A/N: I have had this chapter done for the last several weeks. I put it aside because I wasn't sure it was what I wanted this chapter to be, but after much consideration and consultation, I've figured out that it has be there. I can't leave the last chapter where I did and not show what happens with Speedy on the couch, although it feels sort of dragging and a little boring to me.
I guess y'all be the judges.
Thanks: As always, to my beta-angels, Kysra and Absentia. I'll post the review responses tonight, because otherwise, it'll have to wait until after Louis XVI gets decapitated. (Don't know what I'm talking about? Go to my 'emsscraps'.)
Stupid Cupid 11
Revelations
"The truth is rarely pure and never simple."
- Oscar Wilde
Cyborg dreamed. Not a lot of people knew that, but whatever of his biologically human brain was left, perhaps his heart, provided dreams when he went into the generally unconscious rest of recharging. He didn't dream often, and usually, they were nonsensical and random.
Sometimes, though, very few times, he dreamt of darkness, of screams, fire, and helplessness. It was for just this eventuality that he had an interrupt command installed in his recharge program. The first time he had been caught in a nightmare without being able to wake up was more than enough motivation for him to install it.
So, when he found himself awake and sweating on his recharge bed, he once again thanked the interrupt program for working and disconnected himself. He wouldn't be going back to recharging just yet.
Instead, he decided to go the common room to play some mind-numbing video-games. It was usually the only thing that helped get him back in the restful mood for sleep after one of his infrequent nightmares.
So, when he turned on the overhead light for the common room and Speedy bolted into a sitting position, Cyborg's first thought at seeing the guilty look on the archer's face was that he was going to kill him.
What they did in their own room was beyond his control, but he'd be damned if he let them make nookie on the couch he sat on!
Speedy blinked back the sudden flood of light and took a moment to focus on the gleaming metal Cyborg standing near the doorway. When he finally saw him and the look on his face, he fell back against the couch with a groan, a half-hearted, "Ow," once he was down there.
"What the hell's wrong with you, man, the COUCH?!" Cyborg exclaimed. "Raven, you best teleport you and your kinky ass boyfriend—"
"She's not here," came Speedy's bleak voice from the other side of the couch.
Cyborg raised a brow and approached. "Do you mean to say she kicked your skinny carcass onto the couch?"
Speedy sighed and didn't answer. "Can I just go back to pretending I'm sleeping, now, please?"
Cyborg stood over the arm of the couch and looked down at Speedy menacingly. "What did you do?" he asked.
Speedy blinked at Cyborg and turned over, hiding his face from the light and, presumably, Cyborg's glare. "Can we skip the ass-kicking until the morning, huh?" he asked, his voice muffled. "I'm not done kicking my own ass just yet."
Cyborg felt a twinge of pity for the boy and with a heaving sigh, walked to the television and flipped switches and took remotes, successfully booting up their gaming system. He walked to the couch and pushed Speedy's legs off so he could sit. With a sigh of his own, Speedy sat up and looked blankly at the tv. "There is a spare bedroom you could use, you know?" Cyborg said as the game went through the motions of starting.
"Can't," Speedy said. He caught Cyborg's questioning stare out of the corner of his eye and so he shrugged. "It's on her floor – I don't dare risk it."
"Sheesh," Cyborg exhaled, unable to completely keep the smile from his voice. "Must've been some fight."
"There was no fight," Speedy said. "No argument, no fight, and she didn't kick me out of her room, I fucked up, though and I just can't face her right now," he looked at Cyborg. "Is that enough explanation or do you need more?"
Cyborg began playing the game, the audio on low, for a few moments before he reached a reprieve in the attack on the screen and he turned to face Speedy. "I don't need to hear any of it from you at all," Cyborg answered seriously. He went back to the game. "We all make mistakes, and it's up to her to deal with yours, I guess. Plus, you already know I'll make you dog meat the moment I find out you hurt her on purpose." He shrugged, nonchalantly dispatching enemies one after another.
Speedy watched Cyborg play blankly for a few moments, thinking over Cyborg's words and his own thoughts. "Did you ever consider," Speedy asked sedately, practically unlike himself, "that she might be the one to hurt me?"
Cyborg was momentarily thrown by the depth of the question, the seriousness to it, and his hands paused in his coordinated attack of the robot drones on the screen. His character died and as the screen went through the motions of announcing the end of the game and re-starting, he turned to Speedy. "Do you love her?" he asked suddenly.
Speedy didn't look at him, but paid careful attention to the screen with the video game he had never really liked playing anyway. "The first time I met her," Speedy said, still in that calm, serious tone, his expression far away and practically blank. "I thought she was this dark, brooding goth," he admitted. "Then, sometime later, I thought I'd figured out that she was one of those cold, unemotional people, you know," he exhaled. "And then Brother Blood happened," he looked at Cyborg and winced in remembered apology. "I hit her, did you know that?" he asked. "Under Blood's control, I fought her and I laid a few hits," he shook his head and turned away. "I apologized afterward, and it was the first time I spoke to her – really spoke to her, and I figured out she wasn't at all the way everyone thought she was – the way I had assumed she was."
He smiled and looked back at the screen. "She has a warped sense of humor, she's smart, she's kind, and she called me on my bullshit right off the bat. She hardly knew me, but she made me feel stupid for thinking I had to apologize to her for something I had no control over and ridiculous for even assuming I could've hurt her anyway all at the same time. Then, to top it all off, she made me laugh." He leaned back and crossed his arms across his chest. "Now, I know better, but back then, I thought she hadn't meant to make me laugh." He smiled at the memory. "Eventually, I don't remember what I said, but I said something and she smiled. Not even a big smile, just one of those half-smiles that's really more the insinuation of a smile than an actual lifting of her lips, but I saw her, really saw her, for the first time right then." The memory of what Speedy had taken to calling their true first meeting made him smirk as he remembered that not only did he really see her for more than just a silent standby with some killer moves, but he practically fell on his ass with the realization that she was damn smokin' hot. He wouldn't tell Cyborg that, however. "I guess I've been trying to get her to smile ever since – taking every chance I can get to talk to her to try, thinking of ways to make her happy whenever I'm not with her."
"You do love her," Cyborg said into the silence, more than slightly awed.
Speedy looked at him and he was smiling, a kind of amused-amazed-shell-shocked kind of smile. "Is that what this is?" Speedy asked, adding silently, 'because it feels like hell.' He laughed mirthlessly. "Then, yeah, I guess I do."
"So what are you going to do?" Cyborg asked in his no-nonsense big-brother voice.
Speedy's eyes shot up to Cyborg's in surprise. That was definitely not the response he had been expecting. "What?"
Cyborg looked at him as if his meaning should have been obvious. "You love her," Cyborg repeated. "What are you going to do about it?"
"I don't think there's anything I can do," Speedy answered after the initial shock wore off. The words were half out of his mouth before he realized it, "She doesn't love me."
Cyborg started at Speedy's words and the feeling behind them. "What—" he started, then stopped. "What makes you think that?" he decided.
Speedy looked sideways at Cyborg and smiled, but there was no real humor in it. "Do you think any differently?"
Cyborg turned back to his game and started it again. "Raven is…" he trailed off and shrugged, mashing buttons but only half-heartedly paying attention to his character's advances on the television. "…complicated," he finished on a sigh. "No one can presume to know what she's thinking."
"You know her better than I do in many ways, Cyborg," Speedy said suddenly. "Do you think she loves me?"
Cyborg hesitated.
"Do you think she could love me?" Speedy pressed.
"I'm not really the person you should ask that," Cyborg answered. "She looks happier when she's with you, you make her smile and you've gotten her to do things we haven't before, and that's the only thing I can say."
"So who should I ask?" Speedy wondered.
"Dude, Raven," Cyborg answered, as if it should be obvious.
Speedy smirked in that mirthless way again that was cousin to a grimace. "The one person I can't ask," he admitted.
"Why the hell not?" Cyborg asked.
He looked at Cyborg. "Don't you get it?" Speedy asked. "If she suspected…" he trailed off and shook his head. "As long as she thinks this thing between us is casual, all is fine."
Cyborg rose a brow. "Is it, though?"
Speedy shrugged. "It'll have to be."
The ding of the elevator cut off Cyborg's reply and they both looked over the back of the couch to watch as Raven stepped out.
"Well, look at the time," Cyborg said, standing up and handing Speedy the controller, the game still going in the background so that through his inattention Cyborg's character was set upon and his brains were eaten by zombies.
Speedy held the controller without realizing he was holding it, his eyes on Raven in a pair of white pajama pants drawn all over by brightly colored, cartoonish planets and stars and little spaceships with aliens in them and a red and gray t-shirt with the words 'far out' drawn across the front, her hair picked up away from her neck and the loose tendrils around her temples and nape still humid with rain or shower.
"'Night, Rae," Cyborg said, casually touching her shoulder as he passed.
"Cyborg," Raven said, walking forward toward Speedy.
Speedy watched her until she was almost at the couch, then turned around and stared blankly at the tv.
"You're dead," Raven said, her tone as neutral as usual.
Speedy started and looked up at her, surprise clearly marked in his eyes. "What?" he asked.
Raven motioned to the television screen. "Ash."
Speedy blinked at the screen, but still wasn't following. "Who?"
She sighed. "Your character, Ash," she raised her hand toward the screen. "He was eaten by the armies of the dead."(1)
Speedy frowned as he noticed what the background of the game appeared to be as the computer showed the character Cyborg had been using to play being attacked and killed by zombies on a continuously playing loop with the words, YOU'RE DEAD flashing in gory red letters over it. "I wasn't playing," he set the controller aside. "Cyborg was."
Raven nodded. "Figures."
He turned to look at her. "Look, Raven--" he started.
Raven looked at him and the excuses or apology he didn't actually know how to say stalled in his throat. "I never got to say thank you for everything today," Raven said in his silence. She seemed to ignore Speedy's shock. "It was…" she looked from him to the television and back again. "…enjoyable," she finished. She seemed to notice his pants for the first time when she looked at him due to his silence. She frowned. "Why are you wearing Beast Boy's pants?" she asked.
Speedy was too dumbfounded to even think of answering her question. "I—"
She almost smiled at him and shook her head, turning around. "Don't stay up too late," she called over her shoulder. "If you wake me up when you come into the room, I won't be happy."
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Notes:
(1) Can anyone guess to what this is a reference? Anyone? Anyone? Go ahead and guess and I'll give you a virtual thumbs up…and a cookie…and props in the next chapter if you're right.
A/N: How do I feel about this chapter? Eh. The question is: how do YOU feel about it?
