Teen Titans: "Living Memory"

***

I have bad dreams. They’re not nightmares, exactly, because they don’t terrify or surprise me. They do make me afraid, though. They make me afraid that I can’t trust my mind.

You have to be crazy, in some respects, to do what I choose to do. My friends didn’t decide to have their powers. They decided to be heroes, of course, but I decided to do the same without the benefit of shapeshifting, energy projection, integrated weaponry or magic. That doesn’t make me better than them. It only makes me vulnerable. So I have to be a little unhinged to put myself at that great a risk, and it’s not entirely a bad thing.

But instability, not being able to rely on my brain – that’s bad. That’s what makes a leader a, a fighter, a *detective* unable to do his job.

What worries me most about my bad dreams isn’t that they’re full of darkness. That’s par for the course. I thrive on darkness, because it often helps me work. The problem comes from them being full of odd figures, unknown and unknowable strangers who aren’t familiar, but should be.

It’s often myself. Older, younger, dressed differently, dressed as Batman, maybe in a variation of what I wear now with a hood or cowl. There are at least three or four different Nightwing costumes, and I wonder if this is how people are supposed to get the ideas for wardrobe changes. It’s doubtful.

Of course, I don’t stay alone. I’ll be joined by Beast Boy, but he’ll be taller, dressed in red and white, looking sadder. Cyborg is there, with golden metal, often old, sometimes without any mechanical parts at all. Raven can be… frightening. And there’s even Terra – or someone who reminds me of her, but who wears a mask and can’t meet my eyes.

Starfire shows up least often, but I think that’s because she’s too much herself to be anyone different. I’ll catch glimpses of her at different ages, always with the same burning joy about her. At times I see a girl whose eyes glow like Starfire’s, but remind me of my mother’s. She reminds me of myself, too.

I’ve seen my parents, also, but they’re dim, always hollow, like objects rather than people. Once I saw something that looked like me carry a bloody axe and scream about them even as they faded. It scared me. I don’t think I’m supposed to imagine these things. They’re like answers to questions, answers I’m not supposed to have.

We aren’t meant to know the way things will be, or could be, or could have been. And yet it’s in these deep times of night, when I couldn’t be further or farther from my body, that I believe I can imagine it all. Just faintly, as though I’m a long way off, probably no more real to them than they are to me, a distant, unbidden dream.

***

Written by Gunwild
Teen Titans © Cartoon Network, a Time Warner Company