Teen Titans - Father's Day

Based upon the story by Marv Wolfman and George Perez featured in the New Teen Titans comic book issues #5-6, told now without any damn censoring. All characters in this story are eighteen or older.

TITANS: FATHER'S DAY PROLOGUE: DEFEAT

They had failed.

The enigmatic girl known only as Raven had gathered them, Robin, Cyborg, Starfire, Wonder Girl, Kid Flash, and Changeling, the New Teen Titans, for one purpose alone: to prepare for the coming of the demonic extra-dimensional conqueror, Trigon, Raven's own father. The New Titans were to use their powers and skills to defend Earth, help defeat Trigon, and save the world.

But we failed, Robin thought, gritting his teeth as his body resisted his attempts to move. Failed miserably.

They were meant as a last line of defense, he knew. A collection of mystics from other dimensions, making their last stand on Earth, were the frontline to stop Trigon once and for all. The Titans were just backup muscle. But frontline and muscle alike had been found wanting.

Dick Grayson had been in the business of heroics since well before he could shave. As Robin, he had been trained by the Batman to deal with the worst street crimes, gangs, mobs, serial murderers; all serious, dangerous, and mundane. He could handle that. It was different when things went cosmic.

Trigon had been far above his league, or that of the other Titans; way too far. The impossibly powerful creature had brushed them all aside like toy soldiers, not worthy even of being killed. Robin doubted that even the full Justice League could have succeeded against him.

Perhaps this time the Earth was truly doomed.

Grunting, he stood up. He could see Wally several paces away, thankfully still breathing, and soon located Cyborg and Changeling as well, fallen amidst the debris of the temple, the shattered pieces of granite that could have crushed him like a bug.

How ridiculous was it that he, the only one without any superhuman powers, was the first one to awaken? Maybe one of the others had somehow protected him, maybe one of their heavy hitters, Wonder Girl, or Starfire.

It took just another instant for him to realize that the girls were all gone.

PART ONE: THE DEVIL'S OWN

"Take me, and spare this world!"

Trigon stared at his daughter, the upper pair of his four eyes still glowing with the unholy fire of his manifested power, power that had pierced the barriers between dimensions and lain waste to his enemies.

Raven stood like a flimsy doll before her father, her slender figure in the long dark blue dress and hooded cape made even more fragile by the comparison with the inhumanly tall and massively muscled Trigon. Eight feet above the ground, his wide, fanged mouth smiled, and the deadly fire in his upper pair of eyes relented.

"You know what that means," Trigon said, his voice resonating with impossibly complex bass tones.

"I know." The hood of Raven's cape fell back to reveal tears streaming silently down her high cheekbones. She closed her eyes, not wanting to meet her father's piercing stare, or see her fallen teammates strewn around the ruins of the temple. "But you must never menace the Earth again. You must swear this."

"You will never be able to return, either."

"I know. I accept that."

"Do you accept everything else? Everything?"

"I-I do. Will you swear, father?"

"I do." Trigon extended a hand down to his daughter. "Take my hand and leave this world behind. Forever."

Raven reached up and silently placed her hand in his.

Trigon's eyes flared again with coruscating energies, and father and daughter were enveloped in an aura of heatless fire, as were two of the other figures lying unconscious near them.

"No! NO!" Raven protested. "Just take me!"

"I always keep souvenirs of my travels," Trigon said with a low, growling laugh, before he and the three females held in the grasp of his will vanished.

***********************************************

"You must help us!" Kid Flash exclaimed.

"You are full of anger and aggression, young man," said the elderly man in the hooded robes, and the gathering of men and women behind him nodded in agreement. "Nothing good can come out of that."

"Of course I'm angry! We just had our asses handed to us, Donna and Koriand'r are gone, and Raven -Raven is gone, and the world may just be about to end-!"

"Trigon will not be stopped through violence."

"What are we supposed to do, then? Ask real nice?"

"You would not understand."

"WHAT?"

"They ain't helpin', man," Cyborg said, shaking his chrome-plated, partially-mechanical head, while trying to repair some of the devices implanted in his dark-skinned flesh.

"We must make them, then!"

"We are trying to understand," Robin cut in, his voice holding a subtle balance of dry calmness and ominous menace that he learned well from his mentor. "But you must help us. We don't even know where we are, really."

"Azarath is the sanctuary of Azar. It is nowhere and everywhere. Azar is in our hearts."

"Good for you, but we must attempt to find and rescue our friends, maybe contact others who can help us fight-"

"No fights. Violence is useless. Only by accepting the truth of non-aggression-"

"Oh, like that Gandhi crap did you much good!" Kid Flash interrupted, his hands clenching too fast for the eye to see. "You're just a bunch of cowards!"

"Please, Wally," Robin whispered.

"You're all still alive here only because Raven sacrificed herself!"

"Yes. Raven did what was expected of her," the man said with a solemn tone. "She finally accepted the Way of Azar, casting aside the foolishness of futile resistance, and redeeming her tainted heritage. She-"

"BULLSHIT!"

"Look, we aren't asking you to fight," Robin said. "Raven said she learned dimensional-travel here in Azarath. That you taught her about Trigon."

"So it was."

"Then we just need someone to show us the way to his world. We'll do the rest."

"Your cause is hopeless, doomed by the folly of your methods."

"That's for us to find out."

"Even if we wanted, it cannot be done. Raven learned how to use her unnatural talents effectively, but no other could travel unaided to Trigon's dark realm."

"There may be a way," a soft voice said. A woman stepped forward, throwing back her robe's hood to reveal long, dark curly hair and delicate features framing pale blue eyes. She appeared to be in her late thirties, but her eyes seemed many decades older.

Robin stared. The woman was beautiful, but it was the eyes that caught him, eyes which held untold deep sorrows and regrets. Raven's eyes.

"Arella." The elderly man frowned. "You cannot."

"She is my daughter."

"It would mean turning your back on Azar's Way."

"I know."

"You would not be welcome again in Azarath."

"I understand." Arella lowered her gaze, in acceptance before looking up again with renewed determination. "But I must. Whatever hope there is of saving Raven, faint as it may be, I must take it. I owe it to her."

"You'll go to your doom, then."

"So did Raven."

***********************************************

"I was young," Arella said. "And stupid."

"Gar can relate to that," Cyborg muttered, looking sideways at Garfield Logan, and the shape-shifting Changeling smirked mirthlessly in return.

"Please, continue," Robin said, frowning at his teammates.

The priests of Azar had left them, none even deigning to bid farewell to she who had been one of them for nearly two decades. Such was the cruelty of those who considered themselves righteous, Robin thought, seeing how that had hurt Raven's mother. Maybe she wanted to ease her pain by sharing her past. Not that it made such revelations any less uncomfortable, for all.

"By my late teens, I had already tried all forms of excess available. Yet the drugs, sex and everything else left me unfulfilled, empty. I sought something, anything, to give my life meaning, so I turned to the occult. Was quite fashionable in those days. But the cult of renegade Manicheans I joined did more than merely dabble with satanic rites. Their Black Masses sought to contact a real demon. And they succeeded. They found Trigon."

Kid Flash shifted uneasily from foot to foot. His old-fashioned Protestant upbringing made him nervous at such things as demons and satanic masses.

"Look, ma'am, Trigon may be a real fiend from another world," Cyborg interrupted. "May carry a pitchfork and all, but there's no such thing as-"

"Sorry if I offend your beliefs, or lack of them," Arella replied. "But Trigon is evil incarnate, and no word describes him better than demon. I pray you need not be convinced of this like I was."

"But how did you-?"

"The ritual of his Summoning was as ancient as it was unholy. I was chosen among many as the main offering."

"Offering?"

"I was the willing sacrifice, the prospective bride offered to Trigon through a ritual orgy of depraved sex and bloodshed," She looked down with a pained expression. "To my eternal shame, I accepted the role gladly, and became his mate."

"Oh, boy," Gar muttered. "Of that big, red-?"

"But if Trigon could already access Earth, years ago, why did he wait to invade us until now?" Robin asked.

"He couldn't do it himself. Trigon was too powerful to leave his dimension. His power is such that reality itself is bent around him, like a planet's mass will distort space. Heaven knows how he finally managed to force his way up the potential slope of the fabric of reality."

"But how did you-?"

"He did not come to me. I went to him. There lies our only hope."

***********************************************

Raven's powers allowed her to shift through dimensions like a shadow slipping through deeper darkness, among bursts of dark gases produced by required adjustments of translocated mass. In contrast, Trigon forced his way through the layers of reality with the subtlety of a battering ram. Raven almost fainted as her senses reeled with the violence of her father's power tearing space itself asunder.

They appeared in the middle of a vast, dark chamber, its shadowed walls full of towering statues of Trigon. Recently lighted incense fought the stench of sweat and blood.

Raven blanched, as her empathic senses were assaulted by the lingering echoes of violent emotions flooding the air and stone.

Trigon gestured, and reddish lights rose all around the chamber's perimeter, revealing a veritable carpet of flesh surrounding the raised dais upon which stood Trigon, Raven, and the other two still-unconscious arrivals lying limply by their sides.

"No, no-!" Raven's voice failed her.

The dozens of naked bodies strewn all over the floor around the central dais in concentric circles were all of young, nubile females of various different humanoid species. Many had died so little ago that Raven felt the fading echoes of their doomed souls. Their faces shared similar expressions, impossibly showing both abject terror and impossible ecstasy.

"Worry not, daughter. All shall receive the proper burial honors befitting treasured concubines. What greater honor for them than to give their maidenhoods and lives to serve their Lord and Master?"

"You-you-"

"A pity the rituals were so demanding. Many did prove to be quite delectable and would have been worthy permanent additions to my harems, if they had survived."

"YOU MONSTER!"

"But then, I do have your friends now, and they did seem hardier than the Earth females I knew of old."

***********************************************

"You were in his world then."

"Our rituals parted the veil between realms and took me to him, to become his lover. Even now I can't say how long it lasted. Time lost all meaning, becoming brief intervals of rest amidst dream-like eternities of wanton pleasure. I knew him only as my dream lover, losing all sense of self beyond the joy of being his plaything."

"Uh, that may be just too much information," Garfield whispered nervously.

"Until I fulfilled what he wanted of me. Only then, after I became pregnant, did he show me his true face," Arella continued bitterly, with a grimace of disgust and self-loathing. "Maybe I'd always seen it and I just refused to acknowledge it. He sent me back then. At first I thought he had tired of me, but now I know he always meant to impregnate me."

"But why? Didn't strike me as the family type."

"GAR!" Robin spat.

"I believe he wanted to sire children in our world, so they could open the way to Earth for him. I was nothing but a means for an end to him."

"Then, Raven-?"

"Only the intervention of Azar saved us. When I had nowhere to go but down a path of madness and despair, they took me in, and taught me the way of peace and forgiveness. They helped me rise my daughter and shield her from the evil influence of Trigon. Azar herself taught Raven how to control the dark side of her nature. I-I thought it would be enough, but-"

"But if Trigon has a whole universe of his own to conquer, why does he need Earth?"

"In Azarath they believe that his universe isn't like ours. It may be vast, but limited."

"A pocket universe?" Cyborg asked.

"What?" Garfield asked.

"Pocket universe. Limited plane of existence with different physical laws from ours. If the cosmological constant is slightly different, it can mean an universe with space-time curved more tightly upon itself, so-"

"What?"

"Oh, forget 'bout it, Green-genes."

"Whatever is true, his worlds can no longer sate his hungers, and he wants more," Arella resumed. "If he enters our world, his power may grow even larger here, as he adapts to our type of reality. He could become even mightier than the Guardians or the New Gods."

"Oh, fuck," Robin muttered.

"Is that bad?" Gar asked.

"Very, very bad."

"But Raven made him swear-"

"Trigon's promises are worthless," Arella said with pursed lips. "He'll invade Earth anyway. Azarath wants Raven to buy time, so they can prepare some secret plan I was never told about. But they don't know him like I do. Trigon will twist Raven to his own image, and use her to conquer Earth. I can't let that happen."

"What are we waiting for, then?" Kid Flash cut in. "Open a magic gate or something and let's get moving!"

"It's not that easy. I learned enough of the secret arts in Azarath to pattern a spell of similarity, to reweave my original passage to Trigon's world, but it has been many years since I was taken there, and I must take you all along with me. I don't know if we can do what's needed."

"We'll do whatever we must," Robin stated. "For Earth, and our friends."

"Yeah, let's do it!" Kid Flash agreed.

"I hope you're right," Arella sighed, and unclasped her cape, letting it fall to the ground around her feet, followed next by her robe.

Garfield's eyes bulged and his mouth opened wide.

"After Trigon, no man could ever do anything for me," Arella went on, removing the simple cotton shift she had worn under her robe, and letting it fall as well, leaving her fully naked. "But with your youth and powers, it may be different. It's our only hope."

"Uh, ma'am, you mean we-?"

"We must have sex."

***********************************************

Raven fell to the floor of the extravagantly ornate chamber, sobbing.

"The child-! Why did you have to kill her?"

"She insulted her Lord and Master," Trigon replied casually.

Raven had followed Trigon while walking through a crowd of his subjects, when a small girl had muttered about his demonic appearance, rousing his anger. The child's flesh had actually boiled under Trigon's stare, and Raven's powers barely managed to heal her, absorbing and dispelling the horrendous pain, before Trigon simply incinerated her with a gesture.

"She had been punished already! Wasn't that enough?"

"I decide what is enough here. Maybe I would have let her live, with my mark on her, for others to always see and remember, but you defied me in public, seeking to save a low no-person, Daughter. That cannot be. You gave me no choice but to make a statement."

"What?"

"You made me kill that child, Daughter," Trigon said, before leaving the room. "Remember that."

***********************************************

"I can't."

Kid Flash shook his head. He could not. The woman was undeniably beautiful, with a body that most girls half her age would envy, but he could not. Even if he could forget the years of Sunday morning teachings on the evils of premarital marriage, he just could not.

"You must," Arella said.

"But I-I can't! You-You're Raven's mother! How can I-?"

"You care about my daughter? Don't you wish to help her, then?"

"Yes, but-"

"If you wish to be left behind, so be it."

Kid Flash stared at her for an instant, glanced at his fellow Titans, and shook his head, lowering his eyes.

"I have to go along."

"Good."

"Hey, I've got no problem with it," Garfield said with a nervous smile, trying not to stare at Arella's nude body too obviously. "Uh, so how do get to it? Do we take turns or is it all at once, or-?"

"Garfield-"

"I mean, should some of us go wait around the corner? I don't fancy the idea of you guys staring at me while-"

"No," Arella interrupted. "The connection between multiple participants will be tenuous at best. It may be in consecutive paired acts, but you all must remain close by, or the link will break."

"Oh, crap," Gar said with a grimace. "I don't like being watched."

"Look, forget your hang-ups," Robin said. He had engaged in sex in strange places and circumstances before, but to do the mother of a fellow Titan inside a ruined pagan temple in another dimension, in order to chase after a demonic world-conqueror, was really a first. Even that time in the cave with Talia, on the Batmobile, with Bruce in a lab three rooms away, now seemed casual in contrast. "Where can we-?"

"This spot will do," Arella said, moving to a marble altar still whole in a raised dais. Using a twisted candelabra, she began tracing a star-shaped pattern on the dust around the marble altar. "Candles, we need candles for a pentagram-"

Kid Flash vanished, and an instant later a lighted candle had appeared on each of the pentagram's points.

"I've seen movies," Wally explained, gesturing nervously at the arrangement. "Uh, anything else?"

Arella shook her head, and sat on the altar, facing the young men. "You must make me ready. The ritual will work only if we all achieve climax. That will be the hard part."

Many parts should be hard, but were not, Gar thought nervously. He had never seen up close a nude body as impressive as that of Raven's mother. Her long curly hair barely covered the upper swell of heavy breasts, and hips and thighs were those of a real woman, not the boyish shape of most girls he had known. Surely Donna was more graceful or Kory even more voluptuous, but Gar doubted he would them without clothes anytime soon, if ever, while Arella was right there naked in front of him. Yet his initial arousal had faded. What if he could not do it? What if he could not get it up in front of his friends? What would he do then? How could he ever face any of them again?

Flash looked away uneasily, and Cyborg stood impassive, his face expressionless.

Robin noticed the unease of his friends and shrugged. He never had any problem pleasing his partners, and actually had more experience with older women like Arella that with girls his age. She seemed far less enthusiastic than Talia or Ivy or Catwoman had been, but he foresaw no problems. And he was the leader, so he should lead, he thought, stepping forward and unfastening his red tunic. "We can't waste time. Let's do it."

"What? You gonna strip?" Gar asked.

"Um, we only need to access the proper parts, no?" Robin asked, glancing at Arella for confirmation.