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It’s a slow day at the Titans Tower—there haven't been any reports of crime today, so the Titans take this time to relax and unwind in their home.
Beast Boy, Robin, and Cyborg are hunched over on the couch, ruthlessly mashing their game controllers and fighting to the death virtually while Terra cheers them on from the sidelines. In another corner of the room, Raven hovers undisturbed, meditating. Starfire, on the other hand, vacuously scrolls through internet forums on the laptop.
“Friends, what does the term ‘did your mom’ refer to?” Starfire asks without warning, which causes Cyborg to practically tumble off the couch.
Terra bursts into laughter. From her corner, Raven makes a ”hn” noise and pulls the hood over her head.
“Where did you learn that?!” Cyborg shrieks. On the T.V. screen, Robin’s character sends him flying straight out of the arena, but Cyborg is still too shocked about Starfire’s discovery to notice it.
“The Internet!” Starfire replies cheerfully, flying up to Cyborg and showing him a comment thread on her screen. “This ‘Goobergunk twenty-five’ person said a rude thing about a cute dog, and The underscore Queen underscore Of underscore Waffles told Goober that they ‘did Goober’s mom!’ What does that mean?”
“I– This—” Cyborg sputters. Utterly stumped, he sets down his remote and folds his hands. “Jeez. How am I gonna explain that?”
“Oh,” Beast Boy snorts, pausing the game right before Robin can get another punch in. “This is gonna be good.” With a mischievous giggle, he shifts into a parrot and hops onto Cyborg’s shoulder. “Yeah! You gonna teach her about the bird and bees, Cy?”
“Birds and bees? Isn’t it just like, where babies come from?” Robin grunts as he tosses his controller onto the table. “How does that relate to ‘doing’ moms?”
“Actually, I have been meaning to ask this question for a while!” Starfire says. “I never had the opportunity to ask about where Earth babies come from… is that what ‘doing mothers’ is related to?”
“One question at a time,” Cyborg groans. “Alright, Star… you really wanna know where human babies come from? I dunno how they do it on Tamaran but it might be… jarring.”
“I am ready for anything!” Starfire nods assuredly. “We have fought many terrifying villains, have we not? I can handle some Earthly knowledge!”
“You heard her,” Terra says with a wide grin. “The truth behind human reproduction can’t hurt her! Or, well,” she mumbles, playing with her thumbs. “It did shock me when I first found out…”
“It shocked you? I thought it was just two parents getting their cells surgically combined, or something along the lines of that,” Robin says. “Wait—how does it happen?”
Cyborg facepalms. “Do I really need to give y’all a lesson on this? Did school not teach you?”
“I was homeschooled for pretty much all my life.”
“Same here!”
“I left school when I was a kid…”
“Fine… I guess I’ll educate you guys,” Cyborg sighs, practically having become a tomato at this point. “So basically, when two people love each other very much…”
Cyborg begins his explanation by trying to use code words and convoluted definitions, but Robin convinces him to just cut to the chase and give it to them straight. He quickly comes to regret that decision when Cyborg outlines the process fully, from start to end.
During Cyborg’s explanation, Beast Boy shoves his face into a pillow to muffle his uncontrollable laughter, Terra takes multiple deep breaths so as to not start crying from laughing, and Raven straight up leaves the room (“I’m not getting involved in this”). Meanwhile, Robin and Starfire stare at Cyborg, mouths hanging agape in utter disbelief.
“You are saying,” Starfire gasps, horrified. “that humans reproduce by putting their body parts inside of each other?! We simply will a child to life on Tamaran!”
“You’re telling me that sex is real?!” Robin shouts, equally horrified to the point of standing up on the couch. “This whole time?!”
“The hell do you mean, ‘sex is real?!’” Cyborg retorts. “Of-frickin’-course it’s real! Why else would people be talking about it?!”
“In Robin’s defense, dude,” Beast Boy pipes up from his pillow fortitude. “For the longest time, I thought it was just some made-up inside joke that everyone went along with.” He pauses, considering. “Like that one Morbius movie.”
“Then where do babies come from?” Robin asks, waving his arms around frantically. “I always thought they emerged from the belly button!”
“I’ve got bad news for you, bro.”
Beast Boy informs Robin where babies actually come from. Robin gags.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” Cyborg pinches between his nose bridge. “Has nobody ever taught you about it? Everyone’s gotta find out eventually!”
“Well, my—uh, guardian never explained it to me! I doubt he would have known either! And it’s not like I would have needed to know, anyway!”
“You never gotten curious?” Cyborg’s voice rises to levels of a booming radio, growing more and more desperate by the second. “Felt some sort of an—I dunno— urge inside of you? Hell, even just searched it up?”
“I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN BY ‘URGE!’”
“Rob, Rob, chill!” Beast Boy, having transformed back, places a firm hand on Robin’s shoulder and guides the other teen back onto the couch. “I think Cy was talking about… I dunno, crushes, I guess. Were you talking about crushes?”
“Sure, let’s put it like that,” Cyborg says, slumping back onto the couch in exhaustion. “I sorta meant being attracted to someone and thinking of… you know. I mean, all of us are developing teens, so I’d assume y’all—”
Cyborg is only met with blank stares from everyone in the room.
“Oh, come on. You can’t be tellin’ me you guys never felt it!”
“Uhh, honestly, I only ever knew of this stuff in theory,” Terra confesses, bashful. “Never really… thought of it when applied to myself.”
“I never even thought of it at all,” Robin adds. “I mean, I can admit when someone looks nice, but I’ve wanted to…” He grimaces. “You know. Kiss them.”
Starfire lets out a disappointed sigh.
“I dunno though, maybe that’ll change in the future.”
Starfire perks up again.
“Have none of you guys ever been attracted to someone before?!” Cyborg cries out, shocked. “Not even a crush? Feeling the jitters and butterflies in your stomach and shortened breathing around someone?!”
“Dude, did you just describe a panic attack?”
“I do not know this ‘crush’ you are speaking of,” Starfire says. “Does it mean to crush your feelings? Does that not hurt?”
“No, Star, it’s more like when you really really like someone,” Cyborg explains, growing more weary with every word.
“Like… you all? My friends?”
“Not exactly… it’s like when you see someone that looks pretty and can’t stop thinking about them and they’re always on your mind…”
“Oh! I understand!” Starfire exclaims as her face lights up. “So, like Robin!”
Now it’s Robin’s turn to fall off the couch. “What?!”
“Listen, Cyborg, everyone always explains crushes like that, but I never get it!” Beast Boy throws his hands up and flops back into the cushions, cutting off the previous conversation. “Back in school, all the boys in my class would talk about getting crushes, but I never understood why! I didn’t want to get left out, so I just ‘chose’ someone randomly to have a token crush on…”
“And when people tell me that they just get crushes on anyone,” Terra shudders. “I always think, shouldn’t you get to know that person first before you… feel something for them? I never understood this stuff!”
“I agree with Terra,” Starfire says, nodding. “I cannot ever imagine just having the ‘crush’ on somebody I do not already know personally.”
“I can’t imagine having a crush in general,” Robin mumbles, still scrunched up at the base of the couch with his body twisted in an awkward position. “I thought this was ritual stuff kids did for proms… I thought Kitten was just a psychopath for wanting to date me!”
“Oh man, I can’t be the only one here!” Cyborg implores. “RAVEN! Have you ever had crushes before?!”
The group hears a muffled “I’d rather die” from Raven’s room. Well, that answers that.
“But Cyborg, you have not answered my original question,” Starfire brings up after a moment of pause. “How does any of this relate to ‘doing mothers?’”
“‘Doing’ is a slang for sex,” Beast Boy answers plainly, with a giggle. “You know. Asserting dominance over someone by taking their mom.”
“That is the most awful! So when somebody says they are doing something, do they actually mean—”
“NO!” Cyborg cuts the conversation short with a loud protest. “It doesn’t always mean that—” With a disgruntled exhale, Cyborg crashes back onto the couch and grabs his remote. “Conversation over. I’m stopping here. Nobody else is allowed to speak for the next fifty years.”
Beast Boy and Terra glance at each other, shrugging. The changeling simply picks up the controller as well, kicking his legs onto the table nonchalantly and unpausing the game. Upon realizing that they’ve resumed the game without him, Robin yelps, leaping up from the ground and rushing to snatch his controller up.
And within a few minutes, the Titans Tower returns to normal. The boys are back on their video game grind with Terra on the side, and Raven returns to the scene after the fiasco blows over. Starfire, however, decides to shut her computer after today’s events. As curious as she is about the Earthly customs, she has a feeling that some things should never be brought up to the others.
Terra is right: it was quite the shock to learn about the truth behind human reproduction. Maybe she can ask more another day, but really, she does not need—or even want to know all these things. Starfire hopes that is the only strange aspect of humanity she will ever need to discover for the rest of her life.
If there is one thing she’s learned today, it’s that sometimes, ignorance is bliss.