Oh gosh, here's another one. This is one that I wrote a long time ago and probably stinks, but hey, why not. It's a Raven and Starfire bonding fic, and a little something that has been nagging at me ever since I saw this episode. Because yes, I love Blackfire. I think she's awesome. And if I get bricks thrown at me because of that, well... I can take it. XD

Enjoy?

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Raven sat up in her bed, looking around her room.

It was almost completely dark, but her amethyst eyes easily saw the outlines of everything sitting around the walls. all the collectibles she had gathered over the years. Some didn't mean anything to her, but she had liked the look or feel of them. Others were artifacts that her mother or the monks of Azarath had given to her, and she had kept them in her room for as long as she could remember.

Nothing was out of place. Raven listened, straining her ears, but everything was quiet. Her legs shifted under the blankets, and the sheets rustled, a familiar sound so that it registered only as white noise. The books sat silently on their shelves, staring back at her with their solemn faces, having no opinions.

Raven wondered why she was awake. She wasn't particularly upset by that fact, but not knowing wasn't something that she could live with and the dark bird pulled her blankets farther up on her legs, pondering the answer.

She often woke up in the middle of the night. It was nothing unusual. In fact, Raven barely went an entire night without waking up at some point. The causes were as varied as could be, and sometimes it just happened for no reason at all, but the empath was used to it by now.

A few times it was because of her insomnia. Sleeping the entire night through had never been an option on Azarath. There was something about her home planet that made one be compelled to stay up late and watch the stars in the sky. It had become a habit that she had picked up from simply sitting with her mother.

Raven had taken to drinking tea whenever she woke up for no reason. Making herself a cup and standing at the large windows, just watching the stars would calm her down, and sometimes she could get to sleep afterwards.

Of course, the stars were nowhere near as brilliant as they were on Azarath. And Earth only had one moon compared to their four, but Raven enjoyed it quietly anyways. The distance could make her feel disconnected from her previous home, but the empath supposed that this was a good thing. The less she thought about Azarath the less she would miss it.

As a demon child, Raven had been excluded by other children her age. Being ostracized was comfortable to her, even if it wasn't pleasant. But Azarath was where she had grown up; where the monks who had protected her lived; where her mother would hold her in her arms and hum a tuneless song.

However, it didn't feel like she was waking up for no reason this time. Raven was tired; it had been a complicated day. She didn't want to face thinking about any of that; it had hurt her through a friend.

That was something else that Raven was used to. She wasn't surprised when a hurt overflowed into her state of being; it was part of being an empath.

That was the cause a lot of the time; Raven was an empath. Although it sometimes irritated her to no end that her friends couldn't seem to block their feelings off and give her some peace of mind, she had gotten used to it. In fact, she had gotten so used to feeling her friends' emotions that when they weren't around for her to feel she couldn't seem to get comfortable.

At night it was the worst. Being asleep, the teens couldn't wall up their emotions even if they tried to, and all the waves of feeling poured around the dam that she could sometimes erect to keep them out. Unsuppressed, Raven could see how her friends felt at night. On occasion, her teammates were so loud that she couldn't sleep, and the dark girl would stay up and determine how they were feeling, just to pass the night hours. They couldn't hide anything from her, and Raven would be able to tell if they needed a smile the next day or not.

Dreams also disturbed her. The tone of a dream could change so quickly that one feeling would barely register before being swept away in the swell of another one. It was at times like these that Raven wondered which feelings were hers, and which were from an outside source. It bothered her that she couldn't tell, but then again, knowing that her friends were dreaming, and alive, sometimes then even the worst dreams could lull her to sleep like a lullaby.

Raven prodded at her conscious, but could easily gauge that it was not because her friends were not around to project their emotions.

Cyborg's were flitting around on the edges of the bird's psychic, in and out with an effect that almost made her dizzy if she tried to focus on them for too long. A few minutes with eyes closed and listening with her mentality, Raven discovered that Cyborg's dream was one of hope. It lifted her spirits to know that tonight he wasn't suffering from nightmares.

It was very unusual to find Cyborg feeling very neutral about something, even while he was asleep. His dreams were to the extremes, just as his moods during the day were. Cyborg kept up a happy and fun front during daylight hours, but at night sometimes he was tortured with the worst dreams. He lived again the accident that changed him for life, and smelled the acrid burning of a laboratory.

When this occured, Raven wanted to find him and sit with him, but something always stopped her when she had just about made up her mind to do so. It was a private affair that Raven was sure Cy wouldn't want her to be a witness to, and having her support, while showing that she cared, would embarrass the young man more than he needed to be.

Raven moved away from Cyborg, across to someone else's head, searching for whoever was sleeping, and how well.

Beast Boy was sitting in the middle of her mind, settled and floating in place. He must have been completely exhausted from the day to be barely dreaming at all. The green changeling sometimes had terrible dreams where all of them would be in immense pain, or dying and he couldn't save them.

The days after these tormenting nights, Raven held back on her teasing of him. He needed a break. It was her way of telling him that they would never die on him, and he would be able to save them if need be. Everyone knew that Beast Boy was much smarter and stronger than they sometimes gave him credit for, but the boy was extremely self-conscious. He was insecure, and needed to hear it out loud that they would be there for him if he needed them to be, that they wouldn't leave him.

He knew it, in the back of his mind, but if he didn't hear it out loud, he couldn't believe it. Raven had discovered that this was part of the reason Beast Boy talked so much. The teen did like conversation, but he could speak to any one of them and drive them up the wall with all the chatter, to the point where they would snap at him.

And although it might hurt him superficially, he would eventually get over it. Those waspish comments that were meant to sting assured Beastboy that, yes, they were there with him. It wasn't his imagination, he did, in fact, have company.

Again Raven lifted her psychic away from that one of her friends and focused on a different one. She supposed that in this way she wasn't so different than Beast Boy; perhaps this was her way of making sure that her teammates were still with her. She had grown up with people turning away from her, and keeping their distance.

She was getting used to people constantly being around her, and (this had surprised her to no end once she had realized it) she was beginning to like having them with her. It was something that she had never been able to experience before. It was foreign, filling, and unpredictable.

Liking something unpredictable was growing on her too.

Raven found that Robin was sleeping fitfully. His mind was being haunted by glimpses of villains they were attempting to catch, or leads that he had to put to sleep for the night before he could do the same.

The empath could almost feel him tossing and turning in his sleep. She shook her head and sighed ever so slightly, brow furrowed with worry. What could she do to ease his complicated nights? Nothing that wouldn't be her invading his privacy. Raven had vowed she would never do that to anyone.

It upset her that her leader almost never got a good night's sleep. But the two barely ever spoke during the day. She doubted that he noticed her much at all. And even though she paid so much attention to all of them, in her own way, they didn't return the favor.

That was alright; having them there was a big enough change for now. They hadn't been a team for all that long, and were still getting to know each other. The others seemed to have bonded much more quickly than she, but that was something else she didn't mind. She wasn't a very social person to start with.

Raven's large eyes opened. Once more she studied her room, but the empath hadn't missed anything the first time. Something was still tugging at the edges of her mind, and it was difficult to tell what.

A soft pale hand reached up and brushed a stray strand of purple hair behind her ear. Her mind reached out one last time to search for her last friend. Raven anticipated Starfire's dreams; happy and lovely, or falling, falling.

Raven wasn't sure why falling was such a fear for Star; she wasn't sure what she was falling from either. It could be that a wave of disappointment would drown her while she fell, but from herself or others it was impossible to tell. Other times it could be a sadness that would fall softly down with her.

And the whispers in her and their teammates' voices would follow her.

They could terrify Raven, who wasn't even the recipient of the dream. The words would be whisked away as soon as she woke up, leaving only vague imprints of what they had been. The empath had to resist teleporting herself to Starfire's room and hugging her back to sleep.

That wasn't her style, and she did beat down the impulse. Raven wouldn't know how to go about doing something like that anyways.

But tonight, where Starfire's dreams would normally be clinging in her head, there were none to be found. Raven felt a jolt and sat up straighter, coming fully awake now. Her friend wasn't in her bed, and wasn't dreaming. It was no wonder Raven couldn't get to sleep. Star's dreams were just as loud as any of the boys', sometimes louder, and not having her there was akin to missing a limb.

The empath blinked and extended her reach, feeling her way through the dark.

Finally, there was a surge of emotion on the very edge of her mind. Raven almost collapsed back down with relief (although she would never admit it to anyone). The alien girl was still here; she just happened to be on the roof tonight.

Raven couldn't begrudge anyone a nighttime therapy session; she had enough of them herself. The girl couldn't help being a little annoyed that Starfire wasn't sleeping though. Without all four of her friends snoring in their beds there was no way she would be getting any shut-eye.

Focusing her entire psychic on Starfire, Raven realized that she wasn't feeling any of Star's usual waking emotions. There was sadness, fear, regret, a little bit of anger, and sympathy, all mixing together as one. But, other than that, stronger than all of those combined, was a love that shocked Raven to the bone.

Unable to inference the source or what it was directed to from the power of the feeling, Raven chose to do something that was extremely unlike her. She slipped out from under the covers, stood up and teleported herself through the levels to the roof.

Once there, the empath took a moment to enjoy the view. It was a clear, and slightly cold, night in Jump City. Stars twinkled at them merrily, but cold in their disdain for those bound to the Earth. The moon was completely hidden; it was a new moon that night.

Waves crashed against the rocks stories below, creating a soothing sound. A slow wind plucked up the courage to blow, sliding across Raven's skin and raising a few involuntary goose bumps on her arms.

The alien was sitting on the side of the t-shaped structure with her legs dangling over the edge. Her arms were lying in her lap, hands clasped together and around something that Raven couldn't see. Starfire's eyes were tilted upwards, staring at the stars just as Raven did on those occasions where she couldn't sleep.

As a shadow, Raven made her way over to Starfire and sat close by her side, joining her in the exhilarating sport of star-gazing.

Normally, the alien would jump and gasp, and perhaps laugh at Raven's sudden silent appearance. This night she did nothing, not even tear her green eyes away from the tapestry above them to glance in the empath's direction. She was absorbed in what she was thinking.

"I did not know that you too liked to come up here and watch the colorful gases burn," Starfire suddenly remarked with a straight face. Now, her head turned to look at Raven's profile, which was just as stoic and serious as she.

Raven answered her in an almost casual voice, "I don't." her fingers tightened around her cloak, but she did not move it. It had looked as though she might wrap it around Starfire for a moment, but she had stopped herself.

The dark girl crossed her legs, balancing easily on the dangerous ledge. "I came up here because of you." She stated bluntly.

A look of concern crossed Star's face, but it was gone soon after, completely uncharacteristic of her. "Oh," she said in reply, turning back to their stars.

Another minute of silence passed between the two. It wasn't an uncomfortable one, but rather one where neither feels like they are obligated to talk or to walk away. The silence comforted them, in an empty kind of way.

"I am feeling bad for my sister," Starfire admitted quietly, ducking her head. The silence was broken, and the moment gone, but it would be held forever in both of their hearts as something that wouldn't be, couldn't be, rivaled by anything else.

Raven nodded. It was logical, in an illogical sort of way.

Blackfire had been taken away only the day before, and the wound was still stinging in all of the titans. Starfire's older sister had wormed her way into all of their hearts somehow, even Raven's unshakable one. She was charming, friendly, and fun. But to lie to them and purposefully deceive them so that Starfire would be taken instead was unforgivable.

Blackfire had gotten what she had deserved in the end, and was taken away by the police who wanted her. Raven hadn't known what to think after that, but if she had felt so confused, it couldn't have been anything to what Blackfire's younger sister had been feeling.

Star cautiously looked up, meeting Raven's purple eyes in an intense stare. The empath knew that Robin had talked to Starfire earlier this day. He had said as much, even though her leader hadn't told her any more, saying it was private business between them and needn't be discussed.

"I know," Raven simply answered. She could now guess that all these emotions that were tumbling around inside of Starfire were from, and for, Blackfire. Once that had been established, everything else fell into place easily.

Starfire closed her eyes, her grip tightening around something in her hands. Raven glanced down, and widened her eyes a bit in surprise when she saw the brilliant green pendant that Blackfire had given her sister clutched tightly in her hands.

Raven blinked. "I thought that Robin threw that away." She commented. She had seen Robin throw it away herself, and Raven always trusted her eyes, no matter what anyone told her to the contrary.

Star did not attempt to hide the object. She actually loosened her hands and held it up. The starlight played softly against all the sides, making it glow with an emerald tint, and lighting up Starfire's face.

Blackfire had been correct; it did match Star's eyes.

"I went back to retrieve it," Starfire confided in Raven. "I could not stand to see it lying on the ground there. So I brought it back." There was a hesitant pause where the girl was wondering what she should say next. "I… I have been sleeping with it under my pillow."

This shocked Raven, but not as much as she would have thought. Everyone had their secrets, things that they would rather not admit to anyone, even close friends. This was probably one of Starfire's; and it was no wonder that she wouldn't tell Robin about it.

The dark bird had her own secrets. She would not be sharing them with anyone; not as long as she could help it. But it warmed her up inside a bit, that Starfire trusted her enough to tell her this. The two didn't get along famously most of the time.

The stars must do something to the both of them.

Raven moved closer to Starfire. "Okay," was all she said in response to the confession. Her tone said that she neither approved nor disapproved; it was not her decision to make, and it was not her necklace to make the decision about.

Star studied Raven. It was impossible to tell what she was thinking; her face was as blank as a sheet of paper, although her eyes reflected the sky beautifully. Starfire sighed and looked in the same direction as her teammate.

"I love my sister… even after everything she has done to me…" and here the pendant went around her neck to rest on her chest, "I still love her."

Raven's lips turned ever so slightly upward at this. "Of course you do." She turned her entire upper body to look at Starfire, who met her gaze steadily, with a slightly puzzled expression on her pretty features. "She's your sister."

Starfire smiled too. One hand went around the green gem that hung around her throat, holding it tightly almost like she was afraid that it would disappear if she ever let go. Raven watched this happen out of the corner of her eye.

A second later found Raven's cloak partially around each girl, and their eyes, green and purple, were staring at the sky where a sister had recently departed.

And, grudgingly admitted, she would be missed.