Well, I really hope I'm not totally confusing you guys… I know that a lot of the feelings and reasons in this fic are pretty… complicated, but I hope that I've been able to describe it well enough so that it makes sense. That's probably why it took so long… Sorry! Thanks everyone for all the feedback, and I will do my best to make more sense in this chapter.
The title to this chapter may raise some eyebrows, but I assure you, I mean nothing improper or derogatory by this…
Chapter 4
Don't Say the "D" Word…
Beast Boy just stood there, mouth open. Wow… that was harsh. Even for Raven. Maybe he'd picked a bad time. Maybe he hadn't been clear enough that he wasn't going to go all 'mature' on her again. Or maybe… maybe she just wasn't interested.
He moaned and threw his head back into the wall, listening to the long hollow doooonng. He had tried to impress her, and ended up alienating her. Genius, he thought sarcastically. Then he hung his head and stalked to his room, holding in all his frustration until the door was closed. Looking up, he saw his mirror against the wall.
"You idiot!" he yelled. "She's not interested, okay! She never was. All that mature crud you faked yesterday… it was just… argh!!!" He lost his words and resorted to just growling and stalking in tight circles around the room. Finally, he swung back in front of the mirror and continued, hurt and upset. "You blew it!" He sighed and hung his head. "Now she'll never go out with me…"
His head jerked up. That was exactly what he had said about Terra. She'd come around. But that was Terra. He'd known that she was interested in him. This was Raven he was talking about. He didn't even know if she liked him or not. Now, more than ever, he felt like she just didn't care.
He hadn't faked his anger when she wouldn't stop being sarcastic towards him. The mature stuff - the reserved, serious guy - was an act. He'd pulled it from an episode of Dr. Phil. Just flipping channels in the middle of the night to blow off some steam from their argument, Beast Boy had stumbled across the late night edition of the famous doctor. It was about a couple who's relationship had been thrown into turmoil because the woman's husband was a total clown. What did she want him to do? She wanted him to be more mature.
Beast Boy could almost see a light bulb go off above his head in his reflection on the TV screen. That was it! If he acted more mature, maybe Raven would like him more. She never seemed to react to well to his joking, immature side…
But it had blown up in his face. Raven seemed even more upset with his grown up side than anything else. He'd never seen her so upset…
Thumping his green head against the glass of the mirror, Beast Boy decided one thing, something that Raven had said many times before.
It is pointless.
Climbing over piles of… unidentifiable stuff, Beast Boy jumped up to the top bunk of his bed, morphed into a depressed little puppy, and curled up in the sheets.
Raven leaned against her door, eyes wet in the darkness. She scrubbed the tears away bitterly. More came. She began to sniffle and shake and her sobs grew in intensity. It surprised her more than anything else, but she couldn't stop it. It was like she no longer had any control over her emotions at all.
Before she knew it, Raven was sobbing intensely. She dropped to her knees, tugging at her hair in her attempt to stop herself. Sparks of dark energy flew off of her. Several books on one of her shelves went black with her magic and shot out of their place into the opposite wall. The force of her emotions cracked her window, tied her curtains into a tight knot, and sent the rest of her books into the wall and all over the floor.
Finally, her sobs eased. She gasped for air. The intensity of her emotions startled her. Where had that explosion of misery come from?
Raven's dark eyes narrowed. She knew exactly where it had come from.
"That's it," she said, breathing heavily. "Time to fix this the drastic way."
Tears still creeping down her pale cheeks, Raven picked up her meditation mirror. She sniffed, wiping the rest of her tears away with a quick rub of her dark sleeve. One deep breath and her signature chant later, Raven found herself in darkness lit by blood red stars. She stood on a circle of rock several meters long that floated above nothing but more stars.
Concentrating, Raven called her different sides and waited. And waited. After several minutes her eyes narrowed. Where were they all?
Raven took one step forward to search and halted. Something was wrong… with her. Her nose twitched, her eyebrow trembled, and she suddenly exploded in a fit of laughter. It was so unexpected and so powerful, she fell over, grasping her aching stomach. She laughed so hard she cried, tears falling to the gray stone. Several long minutes passed before she could recover herself again. It was getting worse. That could only mean one thing: they were close. In fact, she could sense one approaching. She could easily guess which one it was considering her emotional outburst just seconds before. But where were the others?
"Raven!"
Raven spun around as the Raven-in-pink, Bliss, ran up, an enormous smile across her face. She halted a mere two inches away from Raven and leaned in, smile spreading even wider until it looked like it would grow past her face.
"He asked me on a date!" she gasped, practically squealing. "A date! Can you believe it?" She spun around, clasping her hands together and twirling to herself. "A date! A DATE!!! A D-!" Raven became aware of a large crack in the gray rock a few feet away that grew longer and thicker as Bliss danced. This was bad. She was literally losing her mind.
"Stop! Don't say that word!" Raven ordered fiercely, fighting the intense urge to smile and giggle and twirl and blush along with her pink clone.
Bliss' twirls slowed. "What word?" she asked innocently.
Raven huffed, cheeks going florid. "That… the "D" word." She called upon her stern voice again. "Don't say it. Besides, I said no."
That seemed to suck all the life out of Bliss for a second. But, to Raven's intense annoyance, her smile flew back over her face like it had never left. "Well, at least I know he likes me! He likes me, he likes me…!" and on she went, singing to herself and skipping and twirling some more until Raven felt ready to throttle her and join her dance at the same time. She was way too happy, even for her. Way, way too happy…
Before she could actually lose her temper (or her mind), a second Raven glided up. Misery. Her robe's color melded with the stone she stood on, and her skin seemed grayer.
"I said no?" she whimpered, tears flowing. "And I slammed the door in his face? Oh, Beast Boy… I've done so many terrible things to him, but now I've broken his heart completely!" And with that, she broke down into a fit of unstoppable sobs. Raven just stood blinking, eyes going wet with the force of her clone's breakdown. She had to stop this before she blew Jump city to bits. The crack in the rock grew longer and a chunk of it broke off into starry nothingness. "I can't believe what I've done!" Misery continued.
"I had to," a third voice said from the left. Raven, trying to scrub the oncoming tears out of her eyes, turned to see herself cloaked in yellow, enormous round glasses sitting at the end of her nose. It was Whiz. "My studies show that my IQ would have dropped five points over the course of a half an hour. Just because Garfield does not have a brain does not mean I have to lose mine for the sake of going out with him."
Bliss hopped up to Whiz. "Garfield? Oooh, that's so CUTE!!!! It's such an adorable name!"
Raven was about to agree with a giggle, but another emotion cut her off.
"Pu-lease!" a fourth Raven, Flair, sniffed, "BB's cute, but he has no sense of style. I mean, purple and black is so last decade!"
Whiz squinted at her, lifting her glasses up a bit higher on her nose only to have them slip back down again. "Isn't that what you're wearing?"
Flair looked down. Her light purple robe accented a black leotard. She blushed. "This isn't purple," she sputtered, offended, "This is lavender."
Whiz squinted again, but said nothing.
Raven was ready to break in when a spitball hit her square in the side of the head. Another Raven dressed in orange, Hoax, approached.
"So, why can't I go on this date with BB?" she asked, like she hadn't just nailed Raven in the ear with a hundred-mile-an-hour spitball. "He's the coolest!"
"Don't say that word!" Raven insisted. "Now I need you to calm down or-!"
"Calm down?" Misery sniffled. "I just broke the heart of the only man I ever really liked!"
"Calm down, you big crybaby!" Hoax said, folding her arms, not noticing another chunk of rock breaking off of the stone platform.
My thoughts exactly, Raven thought, cringing at the pun. She was literally destroying her own mind with this insanity. The more her different sides goofed off like this, the more she freaked out in the real world as well. She turned red thinking of going Starfire happy in front of Beast Boy, or becoming a pathetic sob story like last time. They had to be stopped before that happened.
"Ah, the multi-colored raven falls;
It's wings weak and shriveled;
All things fail in their time;
So why is this such a riddle?"
The poem came from yet another Raven approaching, this one cloaked in brown. A green-clad Raven, Valiance, followed the brown Raven, Elegiac.
"Yeah, what's this crazy party about?" Valiance asked.
No one really had an answer to this accept for Raven… well, the human Raven.
"You are all out of balance," she said, a bead of sweat forming on her forehead as she noticed another crack showing in the ground. The rock groaned, and she felt a tremble. "I can't control you when you're so… extreme, and I can't afford to lose control in the real world. I'll hurt someone."
"I think I already managed that one," Misery moaned.
"It can't happen again," Raven continued, ignoring Misery. "The next time I have an emotional breakdown, I could knock Titan's Tower into the bay."
"Sounds cool!" Hoax put in excitedly.
"It's not," Raven replied.
"I don't think I'll be able to get over breaking Beast Boy's heart," Misery mumbled.
Raven sighed. Misery was her biggest problem at the moment. What could she do to make her happy… An Idea came into Raven's mind, and she didn't like it. "Fine, if I go tell Beast boy I can go with him on a d- an outing, will you calm down?"
Misery sniffed. "I think so."
Bliss sucked in a huge breath and squealed. "A DA-!" The squeal was almost drowned out by the rumble and groan of the rock beneath there feet. Strangely, none of her sides noticed it. But Raven was almost knocked over.
"I told you not to say that!" Raven growled, regaining her feet. "And if I go with Beast boy that means that YOU" - Raven leaned in close to Bliss' face - "need to stay relatively calm. Understood?"
Bliss gave a sheepish little nod. The rock settled, fell silent, and Raven huffed with relief.
She straightened up. "That means all of you," she added. "I need you all as calm as possible."
Valiance raised her hand. "I think you're going to need a lot of me for this one, Rae," she objected. "Whether you like it or not, Mistress Misery over there is going to be shyer than anything. You'll need me to balance her out."
Raven nodded. "I will," she agreed. Then she noticed a mischievous little smile on Hoax and Bliss' faces. "Behave." she said coldly. "Just because Beast Boy wants me to think of this as a date, it isn't. It won't grow into anything, I promise you. After this, hopefully, I'll be able to deal with this… new Beast Boy. We'll meditate before I confront him again just so that you all are as calm as absolutely possible when I talk to him. I don't want any surprises."
Maybe this trip would be good for her. If she spent time with new, mature Beast Boy, she would be able to analyze his new personality, figure out how to react to it, and make the necessary changes in the balance of her emotions. This was what she had done when she first joined the Teen Titans. In this way, she would be able to figure the mildest way to react to anything that they did or said in order to keep her powers under control. Now she just had to redo it with Beast Boy, and all would be well again.
Raven spent the rest of the night meditating with her different sides, preparing them for her outing with Beast Boy. She didn't want any surprises. When she was sure they were as calm as she could possibly get them (Bliss was still bubbling about the, "coughdatecough", but Raven couldn't get her to stop doing that and so gave up), she left, already feeling her hopes rising.
Still, she didn't go straight to Beast Boy's room. That might be enough to set Bliss or Misery off. Instead, she went into the main room with a book and sat down on the couch. Beast Boy would come out of his room some time or another. She was comfortable with waiting.
It was only a few minutes until the expected green boy entered the room. He didn't notice her at first, and went straight to the kitchen. His back was slumped, his head hung low, and he let his arms dangle in an extremely exaggerated pose that only Beast Boy would consider normal. Raven watched as he pulled some soymilk and a big plate of tofu waffles out of the fridge and sat at the long island that separated the kitchen from the living room. He still didn't look up.
"I was thinking," Raven began. Beast Boy almost jumped out of his skin with a wimpy squeal. Raven kept a straight face with some difficulty (this was something she had once been used to, but after all of her rearranging that night, it took a bit of concentration to control a laughing Bliss). But she continued.
He hadn't been expecting her in the main room that morning. He hadn't even really been thinking about it. But of course she was here, when no one else was awake. Why was he here at the earth-endingly early hour of ten in the morning? He hadn't been able to sleep at all, and it was boring just lying there on the dirty sheets. Breakfast would do him some good, he had, at last, decided.
Now all thought of food was forgotten.
Raven continued. "That geek-fest starts today, right?"
"Uuuuhhhh," Beast Boy stuttered, trying to comprehend her words and answer correctly. "Yeah."
"I was thinking that it could be… interesting. You know, the whole virtual reality thing."
Beast Boy perked up. "Really?!"
Raven had just begun to say 'yes', but Beast Boy leaped over the island and onto the couch beside her in one jump and spoke before she could get it out.
"Cool! This'll be so fun! Oh, and that whole dark, serious thing - it was a, uh, faze, and I'm all over it now."
…
…
…
…Oh, great…
