Brotherhood Siege

Once upon a time, the most dangerous enemy the Titans ever faced did not come shouting.

He came quietly, with a plan.

His name was the Brain, and he was not a person in the ordinary sense — he was a criminal genius, an intelligence preserved in a robotic chassis, all cold thought and no feeling whatsoever. He had spent months, patient and methodical, mapping every young hero team on Earth. He learned their locations, their schedules, the way each team communicated, the distances between them, who could get to whom and how quickly. He drew it all up in careful diagrams. And then he assembled the Brotherhood of Evil — a collection of villains that outnumbered every young hero on the planet — and gave them their assignments.

Twelve locations. One signal. Everyone strikes at once.

It was the most sophisticated plan anyone had ever aimed at the Teen Titans, and it was designed to leave every team alone and overwhelmed, too far from every other team to help or be helped.

Starfire was in Tokyo.

She had flown there three days earlier to work alongside a Japanese hero team investigating strange Gordanian probe activity over the Pacific. She was in the middle of a detailed debrief when every channel she monitored lit up at once. The emergency alert — the one the Titans used only when the situation was serious beyond ordinary — was firing everywhere simultaneously.

She read the situation in two seconds. Twelve attacks. All at once. Jump City under siege.

She turned and flew.

There is a speed that Starfire reaches in the high stratosphere, where the air is thin and nothing stands between her and the open sky, when she draws on every photon of sunlight available and lets herself be a comet rather than a person. She crossed the Pacific Ocean in just over twenty minutes. Below her, the water was dark and enormous and deeply indifferent. She was faster.

She came over Jump City Bay with her eyes blazing green and took the situation in as she arrived. Three Brotherhood villains attacking Titans Tower simultaneously. In the courtyard below, Beast Boy was holding the line in animal form — cycling through creatures, buying time. Raven held the building's outer perimeter with her dark energy shields, stretched very thin. Cyborg was at communications inside, relaying data, tracking the attacks across four continents.

Starfire came in low and fast over the water.

Two starbolts, precise and deliberate. BOOM. BOOM. The villain called Monsieur Mallah stopped advancing.

"STARFIRE!" Beast Boy's voice came up from the courtyard, and he turned into a golden retriever for two full seconds before remembering that this was a battle, which was possibly the most Beast Boy thing he had ever done.

The fight at the Tower lasted ninety minutes. Three coordinated opponents who had been briefed on the Titans' methods, who had practiced their approach, who knew who they were facing. It was hard in the honest way that real fights are hard — every Titan pushed to their limit, making quick decisions, trusting each other without time to discuss it. But at the end of those ninety minutes, the Brotherhood's attack on Jump City had failed.

Then came the longer work: Robin and Cyborg at the relay systems, reaching out to every Titan team that had been hit, coordinating, accounting for everyone, organizing assistance where it was needed. Starfire helped relay communications in three languages, translating between hero teams who spoke different ones. They worked through the night and into the next day.

By the second evening, every Titan team was operational. Every Brotherhood villain had been accounted for.

Robin came up to the roof of Titans Tower and stood very still for a while, looking at Jump City's lights spread out across the bay. The city was whole. The sky was clear. Everything the Brain had aimed at was intact.

Starfire came up beside him. She was still faintly luminous from the sprint across the Pacific — solar charge takes a while to work through the system — and she smelled like ozone and open sky. She looked at the city with him.

"Good team," Robin said, after a while.

"The best," she said.

The Brain had modeled the Titans' powers, their response times, their formations, their known strategies. He had run the calculations carefully. What his calculations had not included — what you cannot put into a diagram or a timing chart — was the fact that these five people would fly across an ocean for each other. Would stay up all night for each other. Would turn into a golden retriever for two seconds out of pure relief that a teammate had arrived.

That is what the Brain had not modeled. That is exactly what a team is.

Close your eyes. Jump City is safe. Five heroes are standing on a rooftop together.

That is more than enough.

Sleep well.