Four days, bitches! I'm on FIRE.
Words were not Beast Boy's forte. He knew that he'd never be able to discuss War and Peace with Raven. He knew he'd spend a year just trying to get through the book. When he spoke, it came out awkward and stumbling. He knew his constant dudes and likes made people think he was stupid before he ever said anything stupid, and when he tried to write his own jokes he could never come up with much more than puns.
But he was pretty good with pictures. When he was a child in Kenya, slathered in sunscreen from head to toe, he remembered sitting by a stream, staring into the water and watching swirling fish and bugs skimming over the surface. Years later, he could still put a pen to paper and draw them. It took a long time, slow with plenty of erasing, and he wasn't good with anything other than pencils, but he was proud of his pictures.
He had a collection of them. There were lions and seals from the zoo, sleeping in the sun. There were open mouthed huskies and landscapes at sunset. There were deer creeping through the brush, and rabbits with their nose twitching in the air. They had been growing in a small drawer deep in his closet, until he had Raven.
Raven was good with words. She would sit with him in her room, grabbing books from the shelf and reading him poems and prose, her voice soft and soothing as she told him about magic and love and adventure and death. He was jealous of that, her ability to find the prettiest words and understand them, and explain them in a way that even he could understand.
He wanted to pay her back for that. For her patience with him, for loving him even though his best attempt at a poem was "Roses are red, violets are blue, I hope you're not angry. I love you." Even though the longest book he had ever read by himself was just under three hundred pages. Even though the oldest book he had written was published in 1972.
He made her cards. Each picture he had saved over the years flipped over, with cautious, steady handwriting stumbling with awkward professions of love and promises to be kind. He drew pictures of her, of their friends, and slid them over her door to dash away when she couldn't see. It was better than handing them over in person, where she stared back at him, her eyebrows slightly raised.
But he knew she liked them, though she had only praised him once or twice for it, and that was enough for him.