Disclaimer: Sorry, I don't own the Teen Titans.

Ascension of the Beast

Chapter III

Lost in LA

"Idiot," Raven said, just before letting out a sigh of slight frustration. "Why did I let you drive?" Beast Boy could only give her a nervous grin in return. "Only you could end up in Watts while trying to get to Anaheim," Raven's monotone did not express any emotion behind her words.

In all honesty, she didn't really want to go to their intended destination anyway. She had only agreed to go to Disneyland because she thought it would be something that Beast Boy would enjoy, and her ultimate objective at the moment was to keep his mind off from a certain African country. In a way, she was kind of relieved that he had gotten them lost—she really didn't want to have to deal with being harassed by giant mice and ducks.

Raven was actually enjoying the ride to a degree. Garfield had been an actor, and as such had at least some familiarity with the LA area. But Raven was almost like a tourist here. This ride, which had taken the duo through most of Los Angeles County, was helping to familiarize her with her new surroundings. Besides, the LA area had quite a lot of beautiful sights. As their car neared the Watts Towers, Raven found herself, for reasons unknown even to her, drawn to the Towers' aesthetic.

Beast Boy noticed through his enhanced peripheral vision as the landmark captured Raven's gaze. In all honesty, getting "lost" was no accident. The changeling knew that his demonic friend would never enjoy herself at Disneyland, and instead chose to take her for a ride through the entire LA Metro Area just to see what kind of things would draw her attention. "Wanna take a closer look?" he asked, with a friendly smirk on his face. She simply nodded as he began searching for a suitable place to park.

As the two approached the landmark, Raven finally noticed what materials comprised the Towers' construction. "So, it's made of garbage?" she mused upon the rhetorical question. "Reminds me of your old room at the Tower."

"Ha-ha," the changeling replied sarcastically. He thought for a moment and began to recall what he had heard about the landmark's origins. "The dude who built this spent like thirty years of his life working on it. He didn't really have any sort of plan, and he just kinda used things that other people had thrown away or abandoned to build it." He paused for a moment to gauge her reaction; she seemed to be listening. "After he left, the city wanted to tear it down, but I guess there was an uproar and they decided to give it a stress test in the hope of being able to condemn it for being unsound. They set up a crane and pulled at it laterally, hoping to find its fail point; it never buckled or even shifted. Actually, the crane ended up falling apart, if I remember the story right."

Raven looked at the young man with no small level of surprise. She had known he wasn't as stupid as he tended to act, but she always thought of him as being uneducated. This trivial story he had told her challenged her view of him in that regard. "How did you know all of that?" she asked, honestly surprised that he would know so much about the historic landmark.

He just shrugged, and proceeded to ignore the question. "I think the story adds to its beauty. I mean, here this entire landmark is made out of stuff that no one wanted anymore, but it was all re-purposed into this great work of art. It kinda shows that sometimes your assumptions about things can be totally wrong; I mean, everyone thought this was all junk until the guy put it all together, and now it's a recognized national, state and city landmark." He shuttered a little while inhaling before he finally concluded his remarks about the landmark, "it kind of reminds me of us, you know?"

Raven understood what he was saying. When the Titans first got together, they had all either been rejected or pushed away from their former homes. Cyborg was treated as an object of terror by those around him because of his robotic features. Starfire escaped Gordanian slavery, and would never have been a slave to begin with if it wasn't for her sister selling her. Raven herself had always been ostracized by the people of her home dimension because they feared her demonic powers. Robin was the only "normal" in the group, but Batman pushed him away by treating him like a kid. Beast Boy, though...

Raven knew so little of Beast Boy's past that she could never be certain of much on subjects like this. She knew that he had left the Doom Patrol because Mento was a bit too much of a hard-ass and placed the parameters of the mission above even the survival of his team—traits she and the other Titans witnessed first hand when they helped the Doom Patrol in the action that ended up inaugurating the global war between the Titans and the Brotherhood of Evil. Beyond that, she could also guess that he was probably rejected by society because of his green skin color (until he became a famous actor/superhero, at least). Other than that, she knew nothing about his past, and the unsated curiosity was really bugging her.

"So, what do you want to do now?" Beast Boy asked her, jerking her out of her thoughts. "If we tried to go to Anaheim now, Disneyland would probably be closed by the time we got there," he noted, while looking at his watch.

"It doesn't matter to me," she answered. Honestly, the excursion left her somewhat tired and she'd prefer to go home. But she was still had the mission Cyborg had assigned her to take care of, and unless she and Beast Boy did something entertaining, returning home would probably result in him returning to the study for another week.

"Well," the changeling said before pausing to think. "Wicked Scary IV's on pay-per-view. We could go back to the house and watch it. If you're not too scared," he implicitly teased her about the time the team first watched the original Wicked Scary—that was an interesting night, as her repressed fear unleashed a nightmare that was so powerful, it infected the consciousnesses of the other Titans as well.

"Sure," the empath began her reply, "under the condition that you never bring that up again." It was a somewhat embarrassing incident for her. She'd always been trained to control her emotions, but what she was doing that night was denial, not control. To be controlled, the fear needed to be addressed; but, until the nightmare forced her to accept it, she denied that it even existed.

As the two got back in the car, Raven thought about denial and trauma and the unhealthy consequences thereof. Of course, not everyone had demonic powers which could literally bring their nightmares to life if they didn't accept their emotions. Nevertheless, she figured that, in order to cope with something, a person had to accept it. She wondered if this was what Beast Boy was doing. She really couldn't fathom that someone with as carefree a sense of humor as his could really have that horrible of a past, but there had to be a reason why he would never talk about it.

In that moment, she decided that she would try as hard as she could to get him to reveal to her what he was hiding. 'Besides, it couldn't be half as bad as what I saw in Dick's memories,' she thought to herself.

Author's Notes
This is a rather short chapter and it really doesn't go into much other than developing the relationship between Beast Boy and Raven a bit. I figured it would be necessary for the future of the story for Raven to begin seeing a deeper side to Beast Boy.

Annatheavidreader-I figure I owe a response to reviewers who write their reviews in as much depth as you've been doing. Also, I don't want to spoil too much, but I figure I can say that Sakutia is going to be important to how the plot of this story unfolds in later chapters.

Stay Tuned
What will happen when Raven asks Beast Boy about his past? Will she have bitten off more than she can chew? Stay tuned for the answers to these questions (and more).