"Why do you always do this?"
His voice was thick and muffled. A cracked, decaying wall holding back tidal waves of sorrow. His soft black hair tumbled across his forehead, but tonight its unruliness conveyed more defeat than rebellion.
Raven remembered how many times she had run her careful fingers through the fine strands. Those days when he'd lain his head in her lap and closed his eyes, allowing her to press her cheek against the black-ink locks, to study his handsome but tired face, unobserved.
"For you. For both of us, Jason."
Even Raven was unable to retain her usual statue-cold demeanor. Her words slipped out tight, catching in her throat before they clawed their way out. Her face was cast in unnatural shadows by the city's light, but he could still read the pain that flickered, like dying coals, in her eyes.
His ungloved hand reached out and cupped her chin. A calloused, hardened palm for such a gentle touch.
"Please, Raven."
His voice was low, strained with confusion and the sense of impending loss. He could see the chasms of nothingness opening their maws before him, waiting for him to plummet in. "Whatever it is, we can make it together."
She could feel the desperation rolling off of him. The fear he would be alone again.
A clenching ache coiled around Raven's heart. It was cruel that fate should force her hand, to make her cut away the person who relied on her the most. The person she trusted the most.
But she couldn't stay. Couldn't bring her demons any farther into his life.
His life had been composed of dizzying sequences of false trust, betrayals, disappointments. Abandoned. Each new, tentative lifeline he made dropped dead like a diseased insect.
She had promised him—promised herself— that the gut-wrenching pattern would end with her. Now she had become just another statistic in his sepia-hued life, another failed attempt at trust. At caring.
But it was for him.
Raven leaned into his touch, desperately holding on to the last moments she had with him. She remembered the night she had been sent out on patrol during a heavy rain.
He was waiting beneath the awning of a small bakery, droplets dripping off the ends of the striped fabric, creating a shimmering curtain of water through which he watched her. She could barely recognize him through the torrential deluge, and his casual street clothes made her all the more slow in identifying the confident and teasing face that followed her, both in waking hours and asleep.
He had stepped out from beneath the awning as she studied his hazy form, trying to place him. Just the few steps took to cover the ground between them left him soaked. His midnight oil hair was plastered against his face, t-shirt hanging wet and heavy off of him. Small beads of glittering water rolled down the bridge of his nose and plunged off the tip.
By the time Raven had realized who it was, with her aura of magic keeping her warm and dry from the downpour, he had wrapped his arms tightly around her waist, pressing his cold, sopping form against her own. His lips were cool and moist and tasted like fresh mint tea. Raven was covered in pale goosebumps from the feel of his clammy skin against hers.
But it had not stopped her from winding her own hands into his dripping hair, bringing herself even closer against him. She had deepened the kiss, her mouth tasting his lovingly, hungrily. His hand traveled up her back, coming to rest on her neck, massaging the sore muscles gently. It was only when Raven had shivered slightly, cold against his drenched shirt, that he had peeled it off. His bare chest pressing against her small, warm one. Rivulets of water ran down his back.
She hadn't felt cold after that.
Raven opened her eyes to see Jason staring at her with a broken sort of despair. The look of a person who already knows they've lost something, before they ever had a chance.
She wants so badly to kiss the wounds and hurt away, to hold him close to her and promise that everything will be okay.
But Raven knows she can't. She can't let him fall any farther. She can't run the risk of making his life a living hell, the way hers is.
She rests her forehead against his, one last time, and remembers how he used to sneak into her room when she was sick with the flu, bringing her a liter thermos of hot tea and his current favorite book to read.
She remembers how he would kiss her awake when she writhed in unseen nightmares that Trigon and Slade haunted.
She remembers how much he means to her, and this solidifies her purpose in her mind.
Slowly, sorrowfully, she unclasps her cloak and catches the material in her arms. Raven steps back from him far enough so that she can reach around his neck and fasten the dark blue cape around his own shoulders. She casts him one last look, her smile twisting in the same way as her heart.
"So long, X."