Dedicated to those people I recall especially enjoying the writing of, since I've been gone a while: The Writer you Fools, Cherry Jade, alena-chan, and of course, castle in the air.
Implied slight Rob/Rae, but mostly Rae-centric
Back and Forth
It was uniquely vexing how her abilities could be so simultaneously hindering, and necessary. She imagined if the word vexing was to be stamped across her forehead in that official and blotchy red that post offices used—as well as courtrooms—then it would also be spelled incorrectly. That was the degree to which she felt it in any case.
And in Raven's world, incorrect spelling was as heinous a crime as murder or shoplifting in a bookstore.
She had the tower to herself for a blessed span of what she could always safely call 'too short' and was using it the same way she had been for the past three weeks, whenever such an opportunity of aloneness was possible. Arms crossed, eyes slightly narrowed, and a small downward curve to the left side of her mouth, she concentrated on making the television gain a few absurd extra feet before letting it settle back down and sighing.
Kiddy stuff, really, she knew. But she had to start somewhere...or rather, re-start.
Sometimes she wished someone might justify her presence in the tower, that any of her teammates would invite her to a sparring session—bad as she remained at those to this day—or conversely, a movie. Sometimes she wished for that piece of normalcy.
But most of the time she was as she sat now: on the couch, wholly focused on a problem she was all too certain she could overcome...by herself of course.
It had been mostly unexpected and completely maddening, that freak curse that bubblegum head Jinx had bounced her way. Raven always thought Kid Flash gave the witch too much leeway, but that really wasn't any of her business until now. As soon as she'd realized what had happened and what it meant, Raven had made short work of telling the boy off on everything concerning his romantic interests to his fashion sense...and even if that was a little offbeat, the world did manage to keep spinning (barely.) The spell had a locking mechanism worked into its terribly sloppy strands of curse, hex, and gobbledygook that all culminated to create something that Raven could find nowhere in any of her texts, but the effect of which was evident without written explanations.
She had to start over.
With a groan she turned onto her side, allowing herself a moment of sulkiness since no one was there to see.
"It should just, come back...again...eventually..."
And with those delightfully reassuring words, Jinx had made a quick exit with her mustard and ketchup boyfriend of two years. How the Hell she managed to keep a hold on him was well beyond Raven's understanding. Why the Hell she would want to was even further from that, but that would be nothing more than expected of someone like her, right?
Right.
Either way, thanks so very much to Jinx, Raven found herself quasi-powerless and utterly pissed 100 of the time. This, as one might suppose, did not equate to happy living in the T Tower, which led to many politely arranged afternoons out.
Raven understood that there was an equal chance of that being because they wished to avoid her historically impressive warpath(s) or they just wanted to have some fun while they had the time. So accustomed to her refusal to join in, she deigned to believe the lack of a completely uncertain offer to join was to accommodate her rather than exclude her.
True enough, she never found much practical use for their outings.
They were simply doing what she had been so vehemently insisting upon for a solid number of years. Still, there was that nagging at times like these, that peculiarly unnerving longing for the interaction she was quite convinced she usually detested. Maybe it was as simple as feeling vulnerable. Or maybe not.
Who knew?
Lost in thought, her newly juvenile powers had decided to levitate the game station and then drop it, the sound of which broke Raven from her reverie.
"Damn!" she muttered with all the loathing she could muster—quite a lot.
A groan trailed out of her pursed lips as she glanced at the wide window looking out on the bay. The sun was already half way below the city skyline. Maybe the others were staying out for the night too? Brushing some ornery strands of hair out of her eyes, the sorceress was not so blind to tell herself she didn't care, that she was perfectly fine. She knew her own push-pull complex well enough to recognize the loneliness at its center.
She glanced at the fallen game station and exhaled in a rare pout.
But Hell if she was going to admit it.
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Beast Boy often felt that Raven knew him better than anyone, save perhaps, Terra. Oddly enough it wasn't because they had grown closer over the years, and it wasn't because he spoke more to her than the others. No, since he was a much younger boy Garfield Logan had been very talkative, indeed with everyone he might happen across.
But he did get the feeling Raven listened more to him than she let on, more than the others saw. Possibly this was the reason he thought about her so much, and given moreover to needing to see a smile on all of his friends, tried to get a rise out of her. Even to this day, and they were fast outstripping the years of the semi-acceptable delinquency of youth.
Not that that would ever stop Beast Boy from a particularly brilliant prank.
But that wasn't the point here.
Tapping his foot in absentminded rhythm as he strategically mashed the red and black buttons on the newest addition to the relatively new arcade, Beast Boy wondered if Raven was okay. Initially this might have seemed a foolish thought, but if one could put aside certain pieces of the heliotrope haired girl's singular personality, one came up with the obvious fact that she really was just another person.
Well, half-person, half-demon, but Beast Boy had never really had a problem with people who were part one thing and part another.
Lately he hadn't been teasing her as much and he supposed she noticed since Raven had this annoyingly thorough habit of noticing everything, no matter how hard you might try to disguise it. Beast Boy thought anyone who tried to hide something from his pale friend however, was probably something along the lines of stupid.
Or insanely ignorant, but that was pushing it.
Since the Jinx incident he'd tried to be obliging without being ridiculous, in his own way. He wasn't all too sure that it was helpful in any one way or another, but he felt it couldn't hurt either.
As the arcade game screen flashed a new record and he set to mechanically placing his initials in (B.B of course), the changeling flashed on what he'd said to the girl he secretly considered the closest thing to a confidant he had.
"Rae, what do you do when we...er...I...do you ever...what I mean is..."
"What?"
"...ah, nothing. See you later Rae. Take it easy!"
"...bye."
Part of him had pulled back at the distinct sadness in that one syllable. Bye? She was all but resigned to watching them go without her, he knew. But she wanted that, demanded that for years and if she was going to change, Beast Boy was just stubborn enough, and enough of a good friend to think as he walked out without looking back:
You have to come to us now.
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"Just got the latest, metal man! How's it goin'?" A teen with spiky hair and a charming grin tossed the newest edition of a tech magazine at Cyborg who easily caught it and returned the smile.
"Great, thanks man," he said and waved as he exited the store. Looking around, the half man, half machine deduced quickly where his three friends would be. BB would be ravaging the arcade, no doubt; Starfire could be any of a dozen places but likely to be found in either a jewelry department or the food court; and Robin was probably in the bookstore, because boy blunder didn't seem to care for any other place in the new shopping mall. Everything was new though, always changing now, and as Cyborg made his way through the inside arena of shops, people, and random vendors, he wasn't certain this was okay with him.
Change had always made him nervous, which did nothing to explain his uncanny friendship with the changeling himself, but then, that was something entirely different on so many levels.
Idly he flipped through the magazine, skimming a caption on an item and its number if it seemed particularly complex or shiny. He might never say it out loud but he was rather drawn to shiny things and briefly he wondered if any of the team pondered at the simplest reason for him wanting the T car so well buffed. Raven had made one comment to him after a ridiculously long round of buffing.
"You certainly have a thing for reflection."
Witty, brief, and a wry jab in all of the Raven way she was, Cyborg had chuckled good naturedly at her and waved a hand as if to say she was right without saying it. His relationship with the dark girl was a bit of a big brother role, at least in his mind. He knew sometimes people got the wrong idea, his over-protectiveness of her specifically being the driving force. But it wasn't true.
Settling on a vacant seat in one of the many sitting areas, he admitted she was very good looking and had a fierce charisma that could sway you as soon as sting you, something many people did not know. Yet he had never been drawn to her in that way. Still, there was that feeling, that intense desire to shield her and that was in its own way, a kind of deep caring and affection. His human eye passed over the top of the magazine to incidentally see an older sister—he assumed—ruffling the hair of her younger brother, a sound of protest, and laughter. It was something very much like that, he felt.
Cyborg attributed his pursuit of a real friendship with Raven to his own enjoyment of friends and her ability to unintentionally exude the deepest meaning of emptiness. The big brother in him understood Raven never had a family, a real family, any semblance of it, that in fact she was afraid of that family. That part of him understood because he could, in some ways relate.
And he knew she could not accept what she did not understand.
Standing, folding the magazine in half as he began to walk towards the food court with half his mind on a burger and fries, Cyborg had the other half of his mind on the noticeable change close to home.
It was palpable in only a couple ways, but it was so very obvious.
Raven was changing, just like everything else.
Coming upon the food court as he reached the top of the escalator, he was not surprised to see Starfire happily situated with her amassment of mustard bottles and knew some things would never change.
This was as comforting to him as knowing that Raven could change after all.
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The alien princess did not see the reason for the majority of humans preferring ketchup over mustard. Compared, the yellow stuff was gloriously beyond any of her wildest dreams including zorfnaks and klorbrinks, and those were very, very good. Meanwhile, the red stuff of a deceptively similar consistency, was very bland and kind of made Starfire have a bad flash on when she was a child and forced to eat errnorfs.
She shuddered slightly just thinking about it. They reminded her of what the humans called sauerkraut, mixed with goose liver and probably some of that weird...what was it called? Oh well, whatever it was, it could not compare with her mustard. Definitely not! As she came to this conclusion—not for the first time—she saw friend Cyborg come up the escalator and waved enthusiastically at him. He returned the gesture and her smile increased tenfold.
Truly, she was very grateful to have fallen to earth. She would never have known half of what she now could claim to, and never would have experienced anything that made her into someone she could say, quietly, she was proud of. With each of her friends she had a certain kind of behavior that worked, and Starfire was clever and quick enough to realize which was which, and use them respectively. It greatly lessened any potential conflict or awkwardness to slip into the part of her that worked best with each of them. At first she had thought this was deception and felt very badly about it.
"Starfire," Cyborg greeted her with a grin and pulled out a chair.
"Friend!" she offered him a bottle of mustard. He kindly declined and set his magazine on the chair before going to grab his usual burger and fries, as she knew he would.
Now she didn't feel guilty at all. Friend Cyborg had explained at some point that he too behaved very differently around her, for example, than he would around friend Raven, and when she thought about it a moment, this made an awful lot of sense. The quiet sorceress was perhaps the person all of them acted most differently around, as they had been trained to, invariably, throughout the time they'd spent together. Initially she'd been taken aback by Raven's clear dislike of most interaction and friendly attempts at...anything. In fact, Starfire was a little embarrassed to say she'd felt a bit of dislike as well, for Raven and her attitude.
Or that was how she'd thought for a while anyway.
The switching bodies for a time had helped smooth a lot of the surface tension away, which made Starfire happy and a smile come easier to her face whenever she saw friend Raven after that. She felt a little more honest in her friendship. But that wasn't her real turning point. Actually, though things had changed in many ways, in even more ways, some things had not, and one of those was Raven and her pleasure in privacy. But lately, just lately, the Tamaranian suspected her friend of being a little more hesitant than irritable, a little more gracious than grumpy.
Starfire knew she wasn't imagining this slight tilt in action or persona.
Still, she wondered if anyone else noticed this morning, how when they left, for the first time since she could ever even imagine remembering, Raven looked sad.
She looked lonely.
It wasn't a loneliness her friend accepted, and Starfire could tell this by the way Raven's shoulders stood rigid and her lips were pressed in a thin line, to bottle up that strange feeling. Starfire could not relate. She did not believe in bottling up anything except perhaps mustard, and that only for storage.
Feelings, she firmly believed, were meant to be shared with friends at least.
At the same time, she completely understood that just because she thought this didn't make it so and was sad in her own way, not knowing how to help her friend, or if she even ought to try. Sometimes, the princess now knew, people simply had to help themselves.
Maybe this was one of those times.
The scraping of the chair being pulled out again snapped her back to attention and she looked up to see Cyborg placing his tray of a burger, fries and a milkshake on the table. As he sat down, the young man blinked as he remembered something and picked up three small packets off the tray and tossed them at Starfire who caught them blankly.
"You can take 'em home, or something," he grinned. On closer inspection, they were those small packets of mustard that the food places in the mall often offered as well as the bottles on the tables. Glee spread across her face clear as sun and just as bright.
"Thank you friend!" Starfire chirped and hoped one day she, or at least one of the team, could find something that made her amethyst-eyed friend just as happy or excited.
She had a fleeting thought: a good book, that would be good for friend Raven.
And that was just a hint of how much better Starfire understood the sorceress than anyone else might ever begin to know.
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He tapped his fingers in time with the music on his iPod.
One could not send Robin anywhere anymore without his iPod, Gotham and Jump forbid. The world might come to an end (again, if in a comparatively dull fashion), or at least there would be one very unhappy boy wonder.
And that was about the same thing for the team since they continued to greatly revolve around his mood swings. It couldn't be helped since they'd been together for so long and always gravitated toward him as the center of their team and lives. Robin liked his iPod.
It had been a gift this past year from Raven.
Interesting, he found it, that she never, ever gave him a birthday present, or a Christmas present, or anything like that. But she gave him gifts every great once in a while for no apparent reason. His mind worded it like that because he knew there must be a reason.
Raven didn't do anything without a reason, and a damn good one at that.
But it was a mystery to him, always.
He wasn't special, he thought. In fact, he knew she did the same for the others in that same degree of 'rare' and 'sometimes'. Beast Boy had a couple new games sometimes out of nowhere or Starfire suddenly had a pantry of mustard or Cyborg had a new subscription to those tech magazines he liked so much. Things like that did not go unnoticed by him, quiet as Raven kept them.
It wasn't like she was trying to keep it a secret, but he both applauded and wondered at her discretion. For all he could say and tell, she continued to treat all of them with a strenuously similar amount of kindness and respect, and in her own way, affection. Yes, Raven had that in her, he knew and he knew the others knew as well. It wasn't something they needed to call into discussion to see it for what it was.
She was trying, especially in the past year, she'd been trying.
Sometimes he tried to repay that effort.
Small ways like having her tea set for her or leaving a book he thought she might like on the counter where he knew she'd always find it, these ways, he hoped, said something to her like: keep going.
Trailing his hand across the spines of the books in a particularly dark corner of the bookshop, Robin inhaled. He had a bit of an eccentric love for the smell of old books, the pages, the covers, everything about it seemed to transport him and Bruce had made sure he was well educated enough to appreciate the age. A small and dry smile made its way to his lips. That old man...he was a good man.
Robin was grateful and ever in debt, he didn't doubt it.
But he didn't think about it too much, the team and Jump having taken up so much of his thinking space. And just as for every Batman there was a Joker, for every Robin there was most definitely a Slade, and so whatever was left went to that, and then some. Of all people, Raven had helped him the most with his obsession. She didn't tell him it wasn't healthy, or that she was worried. No, that was what everyone else told him, all of them meaning well and not making a dent in his patterns.
Late nights, early mornings, all-nighters, hours of inane training that probably worked against him. All these things she accepted...for months, going on a year, without a word. But sometimes he would catch her gaze, fixed hard on him and with that look she managed to say everything: you're killing yourself, idiot.
Starfire had wept to her one night, and he had stumbled on their conversation.
"But friend Raven...I'm scared," the redhead had whispered and Robin had felt his own heart ache in response to that worry and anxiety he had caused.
"Starfire, Robin will be fine. He's smart and he wants to catch Slade." Here there had been a pause and Robin had shifted in his hiding place in the shadowed hall as he swore Raven glanced over Starfire's shoulder to stare directly at him, but speak to Starfire as she continued, "Fat lot of good it'll do him in catching Slade if he does Slade's job for him."
And here Starfire had nodded and wiped her eyes and crushed Raven in a notably uncomfortable looking embrace and Robin had slipped away to sleep for the first time in far too long. Though he did get up that following morning early to make sure a certain tea was hot and ready, everything slowed down for him then.
Everything got a shade brighter.
Starfire's smile was less strained. BB cracked jokes with him again and Cyborg stopped being the edgy shadow around him that he had become after too much of Robin's snappy reply to every little thing.
His iPod was on repeat one, and the track seemed particularly appropriate as his eyes found the title of a book he knew Raven had not yet read and just might very well enjoy.
Glancing down at the display he realized she might like the song too.
My angel rocks back and forth by Four Tet.
Raven did have an appreciation for cleverness, even if the play on words did border on positively silly. Pulling the book from the shelf he sauntered over to the old register to pay, thinking maybe next time he would ask Raven to join them, and entice her with the bookstore.
It had always worked before.
And for some reason, he seemed to think she might say yes next time.
Jinx had certainly thrown a wrench into their usual way of functioning. No matter how strong the team got as a whole or separately, Raven was central to many things and sometimes the only one who could effectively take out some of the usual suspects—such as Plasmus. Wrinkling his nose at the very thought, he sighed. Hopefully the curse, or hex, or whatever would do them all the grand favor of up and leaving by morning. He did not appreciate his team being, essentially, one member short. And he didn't like the extra worry that inhibited his own actions out on duty.
Too much of him was recently watching out for the girl who insisted even now she could take care of herself, thank you very much. He could barely concentrate on attacks and counterattacks in his own skirmishes when he had his mind and eyes on her battles. This wasn't the only thing that was causing a slight tension behind his eyes however.
Because Robin had begun to be almost painfully aware of Raven outside of the daily missions as well.
He saw her move from room to room and he saw her sit for undetermined hours in peaceable quiet and he saw her exchange brief moments of friendly conversation with the others. He saw her and he felt a stirring that he was not sure he was okay with.
There were other things in life to be concerned about, to be occupied with, things more important than a suspicious race of his pulse or embarrassing flush on his cheeks that thank god the nighttime usually covered.
There were other things.
But the iPod Raven had bought him that past year was still on repeat and the book in his hand was still for her and the song was still reminding him of how she had become.
My angel rocks back and forth.
And so, Robin admitted, she did.
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Raven was on the roof of the tower when they all returned, and she made out the vague chatter but didn't have it in her to go see them as they came in. She would wait until it seemed they were all asleep, and then quietly slip down the stairs and into the common area, though she could as easily slip through the ceiling. Sometimes walking made her feel delightfully human.
She would wait.
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The next morning her tea was ready for her and a new book was by the teapot. This, Raven almost expected. What she didn't expect was the note that fell out of the cover as she opened it. A short message did the trick with a line so straight only one person could have written it, not that she needed a note to know.
Next time.
Robin walked into the kitchen at that moment, noting an especially elegant upward quirk of Raven's mouth as she carefully folded the note and placed it back in the book before pouring herself her cup of tea.
HOLY COW! HIATUS happened and didn't warn me. How dare it! Anyways, a one-shot to get me back into the swing of things.
-y. rei