Another drabble for the Emotion Prompt Challenge on Tumblr. This time, I got "insane Raven".
Raven had always thought being around the unstable emotions of the other Titans disrupted the fragile peace she maintained within her mind. She hadn't realized until they were gone how much they had the opposite effect. Their complicated, untempered, but ultimately human emotions had drowned out her own darkness. Yes, they stirred and agitated her own feelings, but what they drew forth from her was human and, as far as she could tell, good. Even the annoyance and frustration that often flared first was mixed with fondness and, at its core, varying levels of love.
Without them in her life, there was nothing to overpower his voice. His mocking, incessant growl that had become the perpetual background noise to her self-imposed isolation.
It hadn't been her original plan. She had never expected to get to stay with the Titans forever, but she was a little surprised how quickly that temporary refuge had fallen apart. It was as if Starfire's words that fateful morning had planted a seed in all of them. The drifting. One crashing wave had begun fraying the ties that bound them together and as certainly as predicted, they all began parting ways. And in Raven's case, had drifted so far out to sea she couldn't see land anymore.
Robin had separated from them first. When it had become clear that there was no way for them to bring Starfire back to their own time, he still clung desperately to his mission to find her. Eventually, even his determination gave way under the weight of constant failure. Instead, he redirected his obsessed focus on righting the wrongs he could fix in their city. None of them had been able to break through his single-minded motivation the way Starfire had, and gradually they became frustrated of trying and fighting with him. His mind was made up. They had lost him long before he moved out of the Tower and took up the solitary role of Nightwing.
She couldn't remember who initiated the next split. The tension between the teammates had escalated and smoldered as the permanence of Starfire's loss set in. Everyone got on each other's nerves easier, their tempers already raw with helplessness. Beast Boy fought with Robin. Cyborg fought with Robin. Their frustration made Beast Boy and Cyborg short with each other. Their fighting fed Raven's irritation and made her snap easier. And all the time, the currents pushed them further apart. At some point, it had become clear they weren't a team anymore, and with all that had been said and could not be unsaid, there was little inclination to stay together.
By then, the voice was getting worse. She could feel it. It spoke to her in her sleep, filled her nights with dreams of fire and devastation. At first she thought it was a response to her own stress over the break-up of her chosen family, but he made sure she knew it was more than that.
Her destiny. The fate Azar and the monks of Azarath had spoken of so guardedly around her. Its time was coming, though how quickly she did not know. All she knew was that she needed all her focus just to try to ignore the voice. That was what ultimately made her leave. She could not counter Trigon's influence if she was constantly bombarded by equally toxic emotions from outside. The little moments of contentment, companionship, and positivity had become less and less frequent as each of her former friends focused more on their own futures. When she did depart from the Tower, a part of her wondered how long it would be before anyone noticed she was gone.
She had considered voluntarily committing herself to Arkham for safety, but being surrounded by that many sick and violent minds would only make things worse and she had little faith in exactly how successful the asylum was at keeping their charges secured anyway. Instead, she had found an abandoned building on the edge of town, forgotten for the most part, but still attached to the city's electrical grid. She wasn't sure why the building had been neglected, but its overlooked state fit well with her own state of mind.
A bit of white paint, a secure door, one light, and the room reflected the emptiness her soul craved. Closing the door on the world one final time, she set about embracing the monastic existence she had fled from only a few years before.
While the silence and lack of distraction allowed her to focus all of her time on meditation, it only served to amplify the noise in her mind. Her emotions, a burbling susurrus at the best of times, were a bickering tempest now. The loudest voice in the storm wrapped her heart in an iron maiden of Loneliness and taunted her with memories of the days she briefly had a family. She had known it wouldn't last forever, but it seemed so unfairly brief now. With no one around, she found it harder to motivate herself to repress these emotions, and now and then submitted to the grief of her losses even as she knew there was no other way. At least here her powers could play themselves with minimal notable impact on anything but her own psyche.
They found her, of course. She had no cues to indicate the passage of time, but one by one they came. At least, she thought they did. It got a bit hard to tell what was memory and what was new on the unchanging white canvas of her world. She thought Nightwing came to demand what she was doing, but that could have been a year ago when he was still Robin. Beast Boy may have come to try to convince her to come out, but she wasn't sure if that was here or her old room at the Tower. Cyborg's soft voice sought understanding and offered reassurance, but she couldn't tell if the smell of oil and welding soot were part of him or part of a memory of sitting together by the T-car. She did notice their voices never occurred together. Each time, she rebuffed them, whether person or phantom. That part of her life did not exist anymore and never could again, even if Trigon released her from his thrall. After a time there was no new evidence to suggest their appearances were not simply regurgitated memory or wistful fantasy.
The one voice she knew was real was his. The crackle of fire and the stinging hint of smoke was the constant backdrop to her every thought. Trigon was the one being who could find her wherever she tried to cloister herself and his presence filled her sanctuary increasingly as time lengthened on. Every moment became a constant effort to hold back the will that tried to insinuate itself through her mind, like trying to hold a door shut as a raging flood poured against it from the other side. He beckoned her to come to him, to take her place as his portal, his gem. Why did she owe any loyalty to this world? She had no one left here to stand by her. Even if they did care for her, they could not even stick together when dealing with their own personality differences. What hope did they have of facing an all-powerful being like Trigon?
Still, Raven resisted. For all that it had overlooked her now, for that brief shining time, this world had been her home. She had had friends, even if that time was past. Prophecy or not, she would not give in to Trigon easily. He told her time and again how inevitable her fate was, but it began to dawn on her that perhaps he wasn't quite as omnipotent as he presented himself. Although he burned across her mind continuously, he could not physically control her body. And from what she gathered, he could not use her as the portal unless she went to the necessary place and willingly performed the ritual. Even when the red symbols blazed across her skin, their color painful to her eyes after seeing only whiteness for so long, she realized there was one way she could prevent his victory.
Every day detached her further from the outside world. She existed now solely in her bubble of silence and solitude. His voice was just that, one of many that assaulted her temporally disjointed mind. What was she really losing if she just…let go? Not dying; she knew already that Trigon would not allow her body to do that until she had completed her part in his plans. But why struggle so hard to stay grounded when that ground crumbled a bit more easily each day? What was she holding out for? Why not just allow herself to drift that little bit farther over the edge, to be carried away in the torrents of her mind where voices spoke loudly, but without consequence. Where past and what might have been merged into a chaotic story of random pages read out of order, their meaning confused and out of context. Where he could still shout at her, but with no more credibility than the echoes of nightmares from her childhood, and no more substance in the harsh light of her cell.
For what influence could he hope to have on her or through her if she was no longer connected to reality?