Chapter Four: She Did What?
"What? You mean I sucked on Beast Boy's neck for nothing?"
Unnoticed by either of his friends in the room, Beast Boy's eyelids twitched.
"Quiet, quiet!" Robin said softly, making shushing gestures. "We don't want to disturb him!"
Beast Boy opened his eyes and instantly knew he was in a hospital bed. He'd spent way too much time in such places, years ago, first because of an incredibly rare disease, and second because of the surprising side effects of the highly experimental cure. (Turning green all over, from head to toe, tends to make doctors and nurses think there is something terribly wrong!)
Two of his friends—Raven and Robin, as he'd thought—were standing near the foot of the bed, staring at each other.
If Beast Boy had taken a few seconds to think this over, he might have closed his eyes again and kept his mouth shut a while longer. But he was still groggy, and the risks didn't occur to him until it was a trifle too late. He simply reacted to the strange words which had dragged him back into the land of consciousness. "Guys?" he heard himself say hoarsely. "What's this about . . . my neck?"
Two heads snapped around toward him. Naturally he focused his eyes on the prettier one.
Raven's face showed an amazing sequence of shock, relief, anger, and finally embarrassment as some color rose to her cheeks. Beast Boy wished he had a camcorder running—it wasn't every day you saw so many of her emotions rising to the surface so fast! Besides, she looked exceptionally cute when she blushed, although in all the time he'd known her, he'd only had the chance to see it happen a couple of times before. Be nice to have a picture as a memento!
Meanwhile Beast Boy's question was still hanging heavily in the air, waiting to be addressed. Around the time Raven pulled up her hood to shadow her blushing face and then quickly turned away from Beast Boy, Robin finally took it upon himself to grab the conversational ball. "While Cyborg and Starfire and I were dealing with Puppet King and his minions, you met Lady Viper. Do you remember that part?"
Beast Boy thought back. "That's the blond woman who . . . uh, wasn't wearing much? She stared at me and then I . . . couldn't . . . look away. She kept talking to me . . . and then I heard her talking to Raven . . ."
"Magical hypnotic gaze," Robin said reassuringly. "You couldn't help yourself."
"Yeah . . . but finally it started wearing off . . . felt like recovering from a session . . . in front of Mad Mod's hypno-screens . . ."
"Probably she lost control of you when she was focused on trying to give Raven the same treatment," Robin speculated.
"Okay . . . so I suddenly could move again, and I knew she'd done something nasty to me . . . so I morphed and charged forward to knock her down before she could zap me again. Then something . . . weird . . . happened . . . and there was pain in my neck . . . and I woke up here."
Raven was still and quiet. Robin cleared his throat . . . twice . . . and then got down to brass tacks. "Okay, I'll fill in the blanks for you. Turned out you weren't the only shapeshifter in the room. Lady Viper can change the lower half of her body into a giant snake's tail. When she does, she also grows poison fangs and a long, snaky tongue in her mouth. She must've made the change in the blink of an eye! Then she bit your neck and then skedaddled while Raven was giving you . . . uh, emergency first aid, followed by a healing spell."
"And what was the . . . yelling about . . . when I woke up?"
Robin ran a gloved hand through his spiky hair and then said, "I was just telling Raven that recommended first aid for venomous snakebites has changed over the last several years. The printed training materials in Azarath must be behind the times. Cutting the bitten area open and putting a human mouth against it just creates that many more opportunities for nasty germs from the helper's saliva to get into the blood and cause infection, and by the time one starts sucking out the venom, the effort usually extracts so little of the original dose of toxin that it probably isn't worth the trouble. Also, having venom-tainted blood in one's mouth can cause the helper to get dangerously ill!"
Beast Boy paused to work out the ramifications of Robin's carefully impersonal summary of certain treatment methods. "So what you're saying is . . . she was . . . sucking . . . on . . . my . . . neck?"
"Yes, with the very best of intentions in a sudden life-and-death situation," Robin explained patiently. "I'm not sure how much good it did, but I'm not ready to swear it did absolutely none."
"She was . . . sucking . . . on . . . my . . . neck."
"Yes, I think we've established that. These things happen. Now, moving away from the past to the future, the doctor said that if you woke up soon, he'd just want to check you over one more time and then he'd probably give us the go-ahead to take you home to finish convalescing—"
Beast Boy repeated, more strongly: "She was sucking on my neck!"
He thought Raven flinched, which hadn't been his intention. She had spent the last couple of minutes turned away so Beast Boy couldn't see so much as a square inch of her face. That didn't change as she said in her usual monotone, "I think he's still a touch delirious, Robin. Sounds like a broken record. Can't we hit a reset button or something? You know, shut him down overnight and then come back and try all over again in the morning?"
"No!" Robin said sternly. "After waiting all this time for him to wake up, we are not going to turn around and give him a massive dose of sedative to knock him out all over again just for your personal convenience!"
Raven grumbled something in a language Beast Boy couldn't even name, and he didn't think Robin understood it either—but the general sentiment was clear.
"Look," Robin said, "you've done all you can for BB, and probably saved his life with the spells if not with the earlier treatment. Now that he's awake, he can tell the doctors if any nasty symptoms are cropping up. I'll get him safely home as soon as possible—but it sounds like the two of you need to . . . keep some space between you . . . for a little while until BB—or maybe both of you—can see all this in perspective. You know, let the initial embarrassment fade a little?"
Raven had teleported out before Robin even finished his last sentence.
A bit late, Beast Boy said, "I'm not angry at her, you know. Just . . . shocked."
Robin looked at him thoughtfully. "I think you should know that Raven's been in here for the last eighteen hours, ever since we deposited you in that bed. Without her healing spells, I bet you'd have died in minutes. There's only been one previous recorded survivor of Lady Viper's bite, and Raven was bound and determined to make sure you were the second!"
Beast Boy frowned. "Who was the other one?"
"My friend Batgirl, last year in Gotham. She thought it was because she'd managed to do to herself something similar to what Raven did to you as first aid—incise the wound, then use a miniature suction cup to draw out some of the venom."
"'She thought'? You don't sound convinced."
"No, I'm developing a different theory—checking the records last night, I noticed Batgirl was also the only recorded female victim of Lady Viper's bite, and even acquired the powers of Lady Viper after she finally awoke! I think the magical curse which turned that snake-lady into what she is today may be contagious to other females when bitten, putting them into a coma for a day or two while their bodies change, but just plain kills the guys! If I'm right, then Raven's healing spells probably made all the difference in countering the magical component of the poison in your body. After we got you here, the lab was able to brew up a batch of the same antidote developed in Gotham, but I doubt it mattered at that point . . . "
Robin kept talking and talking, but Beast Boy wasn't really listening. He left the words wash over him while thinking: Dude! Raven was actually sucking on my neck? And I can't even remember what it felt like? Why do I always have such rotten luck?
Meanwhile Raven was speeding back to the Tower, telling herself that of course Beast Boy was disgusted by the icky discovery that she'd tasted his blood, especially for what turned out to be a flawed reason, and now he'd probably avoid her as much as possible, at least for the next couple of months, until his scatterbrained personality fixated on other things and let this unfortunate incident slide away into the back of his mind, filed under the category of "Ancient History I Don't Want To Worry About Any More."
Which was probably a good thing, right? Wasn't she always objecting to his pestering her, trying to get her to play games and listen to his jokes and test-taste his tofu-based cuisine and waste time in lots of other ways when she could be curled up with a good book in the privacy of her own chamber? Heck, under the circumstances, it was a cinch he'd forget all about any future mistletoe ambushes he'd previously planned for this holiday season!
Once back in her room, she sat in mid-air, set her jaw, closed her eyes, and started meditating about nice, relaxing, non-controversial subjects so her emotions would settle down and her pulse would go back to normal.
That was the original plan, anyway. But Lady Viper kept creeping into her thoughts. Not exactly conducive to staying calm.
Raven kept telling herself that fantasizing about all the unpleasant things she wanted to do to that Jezebel wasn't the right way to keep her emotions firmly in check . . . finally she managed to shove aside that subject for awhile in favor of a less violent topic, to wit: Formulating back-up plans for contriving a real kiss with full lip contact, strictly in the name of testing the limits of her self-restraint under such unprecedented stress . . .
A couple of hours later:
A doctor had said that Beast Boy's vital signs all looked good, but he ought to rest for at least another couple of days at home before trying any prolonged physical exertion.
Robin got him home. When they arrived at the Tower, Starfire insisted upon hugging her green friend, which wasn't so bad—she actually remembered to restrain her alien strength because of his convalescent condition—and Cyborg clapped him on the shoulder and made some joke about how Lady Viper, after biting him, was probably in worse shape than he was! Beast Boy managed a feeble rejoinder about how Cyborg was welcome to get bitten next time, if he thought it looked so safe and easy!
Raven was nowhere in sight, and Beast Boy decided this wasn't a good time to knock on her door to thank her for all she'd done. It could wait until tomorrow.
Once he was alone in his room, Beast Boy studied a wall calendar, carefully trying to remember just how long the "hunting season" for kissing girls under the mistletoe was supposed to last. Didn't people do it all the time at New Year's Eve parties? That gave him at least until January 1.
Yesterday morning had been the first time in his life he'd ever tried that stunt, and Raven had taken it surprisingly well. Hadn't even thrown him out the window, much less banished him to a dimension of eternal darkness! Such restraint had to be a good sign! With that sort of encouragement, he figured he could try it at least once more, sometime in the next couple of days, and see what happened . . .