Dedicated to: The Writer you Fools, Alena-chan, Cherry Jade, and castle in the air—gifted writers I very much enjoy reading the work(s) of
Reviews appreciated, as always they will be. :)
"The Right Way"
"I recommend the one on the top shelf, to the far left," he said without looking up.
"The top—? Oh, I see," she said the last part to herself and floated up the five or so feet necessary to attain the hardbound tome. "Beauty and the Beast?" her voice now dripped a bit of its former dryness. "Robin, this is a child's story." She floated back down, book still in hand as she approached her leader. He reclined in a lazy manner on one of the three couches, more or less sprawled on the furniture as he thumbed through his own reading. Absently he nodded and Raven noted a barely audible:
"Mmhmm." He turned a page. The sorceress scowled, waving the book in front of the bird boy's face enough to snare his attention in the form of a somewhat snappy twitch that seemed to say 'what?' She arched a brow at him. He shrugged. "I know it's a child's story." The demon invariably seethed.
"Well?" she prompted, as if that should ask everything and sighed loudly, something she only did with him—a sign of her intense displeasure. Robin eyed her thoughtfully.
"It's a good book," he flashed her his megawatt smile that often got him into troubling matters with waves of fan girls when he tried to go out these days—which meant he didn't try too often, not much anymore anyway. Amethyst irises swirled and the whites glowed slightly as Robin shifted a bit under the unreadable stare of his fellow bird. She did so love to make him squirm, he thought somewhat petulantly. Now why couldn't he do that to her? But his thoughts were interrupted with another sigh from the empath as she seemed to relent and settle on the couch adjacent to his, opening the book with a more than dubious gaze. Robin turned his eyes briefly back to his book, but for some reason found his focus drift from the page to the only other person in the room.
Raven repressed the urge to arch a brow in question.
She wondered why he didn't go back to reading. It was a sanctuary-esque time of day when the loud ones were out and about. Usually both he and she took full advantage of the quiet, but now Robin wasn't reading. He was watching her, and Raven knew it.
She felt it.
It was...distracting.
Now why should that distract you? Her inner voice sounded a little too smug, even for her own tastes as Raven did her best to not let her leader distract her so...unassumingly.
Terrific. Now I'm distracted by my being distracted, Raven intoned to herself, not losing sight of the fractional humor there as she shifted her position, propping her feet up on the opposite arm of the couch and focused in on the printed words in front of her with new purpose.
This slight movement, however revealed quite a bit of leg as Raven's cloak slid to one side of her. Of course Robin had seen those legs before—in battle, around the tower, and so on...but something about the way they were crossed so languidly, sensual even…it was doing strange things to him. Well aware of what kind of danger he could be in if the owner of said killer legs might do to him if she found out where his concentration centered, Robin cleared his throat and forced himself to go back to reading. Just as he turned, Raven peered over the top of her hardcover with a curious look, but seeing Robin back to his reading, she shrugged and followed suit.
A half hour passed and Raven stretched like a cat as she set her book down to one side.
"Tired?" Robin inquired, his tone just the slightest bit teasing. Raven shook her head, running a hand through her hair absently.
"No, thirsty," she said and floated over and into the kitchen.
"Grab me a soda!" Robin called after her.
There was a somewhat ominous pause.
"Magic word," she called back.
"Excuse me?" he replied, confused. Was she serious?
"You don't expect me to play maid do you? Ask the right way. Even demons aren't beyond a little politeness now and then," Raven shouted, still hidden by part of the wall since she stood in front of the refrigerator.
"Are you serious Rae—" He was cut off as a can of soda came hurdling toward him. Robin thanked his reflexes as he snatched it out of the air a split second before it smacked him in the face. "Hey!" His frown deepened as Raven floated back into the room with a glass of water. Expression slipping to perplexed, he asked, "No tea?"
"If I stayed in there long enough to make my tea you'd have me making dinner for you next," Raven said without feeling and plopped back on the couch, distinctly irritated and distinctly not in the mood to continue any sort of conversation.
Not wanting to press his limits too far (and remembering Raven's rather evident lack of practice in the cooking department), Robin tapped the sides of the coke can and took a sip before continuing with his own book.
Another hour and a half passed and Raven, now well into the end of the book, had decided maybe it wasn't such a children's story after all...not entirely anyway. It was perhaps a little too happy in the end—what with dust mops becoming alluring French maids and teacups becoming cherub faced little boys (she twitched a bit)—but Raven found herself admitting it was sweet.
How odd, she mused with a rare gentleness.
So wrapped up in her ponderings, the sorceress did not notice she had regained the attentions of the walking traffic light—now the lounging traffic light—as he watched her carefully. He'd turned on a whim to see if she'd fallen asleep; she was so very quiet all the time he suspected she might have been. Instead he saw her very much awake, though her eyes said she was in another world where a beauty had learned to love a beast, and not here in the tower with him. His own expression, usually either cocky or serious, softened. Raven seemed to be thinking about something and...Robin leaned forward in spite of himself.
Was that a smile?
Not a smirk, not an "I so owned you in training today" grin...no.
It was a smile.
And he found himself thinking she was pretty.
Of course Raven was sexy. No matter who you were, what sex, what orientation, what kind of species the fact that Raven was sexy was undeniable. Curves that could kill, right?
Right.
But pretty? Robin had never really seen her that way. Starfire was pretty. Not Raven.
Well, not until she smiled. It gave her a lightness that was unexpected and a gentleness that was, on the whole, almost unrecognizable. It wasn't that she didn't care. No, as the leader of the team, Robin knew better than that, but emotions like these he also knew, she most often took care to bottle up and shelve safely away in Nevermore.
"Robin? Hello, earth to the Boy Blunder, defender of all things caffeinated and badly color coordinated...?" Raven sighed as she stopped waving her hand in front of his blank face and stooped to stare straight into his eyes, hands on her knees. She tried again. "Robin?"
"I can so color coordinate," he said, his expression catching up to his words. And something in him, dormant until now started poking him into awareness that he was less than a few inches away from the empath.
"What a great deception you have laid upon us all then," she replied wryly and stepped back—to Robin's both imminent and confusing disappointment. Why did he care if she was at least a foot beyond his reach now? Since when did it matter?
"Finish?" he asked instead, gesturing to the book on the couch Raven had previously occupied. She crossed her arms and nodded thoughtfully.
"You're right, it was a good book," she said. A degree of his usual cocky charm returned as Robin shot her a shrewd look.
"Say it again," he said. Raven scrutinized his smirk. What was he playing at?
"It was a good book...?" she said with some misgiving.
"No, the part about me being right," Robin grinned and Raven did roll her eyes now.
"Absolutely not," she retorted and turned on her heel to retrieve the book and replace it on the shelf.
Imagine her surprise when two warm hands settled on her shoulders, just barely preceding the warm breath on her neck as Robin's voice asked her, "What if I ask 'the right way'?"
The dreaded one-shot strikes again!
Thoughts?
Also, if anyone's interested, two new forums. I opened a Challenge forum—yes, there's another one but I only realized it after I created one, so I'll use a more-the-merrier outlook. A friend of mine also opened one for Favorite everything pretty much, so you might want to check that out too. Listed as mentioned. Both are of course TT or I wouldn't be mentioning them here.
Challenge – mod: sekai no yakusoku
Favorites and so on – mod: Kaji Hikage
Check them out if you have time/ are interested. :)
-Rei