Disclaimer: No, I don't own Teen Titans.
Chapter 59
"Beast Boy to Raven," the former whispered into his communicator, "come in, Raven."
A black vortex appeared beside him, and Raven stepped out.
"GAHHHH!" Beast Boy jumped aside, "I meant you should call back," he waved his communicator at her, "not burst into my room!"
"We said 2am," Raven rolled her eyes, "you didn't need to call."
"So you weren't even going to warn me?!" Beast Boy cried, "what if I was changing?! Or-"
"Everyone knows you rarely change uniforms. It'd be a miracle if I walked in on you."
"Oh yeah?" Beast Boy huffed, insulted by the attack on his not-so-hygienic hygiene habits, "well...uh..." he wracked his brain for an equally insulting retort, "maybe you wanted to walk in on me! Why else would you let future me move into your room?"
Raven reddened.
"Ew."
Beast Boy smiled triumphantly.
"Do you want to find the kids or not?" Raven deflected, eager to erase the picture Beast Boy painted in her mind.
"Huh?" Beast Boy's brow furrowed, before remembering the reason for her late night visit, "oh! Yeah! Team Logan to the res-" he felt himself enveloped in darkness before emerging in the common room, "-cue."
Raven let go of his arm.
"Dude, you could have warned me first."
"I might have if you hadn't been too busy playing mental 'house'."
"Hey! I-"
"Quiet," Raven shushed him, "do you want to wake everyone up?"
"I mean," Beast Boy followed her over to the mainframe, watching as she pulled up the Jump City PD database, "would it be that bad to tell them that we KNOW because Marie called Ryan Ma-"
"If my future self didn't want them to know about Mark, then we're definitely not telling anyone now," Raven typed in some additional commands, pulling the footage from the mall's CCTV cameras.
"But you don't even want there to be a future 'us'," Beast Boy countered, "and Starfire said there was a whole different future she saw when she time traveled, so maybe in our future we never even have kids, so can't we just-"
"No," Raven repeated, "we can't."
Beast Boy moved to respond, then stopped himself, a glint in his eye, and sauntered closer to Raven, "so...you're saying in our future you totally do wanna marry me? Is it the ears?" He wiggled them, along with his eyebrows, "they're hard to resist, right? Everyone digs them."
"The only thing I'm going to be 'digging'", Raven seethed through clenched teeth, "is your grave if you don't be quiet."
"Are you sure?" Beast Boy prodded, "because it sounds like-"
"I am NOT marrying you," Raven snapped, "but clearly we don't understand the specifics of time travel, so we have no idea how telling the rest of the team is going to impact future us from Marie and Ryan's timeline."
"But-"
"Here," Raven interrupted, unwilling to entertain any more of Beast Boy's insinuations, "this is the footage from the food court."
Beast Boy stepped closer to the screen while Raven paused and zoomed into the image.
"They don't look that much like us," Raven commented, "but if we switch out the coloring..." she took a screenshot of the image, and superimposed another shot of Ryan and Marie from the tower's security footage on top of it.
"Whoa..." Beast Boy said in awe.
"The girl could definitely be Marie," Raven asserted, then pulled up a separate image from the day the kids had used Cyborg's holorings, "and the boy looks pretty similar to Cyborg's holoring version."
"If they just left his ears alone, it'd be a lot easier to know if it was him," Beast Boy commented.
"It would also defeat the purpose of using a holoring in the first place."
Raven closed the other images and played the footage from the mall again.
"Mark!" The low quality audio crackled.
"See?" Beast Boy cried, "they look like them, they sound like them, and one of them's called Mark? That's totally NOT a coincidence."
Raven didn't respond, eyes trained on the footage.
"Right?"
"Sh," she demanded.
Beast Boy trained his attention back on the screen.
"Lily! Stop stealing my food!"
Raven stopped the footage.
"Did you hear that?" Raven asked him.
"...Yeah?" Beast Boy replied, confused. Hadn't they already decided that the kids were theirs?
"Lily," Raven repeated the audio.
"I guess that's Marie's code name?" Beast Boy offered, unsure of where Raven was going with it.
"What if they got to choose their names," Raven turned to him.
"I don't think Ravager would be that nice..."
"So you do think the name 'Mark' was a coincidence?"
"No! I mean-I don't know!" Beast Boy admitted, frustrated.
Raven turned back to the screen and clicked play.
"Children," audio cackled, "sharing is caring, isn't it? If you run out of French fries, there's no reason we can't get more."
Raven paused it again.
"Does that sound like someone who wouldn't let them pick their names?"
"I don't know," Beast Boy said, "how could you even tell that?"
"I can't," Raven ceded, "but I do know that Ravager is calculated. She'd been planning her attack on the tower for weeks. She hacked Cyborg, put cameras in the tower, hid those bots - she's controlling," Beast Boy listened intently, "so there's no way she let the kids go out without her."
"So..." Beast Boy puzzled, "the girl with them is Ravager?"
Raven nodded.
"I think so. And I also think she's bribing them into liking her."
"Bribing them?"
"You heard them at the mall," Raven said, not feeling the need to replay the rest of the tape, "she gave them fast food and took them toy shopping. Kids like that stuff. Right?"
Beast Boy nodded vigorously and added brightly, "I do too!"
"Good for you," Raven said unenthusiastically, before continuing her thought, "so it's possible that Ravager let them choose their own names as a way of getting them to like her."
"How could they like her?!" Beast Boy cried, "even if she bribed them with stuff - she kidnapped them!"
"Exactly."
"Exactly what?" Beast Boy demanded, lost in Raven's logic.
"I don't think they do like her. She's trying, and maybe she's succeeding with Ryan, but she's not getting anywhere with Marie."
"But...how can you even tell-"
"Because Ryan's code name is 'Mark'," Raven said, "and I think Marie picked it. She was sending us a message."
"Really?" Beast Boy asked, doubtfully.
"Definitely," Raven stated resolutely, "she's a smart kid."
"She takes after her mom!" Beast Boy beamed, and Raven rolled her eyes, "so...any other insights, oh brainy one?" He asked jokingly, then added, more seriously, "'cause I'm not sure how any of this is gonna help us find them..."
"We have two leads now," Raven informed him, "first - we know what their holoring disguises look like," Beast Boy gave a nod of agreement, "and two, we have a name."
"A name?" Beast Boy asked, "whose name?"
"I don't know," Raven replied, "but if Mark was meant to be a clue, maybe Marie's code name was one also."
"But," Beast Boy wracked his brain for the other name they'd heard, "we don't know anybody named Lily."
"But Ravager might."
"Duuude...you're not just smart - you're a genius!" Beast Boy wrapped his arms around her, squeezing her in his joy at the thought of actually getting closer to finding the kids.
"...Beast Boy? Raven?"
The common room lights switched on, and Raven turned the mainframe computer off just in time for Robin to conclude that they were not researching a lead he'd personally dismissed, but were actually engaged in other...activities.
"Are you guys...hugging?"
Raven and Beast Boy turned to each other, momentarily having forgotten that his arms were still around her, then their eyes widened and they jumped apart, aided by a jolt of energy shoving Beast Boy away.
"I...didn't mean to interrupt..." Robin backed towards the door.
"No!" Beast Boy cried, "we were just-"
Raven slapped a band of energy over his mouth, which did little to help their cause, but prevented the truth from being spilled, and said, "we were just talking...about Marie. We just...miss her..." Raven said, eyes downcast in a grand display of sadness.
"Oh," Robin's face morphed from one of embarrassment to understanding, "I'll...get out of your way then." He left through the doors, without the coffee he had certainly come in for.
"Good save, Raven," Beast Boy grinned, "very convincing."
"Convincing?" Raven asked, quizzically.
"Yeah," Beast Boy said, "I know you only let me talk about missing Marie and stuff because you feel bad. And she's technically your kid so you're supposed to care."
"Supposed to?"
"I know you don't miss her Raven - it's ok," he assured her, "it's just nice that you let me-"
"I might not miss her the way you do," Raven informed him icily, "but that doesn't mean I don't think about her every day and wonder if she's ok or hurt or taken care of," her anger intensified, and Beast Boy backed up against the mainframe in fear, "it doesn't mean I don't care. Just because I don't express every single emotion I'm feeling doesn't mean I'm heartless, Beast Boy. I wasn't acting. Whether or not I like it, she's my kid. I can't not care that I don't know where she is or who she's hurting with her powers. She's my responsibility. And I failed. How can I not be upset?!"
And with those parting words Raven summoned a portal, "Raven, wait, I'm-", and disappeared within it, "sorry," he muttered.
Beast Boy ran a hand along his face.
"Rough night?" Robin walked back in from outside the doors, clearly having heard the loud end to their conversation.
"You have no idea."
/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\
Ravager watched the monitors as the children slept. In lieu of that ludicrously overpriced console her Beast had wanted, she had distracted him with a set of tiny connectable building blocks. The kind that causes an unimaginable amount of momentary, shooting pain when stepped upon. She couldn't help but smile when she thought of how she might incorporate them into their training. Perhaps if the floor was covered in little plastic bricks the two would make a better effort to stay afloat instead of constantly falling back to the ground. It was something they had yet to focus on, but Ravager was well aware of those aspects of their performance that required improvement. Staying afloat was one of many.
Her Witch - Marie as she had now consented to call her, was easier to please. She'd simply wanted a stuffed animal. A frog. Perhaps the green reminded her of her father. Rose was quite displeased with the connection, but she had promised a toy of their choosing, and she was a person of strong morals, however unconventional the world might find them. If Rose should make a promise, then naught could stop her from following through. Unlike so many others, people whose oaths and vows amounted to nothing when faced with hardship, challenges - any small inconvenience that might put them off their way, Rose's word was worth its weight in gold, if not in platinum. So she let her little Marie sleep fast, clutching the frog of blasphemous green to her chest.
Both children slept on the mattresses and sheets they'd earned, their heads on pillows they had won through tirelessly honed attacks. Both children slept with smiles on their faces. And Ravager took pride in it all.
/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\_/\
Marie did smile, as she drifted off. But she did not share Ryan's dreams of chicken nuggets and new toys. No, Marie smiled because she was still sure her parents would find her. Her real family, not Ravager's invention. She had thought she'd seen them, and the more the thought about it, the more she had convinced herself, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they would come for her. So Marie would wait. But that was ok. Marie had hope. And so she smiled.
