And Grief Shall Endure
Beast Boy stared at the waves that lapped against the shore. He held a smooth stone in one palm, rubbing his fingers against the smooth coldness as it began to warm again in his hand.
What had gone wrong in his life? He wondered that every day, sometimes even every hour.
Memories of his family crashed into his mind and he pushed them away the way a drowning man tries to push away the water that fills his lungs.
A moonless night, but the tides were so strong…
There was just something about the sea. It pulled at him, drew him to it. There was a depth to the ocean, a great, empty vastness that drew him like a bird to the air.
Beneath the dark, roiling surface, another world lay…
Beast Boy shook his head. He hadn't come out here to stare at the ocean, much as he would like to.
In the Tower, Robin and Raven were having another argument. They called them "discussions", much the same way his parents had called their arguments "discussions", but unlike his parents, there was no love here. There was no kissing and making up and going back to bed together to make the headboard slam into the wall so hard he could hear it in his room, six doors away.
Robin had always been the brave one, Raven the cautious one.
It was how you knew who they were. Robin needed to move— he drove his motorcycle so fast it was less "speeding" and more like "flying slowly". He was constantly working on his acrobatics or his fighting, or trying to piece together some mystery. It was like he just couldn't stop.
Raven couldn't start. She was so quiet, so still, until she roared into action and kicked butt.
The arguments had become louder and louder, lately. They made him remember the shouting in the accident, sometimes, the way his mother had screamed and his father had groaned, and that thing had gone BANG-BANG-BANG like their headboard after an argument.
Starfire took to the roof, and to flying, while Cyborg retreated into the garage.
He had tried, once, to retreat into the Gamestation… But Raven had gotten so mad at Robin that the couch had lifted off the ground and the television had shattered.
After that, he'd stopped even staying in the same building.
Briefly, he saw Starfire whirl through the air, bolts of energy surrounding her.
After that, though, the night resumed its silence, and he resumed his watch on the tempestuous ocean.
"I shall return to the great white mother," he murmured, but it made no sense. Because there was no mother to return to, no matter how much he wished that Robin and Raven could be his parents again, as the Doom Patrol had been.
Inside of him, that dark, secret grief that he sometimes felt he was the only one to bear welled up.
Some of Blake's poetry returned to him, but it was only a fragment of a short poem. "Of crimson joy: And his dark, secret love Does thy life destroy..."
What was the beginning of the poem? How had it started out?
He remembered working on memorizing it with his father. They had started out with Lewis Carol's The Crocodile and worked their way up… The Crocodile, The Sick Rose, on and on, longer and longer, until he could memorize Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour: July 13, 1798.
He wracked his brains, trying to remember his father's voice, but he couldn't. He could remember the way the light had slanted across the page, the way his father had placed his hand on his shoulder, the way he had seen him tilt his head and laugh… But for the life of him, he couldn't remember his father's voice.
It terrified him. Was he losing his memories of his parents? He didn't want to lose those memories. They were so precious… Ever since the manor burned down, they were all he had left of his family.
He missed those days with a sweet, hollow ache that burned in his throat and made his chest hurt. His stomach clenched into a knot as some of the windows in the Tower shattered.
There would be another clean-up crew.
Soon enough, though, Robin would leave. He could feel it in his bones. He had heard the conversation between Batman and Robin, how Batman had inquired if Robin were done with his fool's errand yet.
And then Batman had said something odd, about how he missed him, and how the manor wasn't the same without him, without some damn gypsy running around.
Beast Boy chewed on the thoughts, but didn't get anywhere. Robin was still, after all this time, a mystery to him.
He and Raven were so alike.
Something launched through one of the Tower's many windows.
Beast Boy shrugged and continued to rub the stone, now completely warm in his palm. He stared at the reflections of stars in the water and wished there were a moon.
There were lots of poems about the moon. He knew a good many of them.
Calmly, he began to run through the list of titles he knew, all of them. Well, except for the Shakespearean poems— he didn't like them.
He had never been fond of Shakespeare, for some reason. His father had loved Shakespeare, but Beast Boy had never been able to bring himself to enjoy it.
He watched a boat sail across the water, lights blinking, and thought suddenly to his mother's collection of ships in bottles, remembering the way the wood glue had smelled, and the way she had used long, long tweezers to assemble the ships inside their bottles.
Robin screamed something; with the distance, Beast Boy couldn't tell what it was. It didn't matter, though. The argument would end soon enough.
And soon enough, Beast Boy hoped, Robin and Raven would start getting along again, working together as smoothly as well-oiled machine.
And grief shall endure not for
ever, I know.
As things that are not shall these things be;
We shall live through seasons of sun and of snow,
And none be grievous as this to me.
We shall hear, as one in a trance that hears,
The sound of time, the rhyme of the years;
Wrecked hope and passionate pain will grow
As tender things of a spring-tide sea.
—from The Triumph of Time, ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
NOTE: I know it seems unlikely that Robin and Raven would ever argue… But bear with me. There IS an explanation. You'll see it soon.