The Titan’s Tower alarm went off, red lights flaring. The comm units on each titan flared and they all raced to the main room for debrief.
Once there, team leader Robin brought up the distress call on the overhead hologram screen for everyone to see.
“Jump City’s police have been recieving reports of multiple weather anomalies all over the area. The common denominator of the reports appear to be freezing temperatures and overwhelming emotional responses from witnesses in the area. The prime suspect was found missing from his cell an hour ago.”
Robin pulled up a mug shot of the suspect on the hologram display. Starfire stepped forward and picked up where Robin left off, having read the report he had sent to her new Wayne-Tech template minutes ago. “Mark Mardon, alias ‘Weather Wizard’. He was held in the Jump City Correctional Facility for several felonies including robbery, assault and battery, arson, and manslaughter.”
“Weather Wizard?” Beast Boy spoke up. “Aren’t wizards, you know. Not our jurisdiction?”
Raven nodded in agreement, her voice cool when she ellaborated, “It states so in the contractual agreement the League made with MACUSA.”
“Mac-whosa?” Kid Flash questioned, his head tilted in confusion.
“Dude, don’t you read the reports?” Beast Boy sighed animatedly. “The Magical Congress of the USA. We’re to give them any rogue wizards that make a mess in regular, non-magic cities.”
“Who do we call then?” The speedster asked.
“Their Consultation Office.” Starfire answered, already dialing the number.
Robin scoffed. “Beaurocratic policies are a stranglehold on our society’s ability to enact justice. We shouldn’t have to make a call to take down a villain, when all they’ll do is send us plebeians from the sixteenth century that can’t even fight properly.”
The call ran through and Starfire smiled to the person on the line’s greeting. “Yes! This is Starfire calling from Titan’s Tower. We have a situation.”
——
Court-mandated community service. That was the only reason Draco was in the cesspool that is North America, working alongside muggle metas. He got off easy compared to his father, who was sent to the newly improved Azkaban prison. Draco supposed he could thank the golden trio for arguing that the use of dementors as prison guards was an inhumane practice. They upturned ancient laws that had been the status quo for many centuries, proving each one was outdated and not viable to modern societal needs.
If those laws had remained in place, his father would have lost his mind on that island. Draco didn’t like owing the trio anything. It was troublesome when he simply owed Potter his life, but now he went and did this. Ever the hero, that Merlin-cursed fool.
“Hey, Malfoy. We got an assignment.” Draco’s muggleborn partner, Larry Clifford, returned to their shared office room with a pile of papers two feet high.
Draco quickly grabbed the summary page off the top of the pile and scanned over its contents fervently. “Weather Wizard? There’s no such classification. Do you know of an American pureblood family named Mardon? This sounds muggle.”
Clifford sighed, the breath rushed enough to waff against his ridiculous chevron mustache. “It is muggle, which is why it was passed down to us to handle. I think our boss just likes to see you squirm.”
The paper crinkled in Draco’s fist and it took all his self control to not tear the page up into ribbons with a good hex. Or maybe even by hand. Might be cathartic.
Before he let himself dip to such low levels of behavior he took a deep breath and centered himself. He smoothed the paper out against his desk carefully and nodded. “Very well. Let’s get to work.”
——
There was a stare-off happening in front of Titan’s Tower. Robin and Malfoy glared at one another, each seeming to further puff up their chests every twenty seconds that passed.
The rest of the Teen Titans were looking back and forth between them, tense and confused. The standoff was a cross between a tennis match and the Cold War.
Clifford looked as though he was waiting to see if his partner would pop like a balloon if he were to inflate any further.
Starfire was sad to interrupt whatever human bonding ritual this was, but they all needed to hurry if they were to get to the bottom of the weather anomalies before anyone got hurt. Lakes had been reported frozen over…and it was the middle of July. “So you were saying that the Weather Wizard is not in fact a wizard?”
The blond wizard finally looked away from Robin. He smoothed a hand down his blazer, though it couldn’t have been for wrinkles because the suit was immaculate. Starfire’s mind went to the city’s alley cats and the way they groom themselves to calm down from a confrontation. “Yes. While the man is a muggle, the artifact he’s using as his ‘wand’ is magical in origin. You can arrest the man, and we will work alongside you to confiscate the weapon.”
“Rad!” Beast Boy cheered, showing his toothy smile.
Malfoy took a step back. “Your friend appears to have a green-skin hex…and a tail? You should really get that seen to.”
The Teen Titans laughed, leaving the blond wizard very confused.
——
They had it wrong. They had been so very, very wrong.
It wasn’t the Weather Wizard.
The team and the two wizards stood together in the central park of Jump City, where the central-most weather activity was reported. The trees around them were frosted over. The flowers that outlined the walkways in the park had withered and died from the exposure to cold tempratures
without the protection of permafrost. Everyone in the vicinity shivered not just from the cold, but from an overwhelmingly dower sensation in the air. Like the world would never be right again. Dispair settled in with every breath that fogged in the air.
Across from the heroes and wizards, over a dozen rogue dementors floated slowly towards them. They creeped ever closer, taking their time. There was no need to rush, as their prey wasn’t going anywhere.
Beast Boy’s hair was standing up at the back of his neck. He couldn’t see where the threat was, but his animal instincts told him there was definitely something coming for them, and it felt like death.
Robin grew stiff, eyes dialated and breathing heavy. He reached behind him and unsheath his sword. The clammy air around them felt like his grandfather breathing down his neck. Expectations he would never fulfill.
Starfire gasped, and lost her power of flight as she slowly lowered to the ground…the pressure in the air was too much for her emotion-fueled powers. She felt like she would never feel happiness again.
Kid Flash’s teeth chattered and he rubbed his arms vigorously to warm them up. His limbs were freezing up, and if this continued he wouldn’t be able to run in his condition.
Clifford cast his patronous, a mutt of a hound with an rediculous mustache on its mussle that matched its owner’s. The dog barked and dashed at one of the dementors coming near. The dog held it off successfuly, but there were too many of them for one patronus to handle.
“E-expecto…” Draco shook his head and cleared his stammering throat. He fisted his trembling fingers to chase away the numb feeling. He got them mobile enough to weild his wand properly. “Expecto Patronum.”
Nothing. Draco cursed. This damn spell, he’d always had issues with it.
“What do you need?” Raven appeared next to him from the shadows, making the wizard jump.
He re-focussed on his attempts to cast the spell. “A good memory. But my life has not been very…I just don’t have a lot of them.”
Raven’s violet eyes landed in his own, and he could almost sense her dark demigod magics assessing him. It didn’t feel like the dark magic he’d come to know in his life; it was more like a protective shadow of chaos, tamed by the patience and strength of this one girl. “Think of your friends.”
“They’re gone.” Draco whispered, daring to voice anything so mundane as a weakness. Nearly everyone with the mark in Slytherin house had been sentenced to a number of years in Azkaban after the trial. Zambini got out on mandatory community service like Draco did, but the rest of them? Were they really even his friends anymore? What of Daphne? Did she really love him? An ex-Death Eater? Or did she agree to the engagement out of duty or worse…out of pity?
Raven saw Draco’s face pale. She didn’t hesitate and continued talking through her own slowly increasing dispair, she held her emotions back with an ironclad will. “Family?”
“I-I’d use that normally. But that’s another issue entirely.”
Beast Boy spoke up, sheepish in his countenance and doing everything he could to keep from shifting into a turtle and burrowing under the ground. “Just because you’re distant from your family doesn’t mean that you should dismiss the good memories you have of them.”
“I’ll help, if you let me.” Raven assured, gathering the darkness behind her in preparation.
The dementors were almost upon them. They were out of time. Draco turned to Raven, and nodded. “Do it.”
Raven framed her hands—currently gloved in purple shadows—around Malfoy’s head, her fingers pressing chalkra points below his ears, aside his temples, and at the back of his neck. “Azarath. Metreon. Zinthos.”
The memory that came to the fore was like a candle in the night. He heard his mother singing.
It was winter, but there’d been birds in the trees. Draco was three years old. He’d asked about the birds in the manor’s garden with the black and silver wings and blue feathers. She then had the house elves make them hot cocoa and sang him a song, a nursery rhyme about magpies.
One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.
Draco started to hum the nursery rhyme to himself, remembering his mother singing to him in her lap while sitting cossy in a sofa before the manor’s impressive fire place…his father looking at them with a proud smile, and conjuring birds just to see Draco smile.
“Expecto Patronum!”
A large magpie burst from his wand and joined the hound in herding the dementors away from the heroes.
Malfoy felt powerful, something that he knew should be credited to the purple-haired demigod that stood next to him. She had empowered him, reinforced the memory to have it hold strong. He summoned several more magpies to help corral the dark creatures.
Seven. He had summoned seven patronuses.
Take that, Potter.
“Call for the dementor control unit!” Draco got his head together enough to order a gawking Clifford. His partner bumbled an urgent message to his mustached mutt and sent it off to the control unit. The dog rushed off.
“How much time do we have?” Draco asked the man.
“They should get here in fifteen minutes.” The muggleborn wizard estimated.
“That’s too long.” Draco grit his teeth.
“I can get there faster.” Kid Flash offered, warmth spreading into his limbs again thanks to the magic glowing birds. “Where is it?”
Draco gave the speedster the address and the hero was gone in a blur.
“Alright,” Robin stepped forward, sword gripped tight. “Starfire, Beast Boy and I will cover the park and surrounding areas for civilians and get them to safety. Raven, stay with the wizards. Together, you three can get whatever’s in those trees into one big cluster.”
At that, Malfoy ordered each of his patronuses to follow a hero. Three glowing blue and ethereal magpies followed after Robin, Starfire and Beast Boy.
One affixed to Raven’s shoulder, who stared at it with a small smile. The remaining three flocked before Draco, awaiting further orders.
“Let’s round them up.” Draco said.
——
Draco, along with Raven and Clifford, successfully corraled the dementors in time for back up to arrive. The dementors were contained and transported back to their secret sanctuary guarded by unspeakables.
After filling in the aurors—who had popped to their location only after they convinced the sudden speedster in their office to explain the emergency at regular speeds—with a verbal report of the situation, Draco and Clifford stood before the Teen Titans once more to say their goodbyes.
Draco stiffly tolerated a hug from Beast Boy.
Raven and Draco shared a mutual aversion to physical contact, so they simply nodded to each other. Draco did however, use up his quota of graditude for the week on a single ‘thank you’.
It was echoed back by the entire team, save for Robin who reminded everyone to be on alert for a still-missing criminal meta.
Draco and his partner then walked away, and disapparated into the night with two quiet pops of displaced air.
Not five minutes later, the comms on each Teen Titan’s belt pinged an alert. The Weather Wizard was reported stealing from a national bank on 41st street.
Robin grinned at the others and gave the order. “Titans, go!”