Author's Notes:
JazzyBizzle – You're welcome. He couldn't tell people how he was feeling because he didn't know.
Annab1119 – Glad you liked it. But I thought it was clear why he left. Not fitting in. Unable to concentrate. Causing more problems that he was solving. Constantly pissing Raven off. But mostly because it's the first step necessary to get a dude out of the Friend Zone.
Nicoletteschmidt1 – Thanks; I'm flattered. I'm eager to see where it all goes, too. I mean, I have a plan, but more than once, when I've sat at the Keyboard, the story's gone where it wanted, not where I pointed it.
Jimmy – Comes of having had my level of life experience. People just don't fall into each other's arms. It takes a while.
This is your first real "M" warning. While Raven may or may not have had the back of her and brushed by "something" when she was showering with Beast Boy, this chapter has a scene that gets pretty explicit. If that sort of thing bothers you, you might want to skip it. But then, you'll miss all kinds of changes.
"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"
"I do." – Lamont Cranston
"Where's Raven?" asked Cyborg the next morning at breakfast.
"I haven't seen her either," said Robin. "She's probably still in her room."
"Oh dear," said Starfire. "Usually if Friend Raven is not out of her room by this hour, she may not emerge for days. I shall go see her."
But before Starfire could reach the door, Raven entered. Her eyes were bloodshot, and had circles under them. Her grey skin was discolored. She looked exhausted and almost feverish. Her face was slightly swollen and her hands were shaking.
"Raven," said Robin carefully, "is everything . . . ok? You look, um, pale-er."
She looked up, her hair across her face. A tiny smile quirked one corner of her mouth. "Oh, everything is ok. It's more than ok. Starfire . . ." Raven turned. "I'd like to talk to you after breakfast about some . . . girl talk."
Much later.
"Friend Raven," said Starfire, "This is not the girl talk. This is . . . serious. I do not think that I am the best person to help you. I – I do not know anything about earthly emotions. I cannot even understand Robin."
"Don't be ridiculous. Don't forget, I've been you. Well, sort of. You can easily display joy, boundless confidence, and righteous fury, to fly, fight, and throw your starbolts. I've done it myself that time we switched bodies," said Raven.
"On my planet, we live by our emotions, not our intellect. From our earliest age we are encouraged to feel our passions. It is from them that we draw our strength and our power. You have been trained from birth to do just the opposite. I do not see how . . ."
Raven interrupted. "Starfire – when you call up your righteous fury in combat, you don't just spray your starbolts out of your hands constantly. You can call on your power and hold it in. Whenever I start to feel things . . . my power gets . . . loose." She folded her arms protectively over herself.
"But I . . ."
Raven looked down at the floor, and spoke again. "Starfire. I mourned my mother for the first time last night. She's been dead since I was a young child."
"Oh Raven, you have been carrying that pain around for all this time?" Starfire's emerald eyes welled with tears.
"I finally let it out last night in the Failsafe Room. It went pretty well, actually." She looked up. "I only scorched the walls a little. Listen, I'm a pretty disciplined student. I know that if I could just find a starting place . . ."
She stepped forward and caught the taller girl by the shoulders. "Please help me. I'm sixteen years old. And I don't know how to feel."
Starfire looked into Raven's Amethyst eyes and said, "I will try."
At Raven's insistence, the two girls walked down into the core of Titan Tower, returning to the Fail Safe room. Starfire examined the burn marks on the walls from Raven's mourning the previous night. She rubbed at one.
"This is not as bad as I thought. It is just a little soot. Why are the walls not scored?"
"I don't know. It may be the sigils you guys put up to keep Trigon out. Or it may be that after all this time, my pain over my mother's death has gotten smaller."
"Oh no, Friend Raven, here is lesson one – when you lock feelings away, they get stronger, not weaker."
"Ok. So – what do we do now?"
"When you taught me to meditate, you spoke of finding your center, yes?"
"Uh huh."
The both sat down on the floor.
"Feelings are mostly made up of memories. Emotions you have on the spot are just memories you are making right now. Do you understand?"
"I think so," she said.
"Let us begin small – think of something pleasant. Something that happened to you that led to a positive outcome. You have always had feelings, yes? So go back in your mind to the time when you had them, and think about them again. Picture them as an egg, with a hard shell. We wish to crack the shell around the memory open, and let the good feelings out. Have you such a small, positive memory?"
"It's strange," Raven thought. "The first thing to pop to mind is Beast Boy."
She spoke, "I remember that time Beast Boy brought me the Earl Grey-tea flavored ice cream. I tasted awful, but it was very nice of him to think to buy it for me." She looked at the floor again. I was pretty mean about it when I tasted it. But it was so foul. I thought he was playing a prank on me."
"All right," said Starfire. "Picture the egg shell cracking open, and the feeling slowing coming out."
Raven closed her eyes and formed the picture in her mind. She began to remember the date.
Three Years Ago
"Hey Raven, we're back from the store!" Beast Boy's voice rang from the front door of the common room. Raven squeaked, startled, and dropped her book, a very rare partial copy of the Endrial Verses, cracking the spine. She sighed and picked it back up off the floor.
"I'll alert the media," she said, flatly.
"Oh Raven, don't be like that. Look what I found!" He ran across the Tower common room and proudly placed a carton of ice cream on the counter. "Check it out – Earl Grey tea flavored ice cream!
Present Day
"Now," Starfire continued, "As the feeling comes out, you should feel a very small flush of warmth, usually starting at the base of your neck, or perhaps your stomach. It will spread out slowly. Physically, you should feel your muscles relax just a little bit, and your heart rate may go up or down, slightly."
As Starfire described the sensations, Raven felt them running through her body. Her lips began to spread in to a small smile. She remembered the expression on Beast Boy's face as he'd proudly presented the ice cream.
Three Years Ago
"Beast Boy," she'd said, "Earl Grey is savory tea, not a sweet one. It's not usually served with sugar. I don't think it would make a very good ice cream."
She might as well have been talking to the wind. It had ended like her encounters with Beast Boy always did. He didn't hear a word she said, and when she opened her mouth to speak again, he stuck a big spoonful of the grey and white mess into her mouth. It had been truly vile. She bit down, choked, gagged, crossed her eyes, and swallowed. Tears welled up as her taste buds rebelled.
"Very funny Beast Boy," she snarled, "What are you trying to do, poison me!?"
He'd shrunk away, embarrassed. She snatched up her book and stalked out.
"Raven wait . . ." but the door slid shut on his protestations.
Present Day
How happy he'd seemed when he'd opened it. And how appalled he was when he saw the expression on her face. There was a sharp crack, as Raven's eyes flew open and a small black bolt flashed from the stone she wore on her Sixth Chakra toward Starfire's face. The redhead snapped up her hand and blocked the crackle of dark energy without much effort.
"Umm . . . maybe you should go outside while I do this."
Starfire smiled. "I am stronger than I look. And I am confident that you will not harm me."
And so it went. For an hour, Raven searched her memory for small happy moments: the time they'd escaped Mumbo's hat, the time Beast Boy had tried to cheer her up by turning into an emerald raven, the time Starfire had learned to meditate. But at the end of the hour, it was a little startling how many moments involved Beast Boy.
"That is probably enough for today. You will not overcome the training and habits of a lifetime in one session. This will take much work on our part."
"Thank you, Starfire. I didn't know where else to turn."
"It is what friends do."
And so the months passed. Hero work in Jump City never stops, but sometimes it slows down, especially in the winter months. As the holiday season approached there had been no word from Beast Boy. Raven had at first enjoyed the quiet in the tower as the holidays approached without Beast Boy's childlike and noisy enthusiasm for the holiday season. But as the days went by, she found herself unable to concentrate. Each time she began to become focused, she'd find herself waiting for the interruptions he would bring to her reading, meditation, and study. Oddly, she made less academic progress now that he was gone.
"Can I actually be missing him?" she thought.
Raven had more time to focus on letting go without cutting loose. She spent time daily in "non-meditation," slowly learning to draw on her feelings without letting her power loose. At first she made slow progress, and it was reflected in her friendships. Other things became more apparent in a more dramatic fashion.
Raven stepped into the shower, her back to the showerhead, and let the water soak through her plum-colored hair and sluice down her back. One of the benefits of having a small reactor in the basement and a desalination plant on the island: never, ever running out of hot water. The bathroom filled with thick, rolling steam as Raven began to lather her hair. The heat soaked into her typically chill body as Raven began to relax under the thick streams of water pouring over her. One of the downsides to becoming more in touch with her feelings was that she, well, felt more. Pain used to be just a signal that something was wrong. Now it, well, hurt. Now the soreness from Robin's ever more aggressive training sessions nagged at her mind and colored her mood. The hot water and pounding stream from the showerhead felt good. It felt real good. She stretched and rolled her shoulders. Beads of water clung to her curves as condensation gathered on all the walls of the room.
Raven was a girl, but she'd never paid much attention to the fact. She'd been confident that she would be alone all her life, and her emotions had been so repressed that she'd never paid any more attention to her lady parts than you'd pay to the back of your neck. Were they clean? Good enough, and she moved on. But this time, when Raven finished her shampoo and turned around to allow the water to strike her torso, she jerked backwards. It was like an electric shock had run through her groin, causing her to bend almost double in surprise.
"Ah," she gasped. "What the hell was that?"
Now, Raven had read plenty about human physiology. You couldn't be a useful healer without a good working knowledge of how the body worked, so she knew all about human female plumbing. She'd also read about masturbation when she was younger, but her early explorations had produced a response that was indifferent to non-existent. But Raven was unique. She'd just assumed that demons weren't wired the same way, and that her mons wasn't going to work. But this? This was different. She slowly slid her soapy hands along her stomach, past her navel. Her fingers slipped over the sparse purple hair and down her mons, cautiously searching for the little button there.
"Ah!" she said again. It wasn't nearly as intense as last time. "Ooooh.
She gently stroked it with her soapy fingers, the digits sliding back and forth in the warm humid air of the room. Sparks of sensation shot through her body. Her body shivered as the little jolts got longer. With the last one, she held her breath until the tingling stopped. She stood up, dizzy. Her little button had become so sensitive she couldn't touch it any more.
"Well," she thought, "that was interesting. And new. Now I have some idea what the big deal is."
"Hey Raven," said Cyborg one morning not too soon afterward. I'll be out of the way in a sec – you can put your teapot on as soon as the ham and eggs are done."
"Actually," Raven said, sitting down at the table, "I was wondering if I might have a few eggs with you."
Cyborg stopped and slowly turned to look at her. She looked away slightly and turned slight purple and she blushed maroon under her blue-grey skin.
"Sure – it'll be just a minute, unless you'd prefer waffles."
"Maybe . . . tomorrow. A couple of eggs would be just fine."
Robin was also a little startled to see Raven sitting at the breakfast table dining with Cyborg. "Hey Raven – not eating in your room today?"
"Not today. Time for eggs, with my friends, by the big window."
"Okay then."
From then on, she had breakfast with her friends more or less every morning. It wasn't universally fun or pleasant, but it was always great to see Starfire's smiling face. After a few weeks, she couldn't imagine living any other way. The only thing really missing was Beast Boy's toothy grin. No matter what she said or did, he had never seemed to lack a reason to give her one.
She still had to meditate to keep her powers under control, but when she was able to spend more time in the company of her friends, and to enjoy some of the basic delights of life and living. One morning, late after breakfast, there was a sharp knock at her door. The loud clang meant it was neither Robin nor Starfire.
"Cyborg?" Cyborg never bothered her in her room.
"Hey Raven," he said as the door opened.
"Um . . . hello. Why are you here?" She blushed and tried again, "I mean, you never come here. What brings you to my room?"
"I know what you're doing Raven."
She colored again. "What?"
"You're somehow trying to let your emotions out. A little bit at a time, maybe, instead of keeping 'em all locked up all the time."
"Is it that obvious?"
"Well, you've been a little hard on the light bulbs and the electronics this summer."
"Sorry . . ."
"Don't be. It's been worth a truckload of light bulbs to see you smile. But I'm bettin' it's been pretty hard on your stuff. Your books and things."
Raven looked around her room. Still dark and creepy, it was beginning to look a little spartan. She'd lost a lot of her books, at least two mirrors, and most of the decorations in her room since she'd started down this path.
"Kinda."
"I've got a Christmas present for you. Don't know how well it's gonna work."
Cyborg leaned back out the door and brought in a strange looking wire cage. Inside was a spectacular crystal snowflake. The candlelight in her room flickered off of the thousands of faceted surfaces. It was translucent. The candlelight turned it into an amber fire inside the cage.
"It's pretty," she said. "What is it."
"A target."
"A target?"
"Sure. I don't know a whole lot about how your powers work. You won't let me study them. But I do know that's when you feel your emotions, they leak out through your powers. And break something. I'm giving you something to break."
"Cyborg, that's . . . too pretty to just smash because my . . . head is leaking."
"Nah," he said, as he leaned out the door and brought in three more. "They're easy to grow, and don't take long. I've already put up eight in the common room, four in the trophy room, and there's one in every corridor in the building. I thought about growing something really, really strong. But then I thought that you'd probably break it anyway, and these are much quicker to grow."
He walked around the room, putting the cages in the corners out of the way, but visible.
"The stainless steel cages will contain any fragments or dust when you break them. Just bring them to the garage when you break one, and I'll show you how to put them in the incubator to grow a replacement. I was also able to tune the harmonics to the dark energy you use. They'll attract your stray power bolts to them. You still ought to aim them when you can, though."
"I – I don't know how to thank you."
"Oh, don't thank me. It was Beast Boy's idea. I just handled the details."
"Beast Boy?" The red jewel Raven wore on her seventh Chakra flared, and black lightning shot out, shattering the crystal Cyborg held in his hands.
"Sorry," she said, looking down.
"No problem," he replied, reaching down the a case on the floor behind him. "I brought a spare. Merry Christmas, Raven."
She surprised him with one of her rare hugs. His hands hovered over her shoulders as though he was unsure what to do with them. Finally he patted her shoulders and squeezed.
"It's not the same without him, is it?" he asked.
"No," she said, her voice muffled by his chest. "No. It's not. Cyborg?" she asked, "Did Beast Boy leave because of me? I know I'm very . . . hard to be around. I didn't mean for him to leave entirely."
"No Raven, I don't know what was going on in that green bean he calls a brain, but I do know that it was all about him, and had nothing to do with you."
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