Origin

Once upon a time, in the deep green heart of Africa, there was a little boy named Garfield Logan.

Garfield lived in a place most children had never seen — a research station tucked between tall acacia trees and slow brown rivers, where the sounds at night were crickets and frogs and the soft call of an owl high up in the dark. His mother, Marie Logan, was a scientist who studied how animals talked to one another. His father, Mark Logan, catalogued creatures that had no names in any book yet. And Garfield — well, Garfield ran through the camp with bare feet, because the chimpanzees taught him that shoes were optional.

He could tell a chimp's laugh from a monkey's before he was three years old. He knew every bird that nested in the trees around the station. The animals trusted him, and he trusted them right back.

And then came the terrible illness.

It was called Sakutia, and it swept through the camp very quietly and very fast. Garfield grew pale and small and still, and his parents sat beside his cot and held his hands and were very, very afraid. They were brilliant scientists, his mother and father, but they were also just parents. And parents will do anything for their child.

They had been studying a small primate called the green monkey — Chlorocebus sabaeus — and they knew that green monkeys could not be harmed by Sakutia. Quietly, carefully, they built a serum from the green monkey's own biology, and they gave it to Garfield.

He slept.

And then, slowly, he got better.

When Garfield woke up, his parents were crying — the happy kind. His mother tucked a blanket around him and kissed his forehead. His father laughed out loud for the first time in days.

But the next morning, when the sunlight came through the tent window and landed on Garfield's arms, something was different. His skin was green. Not a little green, like a garden leaf. Bright green, like a tree frog in the rain.

His hair was green. His eyes were green. Every inch of him was the most cheerful, vivid, unmistakable green.

And then — before anyone could say a word — Garfield became a gecko.

He didn't decide to. It just happened. One moment he was a small green boy sitting up in a cot, and the next moment he was a small green gecko clinging to the tent pole. His mother made a sound she could never quite describe afterward. His father reached for his notebook.

Garfield the gecko blinked at them both.

Then he was a boy again, sitting in the cot, grinning with all his teeth.

He could be any animal. Any creature he had ever seen or read about or imagined. All of them green, all of them perfectly, joyfully him.

The years that followed were not all easy. Not every story of a hero begins gently. Garfield lost his parents, and that was a quiet sadness that lived in a soft corner of his heart always. But then came the Doom Patrol — a family of extraordinary people led by a man called the Chief, Niles Caulder, who understood what it was to be different. Rita Farr was there, who could grow as tall as a house, and she called Garfield "Gar" and ruffled his green hair like a big sister. Robotman was there too, all metal and gruffness and hidden warmth.

Garfield was the youngest. He was also, almost always, the loudest. He made jokes when missions went sideways. He did impressions of the Chief when the Chief was in the other room. He laughed, always, because laughing made the hard things a little lighter to carry.

In time, he found something even newer and even better.

In a city called Jump City, on the edge of the sea, he met four strangers who were also, in their own ways, wonderfully different. Robin, who had trained in the shadows of Gotham. Starfire, who had crossed whole galaxies to get here. Raven, quiet and careful, whose bravery was quieter than thunder but just as real. Cyborg, who was part machine but had the biggest, warmest laugh of anyone Garfield had ever met.

Together, they became the Teen Titans.

And Garfield Logan — green all over, grinning always, ready to be a whale or a mouse or a T-rex or anything the moment called for — took the name Beast Boy and felt something settle into place in his chest.

Home. This was home.

He looked at his four teammates in the big round tower beside the sea, and he smiled his big green smile, and he thought: I am exactly where I belong.

And he was right.