Back on Track
Chapter 1. Rewind
Raven was grateful for her friends. They encouraged her to get out of her comfort zone, and altogether made her a slightly less brooding person than she otherwise would have been. Without their nagging, she wouldn't get half the life experiences she got on a regular basis, and most days, she was deeply thankful for them.
Today wasn't one of those days.
The boy in front of her –she refused to think of him as her date- had not stopped talking since the moment they met. Raven had been treated to a dissertation of his life: his friends, his hobbies, his part-time job—he had even touched on his elementary school grades.
She was entertaining herself with a little experiment, in which she refrained from nodding or acknowledging his monologue in any way, and saw how long he would go on before catching on. So far, Raven was the only loser, because this had been going on for a good fifteen minutes.
Even at introductions he hadn't let her get a word in, because of course he already knew who she was, and did she know she had actually saved his life, twice? And the first time was this funny business where his friend Jeremy had wanted to check out these mysterious self-moving giant chop cups, so that's why they got caught in the middle when Mumbo tried to hold up the jewelry store.
She had been too overwhelmed to interrupt him back then, and now it was too late.
Was there some sort of protocol for when a date went awry? Was there some way to get it across that you wanted to go home? Raven found herself wishing she had paid more attention whenever Starfire read dating stories from one of her magazines out loud, in her slow solemn English that almost made it seem like those magazines had something interesting to say. As things were, the only options that occurred to Raven were either to bear it till the end, or to stand up, tell him she didn't like him, and leave—she knew no in between.
She was cursing her friends for putting her up to this for the hundredth time, when she realized that the boy had fallen quiet and was looking at her.
"Um," she started, realizing with dread that he must have asked her a question. Afraid of inadvertently agreeing to something, she went with, "No."
"Really? Oh man! I can't believe you've never skied before! It's the best!" he exclaimed, but he sounded more glad than disappointed.
Realizing the floodgates of conversation were open, she tried, "We got caught in a snowstorm once."
His eyes widened, and Raven held her breath. Maybe this much had gotten through to him. Maybe this time he would actually ask about her.
"Well, last year, I was at this bus stop with my friend, and it started snowing…"
Raven slumped back into her chair.
Salvation came suddenly, in the form of her communicator going off. "Come in, Raven," came Robin's voice from within her cloak.
She answered faster than she ever had. "What is it?"
"We need you on the outskirts. I'm sending you the location." A second later, a map appeared on her screen, with a red dot flashing.
"Be right there."She put the device away and got up without sparing a glance to her companion.
"Um, hey," the boy said, sitting up straighter. "So you wanna leave me your number, or…?"
"Starfire has your number." She put her hood up, took a second to detach herself from the relief and joy she was feeling, and phased to the place of disturbance.
Appearing in the middle of the street, Raven immediately got the scent of magic. The enemy was about a couple dozen figures clad in rather cheap-looking dark red robes that obscured them from head to toe.
One of them snuck up on her left, so she whipped around and threw a kick on instinct. The Robe was set back, and Raven levitated backwards, distancing herself from her foe. "Azarath Metrion Z-!"
She saw the glint of metal and a flash of blue light, and then she was catapulted back, with the force of her own power. "Another witch!" she distinctly heard someone shout.
As she tried to grasp whatever had just happened, three Robes advanced towards her. Before she could react, a new figure got in between her and the Robes. With a strange feeling of dread, Raven watched the stranger raised his arms above his head. White energy formed around his hands and molded a beam between them, and something clicked in her brain.
Malchior.
The realization hit her like a punch in her gut. She managed to neutralize her emotions enough to phase out of sight.
"Stand back!" one of the Robes shouted. "We are not against superheroes, only witches!"
"Yeah! We're here for the warlock! Not aliens or robots or-or… whatever you are!"
"Excuse me?" Raven heard Beast Boy's indignant voice from afar.
Robin shouted back, "You mess with the city, you mess with us!"
Raven had pulled her mind back to the battle. Taking a cue from her previous experience, she didn't try to use her whole mantra on these enemies. She stayed hidden, because she was able to sense now that these enemies were only human, and if they couldn't see her they couldn't repel her power. She relied on short bursts of power—blasts of telekinesis to connect their heads to blunt objects and patiently take them out. Once or twice she knocked heads together. And when she could, she stole glances at the stranger.
The strong first impression was quickly dissolving. She came to wonder why that name had even occurred to her. Any way she looked at it, she didn't know the man randomly fighting alongside them. The tall stranger in white armor was someone she had never seen before—not really, not in this life. And yet…
She watched him strike against the Robes with short bursts of white energy.
…There was something too familiar about him. The inkling in her mind was too strong to ignore.
Some things were different. His hair did reach his middle back –the illustration in the book had shown her as much. But that same illustration had shown her white hair, and this man's hair was black. The book had gone to lengths to describe his armor; made of stuline steel and laced with protective spells, with his initial lacquered in black on the chest plate. At the time of reading that, Raven had imagined an 'M'. This man's armor presented an 'R'.
So, Rorek, I guess, she thought sardonically, half convinced she was going through a mental breakdown.
The one part she hadn't needed to imagine was exactly the same. Those icy blue eyes that had looked at her from the pages of a millennia-old book suddenly turned to her, and were still holding the gaze after Raven instinctually disappeared in a swath of black energy.
Beast Boy shook off the last unconscious foe off his dinosaur form and returned to being human. "Well, that was… fast. Pizza now?"
"What even was these guys' deal?" asked Cyborg.
"That's what we're going to find out." Robin's eyes went to the stranger.
Whatever reverie the mage had been lost into after he met the gaze of the dark girl, he snapped out of it when he saw the other Titans approaching him.
"Thank you for your assistance," he told the team, bowing his head. "I couldn't have fended them off if you hadn't come to my aid."
"No problem. It's what we're here for," replied Robin. "So. Who were those guys? What did they want from you?"
"They were witch hunters. And they wanted me killed, I presume."
"Soo, you're a witch, dude?" asked Beast Boy, narrowing his eyes at him.
"'Wizard' would be more precise", he responded cordially.
"Do you know if there are more where they came from? And what-" Robing stopped short and looked around, "Did Raven ever get here?"
"I'm right here," she said, appearing beside the group.
The changeling perked up at the appearance. "Rae! How did the date go?" He got a furious glare in return, and backed off several steps. "Uh, never mind, you can tell us later."
Looking like he felt out of place, and probably embarrassed at listening into personal affairs, the wizard told Robin, "I will tell you everything that might be useful against these foes."
Starfire floated to the front of the group. "Please, what is your name?"
Raven held her breath.
"Bertram," said the stranger. "Bertram of Miir. At your service."
After the wizard introduced himself, Robin had tried to do the same for his team, only to find out the newcomer already knew who they were.
"Teen Titans, protectors of the city," he had said. "Your fame precedes you."
Now, he sat on their couch as he told them about the villains they had just faced.
"The hunters you saw are only part of the group– forgive me," he said suddenly, and yanked down the scarf that covered his mouth and nose. "I don't know if the rest will come on the trail of their companions, but it seems likely."
Robin nodded along, pacing the floor. "What I need to know is, what are their plans? Who are they targeting? Are they trying to set up a modern witch trial?"
"I would think so, yes," Bertram responded. "They are against magic, and seek to wipe out all its users. I sincerely believed they would no longer be around in this time period."
Robin stopped pacing. "Right. We're gonna have to question the ones we caught. And if they have any plans for this city, we'll stop them."
Cyborg laid a hand in Robin's shoulder. "Tomorrow."
Robin looked at his team's tired faces and only then realized it was late. "Tomorrow," he agreed. He turned to the newcomer, who was easily in the worst shape out of all of them. "So. You're not from around here. I don't suppose you have a place to sleep."
Bertram turned bashful all of a sudden. "I-I beseech you direct me to the nearest inn, and you shall rid yourselves of me."
Starfire sprang up from the couch and into Bertram's face. "Nonsense! We are able to offer you a place to sleep, and we shall!"
Cyborg appeared behind him. "Yeah, c'mon, we'll show you a room." He started pushing him out of the room, as Beast Boy jumped up and ran after them.
"Yeah, and maybe tomorrow you can tell us about how you got here," added Robin to the retreating group.
The wizard cranked his neck to look back at him, suddenly rattled. "Oh! Uh, it is a boring story, really. Not much to tell," he said before he disappeared into the hallway.
Robin watched after the four. "Riiight," he said, beginning to regret offering the tower up so easily.
He wanted to ask Raven what she thought of Bertram, but when he turned around he found her long gone.
Raven listened as her teammates and the newcomer walked past her room and stopped in front of a spare one, down the hall after Robin's room. She heard them hang around for a while, talking and joking, before each went their separate ways. After a while, Robin came down as well.
Once she was certain each person was settled in their respective room, she phased to the kitchen. Tea was imperative. She pulled out her cup, teabags, and put the kettle on the stove in an automatic sequence, and leaned on the counter as she waited for the water to boil.
She couldn't be sure it was him.
If anything made any sense, it wasn't him.
A part of her was telling her she should at least let Robin in on her suspicions. But what would she even say? The newcomer looked exactly like the person she had imagined when reading that doomed book, from three lines of description and a single centuries-old illustration?
The name he had given them was different, but a name could be easily lied about. The letter on his chest-plate, which she had read as an 'R', could easily be a 'B', damn gothic letters. And yes, he could be a random time traveler from a similar era who wore the same kind of armor and the same hairstyle and used the same movements to summon magic but what where the odds.
The timing was right, too: they had come from fighting the dragon in Paris a few weeks ago, and Herald had sent him to whatever god-forsaken dimension he sent his enemies to.
Raven had wondered, at the time, if it was a good idea to leave him in a random dimension instead of the taking the tried and tested route of trapping him inside the book, but just then Timmy had complained of being sleepy, and she'd had to figure out a way to have a sleeping toddler on her lap and still maintain her image in front of the honorary Titans. Malchior had slipped out of her mind, which was just as it should be—that story should have been finished a long time ago.
Once home, she had checked the chest by her bed and, sure enough, the damned book was gone.
Raven took the tea to the breakfast table and tried to think calmly.
Could he have gotten out of that alternate dimension? She never had found out how he came to be fighting with the Brotherhood of Evil in the first place. Could he have powers she didn't know of? Could he be powerful enough to return from another dimension by himself, and then to assume a convincing human form?
His powers, other than the physical capabilities of a dragon body, lay in absorbing magic and twisting it to his convenience. There was no shape-shifting that she knew of. The book had been accurate in the description of his powers before, and if he had other powers, why hadn't he used them to defeat her?
And so if he was Rorek the wizard, where had he come from? How was he in the present, and why?
Then there was the third option: that Raven was imagining everything and this guy was an innocent time traveler who had nothing to do with anyone from her past.
But that voice!, her mind shouted at her.
Well… the voice could simply be her brain playing tricks on her. It was plausible that, after the fight with the Brotherhood, he was simply on her mind—one of the many things she wasn't aware became buried under her immediate conscience in the process of meditating her emotions away.
All of her doubts and theories came to an end when the wizard himself walked into the room.
Raven had turned around when the doors swished open, expecting one of her friends and half concocting an excuse as to why she was still there, and when she saw the stranger, she rose abruptly.
"Do you recognize me, Raven?"
His expression was contrite –he wasn't wearing his scarf-, but also determined. She realized he had known she was here.
"Yes," she replied, although she hadn't settled on either name yet.
He walked down the stairs slowly. Raven tensed, but he went no further than the landing, and simply looked at her, eyes pleading. "But, do you really?"
It was as if the sly dragon in disguise she had known had been replaced by this dejected being, who only looked like him by turns and then didn't.
She finished picking.
"Rorek." She made it sound like an accusation. "The good wizard who defeated Malchior—is what I supposed you want me to say."
The mage hung his head, and Raven felt from him a wave of disappointment that confused her.
It was with another tone of voice –more subdued, more like he was pulling himself together- that he said, "You must have a lot of questions. Please, ask. I will answer them to the best of my ability."
All the possibilities she was considering battled in her head. She was trying to see past his words, tear apart his actions, and find the trap hidden beneath. His emotions felt heavy, like something was weighing him down. It felt like there was a lot he wanted to say, yet he was holding back. Raven pulled her hood over her head. She kept a fraction of her focus on the panic button, ready to trigger it should he pose a threat.
She went with, "How are you here." It was too forceful to be a question.
"I will tell you everything I saw," he said evenly. "The dragon Malchior and myself had been trapped, in my book, for—years. That…" he hesitated, "That much of what he told you was true. I saw him get freed, and I saw when you sealed him back in. Then, I couldn't say how long after, he was released again. It was very sudden…-"
"Released by whom?" It had been one of the first things Robin had asked her after the fight, and she hadn't had an answer for him.
"A witch," he replied. "An old woman, small and hunchbacked. Her magic gave off a yellow glow. Her hair was long and white, if I remember correctly."
Raven was reminded of Cyborg's description of the witch who had summoned him to the past. Had she been in the fight against the Brotherhood too? Raven saved the thought for later.
"She seemed to know what she was doing beforehand," the wizard went on. "I hoped for Malchior to be sealed back in eventually, but it never happened. Instead, the witch came back, and released me."
"Why?"
"To help her escape, I presume. I appeared in a cell when I came out. I don't think the people who kept her captive knew I was on the book too. Then we both escaped. I don't know where she is right now."
He was choosing his words carefully, she noted. Answering her questions swiftly and concisely, and then looking at her straight in the eye, as if to show he was telling the truth.
Raven was striving to treat him like any other enemy, but he was refusing to be anything but helpful and compliant.
"If this is all so perfectly innocent, why lie to my friends?"
"I'll tell them everything if you wish it." He said it so quickly even a non-empath could tell he was in earnest. "I just wanted to talk to you first."
"Why me? What do I have to do with you?"
"I needed to make things right—to tell you the truth of things."
"And you actually expect me to believe you?" The coldness in her voice had its effect; she felt a flare of distress as response. She neutralized it. "What are the chances that first I met the dragon, and now the wizard's here? Tell me one good reason why I shouldn't seal you back into the book."
He responded to her violence with levelness. He took a breath, and –with a nauseating mix of hope and dread- said, "There's more."
There it is, she realized. Whatever he was about to say, he was drawing close to the burden that weighed him down so much. But she groaned internally, because she was already strained from his loud emotions toppling over each other. She was half disposed to put up a mental barrier, but she might lose valuable insight.
It's the last chance I give him to start making sense, she told herself. "Fine."
He hesitated. Now allowed the word, he seemed unsure how to begin. Raven observed him from under the safety her hood.
"You said it was unlikely that I should be here, after the dragon had sought you out," he said after a minute. "Well… it's not a natural thing. The odds are tilted in our favor." He looked at her, trying to see how his words were received, but he found they fell on an impassive shell. "You don't remember, but this has happened before. It always happens." He was rushing his words now, his voice gaining urgency. "We are destined to meet—to be reborn in subsequent lives, and reunited. My lady, this has been happening for centuries. An ancient spell made it so!"
He finished this speech with a rousing tone and arms outstretched towards her, all his cards on the table.
Raven stood as the same inexpressive monolith she had been before his declaration, but inside her thoughts were going on several different directions. The situation had taken such a bizarre direction, she felt a degree of relief. Perhaps the person in front of her was neither Rorek nor Malchior, but just a regular nutjob.
The wizard awaited her verdict with wide eyes, as if making them bigger would help him detect a change in her expression.
The silence stretched. Rorek put his arms down.
One thing was certain: he had said the hard thing he came to say, and his own feeling of release made it easier for Raven to think.
"Well, that's… not what I expected," she said, truthfully enough. "Centuries, you say. Does it always end up with a dragon trying to eat me and my friends?"
"No… no, that is a first," he muttered, in a gentle disappointed sarcasm as response to her own. "Raven. I can prove it." Halfway across the room, he held his hand out to her. "You need to touch me. If you touch me, you'll remember."
"I'm not going to do that," she stated—furious he had even suggested it. "You understand I would be very stupid, to do exactly what someone I don't trust asks me to do." She detached herself from all the indignation, resentment, frustration, and emotional exhaustion, and what came out was a devastatingly scathing tone. "Now, I suggest you go back to the room we're letting you sleep in, before someone sees you and asks what you're doing here."
With that she levitated around and then past him, not turning to see him as she left the room. She only felt a remnant of anguish follow her after the doors swished closed behind her, and after that there was nothing but her own thumping heart, the beads of sweat collecting in her forehead, and a whole lot of meditation to look forward to tonight.
*throws another 'Rorek-the-real-wizard-comes-back-for-Raven' story into the pile*
So everything you're about to read was inspired by a 10-year-old video tribute for Spellbound, with the song Samson by Regina Spektor. You'll see why c:
Also, the way Rorek got out of the book is based on the (probably animation error) fact that the witch from Cyborg the Barbarian appeared among the Brotherhood on Homecoming Part 2 but then wasn't in the final battle, so my personal theory is they only got her to free Malchior.