Teamwork Every Shape Matters

Once upon a time, on a night when the wind came hard off the ocean and the rain filled Jump City's streets all the way to the curb, three emergencies happened at the same time.

This is the story the Teen Titans tell when someone asks what it means to be a team.

A storm swept in fast and serious. By nine in the evening the power was out across the eastern waterfront. By nine-thirty the bay tunnel was flooding. By nine-forty a warehouse fire had started on the docks. And the Titan Bridge, downriver, was groaning under a surge of debris.

Three places at once. Five Titans.

Robin took the Tower's emergency systems — coordinating, mapping, talking to the Jump City emergency services, making sure every moving piece knew where every other piece was.

Cyborg drove to the bay tunnel, where three vehicles had been pushed against the wall by rising water. He waded in, planted his feet, and held the ceiling with his reinforced arms while rescue teams moved around him and through him.

Starfire flew to the warehouse fire, going into places firefighters could not, her body resistant to heat in a way human bodies were not.

Raven went to the Titan Bridge. She wrapped the buckling section in dark energy and held it steady — not forever, but long enough for the engineering team to shore it up.

And Beast Boy's instructions from Robin were: everything else.

He became a Saint Bernard. Steady and warm, bred for rescue, Garfield found a family of four sheltering on the second floor of a flooded apartment building on Harbor Street. He barked twice — a certain, directing bark — and led them through the back stairwell to the emergency shelter two blocks east.

He became a dolphin. Two sailors had capsized in the surge. He dove from the dock and found them by sonar in the dark churned water, guiding each one to the dock ladder with a nudge that said: here, this way, you are not alone.

He became a draft horse and worked beside the sandbag crew on Harbor Boulevard for forty minutes, moving what would have taken three times as long without him.

He became a bloodhound and tracked a missing elderly resident — last seen before the storm — across wet streets to a dry-cleaning shop, where the man was sitting calmly in a chair with a cup of tea, watching the rain.

By midnight the storm had eased. Robin called them home.

All five Titans regrouped — wet, tired, a little scraped at the edges. Robin went through the board. Tunnel: cleared. Fire: controlled. Bridge: stable. The family, the sailors, the missing man: all safe.

Everyone had held.

Starfire said she was glad they had all been there. Cyborg said the timing had been impossible and they'd made it work. Raven said nothing, which meant she agreed.

Garfield sat in his couch dent, still damp, holding a bowl of cereal.

"The right shape for every job," he said.

Robin looked up from the board.

"That's the lesson," Garfield said. "Not the most powerful. The right one."

Robin considered this, then went back to his paperwork, which was his way of saying: exactly correct.

Garfield had been learning that lesson since he was a boy in Africa, watching his mother observe chimpanzees from the tall grass. Not what was impressive — what was needed. He had learned it again from the starling and the fire suppression switch, and from the pigeon on the rooftop for three patient hours, and from the cat on the dock at dawn while the sun came up over the bay.

Every shape was him. The Saint Bernard that led a family through smoke. The dolphin that found sailors in dark water. The draft horse that moved what needed moving. The bloodhound that followed a thread of scent through rain-washed streets to a man sitting calm in a dry-cleaning shop, waiting.

All of them green. All of them Garfield. The green was the constant that ran through every transformation, every mission, every shape he'd ever taken.

He was thinking about this when his eyes got heavy. He set the cereal bowl on the table — not quite emptied — and leaned back on the couch, and the Tower was warm around him, and Jump City Bay was quiet outside the tall windows, and his teammates had gone to their rooms.

He fell asleep on the couch in his own shape, as Garfield Logan, green from head to toe.

He slept deeply and well.

He always did, after a night when he had been the right shape at the right moment.