Chapter One: This First Summer Month
1
May 30, 2001
Titan Tower --- The Living Room, 16:04
"I'm sorry, I just think it's a bad idea," Terra snarled. "We've got five people already. It's not like we need another person."
Raven snapped. "I don't remember this being a vote. And the last time I bothered to check, Robin led this group. Not Terra. Stop trying to wrest control."
"Friends, please! No more mean words to each other!" Starfire's eyes glowed.
Robin could only sigh. Both Raven and Terra had points, and Starfire had refused to take a side. When he decided, the others would have to either live with it or quit.
The division on this issue hurt their teamwork badly. They'd had problems subduing Cinderblock of all criminals, just because Raven and Terra wouldn't work together.
The situation had departed Crazy at sixty MPH and headed to Pathetic, on to Bizarre, had taken a sharp left turn at Absurd, and had now arrived at Motherfucking Ridiculous. Population of five, possibly soon six.
"Terra, why is Superman's idea bad? If you can explain, then I'll be happy to listen. But if you just have a bad feeling. . ." He shrugged. "It's not good enough."
Terra looked up. She looked down. She looked at the walls.
Robin quashed a grin. It's like synchronized swimming, but with your eyes.
When he thought up jokes like that, no wonder he had trouble keeping a straight face trying to collar bad guys.
"Nothing to say?" Superman inquired from the giant monitor.
Terra shook her head. The butterfly hairpin she wore glittered faintly in the afternoon sunlight.
"Does anybody else have a problem with this?" Robin asked.
Nobody said a word. Robin waited a few moments, but the communal answer rang clear.
"All right, then. Beast Boy, welcome to the Titans."
The young man stepped forward, a carpetbag in one hand. He transferred the bag to his left hand and offered Robin his right.
Robin took it. It felt normal, just like Cyborg's human hand, or Terra's. The only difference between Beast Boy's hand and his own was the green tint.
"I'll show you to your room, if you want. We just finished decorating it last night."
Titan Tower --- Beast Boy's Room, 16:17
Click.
The light goes on. Brightness.
Beast Boy felt his jaw drop. He knew it wasn't polite to stare, but. . .
"This is my room?" He asked.
"Yeah, 'course." Robin paused for a moment, then offered, "If you don't like the color scheme, we'll be happy to help you repaint tomorrow."
"No, no! It's great!" And it was great.
"I'm glad you like it. If there's anything you'd like to add to your room, just let Raven or me know. We'll be happy to help you get it. Within reason, of course."
"Of course." He laughed. "Hey, could I get an M-16 and mount it on that wall?"
Robin thought he was joking, apparently, because he laughed, too, and said: "What did I just say about within reason?"
"Well, I think it's very reasonable."
The Boy Wonder just shook his head and laughed some more, then left, calling something along the lines of, 'see you at dinner'.
They ate dinner in the living room that night. With the addition of Beast Boy, they no longer had enough space for them all at the dining room table. Terra's presence had pushed the space thing, really.
"Sorry to make you guys have to order a new table," Best Boy mumbled into the plate containing his vegetarian-topping encrusted pizza.
Starfire waved it off. "It is really nothing, Friend Beast Boy! We are happy to have you with us. A new table is no price at all to pay!"
Robin nodded his agreement and mouthed off some inane comment. Cyborg grinned and thumped Beast Boy soundly on the back, echoing Starfire's sentiments. She herself managed to force some meaningless but pretty words through her lips.
Terra alone among the Titans failed to make some action of encouragement, or some encouraging sound.
Raven didn't imagine things. She didn't.
But she couldn't think of another explanation for seeing Beast Boy look to Terra, who crammed her face full of pizza with narrowed eyes, and then make a terrifying face.
But the face passed, and Beast Boy only grinned when Starfire tried to run her hands through his hair, exclaiming: "It is not a color I have ever seen on a human!"
Raven half-expected Beast Boy to fall into some sort of angst mode, but he surprised her (and probably surprised them all) by merely saying, "I'm the living proof that the cure is sometimes worse than the disease."
But as Raven looked at him, aware of his new abilities, she wondered about that. Was the cure really worse than the disease? It certainly didn't look worse than the disease.
Then again, who was she to judge? She hadn't seen the disease. She hadn't suffered the disease.
0
SPOTLIGHT ONE: BE BRIGHT TURN ON THE LIGHT
I'm glad we redecorated after that entire incident. Really, really glad. I don't think I could bear to sit on the same couch again, or look at walls of the same color.
I know Robin couldn't either. The Titans will never be the same.
But that's not what I'm here to talk about, is it? We found the hair in this very living room— in a vase, on a dead rose, of all places. In fact, we learned that our spacious, airy living room would become the funeral ground.
The darker colors suit it. We didn't exactly have a lot of colors to choose from if we wanted to avoid the colors of the victims and their murderer.
The Titans will never be bright again. I'm sorry for that. Those days of pure brightness, I miss them. I miss them terribly. Not a day goes by that I don't think about what we lost, that I wish I could have done something to help.
I have always prided myself on honesty. If I am not a good person, and I know I'm not, then at least I am honest. I may hide, I may conceal, but I will never, ever, lie.
Why didn't I help, you ask. The truth, then: I was too small. Too weak.
Too afraid to do anything about it.
0
2
May 31, 2001
Titan Tower --- Training Room, 07:12
Robin extended an arm, his gloved hand closing into a fist just in time to grasp the bar. He used his momentum to swing himself upwards, towards the next bar. He un-tucked his left hand from behind his back and caught the next bar with it, then added the other hand and used momentum to swing into a handstand on the bar.
He could feel sweat pouring into his eyes. However many hours of this as necessary always made him feel better— if stickier and dirtier— when his early waking insomnia kicked in.
His muscles hadn't even begun to ache yet. He kept going, kicking up his momentum until, he had reached the necessary momentum to perform his favorite move.
From across the room, Starfire watched him, those crazy green eyes intense on his body. He could feel the heat, the weight, the intensity of that gaze.
It made him feel good, to know he had the full attention of his audience.
On the dismount, he performed the quad. Oh, the quad. The move he'd figured out in one of his later years with the circus. The move only two other gymnasts in the world could perform, neither of them in America, neither of them Romany Gypsy.
The quad made him the pride of his people. It had made Batman recognize him as adult, as excellent, as a motherfucking god in something.
The quad. A quadruple flip. Four full rotations of his body, his knees tucked into his chest, his head down, his arms wrapped around his ankles. On the last rotation, he began to un-tuck himself. Before he connected with the ground, his head had snapped up, his legs had unfolded, and his arms lifted.
His hands connected with the mat. He used his body's need to continue movement to head into a back handspring. He kept up the handsprings, finally landing on his feet without leaning backwards into another spring, and cast up his arms.
His parents' deaths had ejected him from the circus, but not even Batman had been able to pull the showman out of him.
He could still feel Starfire watching him. Behind him, her hands slapped together in a thin, ironically unamused sound.
He bowed, a grin twisting onto his face.
Beast Boy walked into the room, wearing the uniform he'd brought with him.
Robin felt his grin practically melt away. He only did shows in his mask and his briefs for Starfire.
None of the other Titans knew.
"Uh, hi, Beast Boy." He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, his face going red. "How did you, uh, well, uh . . . sleep?"
"Slept great." Beast Boy stretched and yawned. "So, what's up with you two? And why are you only wearing your underwear?"
"Well, uh, I had problems sleeping. And when I have problems sleeping, I just come in here and work out."
"Had problems sleeping? But it's well after seven."
"I've been at this for a few hours. Sometimes, I just wake up really, really early."
Now was not the time to go into his insomnia. Now was the time to scooch his ass out of the room and hide it under his bed until either the ground swallowed him or the now-permanent red hue to his face had vanished.
But Beast Boy no longer cared. Instead his gaze now focused on Starfire.
Starfire waved. The expression on her face looked merry as ever, but Robin knew better. She felt just as embarrassed as he did. Tamaranian physiology just didn't show embarrassment in a way that humans grew up learning to read. Her default expression appeared to be happy, but the happiness had nuances that were too subtle for untrained humans to read, or even see.
This particular nuance of happy said: I am happy you are here because you a Friend, and Robin is a Friend, and three Friends together is a recipe for absolute boundless joy, but I rather wish you had not walked in at this exact moment. However, I refuse to let my wish that you could have walked in five minutes later obstruct my general joy at your presence.
Something in the way Beast Boy stared at Starfire unsettled Robin. It didn't disturb him, or make him feel possessive. The look wasn't hunger. It wasn't a leer. It was a perfectly neutral look.
But the intensity of that perfectly neutral look. . . It looked like an expression he might see on Raven's face. Hell, it barely counted as an expression. In short, it was just a look that unsettled you. And it unsettled you because who looks at people like that? Who just sits there and stares at them with no expression at all on their face, and stares at them like that for more than sixty seconds?
Even Starfire noticed it, and one might describe her grasp on human body language as tenuous at best. Starfire's smile shrank for about an instant. But within moments, her smile had returned to its usual size.
"We are performing some early morning training. Would you care to join us?"
Beast Boy grinned at her. "Sure. What do I do?"
Robin thought about it for a moment. "I'm not sure. For now, why don't you try going on the treadmill in different animal forms?"
Beast Boy moved towards the treadmill. "Okay. Now what?"
"Why don't you try a monkey, first?"
Beast Boy nodded.
Titan Tower--- The Living Room, 10:00
"I'm going shopping for a new dining table today," Robin announced after tapping his spoon against his bowl of cereal a few times. "Anybody want to come with me?"
Raven looked up from her cup of tea. She might not be able to convince Robin to buy a white table, but she might just be able to talk him out of buying a yellow one.
If she went along, of course.
"I'll come," she offered. After she'd made the offer, she went back to staring at her cup of tea.
She'd run out of the tea she usually drank for breakfast, so she'd made a cup of tea she occasionally used to divine the future.
The divination-through-tea was a pointless ritual, rather like the practice Terra's family had of using a ring on a chain to divine the number and gender of children each woman in the family would have. It wasn't real magic, just a load of pretty nonsense with the occasional inexplicable accuracy.
Raven blew a single breath on the tea, watching the way it rippled. The patterns of milk and creamer over top of the tea, as well as steam, fascinated her.
"I'll come too."
Somehow, Raven managed to blow on the tea just as Beast Boy spoke. The ripples in the tea didn't look like ripples she'd ever seen before.
She frowned, blew again.
The tea didn't ripple at all. Instead, it remained as still as the cheese-like substance that congealed in a cup if you left it at room temperature with milk in it for several weeks.
"Okay. Who wants what color for the new table? And nothing outrageous, like a functional white or wood stained a shade darker."
The quip belonged to Robin, of course. Robin had always been surprisingly good at jokes that didn't seem quite like jokes. Even she, who knew him better than just about any of the other Titans (with the marginally possible exception of Starfire) sometimes had difficulty telling whether or not he was being serious.
"How about bright green?" Starfire offered. "On Tamaran, that is the color of welcome and inquisitiveness. It would be perfect to sit at and inquire about sleep, schedules for the day, and how the day went as we eat!"
Raven contemplated saying, Newsflash, Starfire: you're the only Tamaranian here. But it seemed a bit harsh.
"How about yellow?" Robin offered.
"On Tamaran, that is the color of pregnancy."
"Isn't that kind of . . . bright?" Cyborg stretched his arms out behind his head. "I mean, this is a table. Not an entire room."
"Too bright, huh?" Terra stroked her chin for a second. "Then how about black? Black isn't very bright."
"The color of illness!"
"Um, would we be putting this table in Raven's room?" Cyborg joked. He laughed. "How about white?"
"The color of the joyful child-begetting consummation of marriage."
Raven blinked. In fact, just about everybody who heard that sentence blinked several times. Starfire had a penchant for saying the weirdest possible thing at the weirdest possible time. This newest comment set a record.
"Thank you, Starfire. That's . . . very interesting. Let's take a vote—"
"—I thought the Titans didn't vote," Terra snapped.
Robin sighed. "Terra, now you're just being contrary. Show of hands, how many for white?"
They all looked at Starfire, who had her head in her hands. They then all looked at the current dining table.
The current dining table was white.
Five hands lifted. A certain redhead banged her head against the coffee table.
3
May 31, 2001
Jump City--- Pier 1 Imports, 13:20
"White."
"Stained."
"White."
"Stained."
"White."
"Stained."
"White."
"Stained."
Beast Boy wandered off. Robin and Raven could get into their pointless argument. He was going to troll for . . . something. Amusement. Yeah. He was going to find a way to entertain himself.
Who would have thought that furniture shopping would be this boring? Then again, he'd never gone furniture shopping before.
Somewhere behind him, Robin and Raven continued to bicker like an old married couple.
He ignored it and continued through the store. Everything he saw was expensive.
Then again, when he thought about the Logan family fortune . . . none of it seemed all that expensive any more.
Every now and then, he picked something up and looked at it. He looked at the classical-Greek style chaise lounge. It was dark green.
Dark green. His favorite color. Green was like the opposite of red, right? Or was that blue?
He never could remember. Colors had never seemed important to him. And now his skin color defied even racism. How did you classify somebody whose skin wasn't even a natural color? Somebody who wasn't black, or white, or Asian, or any that shit?
And over there was a pillow. It was a nice pillow. It would look good on the lounge. It was a little cylindrical pillow, and it had tassels, and— Christ on a pogo stick, it really did look good on the lounge.
Hm, and over here. This standing sconce. The cylindrical shape and bronzy hue matched the pillow perfectly.
Within fifteen minutes, the display area around his favorite lounge looked like somebody out of one of those crazy home-decorating magazines had picked everything out.
Beast Boy clasped his hands behind his head and grinned at his handiwork.
The fourteenth employee walked by, then stopped. She stared at the display area and blinked.
"None of that stuff used to be there," she murmured.
Beast Boy grinned wickedly. "But it looks good there, doesn't it?"
"Well, yes, but those are all different brand names. . ."
"Aw, who cares? The room looks perfectly put together. The different brand names will mean different prices, so they'll buy the whole damn set and think they're getting a deal."
The woman laughed. "So short and so cynical."
"Stop that. You're a salesperson. Salespeople are bloodsucking fiends."
What, did she think he was wrong about the room? It was true. And he was right about salespeople, too.
"I guess it can stay." The woman chewed on her lip for a moment, then brightened. "Hey, can you do other areas?"
Beast Boy paused for a moment, then pulled out his brand new T-Communicator and flipped the lid up the first time.
"WHITE," Robin hissed. When he finally turned his attention to the communicator, it was in an extremely absent way. "Busy now ask Cyborg."
Beast Boy flipped the communicator closed and grinned. "No problem. I've got time."
Titan Tower--- The Living Room, 18:42
"So wait, just how did we get this table half off?" Terra demanded. "What, did you pull the 'I know Superman' trick again?"
Robin shook his head. "No, nothing like that! Beast Boy just used his employee discount for the next six months."
Terra made a sound that could have been a question or a screech.
Robin decided to interpret it as a screech. That way, he couldn't say the wrong thing and go through the rest of his life without any testicles.
"Well, Beast Boy did some sort of interior decorator mojo, and won over pretty well the entire staff by arranging every display area into this amazing show of interior decoration and then they hired him despite his age and he used his employee discount. They're sending him out as an interior decorator/consultant."
Cyborg looked over to the couch, where Beast Boy lay sleeping. "Doesn't that seem to be a little too good to be true? I mean, he's a thirteen-year-old boy. How could he possibly have become some kind of expert interior designer?"
"Cut him some slack, guys. Life has been a complete bitch to him so far." Robin waved his hands in his usual 'cool down' gesture.
"Robin speaks wise words," Starfire said, idly stroking the varnished and glossy table. The red hues in the wood seemed to respond somehow to the touch of her hands. "We have accepted Friend Beast Boy into our team. Is it not our duty to treat him as a teammate? Superman himself recommended Beast Boy to us. But more importantly, Beast Boy is our friend. We should trust him."
All eyes turned to a certain green-skinned young man.
Beast Boy twitched in his sleep. One leg kicked out, then the other. Both moved pathetically in the air for a moment, and then Beast Boy rolled over, onto his stomach.
0
Deep in the shady sadness of a vale
Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn,
Far from the fiery noon, and eve's one star,
Sat gray-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone,
Still as the silence round about his lair;
Forest on forest hung about his head
Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there,
Not so much life as on a summer's day
Robs not one light seed from the feathered grass,
But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest.
A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more
By reason of his fallen divinity
Spreading a shade: the Naiad 'mid her reeds
Pressed her cold finger to her lips.
Along the margin-sand large foot-marks went,
No further than to where his feet had strayed,
And slept there since. Upon the sodden ground
His old right hand lay nerveless, listless, dead,
Unsceptred; and his realmless eyes were closed;
While his bowed head seemed listening to the Earth,
His ancient mother, for some comfort yet.
—from Hyperion, JOHN KEATS