I'm back! Sorry for the really long wait! A lot's been going on. While I had been posting, I was hospitalized, and then work got overwhelming and...ugh. I have a lot of this written in notebooks and stuff, it's just getting the time to post that kills me.
So, here's the next batch! It's sort of a different chapter. The second part (of Slade, Robin, and Terra) was something I wrote just now for kicks and I don't know how good it really is/it doesn't matter much, but I figured I'd throw in something stupid since the first part was so short.
Reviews are appreciated! Sorry for the wait!
Raven was a different kind of quiet tonight. After noticing that she had been sitting in her room all day, Beast Boy convinced her to go out with him to her favorite café. She agreed to go out, but once there, she went quiet again, looking down at the table as the heat from her tea departed in steam.
"So, this whole Slade thing is really weird, isn't it?" Beast Boy tried to make conversation before popping a piece of muffin in his mouth.
"It's expected," she said, not even looking up.
"Raven, you're acting…weirder than normal. Is everything okay?"
"Everything is fine," she managed to look at him, "Really."
"Did I do something wrong?"
"Of course not," her voice had some genuineness to it and he relaxed.
"Okay, I won't ask again," he slowly put his hand over hers, "Do you want to do something on Saturday?"
After defeating Trigon, Beast Boy and Raven had been spending large amounts of time together. Now that Raven had exposed her darkest secret, she trusted her friends with more and she and Beast Boy had accidentally started spending more time together. Raven was surprised by his level of maturity and was especially impressed with his way of handling the Doom Patrol. Once the Brotherhood of Evil was defeated, they started heading to places in the city together in their free time. They agreed to call them dates.
They were exclusive, but slow in their process. Raven was still afraid of what could happen if she showed too much emotion, but Beast Boy knew her well enough that it didn't matter to him. Over the past few weeks, she had started disclosing more information to him- parts of her life, her favorite things- they came in little fleeting pieces that he cherished.
She nodded to the idea, "Saturday sounds good. I need to get out of the Tower. Star's emotions are an overload.
They had agreed to keep his relationship a secret now, as Raven grew more comfortable with the idea that of them being a couple. Admitting to others she had feelings for another person was something she never thought she would be able to do in her life, and she was scared of it but slowly growing more open to the idea. Beast Boy was ready to admit his affection towards the empathy, but for now, her willingness to finally let him into her life, her want to be around him, the slight smile she had as he held her for a moment- this was more than enough for him.
Slade's tidy and spacious main control room quickly turned into a mess with the onset of two teenager's living there. He used to keep the area free of any sort of clutter: binders had their place in drawers and belonged back in those drawers once he no longer needed it. He only kept one pen out and knew where it was at all times.
Robin was a much different worker. While neat in his filing and recording, he needed all his papers out at once with the computer screen showing countless windows of information as he moved from task to task as fast as his mind thought. He often left his notes open when he was training or sleeping to come back to his exact thought later. The look of his trashed desk irked Slade, but he decided that as long as it didn't wander onto Slade's desk, he wouldn't say anything.
Terra, on the other hand, made it look like a tornado passed through the room. Slade let her have her own space for homework, but it was so disastrous he regretted the favor. She had a never-ending supply of colored pens, highlighters, index cards, staplers that were all scattered about her desk, and then other places in the room. Her textbooks and notebooks were often in high stacks on her desk and then when they got too cluttered for her to work there; she moved them around the room and then forgot where she put them. Slade resisted the urge to treat her like a child and clean up after her.
The newest change, however, in the control room were two giant boards against the wall. One listed all of Robin's tasks that had to be completed and they ranged anywhere between researching how to make new weapons, learning new fighting techniques, and items to steal. In the last moment, Slade put up a similar one for Terra that listed all her weekly homework assignments. It was colored coded according to the way she color coded her notebooks and listed things like, "Pass geometry test."
"Why are you going through my school stuff?" she had asked in an outrage.
"Why are you going through her school stuff?" Robin had asked once she angrily stormed out (a common occurrence).
"To show her I care," Slade said innocently, "I know you think I'm lying Robin, but, sometimes, mocking someone is the best way to prove you've been paying attention to them. And everyone wants to be noticed."
Terra's board stayed taped up on the wall and changed every week with her work. As Robin worked through crossing off little tasks on his, she checked off her homework as she did it. And when she came back from school one day with a passing grade on her geometry test, all three of them smiled.
Slade hated the mess in his room, but he never mentioned it. In fact, this mess was only proof that everything was going according to plan.
