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The Titans: Triptych	By : hentaigoten Category: DC Verse Cartoons - Teen Titans > Crossovers > FemmeSlash Views: 1932 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Teen Titans or JLA. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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#8

Inner Dark

Chapter 2 of 3: The Offer

Every cell in her body screamed in protest at it’s presence. Every cell blared an alarm at the presence of something that did not belong here.

It moved with a darkness all of its own, a presence of more than a simple absence of light. Every sense she had told her it didn’t belong, that it shouldn’t be here.

Her body reacted automatically. Glands contracting, dumping a concentrated burst of adrenaline into her bloodstream. Digestion screeched to a halt, her heart rate picked up. Muscles tensed fractionally.

A telekinetic field flickered into being around her, flicking around her briefly. Her mind braced itself, designs crafted over years of meditation swinging into place. Her aura, visible on the magical spectrum, contracted in on itself, folding into defensive positions.

Long memorized incantations, drawing upon the magical fields around her, ran through her forebrain, pre-vocalising in preparation for defence and attack alike. Magics burnt deep into her flesh, deeper than sight alone could reveal, long since established and reinforced through dozens of rituals over the years, awakened and rose to augment her physical, mental and magical abilities, boosting her natural powers to higher levels.

It all happened in less than three seconds after she first instinctively detected the presence. Barely a second after that, it started to resolve itself as the darkness that her every cell screamed in protest at.

Just under two seconds, and she felt its mind. A wellspring of power, of primal emotion, of titanic intelligence…

A split second after that, and she felt its mental probes slamming into her defences.

Three seconds, and she heard its voice, from deep within the recesses of her mind.

A moment’s disorientation, as she looked around the landscape she found herself in. A vast, endless void surrounded her, darkness welling up from all sides. Great islands of rock, passageways moving and shifting…

Raven looked around, trying to find the location of the voice. The walls that had sprung up all around her mind provided no distraction. Their mere presence reassured her.

Her defences were still up. Creatures prowled in the dark, snarling at stray thoughts and emotions that had drifted past her defences. Plants, thorns protruding on all sides, wrapped around the rock face wherever they could gain purchase.

Taking to moving in mid-air, Raven shifted her view, taking in the armoured and guarded massive islands. The voice came from one of them, a place shrouded in the smoke of conflict and harsh industry.

Of course it would have gotten in there.

She flew towards it at speeds unattainable outside of the astral plane. The massive, brooding island of floating rock throbbed with emotion, its walls harsh and daubed messily. In places, daubed only in streaks. In others, with menacing symbols and images taken from her experiences and her extensive research.

Forms sprawled along the parapet, all along the walls. Bodies. A large number of them…

She recognized them. Everyone she had felt this particular emotion from.

Their desiccated forms turned to look at her with empty eye sockets. She tried not to look as they turned and looked at her. The wounds they bore spoke of inventive death and torture, and an utter lack of forgiveness from their tormentor.

She recognized each and every single form along the walls. She saw Nightwing, batarangs dug deep into pressure points all along his body. His face cut open to the skull. She saw Dr. Light, his flesh peeled off his body, his torso held open by surgical clamps, exposing his organs to view.

Jinx, her skin and muscle and fat sloughing off her bones as she moved, intense heat having turned her tissue to the consistency of butter. Aqualad, his fat and muscle drained away, leaving only a mess of bone and skin that still lived and moved against all reason.

There were more, but she flew into the town that clustered madly on the island, building up to the elaborate temple that adorned the peak. Raven landed in the street, dismissing the whispers that came from every empty doorway. She ignored the forms that clustered out of sight. They were all whispers of the main form here…

“Where is he?” She demanded, expecting an answer, though not a helpful one.

“Where do you think?” The voice hissed from behind her.

Raven turned around. A form identical to her own stood opposite her, her cloak wrapped around tight, her hood pulled down. Identical, but for the blood red robe she wore. Identical, but for the red glow of four eyes from under her hood.

“Don’t play games. You know how dangerous he is.”

“As much as us. He’s fun.” The other form grinned under her hood, exposing rows of gleaming white canines.

“Then I’ll tear him to pieces. Where is he?”

“Here, but you know that. He’s waiting for us. One of my friends is keeping an eye on him.” The red robed Raven reached into air, wrapping her fingers around a nebulous chain, and pulling hard.

A form tumbled into the roughly paved street. It was naked, and coated in filth. Bruises could be seen though it, coating it’s body. One eye was swelled shut by a bruise, the other hung barely open. Its red hair was cut roughly short, messily. A thick metal collar was around its neck. Light trails of blood ran from small cuts all over her body.

It was an exercise in humiliation, Raven knew. The red robed Raven pulled the chain, tugging it closer, making it kneel before her. Making it murmur a report. The red robed Raven smiled broadly, exposing rows of shark like teeth.

“Excellent, princess.” She said, tugging on the chain, pulling the collar tight and choking it. “I’ll have to make sure the rats have rabies, this time. The delirium will be a delight to watch.”

Raven glanced at the focus of the red robed Raven’s attentions, her eyes widening a fraction. Princess? But…

Raven slammed a wave of mental force into the red robed, daemonic version of herself.

“What is the meaning of this?” She demanded with a snarl.

“Don’t deny it, you simpleton.” Her daemonic formed alter ego said, pushing herself off the floor. Her hood had been knocked back, exposing her quad of glowing red eyes, snake like in their proportion. Her nose was non existent, but for a pair of slits that barely protruded above her lipless mouth. A smile crossed her face, revealing the multiple rows of canines she sported. “I am you. I am your anger towards her.”

“I don’t-”

“What did I say? You’re an idiot. You despise her for not making the first move. I despise her, because I am you.” Rage said, snarling. Then she paused, smiled. “Besides, she’s much more fun than our father, or Zatana.”

“Don’t-”

“Besides, you should see what that bitch Desire has constructed. I’ll be-”

“I don’t give a shit. Show me the intruder. Now.” Raven demanded, her tone brooking no argument.

“…fine.” Rage said, blinking and transporting them both deep into the island that was her home.

They reappeared inside a massive temple, a building constructed like an ancient amphitheatre. At the centre, a raised dais that bore a grooved table, and uncounted instruments of pain. Stone benches were sculpted into the temple, rising in tiers to allow better viewing of whatever would happen on the dais.

Every surface was carved with intricate depictions of violence, anger and hate. Events that had happened in the real world, others that she had thought of, scenes from history, scenes she kept locked safely away in her subconscious.

Standing, admiring one of the carvings, was a being. His body shifted, his skin and muscle mass constantly shifting form, in patterns seemingly crafted to nauseate and attract the viewer. He turned round, nodding amicably to Raven. There was a vague animal like presence about him, the way he projected himself…canine, feline, something else entirely…

“Raven.” He said, and she felt the fabric of her mind shift and seethe in protest at the sound of his voice. “It is good to meet you at last.”

“Why are you here?”

“Ah, the direct approach. Very well.” The presence said, nodding. “Your body is moving at normal speeds, but I’ve helped accelerate your mental processes. Boosting your abilities, as it were.”

“So?”

“The point is…I have an offer.”

“Not interested.” Raven said dismissively.

“Don’t be so quick, child. Those I work for have an offer you would do well to listen to. We can offer you so much.”

“Heard this kind of talk before.”

“I know. So, I offer you a chance of control…your powers, not as wild as they were before, but just as powerful, maybe more so. The uncontrolled demonstrations of power your emotions result in. They can be removed in an instant. All we ask for are a few basic services. That is it.”

Raven stood still for a moment, frozen in thought, before she replied.

“No.”

The representative frowned, glared at Raven. “This is our only offer, the only one that will ever come. This is your response?”

“It is. Now leave my mind, before I lobotomise you.”

The representative glanced around, seeing Rage grinning malevolently at the head of a phalanx of mutilated friends and enemies. Other robed shapes were emerging, clad in robes of varying colours.

With a snarl of frustration, he disappeared without another word.

“Pity…that would have been fun.” Rage said with a pout.

“This isn’t over.” Raven announced. She knew it couldn’t be. But other than that, she knew nothing. She needed to find out about her enemy…

Like a fish hook in the back of her skull, she felt reality reassert itself, her mental construction disappearing to be replaced by the night sky, the wind, the petals, the breath that stirred the air…

A dull roar filled her ears. Her vision was blurred, fragmented into too many pieces. Something, some otherworldly smell, screamed for attention. Her skin felt raw, fabric scraping roughly against it, sanding off layers of skin. Bile rose at the back of her throat, something triggering the involuntary response.

A soft, rhythmic sound emerged from the static that blared into her ears. She closed her eyes, blocked out the conflicting images, concentrated on the pulse like sound.

It resolved itself steadily, becoming a voice. Familiar, steady, reassuring…she latched onto it, grasping to it like a piece of flotsam in a storm.

Her eyes snapped open moments later, and she drew in a gulp of air, her senses returning to normalcy.

“-ven? Can you-?” Koriand’r’s voice swung sharply into focus, tones of concern evident.

“I’m fine…” Raven said, blinking twice to try and clear her head. Every cell still blared, but the message was confused, jumbled. Warning messages still sounded, but there was something else…a part of her that…

“You were…zoned out. Are you feeling…” Koriand’r paused, searching for words. Raven looked up, focused on her face.

“What exactly happened?”

“You were about to say something, and then you tensed up, and then you just stared right through the air for about a minute.”

“Shit.” Raven said, turning away. There was only one answer to what had happened…

“Is there…trouble?”

“When isn’t here?”

“What happened to you? Raven, please-”

“There was…something.” Raven replied. “Not sure what. It wasn’t friendly. I’m…I don’t know what it was. But at least half of me exalted when it left my mind.”

“Only half?”

Raven turned, and gazed at Koriand’r levelly for a moment. The Tamaran shifted uncomfortably on the spot for a moment.

“Sorry. That was rude like a-”

“No need. I’m just…I need to go. I need to find out what this thing was.” Raven said, with a weak smile and shrug. “I’ll…listen, go back inside. Mingle. You guys are better at it than I am, anyway. And, Kori, I…just don’t worry about me. I’ll see you later.”

A field of energy engulfed Raven, and she disappeared from sight.

The entity watched from a distance measured in dimensions. Carefully measuring responses, its attention focused on the actions and responses of one individual.

The response it’d witnessed was one of many possibilities, but this one was one the realist in him had predicted.

The entity that watched Raven was of an entirely different order than the being she had been refusing. It was of some other fabric altogether…

It smiled as she teleported away, feeling the wake it created in the fields of magical energy.

Excellent. It was time to see how the next moves would go.

The library pulsed with energy. Magical energy pulsed and flowed through the room like a living entity, its beating heart seated at the desk, pouring over a book, searching desperately.

She’d teleported into the room barely fifteen minuets ago, and she was already deep at work. She’d started by reinforcing the protective magics already in the building, in the room, boosting them as much as she possibly could. Ramping up the sensitivity of alarms, boosting shields, shifting the vibrational frequency of the room randomly.

Anything she could do to keep them out.

She pushed the book aside, taking up a large, jet black book, coated in Egyptian hieroglyphics. Turning the heavy pages, murmuring under her breath as she translated the text, searching for a clue, a reference point, anything…

Several minutes passed as she speed read the book. It proved useless. She took up another tome, a scroll of skin, with the words tattooed on the original wearer of the skin before their death. A living text once, it had taken a lot of effort to gain hold of a copy.

She carefully unrolled it, and started reading.

Koriand’r nervously chewed on her lower lip, fretting about what Raven was doing. Something bad had happened, that much was obvious. What was also obvious was that Raven wasn’t saying everything she suspected.

Maybe she wasn’t sure. Maybe she didn’t to find out for sure, before she could do something about it.

Maybe she couldn’t help her, Koriand’r thought and feared. She wasn’t too good at research, but…she could be there for her.

It’d been twenty minutes since Raven had teleported away. It was twenty minutes too long.

Moving through the crowd of guests, exchanging the occasional brief pleasantry when accosted, she quickly sought out Garfield. She found him soon enough, making his way through half of the buffet, while complaining about the other half loudly and vehemently.

“Garfield?”

“Did you see what they went and did? They might as well have put cowpie on the menu! I can’t believe-”

“Garfield, please.” Koriand’r said, with force this time. He took the hint, and shifted his focus away from the buffet, lowering his voice to a lower level.

“What is it?”

“Raven.”

“What’s happened? She not up to the crowds?”

“No, it’s not that. Something, I am not sure what, happened to her outside, when we were outside together. I did not see anything, but…I felt something there.”

“Sure it wasn’t just the company?”

“I was the only one there, Garfield.”

“Okay, fine…”

“I think…she said about something in her mind. I am guessing something tried to attack her, maybe?”

“Sounds like a bet to me. Where is she?”

“Back to the tower, I guess.”

“And you want to follow, check up on her? Okay, I can make a scene. Just give me a bottle of vodka, everyone will think I’m just drunk…”

“No, no need to make a scene! Just…tell an amusing story. They are most likely to give attention to you.”

“Not as much as your native folk singing…”

“Oh! You think so? I’ve been practicing, and I have been meaning to demonstrate to you, but you always have other things to do…”

“Well, what can I say? There’s only three of us in the tower, and there’s all kindsa stuff that needs to be maintained. You know how it is.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Now, shift it. I’ll do what I do best…and what I do is side splittingly funny.”

The book had been preserved in a tar like substance that stayed permanently within its container, sluicing off the pages of the book with an unsettling sense of life when she removed it from its engraved metal container.

Turning the pages quickly, her haste for information overriding thoughts of preservation regarding the ancient text, she flipped through chapters of tightly packed script, handwritten centuries ago. Carefully copied images adorned the pages, illustrating the dense text, providing visual clarity to the chaos of the prose.

Turning the page, she scanned the text hurriedly, stopping abruptly, and rereading with greater intensity, when she spotter several phrases. Focusing, concentrating on her translation, she swore under her breath as she read the passage.

The being that had intruded into her mind, that had made an offer with meaning and will behind it…it was only part of the problem.

There was more. And there had to be an answer here, somewhere…

She kept her focus on the books, on her research.

Something twitched on the edge of her awareness.

Energy surged out of her, enveloped her, and collapsed down to nothingness.

A second later, she reappeared in their communal room. She glared about, seeing nothing amiss, but knowing better.

“You going to make this easy?” Raven demanded.

Fields of energy surged up all around her, slamming into her, breaking like waves on a ship.

With a burst of will, Raven threw out a tight, interwoven field of energy around her, pushing out, slamming the waves of energy out of her vicinity.

“Have it your way.” She snarled, raising off the floor, colour draining from her eyes, fields of energy forming around her, interconnecting and spreading in tight patterns, rigid patterns. Juts of energy spilled out at points, only to be ruthlessly pulled back in, forming a tight latticework around her.

Raven tore into battle.

She re-entered the code again. A chime sounded, there was a buzz of static…but no answer to her calls.

Koriand’r spun the communicator round in her hand, trying to figure out what to do. Raven simply might not have her communicator with her. Maybe it was damaged. Maybe its power had run out. Maybe…

But it wasn’t like Raven to neglect something like that. She was too aware of her responsibilities to neglect that sort of thing. Garfield might blow up a washing machine by leaving his communicator in the wash, but Raven…

She stepped back into the building, back into the hall. The alcohol was flowing freely now, and Garfield was all but holding court, quite near the buffet, handily enough. He was part way through some story, something about walking strawberries. No, flying strawberries. Robot ones. Commanded by the Strawberry King, an unfortunate man with an obsession with fruit…or was it a vegetable?

The Tamaran princess dismissed the thought, tried to focus. Garfield would no doubt keep everyone occupied as best he could, make her absence less noticeable. She could easily step outside again, take off. Back to the tower, back to Raven…

She’d already done what was necessary here. Showed her face, helped further the rebuilding of the city, tried to talk some people into the even greater rebuilding task that lay ahead on the other side of the country…

There was nothing for her here, not now.

She stepped back outside, rising into the air in one swift move.

There was everything for her to struggle for back at the tower.

The door exploded off its hinges, and Raven descended into the basement, ignoring the lack of focus the world had. Anything she tried to look at swam out of focus, appeared distant, too close…

She didn’t rely on her eyes, instead letting her metaphysical senses guide her. The slow, languid thoughts of the island their base was built on. The rapid, short lived thoughts of insects and rodents. Heat, sparking brightly against the cold of the basement. The wakes and eddies in the tapestry of mental thought, the mystical fields, the unseen effects of other worlds, other frequencies, other dimensions, intruding on this world.

Its movements were easy to follow, now that she had connected herself so directly to the incalculable types of energy that filled existence. Her body hung in mid air, rigid, only strict mental control keeping her mind attached to it. Only years of barriers and mental blocks kept her within her body, kept her from leaving it like a discarded shell.

It moved through reality like a hammer. This frequency of existence was not its own, and so its mental and magical forces tore through the skein of existence brutally. But for all its lack of finesse, it had great power.

But for all its power, it still had limitations when operating in this level of existence. It needed a physical body. It needed a shell.

She’d found it.

A snarling, misshapen thing, a skinless bundle of muscle and teeth. Dozens of mouths snarled needle sharp incisors, blunt molars, and other, far more irregular, teeth at her.

It slammed forces of energy into her as she threw it skywards, tearing through the ceiling above them in a cascade of iron and wood.

Raven burst through the hole after it, wood splinters glancing off her skin. She gazed fixedly at the creature with her blank white eyes, her face set rigidly emotionless.

She tore into the creature, telekinetic attacks keeping it at bay while she ripped apart the magics that bound the creature together. Bits of flesh, random collections of teeth, fell to the carpet as it snarled and screeched.

The flow of mystical energy constant through her, now long past the need to murmur and shout incantations, Raven spat out her last words to the creature.

“If you survive. If you dare return to your masters. If they let you live. Tell them what happened here. Tell them this.

“I know exactly who, and what, you are. Don’t take me for a fool because of my heritage. And don’t even think of striking back at me through my friends. You don’t want to see what I’m like when I’m emotional.”

The form growled and shrieked and bellowed wordlessly, the energy folding together its patchwork body failing, its tissues dissolving messily. As it went, the energy it projected, the form it wielded, folded back in on itself, disappearing in bare moments.

The rush of energy no longer wielded by the entity buffeted into Raven, drawn to her as she polarised strongly, drawing energy to her. The impact of energy shook her, and she felt the damage she’d already sustained increase fractionally. She couldn’t…

She did the only thing she could.

She shut everything down.

Koriand’r descended as she came over the bay, coming in low over the water, slowing as she approached the island.

She hovered in mid-air for a moment. Gazing at the tower.

There was something, something…wrong…

Couldn’t be. She was just worried. Just.

Koriand’r sped inside the tower, trying to dissipate the feeling of subtle wrongness, but finding it only increasing as she moved through the tower. Calling Raven’s name.

She was just worried, Koriand’r told herself, trying to reason with something far more ancient and primal, so deep in her mind that it remembered the night for what it really was, that it remembered this feeling, this warning her soul screamed at her.

Nebulous green energy formed around her hands without thought, as she flew into the rec room. Her eyes, lit up with the same energy.

She froze as she did so. Dropping to the floor, landing automatically. All desire for flight gone.

The glow faded from her eyes.

All strength sapped from her limbs.

The ragged hole in the floor. The stink of decaying meat. The objects the filled the room, strewn randomly, broken in places. The wrongness of the air that an ancient, anthropoid sense screamed in warning about.

Raven, lying utterly still in the middle of the room.

Dim luminance from the city spilled through the window.

Her skin was pale, drained of blood.

Blood barely seeped from miniscule wounds.

She lay perfectly still.

Koriand’r sprinted across the room towards her, calling her name.
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The Titans: Triptych