Disclaimer: I don't own Teen Titans. Not even the tiniest part of it. But I do own this. And it is a very sad little scrap of horror indeed.
Raven looked at the rough paper before her and nearly cried. It was strange, she thought, that someone could care this much, could want to go to so much effort, all on her behalf. She picked up the paper, careful of the odd bits and pieces that stuck out, little scraps, some smaller than the tip of her finger, that someone had been so infinitely careful to cut out, to add to this collage. Little spots of brown, too, stained the paper, some not so very small, and Raven could only try not to see them.
Gone, gone forever, never another smiling face, never anther surprise greeting from around a corner ever again. Raven watched as her eyes blurred and spilled over and away, holding the paper clear of the falling tears.
Never. Never again.
Every single image of her that there had ever been, transferred even from video and television. Careful, so careful. Each piece delicately added, glued on individually. A picture of her as she walked into the Tower the first time was the youngest, transferred from the surveillance tape. A picture of her in comfortable civilian clothing with a faint fringe of a sunset around her the most recent, from just yesterday. Standing on the pier. Looking into the sun, dreaming of all the things she could have been. The click of a camera. A kind, glowing smile, a second source of warmth on her skin. She'd blushed, she remembered, at having that smile directed at her.
And now it would never be directed at her again. Ever again.
She always asked for someone to love her, every birthday, every Christmas, every rising of the day. Raven looked to the sky and asked for someone who would care as deeply about her, who would love her and accept her. She had never looked next to her, she never looked into another pair of unnatural eyes. She thought that they were taken, spoken for, nothing she should even bother dreaming about. Why would the goddess of the sun, she had reasoned when asked, want anything to do with someone who very obviously lived and breathed the night?
She reached down and touched Starfire's cheek, the first time she had ever known the other girl to be cold, and said her goodbye, still clutching the piece of paper that had been loosely grasped in her dead fingers.
Over the stab wound to her heart.
Raven's form grew and contorted in ways she had no control over, and didn't care to. She was powerful now, a force of nature, something that could wreak the shear and utter destruction required for the desecration of something so pure. Robin watched from the doorway as she left in a furious storm of shadows, oblivious to all but hate and revenge.
They never found anything but a few bloody smears of the man who killed Starfire. But they found a tiny piece of paper with the bloodstains on it. When Robin picked it up that day, he just nodded and turned his back on the army of police officers that stood before him. There was but one tiny picture left on that fragment: of Raven, the day she had first appeared, golden and radiant, without the taint of Trigon, taken from afar by a video camera. Though this murder had been grisly, horrifying, Robin hadn't even blinked as he watched. Justice was brutal indeed.
Slade Wilson was dead. So was the contract on their heads.
And he had the strange feeling that he would not be seeing any of Raven ever again.
When I finished this I was very happy indeed. Hope you liked it, or at least understood it. For those of you who have read this before, I hope you like the little changes I've made.
