Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Titans.
He's still being beaten, metal foot in his stomach, metal fist in his mouth. The iron taste galls him, the copper taste sickens him, and the metal taste after the fist leaves is just blood.
He's not there, but Slade's still real. Robin can see him, hear him, smell him, taste him.
The dusty apparition, child of dust, will have him as a kill, and see him dead, no matter how many restless dark moments are needed to finish him and send him into sleep.
"You're having the dreams again." There's darkness all around him, but strangely, it's from Raven that the small light comes.
She doesn't look like a teenage girl when she's wearing her night robe and gown, the former plain Crayola-crayon blue and the latter loose-fitting and dark midnight blue and brocaded with metallic silver thread. They both fall to her ankles and expose bare white feet, rubbing anxiously over each other in the only sign of her disquiet. She doesn't look like a girl, instead looks ageless and timeless. She's drinking heated tea, nursing the mug in slim white hands, has offered Robin some and the pot's still sitting on the stove, but he's refused.
It smells…different from what Robin's used to seeing Raven drink. It's jasmine tea, he thinks.
At this softly spoken question hidden in a statement, Robin shoots a pointed glance to the sliding doors and Raven answers him, face never breaking from listless serenity and voice never peaking or dipping. "It's two thirty in the morning, Robin. None of the others are going to come in here."
They are sitting at opposite ends of the kitchen table. When Robin came in to the kitchen she was sitting there waiting for him, sipping her tea and inviting him to sit down calmly, eyebrow rising.
But there's as much turmoil in her as there is in him, if not more; it's just a matter of finding it.
Robin sighs. It's no use to try to lie to a girl who's virtually a living lie detector. "How do you know?"
The look dark violet eyes gives him is faintly annoyed, mostly the annoyance of one who doesn't like to answer obvious questions. But her voice, low and gravelly, shows no irritation whatsoever. "Our minds are linked, remember?" Raven's voice drops to a whisper, her gaze piercing and mesmerizing; Robin is unable to look away. "Our dreams… are one. What you, I dream. What I dream, you dream."
That, at least, explains all the fire Robin encounters in his dreams when he isn't dreaming of Slade.
Raven takes his silence for an invitation to go on. "You can tell me, you know." There's actually some vestige of concern on her face, hesitant and apprehensive, but still there. "Anything."
Robin's hand braced on the table clenches in a fist and every muscle in his body goes taut and ready to pump adrenaline in flight or fight. "It was real," he hisses, through gritted teeth. "I know it was real."
The others don't understand. They know that he was seeing Slade, but they believed he was just an apparition, a hallucination brought on by dust. They thought he had done this to himself, that he'd hurt himself, but Robin knows better, could feel the foot digging into his ribs—could taste the cold metal glove on his tongue as Slade's fist ground into his teeth.
How could that be a hallucination too?
"I know, Robin." For the first time, Raven's voice shakes a little, and he can see a melancholy gleam in her huge, normally dull but now so luminous eyes. "Believe I know, remember? When I was in your body, he hit us, remember? That side of my face was bruised and swollen for days afterwards. Believe me, I won't forget that anytime soon."
Fair enough. Robin nods slowly. "I…don't want to talk about it."
"Yes you do." Her voice is unwelcome, just before a long draught of the tea. Raven stands up and goes to the stove to refill her plain white ceramic mug. She casts a single eye on him from the stove, and her gaze is searing. "You knew I would be down here, didn't you?"
Yes… He did. Robin doesn't know how he knew, but he did, and it only hits him when he sees Raven sitting at the kitchen table sipping tea and is utterly unsurprised.
"You came here, because you knew I would be here," she notes clinically. "Why, Robin, would you come here, where I was waiting, if you didn't, on some level, want to talk?"
Robin doesn't answer, stares at her with belligerent stubbornness.
She sighs exasperatedly and shakes her head, Raven's most overt display of emotion that night; the light bulb overhead flickers slightly, and she pretends not to notice. "Robin, this can not go on. You understand that, don't you? Everything you feel in your dreams, I feel as well. There's a bridge between our minds; every time he kicks you in your dreams, he kicks me too. Every time he grinds his fist in your mouth—" Robin gapes and Raven stares knowingly at him "—he's cracking my teeth too."
"So this is for you?" Robin snorts, ready to get up and walk away and never come back.
"It's for you too." Raven doesn't even bother to deny the more self-serving motive behind her intervention. Her eyes are open very wide, very dark, very liquid. "Do you really want to spend the rest of your life afraid to sleep?"
"No."
White fingers, free of the mug, lace together. "Robin…our minds are linked, but not everything can be communicated by inference and empathy and psychic bonds. If you really want me to help you, you have to tell me exactly what is wrong." Raven lays out a hand, palm up, on the table. Her stance is strangely reminiscent of a suppliant. "Robin, please talk to me." If he tilts his head and squints a little bit, he can make out a pleading note in her toneless voice.
The shadows fall, but there's light gleaming off of the ruby on her ajna chakra.
Robin narrows his eyes, and winds his fingers in her outstretched hand. The skin's colored like ivory but feels like milk. "Alright."