First Mission

Are you comfortable? Good. This story happens at three in the morning and it is about the first time the Teen Titans showed the whole city what they could do together.

Imagine Jump City at three in the morning. The streets are quiet. The harbor is dark, glittering faintly with the reflections of a hundred dock lights. Almost everyone in the whole city is asleep.

And then the alarm: BWAAAMP.

Robin was dressed before the sound finished. He'd been like that his whole life — even before Batman trained him, he was always the first one to his feet. He crossed to the mission board, read the alert, and turned to find that he wasn't the only one already moving. Cyborg was clicking his chest plate into position. Starfire was glowing faintly the way she always did when alert. Beast Boy was pulling his purple-and-black suit on over his green arms. Raven appeared at the door without any sound at all, her cloak already fastened.

Five of them. Four minutes to the harbor.

A mercenary named Trident had seized a cargo vessel called the Sea Arrow in Jump City harbor and locked the crew of eleven below decks. Trident was cold and careful — a man who moved stolen weapons through the city's shipping lanes. Robin had a plan: split the ship into zones, clear each zone, meet on the bridge. Clean. Fast. Coordinated.

The plan held for about forty-five seconds before the complications arrived.

Starfire dropped from the night sky like a golden comet, her starbolts blazing, and scattered three of Trident's soldiers backward into the cargo hold. But Trident appeared on the upper railing with a sonic pulse cannon — black and heavy — and fired it before anyone could react. BWHOOOM. The ship lurched sideways, metal groaning. Starfire was knocked through the air.

Cyborg had a curved deflection plate built into his right forearm — he had designed it himself weeks ago, just because it seemed like a good idea — and he snapped it into position as the pulse arrived. The blast hit the plate and deflected into the harbor with a tremendous hissing splash. The ship steadied.

"Plan B!" Cyborg called.

"There is no Plan B!" Robin called back.

"We are making one right now!" And Cyborg's sonic cannon fired back across the deck with a sharp, decisive CRACK.

On the main deck, Beast Boy made one mistake: he thought about the water and briefly became a humpback whale, which was absolutely the wrong choice on a cargo ship. Something nearby tilted dangerously. He corrected in an instant — whale to gorilla, a single lurching change — and the gorilla was much better. He planted himself at the bow, enormous and calm, arms spread wide. No soldier could get past him.

Cyborg worked the other end, pushing soldiers steadily forward. He didn't call out to Beast Boy, and Beast Boy didn't call out to him. From opposite ends of the ship, they simply understood what the other was doing — pushing and blocking, funneling every soldier toward the bow where there was nowhere left to go. They had never rehearsed this. But they were paying attention to each other, and sometimes that's enough.

Below decks, Raven moved through the dark corridors alone. She found the cargo hold where the crew was locked in by feel as much as sight — she could sense the tight, exhausted fear pressing against the metal walls. She stopped outside the bolted door, pressed her fingertips to the lock, and let her dark energy slide through the mechanism from the inside. The bolt came undone quietly. The door opened. Eleven crew members stumbled out into the cool night air, blinking and coughing. Raven stood aside. "You're safe," she said, once, in her quiet precise way. They looked at her and believed it immediately.

Robin reached the bridge in forty counted seconds. The fight that followed was short — his bo staff against Trident's cannon in the close dark of the bridge — crack, ring, clatter — and then the cannon was on the floor and it was over.

On the dock afterward, in the blue-grey stillness before sunrise, five Titans stood together. One mercenary in handcuffs. Eleven crew members safe on the pier. The Jump City harbor quiet around them.

"That worked," said Beast Boy.

"Parts of it worked," Robin said.

Starfire smiled at both of them. "All the important parts," she said.

Cyborg gave a slow, satisfied nod. Raven stood beside them and the corner of her mouth moved upward — barely — and for Raven, that was everything.

They crossed the harbor bridge as the first light touched the sky, tired and salt-aired and together. Not a perfect mission. But a real one.

Goodnight, little one. A good team doesn't need a perfect plan. They just need to trust each other enough to build one as they go.