I've been away for a while, so I thought I'd give you guys a double feature. This is two separate one-shots with a similar theme. The first one is just cute friendship fluff, the second one is cute romantic fluff. Sorry for the long break! I might get a little more on track from here on out, but no promises. It's gonna be pretty hectic for a while!

Hobbies: Two oneshots, one friendship, one fluffy, about Raven taking an interest in Beast Boy's hobbies.

Games

Early on, Raven didn't ask them to lower the games' volume. She was shy and unfamiliar with Earth. They didn't have video games on Azarath, of, if they did, she had never seen any. Not knowing what the etiquette was for video games at home, let alone Earth, she elected to not complain and spent most of her time in her room, leaving the common room whenever the boys started setting up their game box or whatever it was called. From what she had gathered, there were several in the house and they had fervent arguments about which one was better. She didn't want to hear that, either.

Thankfully, a few months into the team and Cyborg politely pulled her aside to explain that she didn't have to leave and asking them to keep the volume down would be just fine. Upon furthering questioning from her, she was ensured that politely asking them to lower the volume or stop their argument would be fine, and that even raising her voice on occasion wasn't going to rip the team apart if someone wasn't listening.

She marked this moment as the beginning of her downfall.

By the time year three of the team had rolled around, leaving even the youngest member of their team to the upper edge of what could be considered a teenager, Beast Boy had learned what the acceptable volume and excitement level was for his video games. This meant Raven spent her time in the common room. With him. With video game soundtracks sneakily climbing inside her brain.

She didn't realize what had happened until she heard Beast Boy giggling as she poured her tea. She glared at him and Cyborg joined her, as neither of them were too pleasant before they had their morning caffeine - while Robin continued to read his newspaper with Starfire peering over his shoulder, mouthing words as she practiced reading.

"What are you laughing at at six in the morning?" she growled.

"You." He pointed dramatically at her over his bowl of brightly colored marshmallow cereal. "You're humming the Megaman theme."

Her anger vanished, replaced with mild confusing. "What's the Megaman theme?"

"The game I was playing yesterday." He began to gesture with his hands. "It's the platformer with the little blue robot man who goes and beats up all the other robots to get his superpowers. Remember?"

"Isn't that every video game you play?" She smirked a little when he pouted.

Cyborg ruined her smug mood as he began to chuckle. "You know what, Rave? You were. Don't tell me you're playing MegaMan when we're not looking?"

"No." She snatched her tea kettle as it boiled with a roll of her eyes, and poured as she spoke. "Beast Boy just plays the same game so often the song has wormed its way into my brain."

"I do not! And why don't you yell at him for calling you Rae?"

"Same reason as always, Beast Boy: He asked permission. You should try that some time." She sat down and blew over the steamy surface of her tea, before taking a cautious sip. "I suppose this means I have to start meditating in my room again."

"Oh, come on!" he whined. "I won't tease you anymore. Don't go back into your room. I like hanging out with you."

"Does it really count as hanging out if we're doing two completely separate things?" She waved him away. "It's not like I actually know what's happening in your Superman game."

He looked personally insulted at the idea that he would be playing any kind of Superman game. "It's Megaman."

"No, Rae's right," Cyborg said quickly. He was waking up now, and a wide smile had spread across his face. "It's Superman 64. Rae, tell everyone that Beast Boy's favorite game is Superman 64."

He yelped, "Are you trying to get Superman to kill me, dude? Rae, it's Megaman."

She eyed him. We just had a discussion about how you can't call me Rae."

"That's not fair!"

"I believe," said Starfire, giving up on reading with such exciting conversation taking place, "that you and Beast Boy still do the hanging out. Is it not hanging out when Robin does work while I do the painting of the nails? Our bond is strengthened even if there is no talking."

"Yeah! Hear that, Rae? Our bond is strengthened."

"Really making me want to stay in my room."

He pouted and leaned forward over the table, so close that Starfire gently reached out a hand to brace his chest so he wouldn't tumble into his cereal. "You really don't want to spend time with me, Rae?"

She leaned over the table and pushed him back into his chair with a sigh. "It's been three years, Beast Boy. I would hope you could pick out when I was teasing you by now." Seeing that he still looked distressed, she added, "Really, I'm not going to leave. Believe it or not, I enjoy hanging out with you too."

"Aw, Rae, you're a big softie," Cyborg teased.

Robin, smirking, peaked over his newspaper. "Do you enjoy our time together?"

And, Starfire, not to be left out, giggled, "Should I not invite you on shopping trips so you may have more time with friend Beast Boy?"

"Nevermind. I hate all of you."

She still spent time with him in the common room, despite the fact that she frequently caught herself humming songs from games. It was unpleasant, but only in that she never liked having songs stuck in her head. Most of the songs weren't too terrible, and many were downright pleasant.

The song that played as Beast Boy played on his handheld device, for instance, was nice. She leaned over as she stabbed another forkful of salad. "So...what is that?"

He looked at her, surprised. "What?"

"I'm trying to start a conversation." She pointed with her fork at the screen. "Maybe you can explain why you've turned into the loch ness monster."

"Wha-oh! No!" He laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. "Um, the game is kind old. It doesn't have good enough graphics to show me riding lapras. That's what I'm riding. It's lapras, not the loch ness monster. It's a pokemon."

She raised her eyebrows. Surely that wasn't all English. "What?"

He perked up and scooted closer, gesturing to the screen. "It's, okay, so this is Pokemon Red. Basically, you're a ten year old kid and you catch all these cool monsters so you can be the best monster trainer in the whole world."

"The monsters are pokemon?"

"Yeah. Here, look." He swam up to another sprite, starting a battle with another he explained, it came out in a rush, almost too fast, like he was afraid she would cut him off at my moment. "See, pokemon fight to get stronger. They don't die, they just faint. And, like, they have different types. Like, water beating fire, and they have levels so bigger levels mean stronger pokemon."

"I'm surprised you like a game about animal abuse."

"Raven! It's not animal abuse! They like fighting!" He groaned at her suspicious look. "It, like, okay, it doesn't make sense, but it's not really supposed to. It's just a stupid game."

"Does that imply that there are smart games?" she asked idly.

He rolled his eyes. "There are. And I play them, before you make that joke too."

She bit her tongue, keeping herself from asking if he understood smart games, deciding that kind of joke would be best left for later, after she'd gotten through the difficult part. Instead, she asked, words halting and slow, "Maybe...I could play one of the smart ones?"

He froze, turning to stare at her. "What?"

"Don't make it weird," she snapped. "I'm not going to play if you make fun of me."

He continued to gawk ."Are you serious?"

"Why are you so shocked? It's not like I hold some deep moral conviction about video games. This should be as shocking as the first time I agreed to go to the mall with Starfire."

"But you agreed to that forever ago! Why didn't you ever say yes to playing with us? We asked a million times!" He threw his arms out dramatically and she was a little impressed that he kept the little device clutched in his hand.

"It was never anything interesting," she argued. "If you're telling me racecars blowing each other up is the best video games have to offer, I'm taking it back. is that the best you have?"

"No! No, I've got lots of good stuff." He grinned. "When do you want to play? Now? I can get my computer now."

"If you'd like."

She had never seen him move so fast outside of combat. LIke a blur, he was gone, rushing off and rushing back with his weighty computer cradled in his arms like the child. Awkward, bulky and massive, he set it down with a gentle thump on his lap and opened the lid. It had only been asleep, not powered down, and she hardly had time to think before he was opening up the screen and searching through an impressively messy desktop.

"You know, folders exist," she said dryly, watching him search through the names.

"No, Rae, I have a system."

"It's a computer. If you put it all in a folder, you can sort it alphabetically, by size, by date, by type...you could just type it into the search bar," she countered. But he had found the game and was smirking triumphantly as it loaded up. She rolled her eyes. "If you had it organized, it would have been faster."

"System, Raven," he insisted. "There's a system."

"What system?"

"Order installed. Anyway!" he cut her off before she had the chance to argue. "So, this game is really long, but it's really fun and really good and you can change it to easy mode or hard mode whenever. It's all about being smart, not really reflexes and stuff, so I bet you'll be really good at it."

"Don't get your hopes up," she said dryly, watching the login screen warily. "What is this about?"

"You'll find out. Here! Look, make a character." He pushed the mouse towards her, prompting her to start the game, and gawked over her shoulder at every move.

Raven was nothing if not meticulous. She read through every race, every class, every backstory, soaking in the details before finally choosing her path. Character creation took just as long, though Beast Boy seemed rather eager about that, pointing to each slider and laughing each time a face turned strange from a bad click. About halfway through, he helpfully pointed out that the character didn't actually have to look like her, and Raven found the process immensely more enjoyable as she made her own, acceptable looking human mage.

Then came cutscenes. Those were impressive. The games the boys played on the screen never really had cutscenes, and even when they did they weren't like this, with (mostly) realistic looking characters and swelling music and an epic backstory. She was surprised when it ended and she found herself in a tower. She looked at Beast Boy expectantly.

"Play. Go ahead. It's on easy and all the tutorials are on. It'll tell you what to do."

Raven spent the next twenty minutes searching every tiny space of the room, clicking everything that could be clicked on, before opening every single menu and pouring through all the options, leaning over to Beast Boy for an explanation to anything she where the in game explanation wasn't enough.

And then, everything blurred.

"Wait, the dog!" she looked as surprised as if she had forgotten to save a real dog from a real burning building as she turned to him. "I can't go back to the town! But I have the flower I need to save him. How do I fix it?"

"Uh, you can load your save, I guess," Beast Boy said uncertainly. "You can beat the game without the dog, though. You'd have to go back, like...I don't know. Here, open up the saves."

"This is the last point I had access to the city," she pointed to a save well over two hours behind in terms of progress. "So I can resume from here and save the dog?"

"Well, yeah, but you'll have to play through all of that again."

"I know where everything is. It'll be quicker."

"It's still two more hours. The game is over 60 hours, Raven. Do you really want to play for that long?" He looked concerned, and put his hand over hers, gently pushing it away from the mouse. "You don't have to do this."

"It's a game. I can play it however I want." She slapped his hand and loaded up her save. "And I'm not letting a dog die just because I'm lazy, even a pretend one."

"Fick dich selbst," she hissed, loading the saved game again. Beast Boy couldn't pick out the rest (though he had a guess at what the translation might be) as Raven muttered in German. once upon a time getting Raven to slip into German to curse was an accomplishment second only to getting her to exclaim in Azarathian, but today he was starting to pity her.

He winced. "We can look up the answer."

"I'll figure it out. There aren't that many gifts. Or options." She took a deep breath and leaned back. Her eyes closed, and he let her have a few moments to meditate and let her get her emotions under control. Finally, she leaned forward again. "I shouldn't be getting this frustrated over the romantic pursuits of ones and zeroes with other ones and zeroes."

"I shouldn't have-" he said, starting his apology, but Raven interrupted.

"Oh!" She said suddenly, watching the affection bar leap up. "So he loves me now?"

"Yes."

She hummed, letting the characters flirt with one another in the cut scene while her fingers drummed gently on the keyboard. "Honestly, without the meter I never would have guessed they loved one another. There isn't much flirting among monks, or they kept it away from me."

"I think you would have figured it out," he said, biting back a laugh.

"Why would you say - Oh." Her eyes widened as both characters were suddenly naked, engaged in a desperately, tangled embrace. Beast Boy giggled, eagerly awaiting for the shock to wear off and for Raven's real reaction - a shriek, a blush, some kind of horror - to appear.

Instead, she leaned back as the screen darkened and said, "I won't have to deal with a baby, will I?"

Finishing the game wasn't the best part, as Raven suspected it would be. The best part turned out to be the late night discussion with Beast Boy, finding out every different path and every turn he had taken in the game that she had neglected. The game was even more massive than she had suspected, as time wore on and she became focused on her mission, she had completely ignored the side quests.

"They were on a time limit. Their country was being ravaged and you took the time to take care of a few thieves?"

He laughed. "It's not like the game was really timing you! They do that kind of thing all the time. Besides, you can't grind for experience in this game. You have to take every bit you can get. That's why the ending was so hard."

"Grind?"

"Lots of games like this have random monsters show up that you can beat over and over again so you can get stronger. This one doesn't, so you can't really overlevel and make the boss crazy easy like a lot of others."

"I'd like to see that," she said, giving him a small smile for all his work. "Not now, as it's three in the morning, but some time."

"Really?" he squeaked.

"I wouldn't have said it if it wasn't true." She stretched as she stood, yawning and making her way to the door. "Looks like you might make a gamer out of me yet."

Cartoons

Beast Boy had no idea how he had managed to get Raven to watch cartoons with him. Maybe because she spent so much time drinking tea in the common room, she figured it was easier to start watching them rather than trying to meditate over the sounds of physical comedy and bad puns. One day, after a too large gulp of tea and an odd look on her face, she asked, "Do these have an order?"

A week later and he had bought a half dozen box sets of cartoon DVDs, pointing out how this one didn't have a plot and this one had recurring villains and this one had a real story and these, well…

"Most cartoons, like, the really good ones, you can watch them mostly out of order. It's better in order, but you don't have to. And then they have these - two parters and movies and stuff. That's where most of the important stuff happens. Oh, like this!" He held up one called Kim POssible with a grin. "Most of them work like this."

"So that's the most stereotypical cartoon?"

"No! Well, I mean, sort of…?" He sighed, looking at it. "It's Disney, so, yeah, but it does cool stuff. I mean, it's not like Avatar or anything."

"Isn't that a movie?" she asked.

"No! It's...you…" He seemed to puff up with nerdy rage for a moment, then groaned and fell over. "There's too much stuff. I'm gonna get all geeky and you're gonna get bored."

"Not anymore than I am right now," she countered. He whimpered and she sighed, plucking the Kim Possible box set from the floor. She tried to twist her face into something optimistic, but judging by Beast Boy's refusal to move from the floor it didn't seem to be working. "You said that this is a stereotypical cartoon. Why not start here? I've seen a few of them anyway, if I remember correctly."

He whined, "But you don't think it's funny."

"I don't think you're funny either, but here I am." She held out the box to him. "Go put it in before my tea gets cold."

"You...won't be bored?" he asked, but he was already racing across the room and pushing the DVD into the player, his eyes shy and a bright smile on his face. She assumed her silence was answer enough, but as he scrambled back to the couch, remote in his hand, he asked, "Really?"

"Of course."

"Why does everyone keep teasing Ron and Kim about being a couple?" she asked, book she had brought out to the common room long forgotten on the seat next to her.

"Because it's a cartoon so everyone always teases everyone." Beast Boy grinned up at her from his spot on her other side. "But, you know, it's like how we tease Rob and Star all the time. It's just fun to mess with people."

Raven frowned. "But Rob and Star actually like one another."

"Uh, so do Kim and Ron?" he said uncertainly.

"Do they?" Raven looked surprised.

"Uh, yeah. Dude, it's so obvious ten years olds get it." He paused the show to gawk at her. "You're super smart, Raven. How do you-"

"I have trouble with shows. Empathy doesn't work on a captured image. I'm so used to using that for clarity that I've fallen out of practice with the complexity of facial expressions." She tugged her hood up, but not before he caught the embarrassment spreading over her face. "It's especially hard with cartoons."

"Oh." He thought for a while, staring at the paused screen. That explained her disdain for movies and love of books, and her even more intense dislike of cartoons. And, maybe, it explained something else. He looked at her. "You have trouble sensing my emotions, don't you?"

"You and Robin," she agreed. "The same tricks to protect your mind tend to work at hiding your emotions. It's why I'm often in the dark as much as the rest of you when it comes to how our fearless leader is feeling."

"That explains a lot."

"Why? Is it obvious?"

He shrugged, then after a moment laughed. "Well, I mean, something's obvious. It isn't you."

"What?" She looked at him, and after a moment her hood came down so she could pin him more fiercely with a glare. "Really, what? Is it important?"

"Nope. And no one's noticed so don't worry."

He settled back onto the couch, a little closer than before.

Raven sighed so hard it blew some of her hair back from her face. "I don't understand why, if they like each other, they don't just say something. Wouldn't that be easier?"

"They don't know if the other likes them back. They don't want to get rejected or ruin their friendship or make stuff weird. What would you do if you liked me?" There was a slight stiffening in her shoulders, so slight it might have just been her moving. Beast Boy felt his heart race just a little at the thought of it, but even his sharp senses couldn't pick up much from her.

"I don't know," she said, and any kind of shake that might have betrayed her was so well controlled he couldn't notice. "I guess I wouldn't know you liked me as well?" He nodded. "Then I wouldn't do anything. I've had my heart broken once. I don't really want to do it again."

He frowned - it wasn't the answer he had hoped for. "Then why are you acting like they're stupid if you'd do it the same way?"

"Because they are doing something," she snapped. "They're torturing themselves with what they can't have."

"So you think they should ignore each other?"

"No. I just think they should be happy being friends." She held a hand out to him. "Take us. I enjoy being friends with you. If I was in love with you, I'd continue like this. Same for if I was in love with anyone else on the team. I wouldn't pushing anything. I would simply enjoy whoever's company."

"But they're not doing it on purpose." He gripped his thigh just loosely enough that she wouldn't notice how tense his muscles had gotten. Oh, crap, he was going to scare her off. Worse. He was going to make her mad for implying. But he couldn't stop himself from speaking. "If you were in love with me, you might, you know, start hanging out with me more, doing things I enjoy, just looking for an excuse to hang out with me, and you probably wouldn't even notice you were doing it until someone pointed it out."

He shoulders were definitely stiff now. He hoped fervently that it wasn't the murderous kind of stiff. "And what would you do, if you were in love with me?" She regarded him carefully and her face was smooth. God, she was so good at that. But he was good at hiding his emotions from her, so he guessed it was fair.

So, carefully, his nails digging into his palms, he let the wall down he had so carefully maintained over the years. Mento would have yelled at him for doing something so stupid over something so small, when an attack on his mind could come at any time, but this was far easier than saying the words out loud. His heart thudded, his breath raced, but it might have been worth it when he saw the expression on her face. Widening eyes, red cheeks, breathing stopped as her mouth dropped open just slightly. At least she wasn't the only one getting an easy read.

She swallowed, regaining her composure. "So...that's your answer?"

"Yeah." He grinned, wishing there was some way he could hide his nervousness without putting his wall back up. "Do you want to change yours?"

"I'm going to make more tea and watch more cartoons. Here. With you." She grabbed her cup and stood, turning away a little. "Which is an excuse I didn't realize until you pointed it out."

He laughed, running a hand through his hair. "You still don't like cartoons, do you?"

"Not really." She shrugged, turning away. She had done it fast, but not fast enough. He had never seen her so red. "But I do like you."