Just a story one-shot I had in mind. Wrote part of this before I started planning Forgive Me in January.

Disclaimer: Don't own anything… especially the rights to Teen Titans.

Pasts and Masks

Raven

Pasts.

They are what define us.

Some people share their past to others gladly, sometimes, even willingly.

Others… well they tend to go to great lengths to cover theirs up from prying eyes.

I used to be one of those people. The one that hid her past from the others around her.

When I first joined the Titans, I was scared of them finding out what I was.

What I could become, what my life could bring to everyone in the universe. Just by expressing one random emotion within me.

I'd had to learn control, to repress the evil side living inside of me from an early age. Along with everything and anything else that could possibly fuel it and give it power.

I was always told to wear my mask. To hide and suppress all of my emotions. Even when I was alone. And not around other people.

Because one feeling. No matter how small it seemed. Had the potential to destroy the world.

I was sure that if they ever found out about my past, I'd be kicked off the team. That I'd be all alone in the world again. After the destruction of Azarath.

Or worse, hunted like a wild animal. Just as I had been in so many other places I'd gone to.

I hid my true self behind my emotionless mask, to afraid to understand how much I meant to them. How much all of my teammates cared about me.

For a while, my technique had managed to work for me. No problems arose from my arrangement with the others. Besides an annoying green somebody who couldn't for the life of him leave me alone. Who always tried to get me to feel. Not understanding why I just couldn't.

How I wished that I could back then. To feel all that he ever did. Happy, carefree, mischievous. If it had anything to do with being a fun go lucky jokester. He had it on him.

But then, that green somebody just had to go into my mirror with his best friend. And saw just how wrong I was on the inside. How ugly I thought my true self inside me was. The sole reason why I could never feel anything about anything or anyone.

Only, after the incident, he told me he hadn't found anything wrong about me. How it gave him a better perspective about me. Made me seem less… creepy, and more mysterious to him now.

When I had asked him about my Rage. He just shrugged his shoulders.

We all have our dark sides that we need to keep at bay, he had told me.

At the time, I hadn't understood what he'd meant. How could someone have a dark side to them that was worse than mine.

All I know, is that day, for the first time, I didn't feel rejected, despised, hated…

Alone.

My emotionless mask was scratched for the first time that day. Even though I hadn't known it back then. By his kind, loving words that meant so much to me.

I still hid most of my past from view, the parts he hadn't found out. But that day, I had made a new friend. In Beast Boy of all people.

Albeit annoying most if not all the time, but a friend nonetheless.

As I grew up with the team, I learned more about them than anyone else in my life. Including the dark truths they'd worked so hard on covering up.

It was a hard lesson for me to learn when I realized the masks the others wore to hide their true selves from the team. And who better to start with than the cheerful alien.

Starfire, who held her emotions on her sleeve, who was always so annoyingly cheerful and kind.

Who had a love for cooking foods that would require pumping our stomachs or dying. Who had the biggest and most obvious crush on Robin that I had ever seen.

Imagine my surprise then, when my soul self accidentally wandered into one of her dreams at night.

Only to find it hadn't been a dream.

It had been a nightmare.

An ugly, scary, brutal nightmare.

It had been so horrible to me that when I woke up. Tears were begging to escape my eyes, my powers already trashing the room all around me.

I calmed myself down, and fixed all the damage to my room. And then, I had teleported myself into her room.

She had been thrashing around in her bed. Silkie moaning unhappily on the floor as he saw her in so much misery. She was silently screaming. As if she was experiencing some great pain. Which she had seen had been greater than what anyone should bear.

I had to wake her up.

No one should be allowed to stay in a nightmare as horrible as that. Not even the villains we face on a daily basis would have deserved it. Slade, despite how vile he was, wouldn't have deserved a fate like that.

At first, Starfire had been in shock when she awoke. Tears falling rapidly from each eye.

When she realized I was there, she tried to go for a smile again. To try and say that she was the all right or something like that.

But when she saw my face. And saw that I knew what had happened. Her mask dropped, and she broke down in more tears.

That night, Starfire had opened up to me.

About her past. About her life before the Titans.

Her royal messed up family. A father who didn't love her, and a sister who hated how she was normal.

A war that left most of her planet destroyed. And killed both her father and mother.

A peace treaty that was arranged involving her. How her sister had betrayed her by giving her up for a life of slavery with the Citadel.

Followed by the life she had lived until she had escaped.

All the torture she had to endure. How she watched what they did to the older Tamaraneans who underwent the transformation. How they spoke vile to her. Even though she was a royal princess.

It was to horrific to describe. I was half-demon. I had read all about what full demons were capable of inflicting on another person.

But what she had gone through. Made everything I knew about evil demons seem like they were nothing worse than a group of playground bullies.

For once, I learned that something could exist in the universe that was far worse than a demon. And Starfire had to spend two years with them.

My emotionless mask crumbled a little more. Under the pleading green eyes of the Tamaranean. I stayed with her, comforting her that night as she fell asleep.

My mask held firm. And I still remained my unemotionless self after the ordeal had passed.

But that night, I had managed to provide a comfort to someone that no one else could ever have in their life.

And I allowed the cracks in my mask to remain. As a symbol to what I had done in that one night. To help a girl get over an evil that was far greater than my own.

Cyborg had been the next one I learned about on the team.

Being that he had also went into my mind with Beast Boy, he had known I wasn't exactly normal like other people. Not that he was to begin with either.

But the experience had also allowed me to form a bond with him. For Cyborg to become the older brother I never had in my life.

Who was annoying and immature at times. But knew just the right thing to say when I was having trouble with something personal. He had always been the person who helped me to sort through my problems better than the others on the team.

One day, I had been helping him out with the T-Car. Something that had developed a little after I helped him to remake it. All had seemed normal to me.

When I found he was starting to talk to me about his past.

He hadn't always been the Cyborg we knew and loved. Which seemed about as obvious as Starfire's crush on Robin. And vice versa.

His body had been the biggest scientific advancement in medicene since penicillin had been made as the first known antibiotic.

What I hadn't known, was that it had also been caused by the biggest scientific failure in teleportation.

He had been in a room. Full of other scientists. Along with his father and mother.

It was only supposed to be a portal to the other side of the room. Nothing more, nothing less.

They had ran tests over all the machines to make sure everything would work properly. That nothing could go wrong. And feeling the confidence that the advancement of science gave, they decided to go ahead with the test.

One of the portals had turned on immediately.

The other hadn't turned on at all. Which had been a cause of great confusion to the scientists. Who had just been about to cut the experiment short.

When from the open portal. Came a demonic creature that was to ugly to describe.

It had went on a bloody rampage. Plowing through his fellow scientists with tentacles covered in spikes.

His mom tried to protect him. But the creature killed her, in front of his own eyes. It had then proceeded to rip him apart piece by piece.

When his father had appeared with a prototype gun. And blasted it back into the portal. Before the surviving scientists cut the power. Closing the portal.

For months, Cyborg had been in a comatose state. Begging for death to take him inside his damaged mind. Oh, how long he wished to be released from the great pain he was feeling.

But he had woken up. Which had shocked him. Until he had a look at his hands. And saw himself in a mirror.

As a mechanical monster.

After that, he couldn't go to school anymore. All the sports offers and scholarships he had received from colleges nationwide.

Gone. As if they had never been there before.

All his old friends. The ones he had known since he was a kid.

Despised him. Hated him. Acted as if, they had never known him.

He had never broken down once when he spoke to me. Speaking as though it was something he had accepted in his life. And I wasn't sure if it pained me less, or more because of it.

But I never talked to him about it again.

Because I understood that some things, are just left in the past. Never to be brought up again.

Still, my emotionless mask, cracked a little more that night as I thought about what he had told me.

How he had been normal. How he had friends before. How he had been popular not from fighting villains, but rather from being himself.

And how a creature from hell had taken that all away from him. Had ripped his mother to pieces. And forced his father to turn him into Cyborg so he could live.

I slept that night with the knowledge of what I learned that day.

About how Cyborg had been normal. And how it had all been ripped away.

Without a choice.

Without a thought.

Without any feeling on the matter.

Robin, hadn't really been a surprise for me. He seemed to have more secrets than a whale had in weight.

She was only surprised that it had taken so long to learn what made him tick.

It had been the day he had gone mentally insane, thinking Slade was still out and about. When he was still technically dead in the lava cave where the statue of Terra remained.

Even thinking that Slade was in the tower himself.

He had Believed that he had been fighting him while we couldn't see a thing.

I had been forced to go into his mind to try and get him to see reason. That Slade simply wasn't there as he thought.

Only, I had seen something I shouldn't have seen. Something that he'd hid from everyone he knew. Something he had never trusted anyone to know. His mask having kept it secret for all these years.

I hadn't known anything about his past. Other than the fact that he'd been Batman's sidekick before.

In that moment though, I found something dark he kept hidden within himself.

An anger, a rage, a hatred, a sadness, and above all, a cold hearted determination.

It looked like he was in a circus. Watching two adults trapezing far above him.

She saw the moment he saw those ropes snap almost as if in slow motion. And watched as the people he loved more than anything.

Fell, like fallen angels, before his young eyes, towards the hard ground beneath them. The woman, reaching out to him in a soundless scream.

One person stuck out in the crowd of people behind them. Smiling evilly as he watched the evil deed he committed. No hint of remorse or regret on his evil fat face. As he turned around and walked out of the large circus tent.

I came to understand that day what had changed him.

What had made him the way he was.

Why he worked so hard to put every criminal on the street behind bars.

His obsession, his rigorous training, his absolute hatred of criminals.

All because of the actions of a selfish leader of criminals.

The one that had killed his parents. And forever changed his destiny.

I'm still not sure if he knows what I saw while in his mind. I'm not entirely sure of all that I saw either before Slade punched me out.

All I know is that. Again, my mask cracked.

Again I still kept it on.

It was to forever protect my friends from me. That was what I had always been taught.

But now, years later, I can't help but wonder if it was to protect myself from them as well.

It had been ironic.

It had been almost a year since everyone had learned what I truly was.

What my past was, what I really was, what my heritage was.

Everything.

Yet they hadn't turned away, they had still welcomed me back on the team with open arms.

Sure, I received a few more glares from the public. But it was nothing new that I hadn't been on the end of before.

I understood why with the first three Titans. Why they had always hid behind their masks, not really willing to share their painful pasts.

But I had never understood with him. The one who I always tried so hard to push away. Because he was the one who always made me feel too much inside.

And so I kept him at arm's length. Just so I wouldn't feel anything.

But pushing him away had kept me blind from the truth about him. About how much inside he had been hurting. About all the guilt and shame and self-hatred he had in himself.

I'd only seen what he had allowed me to see on the surface as I learned. All that I could see from the distance I set him at.

He had known everything about me. Yet I knew next to nothing about him.

One of the only things I had known was that he was similar to me in having a dark side to control in him. As he had said all those years ago to me.

But beyond that… nothing but the surface of his own mask. The mask that I had never seen him wear. The mask that I had never even realized was his mask.

What he allowed others to see, for me to see.

A mask so perfectly crafted, to exceed that of my own emotionless mask.

If Starfire had carried her emotions on her sleeve, than Beast Boy always blew his out into the air around him. Always seeming even happier and more joyful than Starfire.

But then, one night, was all it took. For it to change.

I had woken up because I had sensed great emotional turmoil coming from somewhere in the tower. I'd learned my lesson and warded my room long ago. To keep me from entering other's dreams or minds again.

But it hadn't protected me from their feelings. From his, specific feelings.

I had gotten out of my bed and walked in my night clothes to the roof. The place where the emotions I was feeling had been the strongest.

I had silently opened the door to the roof.

And I saw Beast Boy.

Curled up on the side of the roof.

He wasn't crying, he never cried. But he was sending waves and waves of sadness off his small, green form. Trying to bottle it all up inside, but failing to do so.

In that moment I finally saw the real Beast Boy. The one I had never seen before.

His mask was finally off. The one thing I hadn't known about him. Or even noticed for that matter, before then.

And I was able to see everything as his emotions seemed to pull me into his mind. Almost begging to have it's secrets be revealed to me.

I saw his life flash in front of my eyes.

His childhood, involving some kind of jungle. Fair white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes in the surface of a pond. He had been normal.

Being bit by a green monkey, so much pain. A syringe being poked into his arm. The pain slowly fading away, only for shrieks of terror to take it's place as he turned into a green freak.

I saw the first time he transformed. It was to save his mom from a viper. His first animal had been an ostrich. Ever since that day, he had been treated differently by all those who knew him.

His dad said his gift was evil. His mom said it was a miracle from god.

Regardless, it hadn't stopped what happened next.

I saw his parents die, and the blame he'd shouldered for years by himself. His thinking being he could have saved them. If only he hadn't been so stupid back then. If he had only transformed into something bigger. He could have kept the boat from going over that waterfall.

Following this, came an abusive, greedy uncle. Who treated him like an abomination. Who tried to have him killed off. All because he wanted his parent's money. Thinking that he had no rights to it because of his condition. He saw the day the police came in, and finally took him away out of his life.

Still, he fled. Wanting to escape the house and all the memories it brought. But he was treated the same almost everywhere else he went. And not in the good way.

From foster homes, to orphanages, to trying to go to school. He was never treated as normal anywhere. Bullies picked on him for his green skin. Girls talked behind his back, wondering how such a freak could be anywhere in a school like theirs.

He had been losing all hope of ever finding a home.

Then came the Doom Patrol.

The first real family he had since his parents died.

Elastagirl had been the kind, caring mother. Just like his own had been. Even after his transformation. She had seen his gift as a miracle, and not a curse. And she had been the one to show him that you shouldn't love what was on the surface. No matter how badly the surface looked to the other person.

Mento had been the strict father he hadn't really wanted. But he had helped him to train his powers at least. Helping him to learn how to turn into a variety of animals. And the rare smiles he gave when he did stupendous. Like once turning into a pterodactyl for the first time..

Robotman had given him the childhood he never had. A love for video games that remained today. An appreciation of the old things in life. And the ability to pull hilarious pranks on others.

Much to my dismay years later. As I figured out pretty quickly.

Then came the last member of his new family.

Negative Man.

He had, at first, seemed just like she was. Flat monotone voice. Showing he didn't really care about the world. Having a certain… creepy air about him. Wearing bandages to hide himself from the world.

In a way, he was kind of like me. Just a really old version of me.

But then, I learned the outside, isn't always what it seems.

Even though he had seemed cold at first, I learned he cared for the rest of his team. Just about as much as Beast Boy did. He seemed to love every conversation with Beast Boy where he opened up a little to him at a time. Telling him a little about himself. And teaching him to look at life in a different perspective. That to not focus on the past, he had to stay hopeful for the future. He was, one of the most important people in his family. And one of the most influential in the crafting of his own mask.

But then came the day. Where he had quit the Doom Patrol. Because Mento had said the wrong thing to him. Because he had turned into a T Rex, and saved his family. And he had chewed him out because of it.

Again, the blame and self-hatred he carried before came back. But thanks to Negative Man, he decided to look to the future. And put his past far behind him, where no one could ever see it.

All the months he again spent alone. Trying to find someone who would be his friend. Or at least friendly to him.

Until he had met the Teen Titans.

Until he had met me.

The feelings that he had harbored for me since that day.

All of this, and more, manifested in front of me.

As my view of him changed with the knowledge I had.

Ironic, his emotions had always been the strongest to me.

But never, not even in myself, had I sensed such a strong hatred of one's self.

In him.

Without his mask.

Finally exposing just how much he hated his past. In taking this moment to grieve over so many things that he believed to be his fault. How he always feared to lose the ones he loved.

And how he feared to lose me more than anything else.

I finally felt my battered mask, the one I had made to disguise myself. My true self from other people for years. And the one thing I kept since I was a small child.

Shatter.

As a tear traveled down my face. As I finally saw his true self.

He had turned around, seeing me in the doorway, with fear in those green eyes of his.

But that fear, had turned into concern, when he saw my face.

For the first time.

Without my mask in place.

As I walked up to him.

And finally allowed my emotions to show.

With nothing blowing up. Now that my mask was gone.

Now years later.

Wherever I go.

Whatever I do.

Wherever the fight takes me in life.

I go.

With the one person.

The one guy.

The only one.

That was the most like me.

The one who hid from his past.

The one who looked to his future.

The one who hasn't ever left my side.

Since that fateful day.

On the rooftop of our old tower.

That seemed like a lifetime away.

Where we had comforted each other.

And found our love for each other blossom and grow.

My name is Raven Logan.

And now.

Wherever I am with him.

I go.

Without my mask.

As he does to.

Author's Notes:

So… what did you guys think? To fast? To slow? To wordy? Or just right?

Till Next Time

Allen