Chapter 14
Changes
"Dearest, you must do it." Said Raven's mother. "This turmoil is destroying you. Everything will be better once it is done."
"I know. But it's doing it that's the problem." Raven pleaded.
Her mother smiled at her.
"You are still young, and so you have the embarrassments of a youth." Her mother said with a large knowing smile.
A large blush rushed through Raven's face.
"It isn't that!" She defended rapidly.
"Really?" Her mother raised one of her eyebrows and looked at her in the eyes.
Raven looked away.
"Okay, maybe it is. What am I supposed to do?" Raven sat down in her dark oak chair next to her desk.
Her mother approached her from behind and laid a hand on Raven's shoulder. But her current incorporeal state meant that Raven couldn't feel it, no matter how much she wanted too.
"What does your heart say?" Her soft voice pierced Raven's heart and made her almost want to cry.
A few pencils and other items on her desk began to rattle and shake.
Raven consciously forced her emotions to quiet themselves.
"You know what to do, my dearest. I leave it to you how and when. But I suggest soon." There was a slight flash of light and Raven's mother was gone.
Raven stood up, turned around, and gathered her candles in a circle.
She focused her power and said: "Azurath Aldore Metrion Ingare Talman ZINTHOS!"
She was then engulfed in the darkness of her personal dimension in space and time.
Raven did what she usually did, she let down all her control and tried to cry her sorrows out…nothing happened.
Raven could feel the tears swelling up in her eyes but for some reason none of them would fall.
Her chest ached and she felt a great depression swim through her body, but she was unable to let any of it out.
She couldn't cry.
She couldn't scream.
She was trapped in her own body.
She transported herself back and went to her bed. She laid herself down and drifted off to sleep.
Naruto sat on the couch feeling bored.
He found this world increasingly strange. He even felt different in it.
Back in Konoha he had rarely felt bored. He would either be training, or being attacked. But here…he was bored. Very bored.
He no longer felt fascinated by the large amount of technologies and devices that he'd never seen before. He just couldn't be bothered to feel excited these days.
Beastboy walked around the couch and sat in it. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees.
"Naruto." He said.
Naruto murmured in response.
"I'm sorry."
Naruto looked at him and felt a swell of respect for the green boy swell within him.
"Thank you." He said.
"Come on, I want to show you something." Beastboy got up and walked off.
Naruto turned off the TV and climbed off of the couch.
Naruto didn't know where Beastboy was taking him. They had been walking for at least an hour with no end in sight.
Naruto noticed that they were heading for some kind of mountain outside of the city.
"Erm, are we gonna walk all the way to that mountain." Naruto asked curiously.
"Sure are." Beastboy said without looking back at him.
Naruto was used to travelling long distances, but he got the feeling that Beastboy was the lazy kind of person. So why was he making them walk.
Naruto queried him about this.
Beastboy listened to Naruto's points and stayed silent for a moment.
"Well?" Naruto asked.
Beastboy sighed.
"Let's just say that the place we're going too…it's the kind of place I'd rather walk too."
Naruto found himself shocked at the distance. He would usually travel long distances through trees and places where he could cover distance quickly, but the coarse concrete beneath Naruto's feet was actually beginning to hurt him.
Beastboy, however, wasn't showing any signs of tiring. Naruto found this increasingly strange. Why did a lazy person like Beastboy want to walk such a distance? And why did it seem that his feet were fine, how often did he tread this track.
After a further hour, the summit of the mountain finally came into view.
A while back the path had turned from concrete to dirt, Naruto was rather glad of this as the earth was soft beneath his feet and it was a welcome change to the coarse surface of the tarmac.
Naruto looked up at the mountain and suddenly came to realise something…it wasn't a mountain…It was a volcano.
Albeit a dead one.
It was obvious, even from a glance, that the volcano was no longer a threat. Though why Beastboy was leading Naruto to a volcano, he didn't know.
Beastboy had hardly said a word throughout the entire journey. It were as if he wanted Naruto to see what he wanted to show but wished to retain his general ritual of silence. For that was obviously how he preferred to undertake this journey, in silence.
After about twenty minutes of walking they came to a huge chasm at the summit of the volcano. Across this chasm was a form of bridge. It was not man-made and looked as though it was probably not stable.
Beastboy didn't seem to have any worries about it.
Naruto got the impression that Beastboy didn't like heights, but the green pointy-eared boy was seemingly unphased by the dramatic drop below the rocky bridge.
The bridge of rock led to a cave entrance into the volcano.
Naruto and Beastboy crossed the bridge in silence. Naruto was thankful that their journey had almost come to an end; well…he hoped it had nearly come to an end.
As they entered the cave mouth, Naruto and Beastboy found themselves in a short tunnel.
Stalagmites and stalactites littered the floor and ceilings though their were more on the roof than on the path they treaded.
Naruto was also thankful of this, the idea of having to walk on or around hundreds of sharp pieces of rock and ice did not bode well in his train of thought.
They exited the tunnel.
Naruto gasped.
The area was completely hollowed out. Naruto looked up and he could see the deepening red sky of dusk through the mouth of the volcano. There was also a chasm and a bridge.
The chasm went down for maybe a few hundred feet before it came to a rocky bed. There was no lava left. It was as though someone had somehow sealed the bottom off from the earth's mantle.
The bridge was about thirty foot long and ended in the very centre of the volcano's hollow body.
What he saw in the centre was even more breathtaking than the volcano itself.
A statue.
But this was no ordinary statue.
The detail in the carving was absolute. The female figure was obviously depicted in her teenage years.
Her figure and clothing was so finely detailed that it seemed someone had carved her body, and then carved the clothing out of separate pieces of rock and fitted them to the statue.
Naruto had never seen such quality.
The girl was about his height. She had large beautiful eyes that Naruto could only imagine to be coloured blue were she a real being.
She had long flowing hair that Naruto thought would have to either be a fine black, or a luscious gold.
Her entire body seemed to be encased in a metallic suit. It looked strong and flexible. Her hands were also contained in metallic gloves.
She stood with her arms outstretched as if to take hold of the world and keep it close, her hair rose into the air as though a gust of power of wind had lifted it from it's position.
Overall she was a very pretty girl.
She was standing on a square pedestal of rock that held an inscription:
Terra, A Teen Titan
A True Friend.
"Terra." Beastboy whispered.
"Who was she?" Naruto asked Beastboy in a low tone. However, even though his voice was quiet and soft, the loud chamber of the hollow volcano seemed to amplify and echo his words.
"Not 'was'." Beastboy said confusing Naruto slightly. "'Is'."
Beastboy turned around and faced Naruto.
"Her names Terra." He began. And with that Beastboy began to tell the story. Naruto had never seen Beastboy as the storytelling type, but as he spoke about this past struggle of how she had befriended them, betrayed them, tried to kill them, then saved them, Naruto couldn't help but marvel at the detail in which he spoke.
It was as though he were reading a book aloud. Naruto felt like he could see each bubble and steamy wisp of the volcano; hear the cries and blasts as the struggle commenced.
Beastboy spoke as though he had been waiting to tell this story for so long, as though he really didn't need any audience, but just felt the need to tell it to the earth and trees and rock beneath his feet.
Naruto listened intently, not something he would usually do. He was captivated by the tale. It seemed unbelievable that this figure of rock was a living being, that it had once been a girl, that it had betrayed them and then saved them, that it had served the monster Slade, and, though Beastboy did not mention this outright, had capture the green boys heart.
It was a tale worthy of publishing, and though Naruto was no bookworm, he would certainly have loved to read such a tale.
When Beastboy was finished he looked up at the statue of the youth above him. Her posture declared power and pain. Her hands stretched out to the world as though to hold it close and protect it from all danger.
She had true power. The power of mother earth itself. More power than any had realised. It was by her hand that Slade fell the first time, to be consumed by the boiling lava and, so thy had thought at the time, never to return again.
Naruto asked how Slade had come back. It seemed to him impossible that a person could come back from the dead.
Beastboy told him of Trigon, Raven's father. He told the blonde-haired youth of the monsters awesome power. How he had brought Slade back from the dead to attack them with powers beyond any of them. How Raven had been used as a key…a 'gem', as they had called her, to open the gateway between their world and the dimension in which Trigon was banished.
Naruto listened to the tale of how they had battled the great being and had managed to trap him once more. How they had managed to strip Slade of his given power and lock him up in the zero-point chamber that Cyborg had invented.
Naruto was shocked. Beastboy had, inadvertently I might add, revealed a large portion of Raven's past and present. Naruto felt a great deep down respect for her and all the Titan's.
He now realised what it meant to be a hero. To be a hero one must be willing to sacrifice those they love for the greater good, and still have the strength to fight on afterwards. Naruto didn't know whether he had such strength, but he hoped he did. Because if such a situation ever turned his way, he would need such strength.
After Beastboy finished his stories, he sat down on the rock and closed his eyes. He entered a very thoughtful state that Naruto felt no will to interrupt.
The blonde-haired boy walked up to the statue and placed his hands upon it's form. It truly was made of rock.
Naruto looked up into the sightless eyes of Terra and for a moment he felt as though she were still alive. As though such a form was merely a prison. He wanted to free her. But he knew he couldn't.
'But I can.' Said a voice at the back of his mind.
'What do you mean?' Naruto asked curiously.
'I can free her.' Kyuubi said warmly.
'How, your element is fire, mine is wind. She is made of rock, which is earth. How can either of us free her?' Naruto asked.
'Neither one of us can on our own, true…but together…' Kyuubi said sinisterly.
'Can we really do this?' Naruto asked.
'We can, but we will need time, and more power than I currently have.' Kyuubi said.
'What else do we need?' Naruto asked.
The fox's voice said a single name that sent a shiver down Naruto's spine:
'Raven.'
When Naruto and Beastboy got back, the blonde-haired boy assembled the Titan's in the living room and told them about freeing Terra.
Naturally at first the were shocked to think that she may still be alive. During the first months in which she had been turned to stone, they had tried every means possible short of smashing the statue to free her. This they dared not do for fear that if it didn't work they might have truly killed her.
Sadly, it seemed they had lost almost all hope of saving her and actually thought her to be dead anyway. So in their eyes, the statue was but a memorial.
Naruto told him that they might actually be able to free her by combining his own power with Raven's.
"Are you sure Raven wouldn't want to combine anything else? Like lips?" Cyborg said with a grin.
Raven's eyes became enshrouded in a white aura and her face was flush with anger. Cyborg quickly backed away.
"Come on Raven, we all know you like him." Robin said with a grin.
Naruto's ears began to burn at their talk and he could feel himself going red in the face.
"SHUT UP!" Raven shouted at them.
"It say's so in your diary!" Cyborg said. Suddenly he slapped his hands over his mouth and began to shake his head frantically as though he couldn't believe what he had said.
Suddenly it seemed as though Raven had gone completely calm.
Slowly and menacingly a black aura enshrouded her body. The air around her went cold as though all heat had been replaced by a darkness.
"You…read…my…diary." She said calmly. "YOU READ MY DIARY!" She screamed.
Every window in the tower suddenly shattered. Lamps and lights of all kinds exploded and the tower trembled with her rage.
Raven forced herself to calm down. The shaking stopped and the Titan's felt a slight wave of relief wash over them that she hadn't ripped them all to pieces.
Raven suddenly grabbed Naruto by the wrist and ran off whilst dragging him with her.
They bounded into her room and she locked the door and stood in the centre.
Naruto didn't know why she had pulled him into her room, but he took this chance to investigate. He had wanted to see her room for a while and what he saw now was nothing like he had imagined it.
Everywhere, either black or dark blue things lingered. The floor was a deep blue and the roof and walls were a jet black. Books and skulls and candles littered the cupboards along with jars of ominous things that Naruto would have given anything just to avoid from peering at their contents.
Dusty tomes and open spell books surrounded the place and the webs of spiders were ever present in the corners of her abode.
Yet, through all the dark and gloom of the room, it seemed that the place itself held an inner peace to it. As though it had a warm inviting feel, but only for him.
He looked at Raven.
She was red in the face and panting slightly from the occurrence earlier.
She also looked agitated, as though she wanted or needed to do something but couldn't bring herself to do it.
"Erm…why did you grab me?" Naruto asked feeling a little uncomfortable.
"Screw it!" Raven said. These were words which seemed highly eccentric coming from Raven's mouth. As though they were the kind of words she would never say in her lifetime or the next. But she said them anyway.
Raven rushed over to him, pressed his back to the door and pressed her lips to his.
Naruto was in shock, he didn't know what to do. More like he didn't know how to stop 'doing'.
His hands placed themselves on her hips and he couldn't help but kiss her deeply back.
When he had kissed Jinx, it had been amazing…but this…this was something entirely different.
And definatly not normal.
He knew this was no normal kiss when he began to see bright lights.
He felt something happening. An electrical spark, not unlike the flow of chakra through his body. But this was powerful, it caused a tingling sensation to tear it's way through his body like nothing had ever before.
It was akin to pain, but infinitely pleasurable.
There was certainly something happening to Raven.
The kiss wasn't really that heated or intimate, on the contrary is was a simple and childish one.
But something was happening all the same. Bright lights flashed around them and when they finally broke apart after a period of time that neither of them could gage, Naruto looked wide eyes at Raven.
She was white. Wearing pure white.
Her face was lit up with a smile and it seemed that she had an air of confidence around her. She held herself up straight as though nothing could ever hurt her.
It was like she was a totally different person, yet still the same old Raven.
She grinned at him, an expression he had never imagined her doin before now, yet it did not seem all that strange with her new persona.
Suddenly though, her posture changed and her white clothes became blue once again and her grin faded. She seemed tired and slowly, Raven fell forward.
Naruto grabbed her and steadied her fall. The moment his hands touched her, her clothes were white again and she was smiling up at him wearily.
"I don't understand." Naruto said feeling very confused.
Raven opened her mouth to explain but she seemed unable too. Swiftly she drifted into a slumber in his arms.
Naruto picked her up in his arms and laid her down on her bed. The moment he separated the physical contact between them, her clothes faded swiftly to blue again. He rested a single finger onto her cloak and it became white.
Naruto was fascinated by this.
But feeling tired himself; he climbed onto the bed with Raven and held her as they both slept.
Naruto brooded over the past day in his mind before the sweet slumber took him, and he noticed something, so much had changed today.
He had found out a lot about Raven herself, had realised a deep pain that the Titan's all shared and thought he found a way to heal it.
Today really was a day of changes.
Chapter 14 finished.