The Teen Titans #40: "The White Rose" Pt. 4

[starlord]

Teen Titans
Issue #40:”The White Rose” Pt. 4
Written by: Jay McIntyre
Edited by: Brian Burchette
Cover by: Jamie Rimmer

To betray you must first belong
-Harold Philby

Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven, but not those who lack the courage of their own greatness.
-Ayn Rand

-1-

Rose found it harder and harder to breathe, and it was only a matter of time before the madman broke her neck.

So she kicked him in the groin. There was only a dull thud, and the Lord of Time smiled thinly at her.

So, he was smart enough to wear a cup. With her precog nonfunctional, and his hand tightening around her windpipe, she only had one option left....

She pulled back both feet and kicked him in the solar plexus.

He wheezed and stumbled back, letting her go. She collapsed to the floor, unable to do anything for the moment but cough.

But while she was down, and the Lord of Time was recovering his composure, Dagon had woken up enough to start bulling his way through the force field again. It was a slow, agonizing process, but he was nothing if not determined. His problem was not healing from pain, but rather working through it.

Cyborg was up again now and blasting away at the shield with rotating frequencies on his white noise cannon. Raven tried to teleport past the shield, but found herself knocked back regardless.

“Yes....sorceress....” the Lord of Time wheezed, “...my...technology is stronger than...any magic....”

“Dude, seriously,” Terra said, “SHUT UP!”

She used her powers to attack the infrastructure of the building directly. It rocked and groaned.

“Terra, no!” Nightwing shouted. “You'll bring the whole place down!”

“Gotta do it, bossman!” she shouted back. “Only way to stop him!”

Apparently the Lord of Time thought so too, for he threw a bolt of energy at her through the shield. She saw it and ducked back at the last moment, but even so it grazed her and sent her reeling, stopping her attack.

Cyborg saw this and narrowed his eyes. The fact that the Lord of Time could attack them through his shields almost certainly had nothing to do with time travel or even teleportation; he just knew what frequency to use. Of course, that would only make sense. Now, to figure out what that frequency was...

Dagon was still working his way through the shield, and had gotten about halfway, and now, finally, the Lord of Time noticed. Uttering some obscure phrase that was undoubtedly his time's version of a curse, he blasted Dagon with some bizarre sort of green and purple plasma fire that knocked Dagon back through the shield....

And Cyborg recorded it's frequency. A high end resonance with a strange double-warble in it. Grinning unpleasantly, he adjusted his white noise cannon to that high, warbling pitch...and fired.

The blast struck the Lord of Time and sent him reeling.

The shockwave of the white noise blast caused a still-gasping Rose to raise her head. She looked at the Lord of Time, who was staring in shock at Cyborg and ignoring her. She desperately wanted to tackle him again, but he obviously was ready to counter her directly. One of the things her father had taught her was to go after an enemy in ways they would not expect.

So she looked around....and saw Daniel Chase still wired into all the machinery. Her stomach rolled over thinking what it must be like to be plugged into all that. And obviously that was how the Lord of Time was messing with history. It was a marvel Terra hadn't taken Daniel out earlier when she had threatened the structural integrity of the building.

If she damanged this equipment, some of the displaced people might never get back, and history would be utterly screwed...but if she didn't sabotage it, the Lord of Time might win, which would be even worse, in her reckoning.

The Lord of Time was shouting at Cyborg, “How did you manage that, you backward primitive...” but Rose tuned him out. Slowly and quietly, she crawled along the floor towards Daniel.

Wonder Girl and Starfire saw what Rose was doing. As Cyborg kept blasting away, Starfire attacked the shield with her starbolts, and Wonder Girl pounded against it with her bracelets as though she believed she could get through that way.

Rose scrambled behind the banks of instruments. She wasn't sure about pulling the wires out of Daniel; that might kill the kid, and Nightwing might kick her off the team for that. But if she could shut the machine itself down....?

Her precog wasn't functioning still, but she knew well enough the thing had to be powered in some way. Using her staff, she smashed open the back of the instrument bank. Thankfully mister sci-fi reject hadn't been able to make it out of some impervious future metal, or something. Wires were exposed within, again, thankfully contemporary. Rose supposed he needed to modify and use technology from this era for some reason. She didn't spend any time pondering it, she just got to work...

-2-

The Lord of Time was still mostly agitated with Cyborg; Starfire and Wonder Girl were additional aggravations to him. “Since you wish to defy my technology, I shall crush you with it!” He tapped a few buttons on a wrist control, and the shield began to expand outwards, towards the Titans. “You may be able to blast through my shields, Cyborg, but your physical form cannot survive it! Nor that of your friends! I shall crush you all to death and then finish off the brat Rose. An ignominious death is not what I originally planned...but it will be sufficiently humiliating to the League when they learn of your fall!”

Terra was pounding the shield with rocks, and Starfire was blasting it, but it was no good. Cyborg sent another blast of white noise through, and it did knock the Lord of Time on his backside and stun him, but this did not slow the expansion of the shield any.

“Run, Nightwing!” Starfire shouted. “Out the window! We'll hold it off!”

“I'm not going to leave any of you here to die!” Nightwing shouted back.

Abruptly, the shield fluctuated, buzzed...then vanished.

If the Titans were surprised, the Lord of Time was doubly so. “What...?” he began.

Rose poked her head up from behind the console. “Hey, Doctor Forrester,” she taunted. “Game over.”

For a moment, the Lord of Time could only stand slack-jawed, gaping in astonishment. Then he was so furious he almost blasted the console. But that would destroy his own power base. Aiming for Rose instead, he realized too late that the Titans could now reach him.

Starfire hit him with three consecutive starbolts, and then Dagon was on him. The vampire didn't go for blood, but did use his fangs and claws to try to find a weakness in the futuristic body armor.

Almost irritably, the Lord of Time kicked the vampire away, but now Cyborg, Nightwing and Wonder Girl were all in his face. He knew the capabilities of each of them, and was suitably concerned.

But he was the Lord of Time; surely he could beat these cretins! They weren't even the Justice League!

So he tried one more strike....a negative energy blast that would have teleported anyone struck by it back to the 12th century BC.

He fired...and Cyborg knocked his aim off....so all it hit was the ceiling, and that particular blast was only designed to work on living matter.

And now they were beating him down, literally beating him down! And Dagon was trying to find a seam in his armor again.....

He pressed the teleport button on his belt, and materialized back inside the gold-brass sphere that was his current time machine. At a gesture, the sphere closed, and he pressed the emergency temporal shift control.

Perhaps, he reflected, as he shot back through the vortex towards his own time, he would challenge the Titans again, on purpose. Or perhaps when he bested the Justice League, he would use them to destroy the Titans. Or vice-versa. Yes, all sorts of interesting possibilities, he thought, as he wiped blood from his mouth.....

-3-

Cyborg scowled with frustration as the time machine vanished in a burst of light.

“Um, guys? I think these machines are still messing with history,” Rose said. “My precog ain't back yet, and this kid is still all wired up.”

“Let me have a look at the controls,” said Cyborg.

It took him a few minutes to work it out, not only how to shut it down, but to reverse it, to send the dinosaur and the trainful of people outside back to their respective eras. Then he began the delicate business of unwiring the hapless Daniel Chase from it. Rose blew a sigh of relief as the temporal distortion field faded, and her precognitive abilities returned.

-4-

Terra was groggy and woozy in Beast Boy's arms. Nightwing stormed over to them. “Terra,” Nightwing said angrily.

“Yeah, boss?” she asked, still only about half conscious.

“When I say don't bring the house down, don't! Clear?”

Terra glared blearily at him, but the nodded her head. “Yeah, okay. Sorry.”

“Good.” He folded his arms. “And another thing.”

“Whaaaaat?” she asked, annoyed.

“You actually said 'dude'? Rose was right before; Beast Boy is rubbing off on you!”

The Titans laughed, except for Rose, who shook her head. Inside, she felt uncomfortable.

“Okay, this thing is safe now, I guess,” Cyborg said, dragging a woozy and confused Daniel Chase away from the mishmash of computers and instrument banks. “Guess we should destroy it.”

“What,”said Rose, “Don't you wanna ship it to those STAR labs people so they can use it to improve our tech?”

“Maybe it would,” Nightwing answered. “But it would also change our future.”

“In which case maybe that Doctor Who reject would never have come back here!” Rose pointed out.

Nightwing nodded. “In which case, he never would have given us the technology in the first place....a paradox, Rose. Time travel isn't a fun thing to mess with.”

“Wibbly-wobbley, timey wimey,” Beast Boy put in.

Cyborg and Terra groaned. Rose was merely angry, but she caught Nightwing staring at her, and argued the point no further. Cyborg and Starfire blasted the banks of instruments until there was nothing left but black, smocking slag.

Once he was compos mentis again, Daniel Chase was glad the Titans had saved him, and thanked them; but he also quietly wanted them to go away. He had long ago learned; keep your head down!

The Titans granted his wish shortly thereafter. Which meant that all that was left was how to explain this to his parents.....

-5-

Two days later, it was Rose's precog that led the team to a bank robbery by some high tech guys with jet packs in Queens.

Her martial arts were improving, and her quarterstaff-kick combination took out the first of the gunmen. Her mind flashed a warning of the future, and she backflipped away seconds before another of the thugs sprayed the area with bullets from his machine pistol.

Cyborg ripped the jetpack off the back of one robber, and Starfire's energy bolt took out another.

Terra stormed in, Beast Boy wrapped around her as a snake, who then launched himself at a terrified robber while Terra gleefully pounded another pair with rocks.

Nightwing was in his element here, jumping, leaping, kicking. He extended a languid hand to Rose, who ran to him and accepted the hand. He swung her hard, throwing her at another robber who was trying to get away by flying out the window. Rose's feet connected with the thug's helmet, which cracked audibly.

“We're the Winged Thieves!” one of them proclaimed.

Dagon slammed him into the ground, hard. “You're third-rate poseurs,” he answered.

Wonder Girl booted another in the jet pack.

Raven wrapped her soul self around the last of the robbers, and that was that. The media actually showed up early this time, enabling Rose to pose for a few pictures, much to Nightwing's annoyance.

-6-

A woman sat in a darkened room. A younger male form stood behind her.

“He's about to make his move,” the woman said. “So we must make ours.”

She turned away from the monitors and stood up.

Each one of them was either a photo or surveillance footage of Deathstroke.

-7-

Rose had, with the Titans help, got a cell phone. They thought nothing of it; natural for her to have one.

When it vibrated in her pants pocket, she didn't openly react. She went right on with her conversation with Raven for a few more minutes.

When she could get away, she took it out and opened it.

It was a text message.

9:30 TONIGHT, it read.

Rose hung her head and sighed, then she texted back an acknowledgment. She had gathered most of what she would need in the past few weeks, some of it, like the cell phone, with the Titans own assistance.

--8—

Rose had long since learned the ins and outs of Titans Tower. The Titans had done what they could to modify it since they learned of Doctor Stone and Deathstroke's....involvement...in it's construction. But she had long since scoped out the modifications that Cyborg had made to his father's backup power supply to the Tower.

So she actually sabotaged that one first, using her precog and her knowledge of the plans to know what wires to cut. It wasn't so different from sabotaging the Lord of Time's equipment, really. The parallel made her uncomfortable.

Then she cut the outside power lines. Securing insulated gloves for that without suspicion was the most difficult part of the whole operation.

All the lights went out.

She crept back upstairs. The only remaining line of defense she wasn't able to take out was the proximity alarm, which not only had it's own power source but was also secured under three different layers of security.

But by the time that alarm went off, it would be far too late for almost any of the Titans to do anything about it...

--9—

When the lights went out, Wally West tried to stand up. He was wobbly on his feet, and his ribs still felt like they were on fire, but he managed. While his healing powers weren't all that they could be, they were slowly getting better with Raven's help.

Rose came in with a flashlight.

“Hey kid,” Wally said. “Seems we're having some technical problems.”

“Hi,” Rose smiled back.

Then she brought her staff up between his legs, hard.

He went down, and as his body tried to heal from the newest problem, she kicked him in the head five times.

Wally mercifully lost consciousness.

--10—

Rose affected nervousness, and ran to “find” Gar in the lounge, his pizza dinner left behind.

“What's going on?” she asked him.

“Beats me,” he said, frowning. “Glad you got the flashlight, though. I think maybe your dad is making another play to get you back, and hit us at the same time.”

“Probably right,” she agreed. “I'm surprised you're not in bed with Tara.”

“Too early,” he answered, not noticing the cutting tone of Rose's voice. “Let's find her, and the others!”

Rose followed along willingly enough, but after he had taken two steps, she stabbed a hypodermic needle into his neck and pushed the plunger. The chemical cocktail of toxins and sedatives would not only put him down for the count, but also keep him from shape shifting for a while as well.

--11—

“Rose?” Tara frowned, looking around, shrugging uncomfortably into her nightgown. “Where are the others? The power went out and I can't find Gar...”

“I'm not sure,” Rose said. “But I do know one thing.”

Tara raised an eyebrow. “What's that?”

“You should've helped me when I asked you to, because really, I was trying to help you. You, Dagon and Raven....you three should have known better.”

Tara looked surprised for a moment, then tensed, ready to call upon her power. “Rose, what did you do?!?”

“What you should have done,” Rose answered, and sprayed Tara in the face with the little canister she had been saving for just this occasion. Like the drug for Gar, it hadn't taken her long to make it down in the Titans' own labs.

“You....” Tara began, trying to summon a rock, then she passed out.

“Sorry, sis,” Rose sighed. “I really am.”

--12—

“Donna!” Rose shouted, colliding with her in the hallway. “Gar and Tara are down for the count! Something's going down!”

Donna nodded. “The proximity alarm hasn't gone off. Somebody snuck in. Come on, let's go!”

She flew, but not too fast for Rose to keep up with her. Rose pulled her amulet out of her shirt on it's chain, and touched it to the back of Wonder Girl's leg, and uttered a Word of Power.

“What--” Donna began, but then collapsed, writhing in agony.

This one had been the most difficult; Rose bit her lip. With Donna's new found power in recent months, she was not simply knocked out by the amulet. Hopefully she would not recover before Rose and her father rounded up the others. Also, Rose was no magician; using the amulet proactively in this way made her fingers burn and gave her a pulsing headache.

But between her preparations and her precognitive abilities, she knew what to do.

--13—

Not surprisingly, Raven was crouched over Wally in the med-lab.

Rose had thought about telling Rachel that she had “found” the amulet, but even that would give Raven time to react.

So she snuck up as quietly as she could, while Rachel was focused on healing Wally, and quickly pulled the chain off and dropped it over Rachel's hooded head, whispering another Word of Power.

This one hurt Rose even more than the attack on Donna; she dropped to her knees and hugged herself as her nose bled. The effect on Raven was much more dramatic; she fell over and screamed, as bolts of white energy wrapped around her and over her.

Stumbling away, trying to clear her aching head and wiping the blood from her nose, Rose heard the proximity finally alarm go off. No time to take out Dick before daddy arrived; and without the amulet she had no way to counter Dagon; she had done all she could. They would have to fight it out from here.

--14—

When Rose came out the front door, still wiping blood from her nose, Nightwing, Starfire, Cyborg and Dagon were already there, facing off against her father.

“Ahh and my little girl too,” Deathstroke said. “My countermeasures only gave you a bloody nose, eh dear? Such a shame.”

“Just shut up,” she snapped back at him, playing her role.

“I should have known you left some surprises for us in the Tower,” Nightwing said. “Strange that Cyborg never found them.”

“You always underestimate me, Nightwing,” Deathstroke answered, “For all your intelligence. It is why you will fail.”

Cyborg, Dagon and Nightwing closed with Deathstroke, and Starfire began blasting away at him. He leapt back and dodged, leaving Rose and Starfire in close proximity.

Starfire was tougher than a normal human by several magnitudes, but she did not have the invulnerability of Wonder Girl or even the relative toughness of Cyborg. She was strong, yes; but she could be beat down all the same.

Rose's precog told her exactly how hard to swing and exactly where to aim. Even so, the first quarterstaff strike only dazed Starfire; she turned and offered Rose a look of shock and fury, and even managed to fire off a starbolt. But between her dizziness and Rose's precog it went far wide, actually smashing a window in the Tower. Three more strikes from Rose and she was down.

She ran to catch up with the others. Deathstroke's heightened brain capacity and enhanced reflexes meant he was holding his own against Nightwing and Cyborg, and his healing abilities enabled him to endure what attacks did get through. In terms of power, Cyborg was the more immediate threat, but also the one it would be much harder for Rose to fight, even helping her father to do so.

But they had planned for this contingency and several others. She pole-vaulted instead into Nightwing's back. As Cyborg turned and stared at her, Deathstroke pulled a small device from a belt pouch and triggered it; a small electromagnetic pulse struck Cyborg, and he went down, mechanical parts nonfunctional.

Nightwing gave Rose a long hard stare...then she and her father were beating him down. He got in four strikes on Deathstroke and one hard kick on Rose before Deathstroke stomped him into unconsciousness.

“Where's the vampire?” Deathstroke asked, looking around.

Rose cursed. She'd lost track of him during the fighting.

“Right here!” Dagon's voice said, and even with the warning of her precog, Rose couldn't get away in time before Dagon reformed out of mist and clamped his long black nails into her shoulders. “You little--” he began.

But Deathstroke had planned for this contingency, too. Holy symbols wouldn't work against Dagon, as firstly he was not evil and secondly they only served to keep a vampire at bay if you had faith. By itself, you could not imprison a vampire in that way.

But he was most assuredly vulnerable to sunlight, and in particular it's most active ingredient, ultraviolet rays. Deathstroke pulled a UV projector gun from another belt pouch and shined it right in the vampire's eyes.

Dagon screamed, and was unable to shift back into mist form due to the nature of the attack, as Deathstroke had anticipated.

Free of his grip, Rose proceeded to beat him down, while Deathstroke kept shining the light in his eyes.

Finally, the vampire collapsed.

“That will keep him down for a short period of time. I have a special coffin that will hold him. A little rough around the edges,” Deathstroke said, panting, “But well done.”

“Thanks, dad. But Wonder Girl was still twitching. We may have to go upstairs and finish her first. She showed some resistance to the amulet.”

“That is within anticipated parameters,” her father agreed. “Let's go!”

Father and daughter raced inside the Tower.

“Couldn't the HIVE have at least helped with the heavy lifting, their bodies I mean?” Rose complained as they raced for the stairs.

“I've got my own equipment for that,” Deathstroke answered, “And I wouldn't ask their help in any case. We can do this ourselves. What about your nose? Did you encounter resistance?”

“Nah, that was backlash from the amulet.”

“Really? How annoying. We'll see to you after we've cleaned up here.”

When the arrived upstairs, Wonder Girl was still struggling to get up. In her weakened condition, she was no match for the two of them.

--15—

The mysterious woman and the young man arrived at the darkened Tower some twenty minutes later. But every room was empty; Rose, Deathstroke and the captive Titans were already gone.

“No,” the woman breathed. “We're too late!”


Continued....


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