Slade Shadow

Once upon a time, the Teen Titans had an enemy who never shouted.

Most villains announce themselves loudly. They crash through windows, or they broadcast their demands, or they stand on rooftops and make speeches about how terribly powerful they are. But the enemy called Slade was not like that. He wore a mask — half orange, half black — and he spoke in a low, calm voice, and his eyes behind that mask were patient in a way that was much more unsettling than anger. He watched the Titans for months before he made his move. He learned everything about them. He took notes.

He was particularly interested in Starfire.

What he had discovered was this: Koriand'r's powers were connected to her heart. The warmth and joy and love she carried inside her were not just beautiful things — they were fuel. When she was happy, her starbolts blazed brighter. When she was with her friends, her flight was stronger. Her emotions were her power source, the same way Tamaran's twin suns powered her people. Slade thought: if I can make her afraid and alone, she will be much weaker.

He built a plan carefully, the way a spider builds a web — slowly, patiently, until it is ready.

One evening a warehouse near Jump City's waterfront sent out an emergency signal: structure collapsing, people inside. The Titans ran. Inside, Slade's trap activated. Special devices fired pulses of electromagnetic energy that scrambled Cyborg's systems. Corridors shifted and sealed, separating the team. Before Koriand'r quite understood what was happening, she was alone in a dim metal corridor.

And a robot stepped out of the shadows at the far end.

It was built specifically for her. Light-dampening shields were mounted across its frame — shields that would absorb her starbolts and scatter them into nothing. It moved with mechanical precision, tracking her every movement. She fired a starbolt and watched it dissolve harmlessly against the shields. She flew upward and it followed her arc perfectly.

She hit the wall once. She hit the wall a second time.

In some other corner of the building, Slade was watching on a small screen. He was satisfied.

But Slade had made a mistake. He had assumed that Starfire's heart, when pressured, would close down and go cold. He had never understood that it does not work that way. When Koriand'r's heart is pressed and tested and challenged, it does not freeze. It thinks more clearly. It burns more brightly.

She stopped trying to blast through the shields.

She watched the robot pull back its arm for a swing. She felt the specific weight of its movement in the air. She stepped forward into the swing instead of away from it, caught the robot's arm at the joint, and pulled. The robot's own momentum carried it forward and down, and she drove it directly into a thick structural pillar.

CRUNCH.

The robot crumpled.

Slade had studied her starbolts for months. He had not studied what a Tamaranean princess can do with her bare hands. He had not studied the way hope hardens into purpose when it meets resistance.

Four minutes after she had been separated from her team, Koriand'r found the door and walked back through it.

The Titans rescued everyone in the warehouse. Slade, as he always did, had slipped away before they could reach him — he was never where you looked, always three steps further along. But Cyborg pulled a small processing fragment from the robot's wreckage and spent three days working over it, learning Slade's observation methods, his timing patterns, his frequencies.

They would know his shape better next time.

That night Starfire sat on the roof of Titans Tower for a while, looking up at the stars. She thought about what the darkness had been like in that corridor. She thought about the robot's shields and the useless scatter of her starbolts. She thought about the moment when the doubt had come.

And she thought about what she had done with it.

She had turned it into a question: what else do I have? And the answer had been: plenty.

A light step on the roof beside her. Beast Boy, in his small green form, sat down quietly and leaned against her arm without saying anything. After a moment Raven appeared at the door and looked out but did not come all the way onto the roof. Cyborg's voice came through the intercom: "Chili's getting cold."

Starfire smiled.

She was not alone. She had never been alone since the day she landed in that parking lot in Jump City. And that, she thought, was a kind of power that no shield could disperse and no trap could contain.

Close your eyes. The Titans are home. The stars are bright.

Whatever comes next, they will face it together.

Sleep well.