming to consider whether or not he wanted to launch into what I assumed would be probably a pretty big and even impressive story—though for my sake thankful he too seemed to realize that it wasn't the matter at hand. "Another time, little one. I know you're curious but it isn't really relevant right now, and as far as I'm concerned they're really not worth our time, right?"

"Right." I calmly sipped the tea, looking at the screen with eyes that must have looked blank, and there was a pause.

"There are a lot of things going through your mind right now, aren't there, Robin?" he would say finally, slowly, looking down at me, with something that almost resembled sympathy as I too returned his gaze and stared into the eyes after having some trouble taking it off the names on the screen. Raven's had stood out to me, as if it was bolded and underlined while the others, though they were important, of course, but seemingly irrelevant in the moment, were the same color as the red blood that offset them. When I looked at the screen I had not been able to take my eyes off the letters and everything I said seemed to be time-wasting excuse so that I could continue to stare at the name, transfixed, and even when I turned away, I could still see the name burned before my eyes, which, set upon Slade, shifted immediately into the mark of Scath—and yet, I would continue to stare at him blankly as I drank more tea.

"I just have one question to start off with," I said slowly, and sipped again.

"Go ahead."

"Does Scath speak Arabic?"

I drank the tea, but I was a step closer to enlightenment.

Author Note:

Ha la la-we getting arab money. you want this hook you gon' pay that money.

Yeah, I am so tired. SOOOOO tired. Goodnight, childs.

~Son