It doesn't snow in Jump City, not even in December. They're right on the coast, after all, and it's such a beautiful view that not many residents even miss the snow.

Beast Boy thinks he could miss it, if he tried. He's never lived in a place that had snow long enough to get used to it. The last time he'd been in the snow was when they'd been tracking down the Brotherhood of Evil, so of course Robin hadn't let them have any time to enjoy it. Before the Titans, the Doom Patrol's crime fighting had led them all over South America and Africa, and not even Rita could convince Mento to take a break in the middle of a chase. Anything beyond that is fuzzy, like an old movie of a happy family with a laughing man swinging him up into the air and a woman trying to catch snowflakes on her tongue. But that was a long time ago.

Right now, it's Cyborg's birthday, and Beast Boy has been hoping the weather might throw them a bone and do something cool in celebration, but the sky remains frustratingly clear. It's been a pretty good day so far anyway: pancakes, bacon, and eggs for breakfast without any tofu in sight (Beast Boy had promised); a video game marathon all day; and in the evening, tickets to the new auto show in town.

Cyborg had been especially happy about that last one, and Beast Boy will admit that it had been pretty fun; he'd even caught Raven hiding a small smile as she'd observed everyone else's excitement. The auto show closes at eight, so after a dinner of pizza, the Titans make their way back to the tower, tired and content.

The kitchen has a pile of dirty dishes in the sink from breakfast, and there are video games all over the living room, but Beast Boy ignores all of it. "Alright, Starfire, you get the cake out of the fridge. Cyborg, you pick the movie. Whadda you wanna watch, Annihilator 2: Origins? Bladeslicer? The new season of King's Legacy?" He hopes Cyborg will pick King's Legacy; it's longer, and Beast Boy loves it when the five of them fall asleep on the couch in a huge pile.

"Actually," Cyborg says, "there's something I, uh, need to talk to you guys about." He rubs the back of his neck.

"What is it?" asks Robin.

"Is the cake not to your liking?" Starfire sets the towering confection down on the table. "We used eight different kinds of frosting."

Cyborg chuckles. "The cake is fine—looks great, even. And," He leans in closer. "Is that donut glaze on the sides?"

"It was my idea!" Starfire beams. "I thought you would appreciate one of your favorite foods on another one of your favorite foods. I also suggested pizza sauce, but apparently that is not an acceptable cake topping." She holds out a fork much too small to cut through even the first layer.

"I can't wait to eat that thing, but—"

"Then dig in!" Beast Boy says, and pushes Cyborg towards a chair. He leans in and whispers, "And don't worry, dude, you don't really have to wear the meat crown."

"Hang on, guys—"

"If I had to wear the throknar, so does Cyborg," Raven murmurs in Beast Boy's ear, and Beast Boy has to suppress a snigger at the memory.

"Guys." Robin's voice is authoritative in a way he mostly only uses on missions or when someone is hogging the remote. "Cyborg said he had something to tell us. Go ahead, Cy." Robin sits down at the table and regards Cyborg with—something. Beast Boy can't really figure out what it is, maybe because of the mask or maybe because he's never been good at reading people, but it makes him nervous all of a sudden.

Cyborg looks gratefully at Robin. "Thanks, man." He takes the chair Beast Boy offered him. His hands curl and uncurl on the table. "So, you guys know I never finished high school because of the accident. Well, back in September, I took my GED test, and I passed."

"Congrats, dude!" Beast Boy exclaims as Starfire moves to hug him. "But why'd you wait this long to tell us?" Out of the corner of his eye, Raven shifts.

"Uh, cause I also applied to Newark City College." Cyborg stares determinedly at them. "In New Jersey. I start in January for the spring semester."

The silence that greets his news makes Cyborg sit up straighter. "It's got really great science and tech programs. I'll be working up close with some of the best scientific minds in the country. This is a big deal, y'all."

Raven breaks their shock; she steps forward and touches Cyborg's shoulder. "That's really great, Cy. We're proud of you."

"Yeah," adds Robin, reaching for a handshake, "Good luck in college."

Starfire speaks up, her eyes wide and bright. "But—you're leaving." Star has just the right voice for this kind of thing: emotional and genuinely innocent, with no trace of accusation.

"You're not leaving." Beast Boy is exactly the wrong person for this. The rest of the team regard him; Cyborg and Starfire are taken aback, but Robin is frowning, and Raven has a look on her face similar to the one she gets while she's reading, as if Beast Boy is some kind of story she's already guessed the end of.

"Dude, yes, I am," Cyborg says slowly.

Beast Boy ignores his teammates' stares. "No, you're not," he says again, more forcefully.

"Look, I know the last time I said this, I ended up coming back, but that's not what's happening now." Cyborg sounds so patient, but all it does is make Beast Boy grind his teeth. "This one's real, BB. This is my twentieth birthday. I'm not a teenager anymore, the name doesn't even work."

That's Beast Boy's usual shtick, lightening the mood with some humor. He's never realized how annoying it is.

"That doesn't mean you move all the way across the country!"

"Beast Boy," Robin says in a placating voice, "I know it's hard to accept, but this has been coming for a while. Cyborg's an adult, it makes sense that he'd want to be independent."

That feeling of something from before solidifies into a knot in Beast Boy's stomach. "Did you know about this?" he asks.

"Not specifically, but I figured something like this would happen soon." Robin sounds so damn accepting, like this isn't their entire world turning upside down.

A tear rolls down Starfire's face. "Then this is it? You are truly leaving forever?"

"No," Beast Boy snaps. "No one is going anywhere," He points at Cyborg at this.

"Wow, did I miss the memo that says you're somehow in charge of me?" This isn't the angriest Cyborg's ever been, but it feels worse than all the others. "I am moving out, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. I'm signed up for classes, we have an apartment, end of story."

"We?" Beast Boy narrows his eyes.

Some of Cyborg's anger dissipates as he realizes his slip. "Ah—yeah, that's—I'm going with Ka—Bumblebee. We're. We've been doing the long distance thing, and. We're gonna move in together."

"You're ditching us for a girl?!" Beast Boy shouts.

"She's not just a girl, you guys all know her! And she's important to me, isn't that enough?!"

"Oh, so she's more important than us?"

"It's not like that, and you know it!"

"I can't believe this! Aren't we enough?!" By some miracle, Beast Boy's voice doesn't break on the last part.

"Okay, that's enough!" Robin steps in between him and Cyborg. "Beast Boy, I get you're upset, but this is Cyborg's choice. You need to respect that."

"How are you so okay with this?" Beast Boy asks incredulously. "You made this team. Don't you care that we're losing someone? How are we gonna do this without him?"

Robin hesitates, and Beast Boy realizes it a split second before he says it. "We're… not gonna do this without him, are we."

"All of us are growing up, Beast Boy," Robin says softly. His voice seems to reach Beast Boy from very far away. "We did a great job defending this city, but now it's time to move on to new things."

"So we're all abandoning Jump City." Beast Boy's only barely aware that he's talking.

"That's—no, Beast Boy, listen," Robin huffs, annoyed. "Most of our enemies are locked up, the city isn't in as much danger anymore, and we're all growing up. It's time."

It's the Brotherhood of Evil's lair again—no Monsieur Mallah's fist squeezing the life out of him, but it's not any easier to breathe now than it was then. He's facing down a split, with his friends on one side and a gaping uncertainty on the other. Only this time, they're the ones making the choice. And they're still not choosing him.

But he's still the one who walks away.

Starfire holds her fist up to the door to the gym, hesitates. Cyborg is in the garage, tinkering with his car and muttering unintelligibly. Raven and Beast Boy have both disappeared into their rooms, and there's a layered joke about birds and feathers in there somewhere. And Robin is in the gym, practicing katas he could do in his sleep, while Starfire stands outside.

Finally, she sighs, foregoes the knock, and walks in.

Robin's mostly the only one who uses the gymnastics equipment. Starfire, Beast Boy, and Cyborg prefer to hone their strength with the weights, or else they join Robin when he insists on practicing sparring; Raven often has to be coerced into the gym. But Robin uses the bars and beams like he was born to them—which he was, in a way.

Right now he performs flip after flip, switching arms and grips as easily as Beast Boy changes forms. Starfire doesn't speak until he is done, dismounting with just a hint of circus flair.

"Robin."

His back is to her, and his shoulders drop as he exhales heavily. There's a towel and a water bottle on the bench nearby, and he sits down and wipes at the sweat on his face. Starfire sits down next to him, an unthinking gesture, and he swallows a large gulp of water before saying, "You're not mad at me, are you."

"Of course not," she says. "Merely… sad, I suppose. You have all been my best friends for so long, and to think that we must separate now is—" She breaks off. Quietly, she adds, "I do not know where I will go."

"Yeah, I, uh." Robin crinkles the plastic bottle in his hand. "I wanted to talk to you about that. See, I've been kinda doing a similar thing as Cyborg."

"You are going to college, too?"

"No, see, there's this city called Blüdhaven, and it's in New Jersey, too, and it has this police academy, and I—I applied to it." He finally looks up at Starfire. "And I got in, and I'm starting there in a few months."

Starfire stares at him in shock. "In New Jersey? Raven showed me where that is, it is all the way on the other side of the country! You are going just as far away as Cyborg!"

"Yeah, but, Star—"

"You have been planning to leave for months, and you did not even tell me!" She stands up, glaring at him.

"I didn't have everything figured out yet. I was going to talk to you once I got an apartment, and I found one the other day," Robin explains, getting to his feet and reaching out for her. "Listen—"

Starfire pulls away from his hands. "You are asking me to say goodbye to you, Robin."

"No, I'm not," he insists. "I'm asking you to come with me."

In the silence that follows, neither of them notices the tiny green fly on the ceiling, and neither of them notices when it buzzes away.

The garage is Cyborg's domain, mostly. Robin has a sizeable portion set aside for himself and his motorbike, but other than that, it's hard to go anywhere without running into one of Cyborg's projects. So when Cyborg wants to immerse himself in one and hide from someone, he has a lot of options. Which means that Beast Boy has to rely on the sound of metal tools clanking and the smell of motor oil before he finds him hunkered over a table with part of the T-Ship's engine spread out on it.

Cyborg doesn't look up when Beast Boy approaches. Beast Boy decides to wait until he puts down the soldering iron to start talking. "When do you leave?"

Cyborg's human eye flicks up at him briefly, then back down at his work. "December 30th."

It's not any worse than what Beast Boy was expecting, but it still makes his hands tremble. "That's not a lot of time to pack."

Another pause. "I've already packed most of my stuff."

Right. Cyborg had known about this for weeks. It's a horrible thought, that Cyborg had been making all these plans, doing all this stuff in secret without telling any of them. Beast Boy had known it in the abstract, but having the depth of it confirmed like this feels much worse.

Cyborg must realize how it sounds, because he sighs and puts down the screwdriver. "Man, look, I get that I sprung this on y'all, and it freaked you out. But you can't act like that, dude. It's not fair of you to just make demands of me that way." He walks around the table until there is nothing between him and Beast Boy.

"I know. I'm sorry."

"I mean, I gotta be able to do what I want—to join or leave whatever team I feel like. 'Specially since—"

"Since what?" Beast Boy watches as Cyborg half turns away again. "Cyborg, since what?"

"Since…" Cyborg sighs. "Since according to Starfire, I'm gonna be obsolete in less than twenty years."

Beast Boy gapes at him. "What? You mean the thing with the future? Dude, she changed that. It doesn't exist anymore."

"Starfire stopped Warp and changed a lot of things, but that doesn't affect the technology of the future," Cyborg says. "If I don't work hard and develop something better than my current system, I'm still gonna end up shackled to a generator."

It's gone very quiet in the massive garage. Beast Boy struggles to say something, anything. "You—you don't know for sure that'll happen."

"No," Cyborg acknowledges. "But I'm sure as hell not gonna take even the smallest chance." He looks almost sad, his back straight and his hands resting heavily at his sides.

"So that's it? That's why you're going."

Cyborg's shoulders slump. "No, man, that's not the only reason, okay? It's all the other stuff I said, too. I'm growing up, I want to start a new part of my life."

"Did we always feel like kids screwing around to you?" Beast Boy can't help asking it.

"No, BB—"

"You wanted to be part of this team before, and now, what, that's just gone?"

"People change, Beast Boy!"

Any rebuttal Beast Boy might've had dies in his throat.

Cyborg closes the distance between them. Beast Boy wonders if he'll ever have a friend who's shorter than him. "You are my best friend, and these have been the greatest years of my life. That's why I need you to be okay with this."

And what else can Beast Boy say but "Okay."

Cyborg hugs him, and it feels the same as it always has, and Beast Boy never wants to let go. Eventually he does, and the only thing left to do is go back to his room. But once he's there, it doesn't get better. The piles of clothing, empty pizza boxes, and other junk make the room seem smaller. He knows every inch of this space, has lived here for years and made it his own, and now he's standing in it struggling to breathe.

If the garage is Cyborg's, then the roof is Robin and Starfire's. For Beast Boy, the outcrop of rocks at the base of the tower has always filled him with a sense of calm. Maybe it's the view; something about having the ocean out in front of him and the sky above him. Not everything in him is human. Parts of him belong to the sea and the sky, in ways Beast Boy himself can't understand.

It seems inevitable that Raven would join him. She sits down on the flat rock next to him, and Beast Boy runs his finger along the jagged edge of the stone in his hand. He doesn't skip this one.

"You probably could've handled that better." Raven's dry voice is an odd contrast to the gentle sound of the waves.

The nice thing about Raven is that she accepts silence as a response. "He left before, and you didn't act like this," she continues. "You just moped around, sighing at his video game controller. What's changed?"

"It didn't feel real last time." Beast Boy sets the stone down. "That time, it was like, I always knew he'd come back. Or, I never really believed he would leave for good. Cyborg leaving… it didn't feel the same as… the other time." But Raven remembers the last person who had left before Cyborg; he doesn't need to say her name. "She didn't want to come back either."

It's a difficult admission, the worst one, that he wasn't enough to convince Terra to come back. Still, once it's out there, he feels a little better.

Raven says, "You have to trust people enough to make these choices. Even if it's hard, even if you love them. Even if they never come back."

Beast Boy wonders how hard those monks on Azarath fought to convince Raven to stay. He wonders if they tried at all. "We're his family. You don't leave your family."

Her voice is very small when she says, "We all left our families."

And that's the thing, isn't it? They'd all been running from something—even Starfire, though she hadn't left willingly, had eventually been forced to confront the reality of what her home world had become, and had chosen Earth instead. "Feels worse when it happens to you," he mutters.

Out of the corner of his eye, he senses her turning her head to face him, but doesn't meet her gaze. "You wanted to be more mature," she says. "You wanted to be called Beast Man. And this past year, you've proven over and over that you have grown up. You're not scared that you can't handle this. You're scared that you can.

"And I'm guessing you knew I'd tell you all this, otherwise you wouldn't be out here."

It's true; for all her oddities that often disturb him, for all that she toes the line between light and dark, things make sense around Raven. Beast Boy might have trouble understanding her, but she's very good at helping him understand himself.

"I just… thought I'd have more time," he admits.

"I always thought I'd have a lot less."

Beast Boy exhales slowly, and finally he turns to look at her. Backlit by the light of the tower behind her, she's looking slightly up, towards the stars. Looking at her home world, possibly? Is up even the right direction to look for another dimension? Beast Boy's never asked. He realizes he wants to know.

Instead, he says, "Wanna handle it together?"

It all happens very quickly after that.

Cyborg leaves first, after installing some major security alarms to prevent break-ins and handing its controls over to Beast Boy. He also gives Beast Boy his favorite video game controller, and Beast Boy doesn't even try to stop himself from tearing up.

(Raven gives Cyborg a wrapped present shaped suspiciously like a book, which Beast Boy doesn't ask about.)

Robin and Starfire don't leave until Starfire has made them all Tamaranean parting gifts, which seem to be some sort of Jell-O, but which Beast Boy wouldn't eat under pain of death. After several bruising hugs, and after Robin lets Starfire dry her eyes on his cape, they too depart on a brisk February morning.

Once they're gone, Raven insists that Beast Boy help her clean the whole place from top to bottom. Which, honestly, Beast Boy doesn't understand the point of; nobody's going to be using the tower, after all. But once they really get into it, he starts to appreciate the trip down memory lane. They find, among other things, Raven's old gym uniform that Mad Mod made her wear in his twisted school, several handfuls of the bell-like charms from Starfire's Blorthog Day necklaces, Beast Boy's employee hat from Mega Meaty Meat, and more birdarangs than they know what to do with.

With the tower scrubbed clean, there's nothing left to do but pack, until finally one day in March, it's time. They lock up the tower and turn on the security protocols, and Raven and Beast Boy are left standing on the rocky island outside the greatest home either of them has ever known.

It's sunset, the sky a soft pink and orange, and it turns Raven's hair magenta. They face each other for a moment, before one of them moves, and then they're embracing—which is slightly silly, really, since they're not splitting up just yet.

"Thanks for being my friend," Raven whispers.

"Thanks for letting me."

Beast Boy thinks maybe it was always going to be them in the end. Just as Robin and Starfire were a sure thing, more definitive than the push and pull of the tides, so too was this ending, here, with the two of them, stretching out in a single moment as long as their shadows on the rock.

They release each other, and then there's really only one thing left to do. Beast Boy shifts into a bird, Raven ascends into the air, and they're flying away.

AN: This story is a follow up to exit seraphim, and chronologically it's set before that one. This is also the first in a planned series. There will be *sigh* a lot.

I originally planned to have this all in one chapter, but it got away from me. You can expect the second chapter to be up in… um…

Title from here: bartleby dot c/o/m /1/3/210 dot html

Crossposted on archiveofourown: works/9561740

I'm also on tumblr, URL: deprofundisclamoadte