Okay, Writer's Block should burn in hell. Really. I am sooooo sorry that this took so long! Ack, it must have been over a week. Sorry!

This chapter's kind of silly, but I was in a fabulous mood and wanted to share it with Raven. And you guys. I'm kind of sad that this fiction's winding down (I'm guessing maybe 2 or 3 more chapters? Yikes!) but, you know, all good things come to an end. I'm toying with the idea for a more humorous, frolicky type story, so yay! Hope you guys enjoy this one, even if it is a bit crazy. C:

The stationary bike whirred beneath her as Raven pedaled furiously. She wiped a layer of sweat from her forehead, breath coming in short gasps. The muscles in her legs burned.

And then she beat her record time.

Raven slowed to a stop, looking at the small clock on the machine in disbelief. The truth blinked back at her in square red letters. Ten miles. Thirty-nine minutes and six seconds. She had smashed her record by a minute and a half.

Raven climbed off of the bike shakily and waited for her heart to slow to an only mildly alarming pace. A small grin quirked at the corner of her mouth and droplets of sweat dropped to the ugly brown carpet beneath her. The indoor gym sucked—there were moldy yoga mats in one corner of the room and slowly decaying gym shoes in another—but they had weights and stationary bikes. That was all she needed.

A tall, muscular woman brushed by her, then stopped. Raven vaguely recognized the woman as a regular here, one of the obsessed physical trainers who had too much time on their hands. "Broken your record yet?" she asked, and since she didn't sound sarcastic or patronizing Raven offered a smile between gasps for air.

"Just about three seconds ago," she said, and wiped more sweat from her forehead. The woman beamed.

"How long have you been training?"

She scuffed her toe, tracing the days back in her head. "Maybe two months?" That sounded right. God, had it really been five months since she'd left the Tower? It seemed…longer. A lifetime ago. She felt different than the Teen Titan Raven, different even than when she had powers. It wasn't an unpleasant feeling. Just…different.

"That's fantastic! Keep up the good work!" the woman said enthusiastically. She used the cheerful voice that physical trainers employed when they lied about how many repetitions on the weight machines their trainees would have to do, but Raven felt a small wave of satisfaction anyway.

As Raven showered in the vaguely mildewing locker room and headed to work, there was a small flush of pride on her cheeks. But then she remembered where she was going and who she would have to talk to, and the small victory faded into nonexistence.

There was still Albertan to deal with.

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The small brass machine stared at her, a small red light on one side blinking slowly. Steam curled over one edge and twisted into the air like a snake—writhing coils looped over one another lazily. A strong smell of coffee cut through her senses and she imagined the charred gray mess inside apprehensively. It was dead. She knew it. The batch of coffee was going to be a sickening mixture of overcooked milk and burned sugar. She had killed it. She had killed the coffee.

Raven worried her lip with her teeth and popped the lid off of the small kettle. If this thing is full of burned coffee, I'm going to commit suicide, she thought bleakly. She didn't really mean it. But she meant it enough for the thought to send cold fingers down her spine.

The lid was off, and it was heavy in her hand. A pungent aroma choked her throat.

She leaned over the side of the counter.

She shut her eyes.

She stayed there for more than a minute.

She totally wasn't going to look.

She would never look.

Never.

Never, ever, ever.

She would stay there until someone shipped her off to some mental house for people who seemed completely and totally incapable of doing the most simple of mundane tasks and leave her there until she got old. And then after she got old she would die. That was okay, though. She could be with her own kind there.

She then told herself she was being a bitch about this whole thing.

She looked.

She looked away.

She was hallucinating.

She looked back again.

And then she screamed with delight.

The boy that she told herself she didn't like was suddenly standing there behind her, wearing the hugest grin she had ever seen. Raven grabbed his hands on an impulse and felt a huge balloon of happiness swelling up in her chest, so big that the whole room was spinning in a dizzy circle. The boy laughed and spun her around. Raven was ridiculously happy about the whole thing.

"Oh my God! I did it! I made a whole freaking thing of coffee and I didn't burn it!" Her voice squeaked at the end of the sentence but she laughed again and the whole world was good. The boy laughed with her, and she felt a real, genuine happiness radiating from his smile.

"I told you, man! I told you you'd do it!"

The boy stopped spinning her and looked into her eyes with a smile playing about his lips. "You're Rebecca, right?" she asked, and Raven felt a happy flush over her cheeks. When he said her false name, it didn't sound like just a name. It sounded like something…special. Something that someone cool and popular and pretty and famous would be named. He made it sound better than it was. She liked that. She liked that a lot.

Raven nodded, happiness welling up in her. "Rebecca Sutton, at your service." She grinned giddily at him, vaguely aware that she probably sounded like a blathering idiot, but she ignored it. "And you're…"

"Keith," he finished for her, and looked down into her eyes with another smile. "So, Rebecca Sutton, how would you like to join me for coffee sometime?"

The world grew still and she could swear her heart stopped beating for…she didn't know. A second. A minute. A day. An ice age. All she knew was that suddenly the world was a gorgeous place and she totally had a place on it.

She had just been asked out by a beautiful, beautiful boy. She had just made her first batch of real coffee and hadn't burned it. She was completely and totally giddy and in love with the world and high on all of the joy.

"I'd like that," she managed to say, looking up into Keith's ocean-blue eyes. And then he started grinning and she started grinning because he was grinning and suddenly they were both cracking up and they spun around and around and around and around, the room a dizzying whirl of bliss and all they could see were each other's eyes.

The entire kitchen's population was staring at them as they laughed and spun around and grinned goofily at each other, a small pot of coffee growing quietly cold behind them…All but one person, of course, because their store manager, Leslie Albertan, was sitting in his office, combing his tidal wave of hair lovingly. And Raven was damn glad about that.

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No one used this part of the gym anymore, the gym owner told her—the empty basketball court had been converted into a space for all the broken punching bags. The gym had started karate classes that had been disbanded after three lessons. There were twenty soft, cushioned mats and approximately five thousand pieces of other equipment left to quietly decay in the forgotten room. Raven dragged one of the more intact ones from a corner and patched the gaping holes with duct tape from the gym's office. It's my space now, she thought with a secretive smile, and it was all she needed.

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The thuds of her punches echoed throughout the empty room. Sweat dripped from her forehead and curved down her cheek like a tear, then dropped soundlessly to the floor. Her breath came in ragged gasps, because it was so, so hard...The punching bag swayed back and forth and she drilled her fists into it. When she moved on to crunches, and then pushups, and finally to the weights in the corner, she could feel a wild, wordless joy singing inside of her veins, because this pain was the sweetest nectar she'd ever tasted. She felt strong. She knew she was stronger than Robin could have ever been, and in her mind she knew she had won.

That night, she sat alone in her small, cheap apartment, sweat-soaked clothing on the floor and blankets pulled up to her chin. Her muscles ached…and somehow it felt good. It felt…right. She felt whole.

Raven stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself. Her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, arms lean and bare in the flickering light. The Ash Brown dye had washed out and she had cut her hair back to chin-length a week ago. She slowly pulled her sleeves back and flexed one arm, then the next. Raven felt the corded muscle in her shoulders and smiled, just a little. And as she looked at herself again and felt a sliver of happiness cut through it all, power rushed into her head on silent wings. She looked down at her fingers and felt a little tingling around them. Her breath caught. And then she whispered, with a sense of hope that filled her through and though with a wonderful, heady joy…

"Azarath…Metrion…Zinthos…"

And for the first time in a long, long time, she felt a warm, welcoming tingle around her fingers; and then she floated over to her bed to meditate.