.

. . .

Because

. . .

Gray carpet smacked Beast Boy in the face.

Gingerly he pushed himself onto all fours, now on human limbs. Where was he? He blinked to shake the white spots from his vision. Traveling that way through a rip in spacetime (or whatever the heck it was Raven did) was always disorienting. A pair of feet came into view and he followed the legs up to a pair of crossed arms and a testy expression. It was as he greeted her sheepishly that he finally looked around, to avoid her gaze, and learned they were in...

Hold on—they were in Raven's bedroom?

"No offense," he began, "but what the hell are we doing here?" This was the first place people would check when they came looking for her!

"I," she emphasized stiffly, "am getting my stuff. What are you doing here?"

Whoops. Maybe he should have thought this through a bit more. (Not that he'd had time..) Beast Boy rubbed his neck, letting out a chuckle that sounded forced. "Thought it was obvious," he said weakly. "I'm coming with you."

A single beat, and then: "No."

With that, she turned away. With a wave of her hand, books began to pull themselves from her shelves, carried across the room on soft white light to pile on her bed. Raven didn't even look at them, instead digging physically under the bed until she came up with a dusty leather satchel. Beast Boy hung back in the center of her room, feeling like he'd been slapped, while weighty tomes nudged him from side to side on their way past. She might as well have tacked on a "You're dismissed."

"I..."

Only her mouth betrayed she'd heard him. "What?"

"Uhm.." he faltered again. It was clear she was expecting him to leave.

The thing was, he always would. When Raven asked him to stop what he was doing he would stop, when she asked him to shut up he would shut up, and when she asked him to go he would go. He'd never liked how often she asked for these things but he'd always give in—albeit sometimes only after a lot of persuasion—but he would. Because, for one, he respected her, and for another, she was always just... you know, in her room. Down the hall. A couple walls away where everyone knew she was safe. Where he could knock anytime he wanted and make up a reason as to why when she answered to cover up the fact that he was mostly just making sure she was still there.

Here she was again, asking to be left alone. And this time... This time, he found he couldn't do it.

"Yeah," he said. He cleared his throat and stood up straighter. "Yeah, I am. I'm coming with you."

She refused to acknowledge him, instead flying to her vanity and rummaging through it noisily.

"Hey, I'm coming with you," he repeated louder. "Raven. Raven." She wasn't even looking for anything, she was just pushing around glass bottles in the shallow drawers in an attempt to drown him out. Beast Boy took a chance and shoved it closed. "Are you listening?"

"You are not coming." Her tone was calm but the tremor in her voice gave her away.

"Why not?" The attempt to sound confident and demanding came out more forlorn. He wasn't even sure he wanted her answer, terrified it might be "because you're you."

Raven ripped open the drawer again, this time pulling out an unlabeled glass bottle filled with an amber liquid and bringing it over to the bed. "Beast Boy," she began, and slowed to a stop. There were a couple heavy sighs before she went on. "It's very... good of you to offer, but you can't come with me." She seemed to forget about her bag entirely as she turned the bottle over in her hands. The golden liquid sloshed noiselessly from side to side.

But the chain reaction of his confidence had taken off exponentially; the more she denied him the more determined he was that it was the right thing to do. "I can," he insisted, "and I will." He knew he was making her angry but there were more important things at play.

A crack struck through her calm resolve. Her cloak fluttered on a nonexistent breeze as she spun toward him, her grip on the bottle tightening dangerously. "I can't believe you're choosing now, of all times, to start an argument with me."

"I'm not trying to st—"

"Do you even remember all that's happened today?"

"Of course I—"

"So then take a hint for once and leave me alo—!" Her rant cut itself short as she finally squeezed the bottle too hard and shattered it. Scents of honey and vanilla and woody herbs filled his nose as she gasped. Glass shards and oily fluid ran down her arm to pool on the carpet at her feet, and he lunged forward to help but quailed at the intensity of her glare. Reluctantly he opted to let her shake the glass out of her hand herself. He flinched as she pried the largest piece out of the center of her palm, a couple centimeters deep. Blood trickled down the curved glass and a single tear threatened to leak out of her eye.

Woah—hold up. A tear?

Never—not in all the time he'd known her—had Raven cried. Not when she got thrown fifty feet into the side of a building by Cinderblock, not when she'd had her heart broken for the first time, not even when she woke up on the day she knew the world would end. She'd always kept control over that. Yet here it was, unmistakably. He could even smell the salt in the air as the tiny drop grew in the white of her right eye. Raven was on the verge of something... something new.

And instead of comforting her, like an idiot he plowed on. "I'm not going to leave you alone," he snapped, though he softened the edges. "You can't go off on your own when the entire world has their torches out for you."

"Why are you so stubborn?" Raven gritted her teeth and pried another splinter from her skin. She was blinking fast—also something he'd never seen her do. "I'll be fine on my own, and besides, we can't both abandon the Titans. People need you." Her voice threatened to break and she sounded so uncharacteristically emotional that for a moment he thought she might have been talking about herself, not him. She tried to clear her throat but there was no getting rid of the bubble there. "The team needs you."

"No they don't," he muttered. "You need me."

The solitary tear spilled from her eye.

She squeezed them shut and looked away, but a second fell, and a third. Beast Boy balked. This was on the next level of wrong. Raven shouldn't cry—no, not that, it was that she shouldn't have a reason to cry. Drops turned to streaks that dripped down toward her neck. The books on her bed flew open and pages flipped wildly, as if a wind was rushing in from the closed window.

"Hey," he probed gently. "Don't do that..." This whole situation must really be messing with her. "Don't do that!" he gasped when he saw her clenching her injured hand. There could still be glass there! He caught her by the wrist, hoping to snap her out of it. Raven was a force to be reckoned with when she lost control of her emotions so he needed to calm her. Fast. The bits of glass on the carpet clinked together as they shook and behind him everything on the shelves rattled.

"Rae," he tried, tentatively. She didn't pull her arm away, so that was good, but her eyes were screwed shut so tight he worried he might need a screwdriver. "It's alright. It's gonna be fine." He had no way of knowing that but saying it out loud made him believe it. "Please don't cry," he added quietly, and then he did something that was either very smart or very stupid. Either way, he couldn't help it. He reached up with his other hand cautiously, the way he might reach toward a deer in the woods, and used his thumb to wipe away some of the water staining her cheek.

White light flashed through the room with a crack like lightning and sent Beast Boy stumbling backwards into her vanity. Dazed, he blinked spots from his eyes and realized the sound of fluttering pages had stopped. The room was silent.

He took stock of all her things, knowing that if Raven had accidentally broken anything with that burst then it was indirectly his fault. Everything was... fine, actually. Which was very strange. Even stranger was Raven, bending down to pick up...

When she looked up and met his eyes, all the sadness was gone, replaced instead by abject confusion. In her hands was the unlabeled pear-shaped bottle full of amber liquid.

Beast Boy gaped at it, then at the floor where it had been shattered a moment ago, then at Raven again, whose tears had dried. They were both quiet for a solid minute.

Raven seemed to come to her senses all at once and wiped hastily at her face, averting her gaze from Beast Boy. An indigo cloak guided by soft light nudged itself past him and startled Beast Boy from his catatonic trance. His jaw fell open and shut, hinging on the words to describe what just happened as he watched her wrap the impossible bottle in a spare cloak and tuck it in her satchel.

He still hadn't found the right words to say when she spoke directly at her bag. "I'm... ready."

He must have been silent for a little too long, because her pupils slid into her peripherals, finding his. What was she saying, exactly? Get out? I'm leaving now? Goodbye?

She shouldered her bag and shuffled her weight onto her other foot. She pulled the edges of her cloak around her arms and still refused to look at him. What was she waiting for...? Then suddenly he saw it—that same look Starfire had given him back on the street, on Ravens face, just for a second. Oh. Oh! Ohhh.

"Wait," he spluttered, right as she moved her hand to open a portal. "Wait, let me get my stuff first! It'll only take a sec!" Without pausing for her to agree he grabbed her wrist and dragged her down the hall toward his own bedroom.

Outside his door Raven lingered, silhouetted in the stark fluorescent lighting of the corridor. She really did look like an angel, all in white with a hazy glow falling on her from above. Not that he would ever tell her that.

"Come in, come on in." He wanted to make sure she followed him in. If he let her out of his sight for a moment, who was to say she wouldn't vanish forever? He chuckled, "And... sorry for the mess."

Raven thought "mess" was a monumental understatement. With judicious hesitance she made her way inside: over the warzone of dirty clothes by the doorway, over the three foot wide tangle of cords from unnameable electronics, past the leaning tower of comic books. While Beast Boy frantically rummaged through his drawers and stuffed things into a navy backpack, she studied his living space. It was a mess, like him, but it did have its charm. In the years they'd lived together Raven had never actually been in here. Not that she hadn't had the opportunity—she had. But she'd always found a reason to decline the invitation.

The bottom bunk squealed as she lowered herself down. "Just another minute," Beast Boy assured her. She wondered what had possessed her to wait for him at all. All of her common sense screamed that it was not a good idea. On her lap her bag shifted and she held it to her chest, thinking of the small bottle of perfume nestled in the side pocket.

"Turn around," he called haphazardly.

Instinctually she looked up at him instead, only to realize he was halfway through changing. She yanked her hood up to cover her face. "Beast Bo—!"

"Hey, don't say I didn't warn you!" he laughed. Her face must have been the color of a cherry tomato. She heard him coming toward her and she pulled her hood down even lower, but the covers under her began to tug. "Whoops," he said. "You're uh, sitting on my sweatshirt, Rae."

She rose stiffly. "Why are you changing?"

"Gotta wear civilian clothes," he said, with a hint of a 'duh' between the lines. "Blend in with the crowd."

Raven looked at him pointedly. "Did you forget that you're green?"

"Blend in more," he amended. "Besides, I've been dying to test out these jeans Cy reverse-engineered from the fabric of my uniform." He snapped his waistband with pride. And she had to admit that in the dim bedroom lighting, with his ratty converse and jeans and Star Wars sweatshirt he hardly looked like a superhero. You could almost pass over the green skin if you weren't looking for it. She hated to admit it, but he was right.

Raven brushed the hem of her cloak between the pads of her fingers. "I... don't have civilian clothes."

Beast Boy smirked. "But you know who does..."

Starfire's room was far more intimidating than Beast Boy's, in a way, even though she had been in here before. It was bright and loud in every sense. Every inch of wall was covered in "marvelous earthly decoration" and even worse was her closet. It was like walking into Star's favorite section of her favorite store in the entire mall.

Beast Boy gave a low whistle. "Dang, we might be here all night trying to find something that isn't covered in sparkles. Bet you wish you'd let Star take you shopping now, huh?"

Raven seared him with a wounded glare and he threw his hands up. "Hey, I didn't mean it like that. I just meant..." He cowed further and left her in the closet with a sigh, scratching his neck absently as he observed Star's movie posters instead.

Raven picked through the frighteningly feminine clothes, poking them each aside as if they might burn her. She knew he'd meant nothing more than to poke fun at Starfire's taste in fashion, but she couldn't help hearing another truth in his words. That she'd declined an opportunity offered to her on many occasions, and would now have to live with that decision because she'd never get another chance.

After closing the closet door with a flick of energy, she hastily changed out her clothes for a flowy white skirt she'd found in the back with its tag still on. Because of their drastic height difference it fell past her knees. Perfect. Beast Boy knocked as she was pulling a rose patterned sweater over a crimson top that was far too short for her liking. She opened the door, meaning to apologize for snapping at him but instead coming out with, "I don't feel right about taking Starfire's clothes without asking."

Beast Boy's gaze travelled down her body, a little too slowly, and she realized with a start that he was blushing. "Somehow, I don't think she'll care," he stated matter-of-factly. "She'll probably be delighted. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, she's been trying to give you a makeover for years."

"True," Raven conceded.

"I'm pretty sure the word "dress-up" has been used at least one time."

A smirk tugged at Raven's thinly pressed lips. "But probably less than fifty."

"If she saw how pretty you looked right now I bet she'd be screaming like a Glarkrian Thammerglot."

He punctuated this statement with a jaunty reenactment of Starfire's best impression of Tamerenean fauna, which included a bug-eyed vacant stare and wildly flapping his hands on either side of his head. On any other day Raven would have answered this with a straight face and a dry comment, but today did not seem to be any other day. Heat kissed her cheeks as she dimly registered the word pretty and a nervous giggle turned into a bubble of laughter that burst before she could cap her amusement at his ridiculous impression. She slapped her hand to her mouth.

Beast Boy's fake bug-eyes were replaced with actual astonishment. "Woah—did you just giggle?"

Raven reached back to pull up her hold and realized with annoyance that she no longer had one.

"Crying and laughing all in the same ten minutes? Are you.." He tilted his head to the side, blinking in that purposeful way vaguely reminiscent of a dog. "Are you okay?"

Raven shouldered her bag. Only Beast Boy would ask if she was okay with such concern after she had just laughed. "I'm just.. in desperate need of meditation." That much was true. "I'm leaving now."

He grinned, undeterred, revealing that one overgrown fang so characteristic of his smiles. "Yeah, sure. But let's hit the kitchen on our way out."

It was with considerably heavier bags that the two of them emerged from a portal into a litter-strewn parking lot wedged between the backsides of two brick buildings.

"Where are we?" he asked.

"Still in Jump, if that's what you meant." She rubbed her head. The day's activities were definitely starting to take their toll. "I'm not going to be able to warp us any farther, at least not until I rest."

"That's alright," he responded lightly. "I know a better way to skip town anyhow."

"And what's that?" she wondered dryly, until he suddenly yanked her arm downward, bringing her stumbling to the ground. "Hey—!"

"Don't fly," he whispered, his ears twitching wildly as he scanned the empty lot.

"Excuse you?"

Beast Boy jammed his thumb in the direction of the opening between the two buildings, where a flickering streetlamp illuminated the stretch of sidewalk that lined the street on the other side. Presently, a group of people ambled past, talking in loud and animated as they went. Beast Boy looked at her pointedly. "Let's get the hell out of Dodge. Then you can fly all you want, okay?"

Raven had never heard that expression in her life but she got the gist. "Did you.. uhm. Did you have any idea where..." she trailed off, embarrassed at how little she'd thought this whole thing through.

"Who, me?" He glanced around, his eyes falling on a single crumpled wrapper that drifted its way between them before coming to rest in a crack in the asphalt. "No, not really. But hey, we can figure it out as we go, right? What I do know is which way the train tracks are." With that he gave her an oversized grin and pointed eagerly to the west.

When a Railroad Crossing sign came into view thirty minutes later, Raven turned to him in disbelief. "I thought that was just another expression."

He lit up as the blaring cry of an approaching train cut her off. "No way! This is hands down the best way to travel when you got no clue where you're going."

Raven picked up her pace to a fast jog as he left her in the dust and went running full speed toward the tracks. Red lights flashed and a clanging noise filled the silent night as the precautionary gate gave a shudder and began to lower. Beast Boy vaulted over it before it had come to a complete stop, shifting his weight from foot to foot as he gauged the speed of the cargo train. It was going way too fast to jump on. Raven ducked the barrier, and stood upright just in time to be hit in the face with Beast Boy's shirt and jacket. The yellow "WARS" part of the logo glared up at her from her arms.

"Hold these for a sec, would you?"

"Excuse you?"

He made a noise of impatience. "They won't follow my form, okay?" But before she could berate him for undressing in front of her for a second time that night, he'd shifted into a bluejay and gone flitting after the last train car as it barreled past, taking the final clamor of the train with it. Raven was left to contemplate the irony of a bluejay that was green as well-watered grass. She made her own noise of impatience and gathered up the backpack he'd left behind to fly off after the departing train.

That first night was hard. Trying to meditate over the rattle of the train and failing miserably. Trying to sleep and failing even more at that. The ground was cold and hard and unforgiving, and there were only cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling to offer any comfort. She was alone with her thoughts, with no way to alleviate the pressure building up within her, and the longer the night stretched the more she felt that feeling bubbling up in her chest—that ringing bell that had been hanging in her heart since she defeated her destiny. The more she listened to it the more frightened she felt. The less sure she was that she could figure this out. She'd had plenty practice learning to control emotions, even Rage, the most volatile of them all.

But this new one she'd been having.. It was different.

It scared her because it didn't feel like one emotion; it felt like a hundred at once. The longer she observed the emotion, the more facets unveiled themselves to her, like layers of an möbius origami that unfolded and unfolded forever and never led back to a flat piece of paper.

Raven pressed her head to the cold steel, letting the shaking of the train bring her back down to earth. Beast Boy was passed out a few feet away and though she still wasn't sure why he'd come, the familiar signature of his fluctuating dream-state emotions was comforting in a way. She watched him kick his leg in his sleep like a dog and found herself fighting a smile. That feeling, that stupid feeling, there it was again! That numbing, crippling, hopeful uncertainty, that terrible weightless weight that felt like a gong and a whisper all at once. This put her over the edge. Raven startled Beast Boy out of his deep slumber when she couldn't take it anymore.

"How are you so calm about all this?" she shouted.

Beast Boy shot upright, glancing around wildly. "Wh... What? Huh?" He finally took in Raven's form a couple stacks of boxes away, her knees drawn up to her chest, her chin resting on her forearms, her eyes boring questioningly into his. His dreams receded until he could no longer remember whether they'd been good or bad, and he bit his lip. He had no idea what she'd said that woke him up but he knew he needed to answer her.

He was about to ask her what she wanted when she put her knees down and lifted her head. There was an infinite amount of sadness in her voice when she put forth her question, and though it was the vaguest question she could have possibly asked he knew exactly what she meant.

"Why?"

Beast Boy cleared his throat. Such a big question. Because I care, he could have said. Because you needed me to. Because we're a team, because we're friends, because maybe, just maybe, we're more than that. Because I was afraid. Because I wanted to. Because I hoped that maybe you'd be happy I did. Something changed in her eyes, some light dancing like fire, and he quickly silenced all the reasons that were swirling around in his head. Sometimes he resented how well she could read emotions. He settled for the vaguest answer to the vaguest question, and hoped she'd be able to extract the right meaning.

He slumped back down against the stack of wilting boxes where he'd made his bed and sighed. "Because."