Chapter Text
The shattered remains of the Gordonian warship burned across the surface of Jump City Bay. Steam hissed from twisted metal as pieces of the massive vessel slowly disappeared beneath the water. The dawn sun crept over the horizon, painting the waves gold and orange. Floating debris drifted lazily around the island while distant emergency sirens echoed faintly from the city.
Robin stood near the ledge, breathing hard. His cape fluttered behind him in the ocean wind as he watched the fading stars for any sign the aliens might return.
Behind him, Cyborg kicked a broken chunk of alien machinery with his boot. “Man,” he muttered, “that was insane.”
“Totally insane,” Beast Boy agreed from atop a chunk of wreckage. “Giant lizard aliens? Space prison ships? City-destroying lasers?” He grinned. “Best. Night. Ever.”
The alien girl descended gently from the air, her boots touching the dirt without a sound. Without the crown and restraints, she looked far more at peace than she had only hours earlier. “You have all shown great courage,” she said warmly. “On Tamaran, warriors who fight beside one another share a bond stronger than family.”
Cyborg let out a humorless laugh. “Pretty sure courage had nothing to do with it. I was panicking the whole time. Still am, honestly.”
Robin finally turned away from the ocean. “Can you tell us your name?”
She straightened proudly. “In your language, I am called Starfire.” She placed a hand gently against her chest. “I request permission to remain upon this planet, if it is acceptable. Your people are unusual, yet also very kind.”
“You don’t need our permission,” Cyborg said, folding his arms. “But I gotta admit, we made a pretty solid team.”
“Solid?” Beast Boy scoffed. “Please. We were epic, dude!” He immediately transformed into a scruffy green dog, barked once, then shook seawater everywhere before changing back.
Cyborg pointed at him. “You are a weird little man.”
Beast Boy grinned. “You’ve got a laser cannon in your arm.”
“Yeah, but I just built it, like, forty minutes ago. How long you been doing that?”
Beast Boy shrugged. “How long’ve you been half robot?”
“Point taken,” Cyborg muttered, sitting on the ground with a metallic clang, one side of his armor sparked intermittently.
Starfire tilted her head curiously. “You are not entirely robotic?”
“Nah,” Cyborg said, tapping the side of his head. “Accident. Long story.”
Beast Boy sat cross-legged. “Could be worse.”
Cyborg stared at him.
“I’m green.”
Starfire stepped closer, fascination in her expression. “Your transformations are extraordinary. You become the creatures completely.”
“Pretty much,” Beast Boy said casually, though pride glimmered under his grin. “Any animal I’ve seen.”
“Any animal?” Robin asked skeptically.
A grin spread slowly across Beast Boy’s face. One second he was a teenager. The next, a massive green sabertooth tiger stood where he’d been. Then it shrank rapidly, fur collapsing inward as wings burst from its back instead - suddenly a hawk spiraled upward into the smoky air before diving back down and becoming Beast Boy again in one smooth motion.
Starfire smiled brightly. “Where I come from, shapeshifters are considered sacred spirits.”
Robin looked toward Starfire next. “Where do you come from?”
“I am from the planet Tamaran,” she floated a few inches above the ground as her hair drifted weightlessly around her shoulders. “Our people take strength from sunlight. It makes us strong, and grants us the ability to fly and shoot energy from our hands.”
As if to demonstrate, green light gathered in her palm.
Robin studied the three of them carefully. A cyborg, an alien, a shapeshifter, and -
Robin turned back to the shore, his eyes scanned the skyline behind them once. Empty. No trace of the hooded girl with purple eyes.
The others noticed. Beast Boy tilted his head. “What do you think her deal was?”
Robin looked toward him immediately.
“Y’know,” Beast Boy continued. “The creepy one with the floating shadow powers, all dark and mysterious? She was like…” He lowered his voice dramatically. “‘Abracadabra Zoom!’ Boom! Giant explosion! Then poof.” He spread his hands. “Gone.”
“Girl barely talked the whole night,” Cyborg said, frowning. “Anyone catch her name?”
Nobody answered.
Beast Boy looked toward the sea where the Gordonian ship had fallen. “She made it out of there, right?”
“Yes,” Starfire said. “I wished to thank her for her assistance, but she was gone when I blinked my eyes.”
Robin replayed the moment in his mind: Trogaar about to strike, the bridge exploding, the girl standing alone against impossible power. She had never introduced herself. Never explained herself. Yet she risked everything for people she barely knew. And then she vanished. No sound. No goodbye. Just darkness folding in on itself.
“She’ll turn up again,” Cyborg said, leaning back on his hands. “People with powers in this city tend to stand out.”
“Especially spooky teleporting goth people,” Beast Boy added.
Robin ignored him, though inwardly he knew Cyborg was probably right. Someone that powerful couldn’t stay hidden forever.
The others fell silent. Waves lapped against debris on the shore.
Cyborg broke the silence first. “View’s amazing, huh?” he noted thoughtfully, nodding towards the glittering ocean in front of them. “Somebody oughta build a house out here.”
Beast Boy grinned and nudged him. “Yeah, if you like sunshine and the beach.”
Starfire smiled brightly. “I like the sunshine very much.”
Beast Boy looked around at the ruined ocean. “So what now?”
“We need a place,” Cyborg said. “If we’re gonna keep doing… whatever this is.”
Beast Boy’s eyes lit up immediately. “Dude, we’re making this official?”
“No,” Robin said automatically.
“Dude, why not?” Beast Boy whined. “Those tadpoles would have totally kicked our asses one by one, but together?” He pointed at each of them in turn. “Bossy bird-dude had plans - ”
“I am not bossy,” Robin cut in.
“Cyborg smashed stuff - ”
“Sure.”
“Starfire shot lasers everywhere - ”
“They are starbolts.”
“Cool, those too.” Beast Boy spread his arms. “And mystery goth girl did spooky shadow magic whatever. But we actually worked!”
Robin crossed his arms. “Tonight only worked because we got lucky.”
“We didn't get lucky,” Beast Boy argued. “We stopped an alien invasion.”
“We stopped one ship,” Robin corrected. “And half the time, nobody knew what anyone else was doing. I’m not saying you all did a bad job - “
“That's exactly what it sounds like,” Beast Boy muttered.
“You all fought well.” Robin sighed. “That doesn’t mean we’re ready for the next threat.”
Cyborg frowned. “So… we do nothing?”
Robin hesitated. Jump City was supposed to be a fresh start; no partners depending on him, and no expectations except the ones he put on himself. He had come here to prove he could do this alone. Every instinct told him to leave before any of this became permanent, before these strangers became people he had to worry about.
He had spent months convincing himself that working alone was simpler, and then one alien invasion had come along and shattered that theory in a matter of hours. Because the annoying thing was that Beast Boy wasn't wrong; Robin wouldn’t have been able to stop the Gordonians on his own. They only won because Cyborg had built a weapon out of scrap because there wasn't time to do anything else, because Beast Boy had thrown himself into danger despite every opportunity to run, and Robin wouldn’t have even seen Starfire as anything other than a threat if the other girl hadn’t spoken up.
He could see the excitement in their eyes, the confidence, the unspoken trust forming already, and he didn’t want to kill that spark. "Whatever this is," he said finally, "it worked."
Beast Boy pumped his fist excitedly. “See? Team!”
Robin exhaled through his nose. “Call it whatever you want. But we can train together, we'll stay in contact. We prepare before the next crisis instead of improvising in the middle of it.”
Cyborg smirked. “Guess I better start looking for somewhere we can work out of.”
They continued talking around him, the conversation shifting naturally toward practical things now; food, shelter, repairs, whether Cyborg could somehow salvage alien tech from the bay before the authorities arrived. Robin rubbed his eyes through his mask. For the first time all night, exhaustion started catching up with him. Bruises ached beneath his suit. Smoke still lingered in the air. The city behind them was waking up completely unaware of how close it had come to destruction.
Starfire floated slightly off the ground again, smiling warmly at all of them. “I believe this is the beginning of something wonderful.”
And somehow, standing here with these people, the idea of not walking away felt… easier than it should have.
That realization unsettled him almost as much as the missing girl had.
Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere out there, she was watching the same sunrise alone. His eyes drifted one last time toward the city skyline, toward the place where darkness had swallowed a girl whole. He still didn’t know her name, but he wanted to see her again.
Robin hated unfinished variables.
-
Steel beams groaned overhead as another section of the tower locked into place.
Robin stood near the edge of the construction platform with his arms folded, watching massive cranes swing sheets of reinforced glass into position above the island. The rhythmic pounding of machinery echoed across the bay while cargo barges drifted back and forth carrying supplies from the mainland. Starfire floated several feet above the construction site, effortlessly carrying massive metal support braces that should have required an industrial crane. Workers below had long since stopped questioning it, now they mostly just waved.
Fifteen days had passed since the Gordonian attack, and somehow, against every instinct Robin had ever trained into himself, they were actually doing this.
The partially completed structure rose from the center of the island like the skeleton of something enormous. Even unfinished, it already dominated the bay skyline. Circular foundation levels had been completed first, along with several support columns and the beginnings of the main operations floor. Cyborg called it “future-proofing.” Robin called it excessive.
“You’re thinking too small,” Cyborg had argued three separate times already. At the moment, Cyborg himself was waist-deep inside an open wall panel beside the tower entrance while sparks burst around him in violent flashes. “I’m telling you,” he shouted over the noise, “if we’re building headquarters, we build headquarters. Hidden systems, defense grid, security scanners - ”
“Okay, but we don’t need missile launchers.”
“They are not missile launchers.”
Robin looked at the enormous cylindrical cannons being unloaded from a cargo crane. “…Those are definitely missile launchers.”
Cyborg pointed a wrench defensively. “After giant alien reptiles invaded the city? I’m preparing for anything.”
Nearby, Beast Boy lounged across a stack of steel pipes. “I still wanna know who paid for all this,” he said through a mouthful of food. “Because this place is insane.”
Robin kept his eyes on the tower. “Anonymous donor,” he replied evenly.
“Yeah, an anonymous rich donor.” Beast Boy spread his arms toward the construction site. “This stuff costs, like… billionaire money.”
“The donor probably saw us save the city,” Cyborg guessed. “Figured we’re worth investing in.”
Robin said nothing. That part, at least, was true. The funding had been routed carefully through old shell accounts and private foundations that couldn’t be connected back to him.
The others didn’t need to know where the money came from. More importantly, he didn’t want them looking at him differently afterward. After all, this wasn’t supposed to become his operation; it was supposed to belong to all of them, even if he was quietly paying for it. Wayne Enterprises would never appear anywhere near the transaction history. Neither would Bruce.
Robin preferred it that way.
-
The island looked smaller every time Robin returned to it. At first it was nothing but steel skeletons jutting from concrete foundations. Construction barges surrounded the shore, cranes swinging overhead like giant mechanical birds.
Robin stood at the edge of the dock studying building plans. The pages fluttered constantly in the wind, forcing him to pin down the corners with spare bolts and tools. Behind him, Beast Boy was busy arguing against the hard hats, claiming that superheroes shouldn't have to wear safety gear in the first place. He kept pointing to Cyborg as proof, insisting that anyone with a titanium skull was already wearing the world's best hard hat.
"That's not how safety works," Cyborg said.
"That's exactly how safety works."
The resulting argument lasted fifteen minutes. Robin made a note to add a medical bay.
-
A month later, the main structure had begun to take shape. The tower's central frame stretched into the sky. Hallways existed only as exposed beams and unfinished floors. Robin climbed three flights of temporary stairs to inspect the future operations room. Halfway up, Starfire appeared beside him carrying three enormous steel support brackets.
"Hey Star, do you need a hand with anything?"
"I do not.”
Then she effortlessly climbed past him carrying more weight than he could deadlift.
-
The workshop of the tower construction site glowed with monitor light and scattered sparks as Robin and Cyborg worked side by side at a crowded bench. Robin carefully assembled miniature transmitters into compact black casings while Cyborg connected larger prototypes to diagnostic screens, testing signal strength through a maze of wires.
Several failed designs lay discarded nearby, but a neat row of newer communicators blinked in unison as the latest test succeeded. The devices rested side by side on the workbench, their steady lights marking the first reliable link that would soon keep the new team connected in the field.
-
Sparks rained down from Cyborg’s welding torch as he sealed another support plate into place. A skeletal frame rose from the rock like the ribs of some enormous machine.
Robin was thankful his mask protected his eyes from the sea spray. He stood on the highest beam of the unfinished tower, boots balanced on a strip of metal barely wider than his foot. The wind off the bay tugged at his cape while he scanned the city through binoculars. Jump City stretched across the horizon in gray towers and flashing traffic lights. Somewhere in that maze was a girl with purple hair, if she was still here at all.
Below him, a welding torch flared bright blue, and Cyborg’s voice echoed across the construction site. “Okay, tell me this isn’t the coolest headquarters ever.”
Robin lowered the binoculars slightly and glanced down.
The skeleton of their tower had grown fast - steel supports bolted into the rock, several floors of framework already rising above the island. Cyborg moved confidently through the structure, welding joints with the ease of someone who understood machines better than most people understood their own biology.
Beast Boy hung upside down from one of the crossbeams. “Needs a vending machine,” he declared.
Cyborg didn’t even look up. “We’re building a multi-story command center and you’re worried about chips. Chips you have to pay for.”
Beast Boy swung down to the ground. “Dude, you can’t fight crime on an empty stomach.”
A few yards away, Starfire hovered beside a half-finished wall, carefully holding two massive steel plates in position. “This place will be our home,” she said happily. “A house where warriors live together and protect the innocent.”
Cyborg grinned. “See? She gets it.”
Robin stepped off the beam, dropping three stories in controlled jumps, catching the edge of a support frame before landing lightly on the rock below. “I’m headed out,” he announced. “Need anything?”
“Nope,” Cyborg answered.
Robin nodded once, opening his communicator. “Good. I’ll be back later.”
Beast Boy tilted his head. Thunder was rolling in the distance. “You going out again?”
Robin clipped the comm back to his belt. “Just checking something.”
-
Cyborg leaned against a crate, enthusiastically explaining power distribution systems to a visibly overwhelmed foreman.
"Trust me, man. Future-proofing."
The foreman glanced up at Robin with a look that clearly asked if this was normal. Robin just gave a thumbs-up.
By the end of the day, half the workers were calling Cyborg whenever something broke.
-
The first room to be completely finished wasn't the command center. It wasn't the common room either. It was the kitchen.
Robin discovered this after walking into the building one morning and finding Cyborg testing every appliance simultaneously. "What are you doing?"
"Quality assurance."
The blender short circuited.
Beast Boy laughed so hard he fell off the counter, and Robin immediately added "replace blender" to his growing list.
-
Robin landed on the roof of Jump City General Hospital again. The alley behind it was narrow and dark again. The one light was flickering again. He had already been here three times this week; something about it bothered him.
Robin dropped silently to the pavement and waited. Five minutes. Ten. An hour passed. A nurse stepped outside for a smoke break. An ambulance pulled in.
Robin shook his head slightly. “Where did you go…?”
Behind him, something clattered. He spun instantly. A black cat jumped down from a vent and trotted across the roof.
Robin relaxed slightly. “Not you.”
-
At first, nobody questioned Robin’s disappearances.
The tower being under construction meant there was always something that needed doing; supply runs, equipment pickups, security checks, coordination with contractors. Robin was constantly moving already, so when he started leaving for several hours at a time, it barely registered. “Errands,” he called them.
Cyborg accepted that explanation for exactly two days, and by week three, even Beast Boy had started noticing patterns. Robin always left alone. Always at night. And always with that same distant, distracted expression that had appeared ever since the Gordonian attack.
“Okay,” Beast Boy announced one evening from the couch in the temporary living quarters, “I’m officially calling it.”
Robin looked up from the blueprints spread across the table. “Calling what?”
“You’re being weird.”
“That narrows nothing down,” Cyborg muttered from across the room while wiring together a half-finished control panel.
Beast Boy pointed dramatically. “You disappear for hours every night, come back all broody, refuse to explain anything, and keep pretending you’re ‘checking patrol routes.’”
Robin looked back down. “I am checking patrol routes.”
“Mm-hm. But patrols follow structures, and yours don’t anymore."
Starfire looked over curiously from where she was attempting to assemble furniture using the instruction manual upside down. “Is there something unusual about this?”
“Yes,” Beast Boy said immediately. “Normally Robin’s weird in a controlling way. This is different weird.”
Robin folded another blueprint with slightly more force than necessary. “Jump City is larger than we realized.”
Cyborg snorted quietly.
Robin’s eyes narrowed. “Something funny?”
“Nah,” Cyborg replied, clearly lying. “Just interesting that your ‘investigation’ somehow keeps circling the same six neighborhoods.”
“Looking for someone, Rob?” Beast Boy asked with feigned innocence, wiggling his eyebrows.
Robin stood abruptly. “I’m leaving.”
“Oh my god,” Cyborg interrupted, laughing now. “You ARE looking for her!”
“It’s reasonable to investigate possible metahuman activity.”
“Uh huh. Who else are you investigating?”
Robin ignored him and headed for the exit.
“Tell your girlfriend we said hi!” Beast Boy shouted after him.
-
Three blocks away, Robin vaulted silently across a rooftop with far more force than necessary.
Girlfriend. Ridiculous. He wasn’t looking for her because he liked her; he was looking because she was powerful, unknown, and operating inside Jump City without identification. Any responsible leader would investigate that.
Robin landed on the roof of Jump City Observation Tower, scanning the rooftops. Robin told himself what he was doing was purely tactical: entire neighborhoods still carried the scars of the Gordonian invasion, any unidentified metahuman involved in an event that catastrophic should have been tracked down immediately.
That was all this was. Due diligence. Just going on patrol.
Maybe Cyborg was right. Maybe she didn’t want to be found. The thought should have ended this entire search. Instead, somehow, it only made Robin more determined. A city this large couldn’t afford unknown variables with powers like hers operating unchecked.
That explanation stayed convincing right up until he found himself revisiting the same abandoned subway tunnels for the third time that week. Robin crouched atop a rusted support beam, flashlight cutting slowly through the darkness below. The tunnels smelled like rainwater. Graffiti covered the cracked concrete walls while broken tracks disappeared into collapsed sections farther underground. No signs of habitation. No sign of the girl in black. Nothing. Again.
He’d started with the obvious ones; hospitals, homeless shelters, abandoned buildings, and quiet neighborhoods. But now he was looking at broken bell towers, empty theaters, libraries - places where someone could disappear without trying very hard. Quiet places. Forgotten places. Now, every mission ended with him looking for someone he’d only spoken to for a few minutes, someone whose name he didn’t even know. Stopping a robbery downtown became checking nearby rooftops afterward. Investigating weapons smuggling at the docks became searching dark warehouse rafters for movement that probably wasn’t there.
And everything ended in nothing.
-
By the end of the second month, the tower no longer looked like a construction site. Massive glass walls reflected the ocean surrounding the island, glowing gold beneath the late afternoon sun. The upper levels had finally been sealed, interior power systems were online, and Cyborg had somehow convinced three separate contractors to install reinforced bulkheads “just in case.”
Robin had stopped asking.
-
One late evening, in an empty concrete room with nothing but a stack of unmixed cement, Robin spent hours running drills over and over. When he finally stopped, exhausted and sweaty, he noticed Beast Boy sitting nearby. "Have you been watching this whole time?"
"Pretty much."
"Why?"
Beast Boy shrugged. "You're actually kinda cool when you stop brooding."
Robin threw a birdarang at him. Beast Boy turned into a monkey and dodged. They spent the next few hours training in hand-to-hand; Beast Boy fought pretty well as his animals, but not as well as a human, and Robin intended to change that. Robin secretly appreciated having someone around who wasn't intimidated by him, but he would never admit it.
-
The skeleton of the tower reached ten stories before Robin noticed Starfire had started bringing lunch to the construction crews. Not because anyone asked her to. She simply appeared every afternoon carrying enough food for twenty people. By the end of the month, several workers greeted her by name.
Robin watched from the unfinished observation deck as Starfire laughed with a group of welders. It struck him that she made friends the same way gravity worked.
Effortlessly.
-
The common room of Titans Tower was unusually quiet. Not because anyone was asleep. Quite the opposite. Everyone was too sore to move. Takeout boxes covered every available surface.
Cyborg occupied most of the couch. Starfire sat nearby, examining a scorch mark on her skirt with intense concentration, as if she could somehow determine exactly which explosion it had come from. Beast Boy was sprawled across the floor. Robin stood at the far end of the room in front of a whiteboard covered in mission plans, or what had once been mission plans; whole diagrams were crossed out, circles scribbled in anger, and one section marked with a defiant “NO.”
Robin capped a marker. "All right," he said. "Today's operation wasn't a complete failure."
Cyborg stared at him. "The fact that that's the good news should concern you."
Robin ignored him. "We stopped the smugglers."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Beast Boy rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling. "You know," he said, "we did way better when spooky girl was around."
The room went still. Robin's shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly. If anyone noticed, no one said anything.
“Yes,” Starfire added. “Her ability to regenerate would be most beneficial now.”
Robin's hand froze. Across the room, Cyborg looked up "Regenerate?"
"Yes."
Robin simply stared. "...what?"
Starfire looked between them, confused by their reactions. "She heals injuries."
"Could you maybe provide," Robin rubbed his temples, "a few more details?"
Starfire considered. “Of course. While on the Gordonian ship, I was burned by an explosion. The girl saw my injury, touched it, and it was healed.”
"You never mentioned this before."
Starfire genuinely considered the comment . “I suppose because she did not make it a big deal. She simply healed the wound and continued.”
“Just like that?” Cyborg asked.
“Yes. Just like that.”
“Did she say anything?” Robin pressed, leaning forward.
“Very little.”
“Anything at all?”
“She told me to be careful,” Starfire said softly.
Robin’s hand tightened around the marker. His mind wasn’t on the burns, or the smugglers, or the mess scattered across the room. An ability like that should have left a trail a mile wide. Someone should have remembered, someone should have known her name. Instead, all Robin had was Starfire's simple account: a burned hand, a touch, and a wound that vanished.
It should have made finding her easier. Instead, somehow, it made her harder to understand.
-
“Robin,” Starfire’s voice crackled softly from his communicator. “Your patrol ended twenty minutes ago.”
“I know.”
“I am ready to begin my rotation once you have returned.”
“Go ahead, I’ll take a different way back.”
-
The elevator worked exactly once, and for forty-five minutes Robin sat in a cramped metal box with Beast Boy. Beast Boy narrated everything.
Every.
Single.
Thing.
"Now Robin is staring at the door."
Robin rubbed his eyes through his mask.
"Now he's imagining ways to throw me through the wall."
Yup.
"Now he's - "
"Stop."
-
The tower was taller now. Not complete — nowhere close — but tall enough that its shadow finally stretched across the water when the afternoon sun dipped low. Robin studied something on his laptop while Cyborg secured another support beam.
Beast Boy walked past carrying a toolbox that seemed far too heavy for him. “Why,” he groaned, “do we own this many wrenches?”
“There’s one less than there should be,” Cyborg corrected. “You threw one at a seagull yesterday.”
“It was stealing my sandwich!” Beast Boy finally dumped the toolbox beside the crate with a loud metallic crash and stretched his sore shoulders. “Hey Rob,” he said casually, “if you find the spooky girl, tell her we already named the team.”
"Stop calling her that," Robin said, without looking up from his laptop, but his typing stopped.
Starfire floated gracefully down from the upper level, landing beside them. “I did not find her frightening.”
“That’s because you’re nice to everybody,” Beast Boy replied.
Cyborg grabbed another steel bracket. “I’m not saying I agree with BB on this one,” he pointed a wrench toward Robin. “But you have been looking for her a lot.”
Robin looked up, suddenly realizing what Beast Boy had announced. “You named the team?”
Beast Boy grinned proudly. “Yeah!”
“After an extensive brainstorming process which took all of five minutes.” Cyborg added without looking up.
Starfire tilted her head. “We are choosing new names? I would like to keep mine, as on Tamaran, it means - “
Cyborg chuckled. “No one’s asking you to change your name, Star.”
Beast Boy straightened dramatically. “Teen Titans!”
Robin considered it. “Not bad, but is ‘teen’ really necessary?”
Beast Boy’s face lit up instantly. “Yeah! Shows the world we’re young and cool.”
“I already told you, it’s not gonna work for long,” Cyborg said. “I’m already nineteen.”
Robin shut his laptop, and his attention drifted back toward the city skyline across the bay. Lights were beginning to flicker on in the distance as evening approached. Ferries moved through the water like slow glowing insects. “Do you think she’d be a good fit?” he asked Cyborg in a hushed voice.
Cyborg leaned against the steel frame. “Dunno, we’ve barely talked to her. Don't even know what she’s fully capable of.”
“She seemed scared.”
"Not to me, she seemed to know exactly what she was doin'," Cyborg leaned against the unfinished steel frame. “Maybe she just didn’t trust anybody.”
“That, too.”
“So let her have her space,” Cyborg said. “Not everybody wants to join a team. You didn’t even wanna join a team, ‘member?”
Beast Boy kicked a piece of drywall. “You think she’s gonna turn up?”
Robin didn’t answer right away. “She helped Starfire, a complete stranger, because she was scared,” he said finally. “People like that don’t just disappear.”
Starfire stepped closer beside him, her expression softening. “I would still like to thank her,” she admitted quietly. “When I was frightened, I believe she comforted me.”
Robin thought about the brief glimpse he’d gotten beneath the hood during the battle. The exhaustion in her eyes. The hesitation. The way she kept stepping back whenever the fighting stopped, like she was already preparing to run.
Below, Beast Boy was still talking. “Okay, we need a cool team entrance.”
“We need walls first,” Cyborg replied.
-
Walls appeared. Windows were installed. Electrical systems came online. The tower stopped feeling like a construction site and started feeling like a home.
Robin noticed it during dinner. Cyborg was telling a story. Starfire was asking questions every five seconds. Beast Boy was interrupting both of them. The table was temporary. Half the chairs didn't match, yet nobody seemed eager to leave. Robin found himself listening instead of checking progress reports.
For once, the construction schedule could wait.
-
The training room was completed next. Naturally, everyone wanted to test it. Robin expected enthusiasm, but he hadn't expected Cyborg to launch Beast Boy through three holographic obstacles within the first thirty seconds.
The safety systems worked perfectly. The same could not be said for Beast Boy's dignity.
Robin marked the test as successful. Beast Boy disagreed.
-
One evening, Robin returned from patrol after midnight. Most of the tower remained dark, the construction crews had gone home hours ago.
The roof had just been installed that week. Robin landed on the top, admiring how the city lights stretched across the bay.
The door leading to the stairwell opened a moment later, and Cyborg walked out carrying two cups of coffee. Neither of them said much. They simply stood together looking over the water.
-
Three months after the Gordonian invasion, the tower was finally complete.
The family living inside it was still under construction.
-
Occasionally Robin found traces of his mystery girl; witnesses describing a girl wrapped in shadows, reports of strange black energy appearing in alleyways. One mugger swearing “a demon girl” had threatened him behind a nightclub. But every lead disappeared before Robin arrived. Always one step ahead. Like she knew she was being searched for.
Robin fired his grappling hook upward and launched silently back toward the surface. Minutes later he landed atop another rooftop downtown. The city stretched endlessly around him beneath the night sky, glowing gold and electric blue in the darkness.
Three months ago, she had stood on a warship bridge and faced down a monster twice Cyborg’s size. Three months ago, she had helped them save Starfire and nearly blown apart half the ship doing it. And then she vanished.
He scanned the streets through binoculars. A woman was dragging groceries beneath an umbrella. Two men argued outside a liquor store. Steam spilled from sewer vents. Thunder rolled across the harbor, and Robin glanced automatically toward the skyline as lightning flashed through thick storm clouds.
Robin could picture the missing girl clearly, he remembered the calmness in her voice while the city burned around them, the way darkness moved when she moved, like it answered her instead of the other way around. He found himself wondering where she went when storms like this hit. Does she have a home and a family? Did she eat regularly? Was she even human? The questions irritated him because they weren’t useful or tactical, but he remembered when he first arrived in Jump, struggling with the same sort of things, trying desperately to prove himself on his own.
Wherever she was, he hoped she was warm.