A Slippery Slope, A Green Horizon.

The Gala

His father's suit fit perfectly, as he knew it would.

All black and white, a classic tuxedo that had seen it's fair share of ballrooms, dance floors and Serengeti plains, not necessarily in that order. Smoothing down the already impeccably ironed and starched jacket, Garfield was struck by a gratefulness for the man he had barely known.

When he had turned eighteen, the Bank of Greater Gauteng had contacted the Titan on the previous instruction of his late parents. The message they passed on to him had been short and simple, delivered in Marie Logan's dulcet Swahili.

"Happy Birthday Gar, Dad and I have been keeping this surprise from you for so long now, we may have forgotten it ourselves. You're a man now, and as a man you're entitled to a piece of the people who got you this far. Today, we will be taking you to Johannesburg and opening a long overdue present. Please forgive us for hiding this from you for so long. Happy Birthday my baby boy."

After what seemed like hours of shocked and tearful numbness, in which all Garfield remembered was finding himself curled in the corner of his room on the tail end of what he assumed was a major breakdown, the name "Galtry" still lingering like poison on his lips, the Titan had booked a flight to South Africa and taken leave from the Titans, for this was something he needed to deal with alone.

There he had found, after many agitated conversations in Afrikaans, a small, yet quite upper-class bank.

The clerk had turned white when Beast Boy said he had come for the Logan account, all but sprinting to find his manager, a Boer woman with incredibly striking blue eyes, despite her advanced years.

A hurried conversation had followed in which he assured her that yes, he was in fact Garfield Mark Logan, that no, he was not dead and/or captured by Somali human traffickers, that yes, he was always coloured green. She had produced a key from her breast pocket and ushered him down a flight of stairs, into a basement several times larger than the atrium above and boasting more than a dozen massive vault doors, along with thousands of various sized lock-boxes set into the floor.

She had moved to one of the great doors and inserted her diminutive key, before clearing her throat in an official manner and asking in halting English, "What was your first language?"

"Kookaburra." Beast Boy said without hesitation. "Because I was always laughing back at them."

The manager had given a terse nod, and swung open the door.

His parents had left their son with personal things, among them a few of his father's clothes, their wedding photos, and (Most importantly to Garfield) hundreds of journals written by the couple during their escapades. All of which had found their way to the emerald young man as a belated gift from people who had not known they would never see it's effect on their son, nor that all other traces of their fortune had been taken from him.

It was from the journals that the changeling found some insight into the people his parents had been, beyond the documentaries and shallow interviews they had done during their lives. From their own words he found out that his father had loved the smell of sea salt, that his mother refused to drink coffee as it made her light headed, they had written of him and how they could already see the fine man he would become, of their travels, their plans and a myriad list of things he relished in reading.

It was in these journals that Mark Logan had confided his reason for stowing the tuxedo away in the vault marked "G. Logan" along with the items that he could not have known would be the last worldly possessions his son would have to remember him by.

"I want Garfield to have my prom suit." He had written, the ink so black he could have penned it moments before. "I know it's all superstition, but that tux was with me the night I finally got to hear Marie say she loved me, hopefully my boy can use some of that luck on his big night too."