If Raven had to think about where she spend the most of her time, it would be on the roof. It all started with the false apocalypse. The first time she got up with the sun was that fateful morning (what she thought would be her last morning) to appreciate the sunrise. The second time she got up with the sun it was to appreciate all the sunrises she had left. For those first chilly minutes, with the knowledge that her father was gone, that she was going to life past 16 … those were the happiest moments of her life.
It started to become a habit after that, escaping up to the roof; not just for sunrises, but for sunsets as well, and then any time of day really. It was a wide open space, with lots of light, and it was quiet too, away from the city, away from the rest of the team. In the end it seemed like a bad idea to meditate anywhere else, so she started spending hours undisturbed on the roof, warmed by the sun and cooled by the wind.
Tonight was one such occasion.
Raven had come up to the roof to see the sun set and then she had gotten stuck. She'd watched the sun go down in a particularly magnificent fashion that night. There had been a warehouse fire earlier, close to the waterline, and the crude black smoke had curled up in the sky so that it blocked out the suns light. When the sun made it low enough to break through again it backlit the clouds and made a beautiful stormy gold, and shafts of sunlight fanned out all around. It was one of the better sunsets she'd seen, so she made sure to stay till the end. When it finally dipped below the horizon she had to stay a little longer to admire the way the whole sky glowed bronze. And then the bronze had been replaced by the warmest shade of pink she'd ever seen. When the sky had finally faded to a cool lavender the stars started coming out. She distracted herself for a while by mapping constellations. Every time she finished one, another that she knew would pop out. She'd just spotted the Pleiades when she made the decision to head inside. She was finally cold, now that the sun was gone for good and her bare leg were sitting on the cold metal of the air intake vent. She had shimmied off her makeshift seat into a standing position when she heard the noise.
If Raven was honest she would admit that her first reaction was fear. Fear is usually anyone's reaction when they hear a high-pitched screech from behind them. She whirled around, her hands curling into fists, searching the rapidly darkening sky where she thought it had come from. When she heard it again she relaxed a little. It was still far off, and it had a familiar pre-historic quality to it. By the time she had figured it out he was close enough to see: a massive green pterodactyl, his huge leathery wings beating through the air. 'I should have known' she thought, watching him come closer and closer. 'Who else makes a sound like a dying cat and a rooster combined'.
He seemed to be in a hurry; his wings hadn't stopped pumping since she caught sight of him. Beast Boy's flight path took him over the far corner of the roof, and as soon as he was able to he morphed back to human. Raven thought he changed back a little too high, he stumbled a bit on his landing, but he quickly powered through it. He seemed determined not to lose any speed.
Raven know Robin had taken Beast Boy out on a mission earlier. It had been a minor emergency, just to round up some escaped convicts. But she hadn't gotten any emergency backup call and Beast Boy looked like he was in one piece. So why was he striding towards her like his life depended on it?
Tentatively Raven reached out with her powers. She immediately had to repress the urge to step back. In her minds eye he was the centre of a hurricane; he had a dozen different thoughts and feelings swirling around him at once, but he himself was the calm, still, centre. She didn't need powers to see he walked with a single minded determination. She deliberated on what to do as he rapidly covered the distance between them. He didn't look okay. Should she call out to him? Maybe he was just heading towards the stairs … no he was looking right at her (and with intimidatingly long eye contact)
Before she could decide he was right in front of her, and before knew what was happening his hands were on her waist and he was kissing her.
At first she could only process fragments: the crash of the waves at the bottom of the tower, his fingers pressing against her waist, his mouth warm and insistent against hers, her heart beating hard and fast enough to burst open her chest.
He started out slow enough but Raven did nothing to dissuade him (was that a sigh he heard? Dimly he registered her fingers digging into his shoulders). Beast Boy kissed her with determination, with purpose. He kissed her like it was something he had waited all day for. He pulled back for a second (only a second) only to go back in from the other side.
It surprised Raven to realize she had gone from shocked bystander to active participant in their embrace. She hadn't known she would like the feel of another body pressed up against her, his hard lines against her soft curves. His fingers left electric currents where they moved against her waist. It was terrifying. It was amazing.
She couldn't tell how long they stayed there, locked together, she didn't trust her judgement of time. They couldn't have been there long, but each moment seemed to stretch out forever.
It ended as abruptly as it had begun. Beast Boy pulled back and craned his neck to look back towards the city. His ears pricked up, first one, then the other. It took her a minute but finally Raven heard it too: the high, whining noise that the engine made on Robin's bike, faint at first, but growing louder with each passing second. The noise seemed to break their spell. Beast Boy untangled himself with uncertain, jerky movements. Then, without another word, he started walking towards the stairs.
"Wait a minute." Her hand snapped out and she grasped his feet with her black magic. "You can't just kiss me like that and then walk away like it's nothing." she said, pacing around him like an angry lion. When she stopped in front of him he looked dazed, like he wasn't entirely there, or maybe he couldn't believe what had just happened (she was having a hard time believing it herself).
"Oh … yeah" he mumbled.
"YEAH?" Raven raised both eyebrows and maintained aggressive eye contact. Her hand clenched into a fist and she tightened her grip on his feet, just to remind him he wasn't going anywhere (they had discovered, much to his dismay, that her magic was one of the few things his shape-changing couldn't get him out of).
"Well …" he took a big breath, then let it out again. "I almost died tonight and it made me realize that that was something I've wanted to do for a long time." Raven forgot to breathe for a second. He said it so casually, the way someone might say 'I think I need a haircut' or 'I'm going to make lunch now'.
"Do you want to elaborate on that," she gritted out.
He took another deep breath and walked over to make himself comfortable on Ravens favorite air intake vent. This was when she noticed she hadn't been concentrating on keeping him in place. She followed him, keeping close, tilting her head back to keep him in view when he sat where she had been earlier.
"Well," he said, "without boring you with all the details of how amazing I was in battle," Raven rolled her eyes, "I'll just give you the basics. Robin took me with him on a call to round up a few low level 'enhanced' that had broken out – super steroids or something like that. We had already grabbed a few of them and we've got lucky number seven between us on a roof. Well I guess he'd grabbed a taser off a guard or something because he whips it out and then next think I know he throws it at me! Who throws a taser?!" Raven didn't know quite how to answer. "Anyways, he must have jammed the circuit open because it was still on when he threw it. It hit me right here," he said, fingering a scorch mark in the center of his chest. "It hit me, and I went down, which wouldn't have been such a big deal … if I hadn't been standing at the edge of a roof … of a 10 story building."
Logically Raven knew he had survived, he was sitting right in front of her telling the story after all, but she still felt the cold hand of dread grip her heart. She knew what it was like to be tased, they all did. It was an inevitability in their line of work. The thing about tasers is there's just so many different versions. Keychain tasers packed a punch, but only once, law enforcement generally carried designs for localized pain with minimal after-effects. The kind the Titans usually ran into on the job though were homemade, and usually involved car batteries.
"So I go over the edge and my body's all locked up. I can't change, I can't move, I can't even yell. And my face is pointed straight down so all I see is the ground coming closer and closer. I know I couldn't have been falling for more than a few seconds but it felt like I was there for an hour. And when I was falling towards my certain death I could only think about two things. First, I never called Steve and Rita back last week, and second, I never got around to kissing you."
They locked eyes for a long, drawn out moment. Raven felt time go fluid again.
"I was planning on calling them as soon as I got home," he said, leaning forwards, his elbows propped on his knees. "Maybe take some time, go and visit them. But… I saw you first."
Beast Boy's big green eyes were focused on her still. She tried looking away, tried casually leaning against the intake vent, but she knew his hearing was sensitive enough to hear her racing pulse. Even she could hear it; a faint roaring in her ears like an echo of the ocean below. She wondered if her cheeks looked as hot as they felt. What was she supposed to do now? She glanced at him from under her lashes. He was still looking right at her, looking at her like he expected something. He was so close too, all he needed to do to kiss her would be to lean down. Did she want him to kiss her again? Her eyes flicked down to his mouth. She did. He seemed to be getting closer, yes, he was leaning towards her - -
They both jumped to attention when they heard the telltale screech of the roof door opening.
Robin stood in the open doorway, silhouetted by the bare bulb behind him, looking concerned.
"Beast Boy," he said, "we need to take a look at your head right away. Cyborg's setting up for some scans."
"My head?" he looked annoyed. "I just got tased man, I'll be fine."
Robin took a minute to reply. He crossed his arms (that was never a good sign). "Beast Boy, you cracked a plate-glass window on the 9th floor with your forehead on the way down. We need to look at your head right away."
When Raven looked back at him his eyebrows were almost up to his hairline. "Is it bad that I don't remember that?" he murmured.
Raven took his hand and gingerly tugged him down from his perch.
"Come on," she said "this sounds serious."
This, at least, was familiar territory. Gathering together as a team, taking care of one of their own. Familiar, but not entirely the same, she thought, feeling Beast Boys fingers still woven through hers.
Later, after they had scanned and prodded Beast Boy as much as he would allow, and the rest of the team had watched in amazement as a deep purple bruise bloomed above his eye, Raven came back to the med wing, alone. It had been hard for her to come. She'd stopped more than once along the way. She didn't know what she was going to do once she got there. Talk about what happened? Talk about their feelings? After considering it for a bit, she doubted she had come to do any talking.
When she peeked in the room it was dark. The only light came from the fluorescent lamp mounted on his beds headboard. He was on his side in bed, with his back to her. She could see his communicator on the table beside him, propped up between two empty tofu packets. The screen was lit up and he was talking to Rita.
"… and then he throws it at me! Who throws a taser?!"
"Desperate people, honey," Rita replied. She had a towel in her hand and was pinching at the wet ends of her hair with it. It did not look like Beast Boy ad woken her up for this call, despite the late hour. "I once had someone throw cardboard boxes full of packing peanuts at me. He just didn't have anything else in the room to reach for. So did he get you with anything? I thought most tasers you had to press and hold?"
"Yeah." He shifted around. If Raven could see his face she was sure he would look embarrassed. "He used a band-aid he had been wearing to get around that." He grumbled.
"Oh honey," Rita sighed and put down her towel. "Defeated by a bandaid." Raven stifled a grin. "Did I ever tell you why I stopped wearing earrings?"
Beast Boy fidgeted with a stiff napkin that was in a rough, crane-like shape. "You may have mentioned it, when I was like nine."
"Oh you'd remember if I told you this one." She reached for something off screen. When her hands reappeared she was rubbing lotion between them. "The year was 1984. I had my hair permed, and these out-of-this-world gold hoops that were all the rage …"
Raven eased the door shut as quietly as she could. As much as she loved Rita's stories about the old days, especially ones with Garfield in them, she felt like a voyeur. Maybe she would come back in the morning to ... talk. Or maybe she'd wait until the sun went down and show him her favorite constellations from the roof.
I wrote this story while I was working at a food kiosk in a mall. It was incredibly dull and I had a massive amount of free time because of how slow this place was. I just waited for people to come and order. But I made myself look busy and important by having a notebook that I wrote studiously in all the time. Little did they know I was just writing dirty fanfiction Mwahahahahaha! This story took me a long time, but it kept me sane, and I'm proud of it, even if the ending is a little weak.
Also, there is a surprising amount of information online about getting Tazered if you just have the time to google it. Bam. The more you know...