Moving In

Are you all tucked in? Good. This story is a quiet one — about moving boxes, new rooms, and how a place starts to feel like home.

Titans Tower had twelve floors. Standing inside for the first time, you could hear your own footsteps echo. The common room had a couch so wide you could lie across the whole thing and still not reach the other end. The kitchen gleamed. The windows looked out over all of Jump City and the shining harbor beyond it. It was enormous and a little empty, and it smelled like new construction.

It didn't feel like home yet.

Victor Stone decided to fix that in his own way. He spent the first two days of their new life in the tower crouched in the basement, rewiring the security system from the ground up. He had looked at it carefully on the first morning and said, "This is adequate." Then he'd looked at it a moment longer and said, "I don't like adequate." So he built something better — sensor grids around the island, locks that read fingerprints and retina patterns, an emergency alarm that could reach any of their communicators instantly no matter where they were in the city. He worked through both nights. When he was done, he walked back upstairs, stood in the common room, and said, "Now we're safe." He meant it as a gift. They understood it that way.

Starfire unpacked carefully. She had not brought very many belongings from Tamaran, but since arriving on Earth she had gathered treasures of a different sort: photographs. She had photographed everything that surprised or delighted her — a bus that kneeled to let passengers on, a grocery store with a misting system over the vegetables, a fire hydrant painted yellow, a small dog wearing a tiny yellow raincoat. She printed each photograph and hung them in rows on her wall with the tape that Raven had taught her to use gently. Then she arranged six small potted plants on the windowsill. The plants had never been twelve stories up before and had uncertain opinions about the altitude, but Starfire talked to them every morning and they seemed to appreciate it.

Raven took the room at the very top of the tower. She carried her boxes up herself — no floating, no shortcuts — and stacked her books on the shelves in an order that only she understood. She placed one candle on the windowsill. The first morning, she lit it before anyone else in the tower was awake, sat on the floor, closed her eyes, and breathed slowly until the world settled around her. The others discovered her routine quietly, over several days, and without anyone making an announcement about it, they all learned: Raven's door was always knocked on before opening. It was just how things were.

Robin did not really unpack so much as set up operations. He made a careful map of the tower on his first night — every door, every window, every angle — the way Batman had taught him, out of habit and care. He claimed the fourth floor for a mission room: Jump City maps on the wall, a whiteboard for plans, a corkboard where he pinned everything he knew about a masked figure called Slade who had been moving through the city like a shadow. Robin stood in front of that board for a long time. He told himself it wasn't something to worry about just yet. He was a little wrong about that.

Beast Boy lost his room key on the afternoon of the first day. He borrowed a screwdriver from Cyborg to try to fix the lock, and halfway through the job he accidentally transformed into a golden retriever, which meant the screwdriver dropped and the lock stayed broken and there was now a confused dog sitting in the hallway. He turned back into himself, looked at the screwdriver on the floor, and said, "I meant to do that." Cyborg said nothing. He just took the screwdriver back, fixed the lock himself in about two minutes, and made Beast Boy a new key with a small green paw-print tag so it would be easy to spot. Beast Boy kept it on a lanyard from then on and only lost it twice more that month, which was actually an improvement.

By the end of the first week, the tower was different. Cyborg's music hummed through the floors on Tuesday evenings. The kitchen sometimes smelled of Starfire's cooking experiments, which were enthusiastic and occasionally purple. Raven's candle flickered behind her door each morning like a small gold heartbeat. On the underside of the kitchen table, if you looked carefully, you would find stickers shaped like tiny green animals. Nobody admitted to putting them there.

It was noisy. It was a little chaotic. It was five different people learning each other's rhythms.

It was home.

Goodnight, little one. Home is something you build — one key tag, one plant, one candle at a time.