Beast Boy jerked awake, nearly falling off the top bunk of his bed. He took a moment to cling to the mattress, trying to clear the lingering smell of smoke and sulfur from his nose. He groaned, scrubbing a hand through his hair. It was the third time he'd had that nightmare in as many nights. If it was just a dream he could shake it off, but it wasn't.
Terra really was gone.
He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing the heels of his palms against the lids as the image of Terra engulfed in the lava and frozen in stone flashed into his mind. He could still feel her last hug, still hear her calling him the best friend she ever had.
And before that begging him to kill her.
Nope, he wasn't sleeping anymore tonight.
He checked the clock. Four in the morning. Even Robin wouldn't be up for another hour or so. Beast Boy dragged himself out of bed, deciding to watch TV till his brain shut up.
Padding down the hall to the living room, he stopped, noticing the outline of light around Raven's door. She wasn't usually awake this early either. He knew he was taking his life in his hands if he bothered her at the best of times, but he wondered if she had had a bad dream too. At the very least, getting yelled at would distract him for a few minutes.
He knocked at the door quietly. "Raven?"
To his surprise, after a slight pause her door opened. He squinted at the sudden light.
"What is it, Beast Boy?" she asked, with the mild, but slightly more pronounced than usual annoyance she always had when distracted from something.
His vision adapted and he realized she was hovering cross-legged in the middle of her room with several open books floating around her. More books, usually kept so meticulously organized on her shelves, lay scattered about her floor like shrapnel.
"Uh, everything okay?" he asked cautiously, not daring to step even a toe over the threshold if she was already on edge.
"Other than my entire library proving completely worthless, yes." One of the orbiting books snapped shut and discarded itself aggressively across the room.
Beast Boy jumped. He looked at Raven, noticing her eyes were bloodshot and a half-finished cup of now-cold tea sat ignored on the floor. "Have you been up all night?"
"I thought I was onto something," she said, flipping through a book almost as big as a pizza box. "There's a transformation spell Geldor of Zyrania used to undo a curse placed on the emperor in the Etherian Scrolls, but it turned out he was turned into a tree, not stone, so that was yet another dead end."
As she sent the big book floating aside and called another off the floor, Beast Boy's heart clenched. So that's what she was looking for… "Raven, why are you doing this?"
She looked up at him for the first time since the door opened, squinting as her eyes focused to far distance again. "What?"
He took a chance on venturing into her room a bit now, carefully stepping over books. "You hated Terra," he said sadly. "You don't trust a lot of people, and she betrayed you. All of us." He felt a fresh stab of pain just saying it. "Why are you doing all this to try and help her?"
Raven looked down again, but this time was staring at empty space rather than a book. "Because of you."
Shock made his head jerk up. "Huh?"
"What you said when we were planning to confront her. How you begged us to give her a second chance. You refused to believe she was truly evil, even after everything she did." The determination had faded from her face, leaving only a strangely sad look. "You know better than most people the nature of my powers. You've seen what I try to keep under control. One day, it might make me do terrible things, things that others would hate me for. If that happens, I just hope you'll give me the same chance."
Beast Boy stared at her, jaw slack. It took him a second to find his voice again. "Yeah, of course, Rave, but it's not like you'd ever do anything that bad—"
":Just remember this, okay?" she snapped, looking up at him. The intensity with which her eyes locked on his made him shiver. It felt like she was demanding he swear an oath, and she might just have the spells to enforce it.
He held his hands up. "Okay, I promise. I'll remember."
She looked away again, seeming a bit embarrassed, but relieved as she buried herself in another book. "Thank you."
Beast Boy scratched his head. Man, it must have been ages since she meditated if she was getting this worked up. "Uh, Raven, I really appreciate you doing all this, but, well…she's not going anywhere. You probably ought to get some sleep before Robin starts calling us all down for training or something."
As if his words had given her body permission to make its needs known, he saw her try to hide a yawn. "Maybe. I need to find some more texts on geomancy anyway to make any new progress."
"Yeah, geometry's always good," he offered, fighting his own yawn in response. "I think I'm going to go veg in front of the TV till I zonk out. You want anything?"
"I'm fine, thank you," she said, unfolding her legs and starting to gather the books. "Just sleep."
"Cool. Good night, Raven."
Her voice stopped him partway out the door. "Beast Boy. If the nightmares persist, there is a meditation technique I can show you to help you sleep easier."
He grimaced slightly. Was it that obvious? Of course, why else would he be up this late unless he was watching movies or going for a record on a game? "Thanks, I'll remember that too."
Shaking his head over the weirdness of that conversation, he wondered if he'd actually wake up and find out it had been a dream too. Things always got confusing when dealing with Raven, even when he was fully awake.
Still, he barely made it through half a rerun of some 80's sitcom before dozing off, and when he woke to the commotion of Cyborg making breakfast in the morning it didn't even occur to him that he'd made it through the rest of the night without any more bad dreams.