"You have spoken with him?"
Based on her eerily calm tone, Garfield took it less as a question and more of an accusation. "Not since he left," he managed after an almost damning hesitation.
"I do not understand, then, why did you just say he was with her?" Koriand'r took a gentle step closer to him, and his muscles tensed with anticipation. He could always sense a fight, and his defensive animal instincts set his nerves on edge.
"That's just what he told me, Star."
She stared blankly at him for a moment longer before furrowing her brows. "Told you that he was going to Gotham...to be with her?"
"To help her," Roy tried, a little more aggressively than Gar would have preferred, seeing how the grooves etched along the alien forehead deepened, "She needed help tracking creeps who were trying to hurt-"
"Only his help, though?" Kori snapped, though her pitch remained eerily innocent, "Surely if she was in such dire need of help, he would have asked all of us to join him?" She crossed her impassive threshold, her tone souring with each syllable. "What kind of help could she possibly need that would just require him alone?"
Roy looked to Gar, who could only shrug. "He kept saying the job was quick and quiet."
"Kept? It has been weeks, Garfield, without a word to anyone...and you were not going to say anything to me?"
"I didn't wanna upset you more than he already had," Garfield said, knowing well how weak of a defense it was. "I told him it was stupid."
"Oh, well," Kori scoffed, "as long as you told him that it was stupid. That makes up for your dishonesty."
"Come on, Red," Roy groaned, "you know it's not his fault."
"It will be if he is in danger-"
"You don't know that he's in danger. Maybe he just doesn't wanna call you back. Don't project onto everyone cos' you're feeling bad."
A darkness fell over Kori's features that gave Garfield chills. "I am not projecting."
"Aren't you?" Roy smirked wickedly, and Gar almost gagged on the strange tension that swelled between them.
"Do not," she warned as her fists slowly simmered with flames, but Roy acknowledged her warning with a ruthless glint in the green of his eyes.
"Don't what, Princess? Remind you of how unconcerned you for him last night?"
"Screw you, Harper," Kori snarled, her emerald eyes narrowing above her reddening cheeks.
"What," Roy beamed as if it was Christmas morning, "again?"
Gar only had time to widen his eyes at Roy's meaning before the room radiated with Kori's flames. Even as Roy dodged her starbolt in time to save himself, Garfield still dove and brought Koriand'r to the floor, evading her billowing heat himself by shifting into a green hare as he rolled away from her.
As the enraged Tamaranian recovered, Roy managed to restrain her from behind with a standing armlock, but it became clear his strength was no match for hers. When her hands reignited with emerald rage, Gar shifted into a gorilla and grabbed the alien, hurling her toward the balcony. He rushed for the sliding glass door, intending to lure her outside before she set the Tower on fire, but Kori was too quick, and her next starbolt hit him square in the chest.
The blistering heat was so intense that Gar barely noticed the large glass panes shattering around him as he barrelled through the door onto the balcony. Instinctively, he thought to shift into a bat or a squirrel or some other gravity-savvy creature to avoid breaking any bones, but the shock and smell of his burning flesh were too overwhelming that he only managed to change back into himself before crashing into the marble fire pit.
His brief journey back to consciousness was distorted and painful as every other aching inch of him felt punctured with glass shards. Not to mention the charred and tender skin across his chest was exposed, peppered with a few marbles. When the ringing in his ears finally gave, Garfield heard a dissonance of different voices, and it occurred to him that Vic and Karen stood over him. In the haziness, he made out Vic's voice.
"He's not even in Gotham, the bikes just outside the city. Last location was logged on the 17th." Karen's voice was thick with annoyance as her gentle fingers pulled at the fabric of his shirt.
"The 17th? That's when we got here."
Kori's voice seemed tiny in his ears, "Is he alright?"
"Does he look alright?" Vic scolded.
"Where outside the city?" Roy asked.
Gar noted a strange pause, wondering if he was suddenly waking from a dream. He fought to open his eyes, recognizing the balcony's white cover, dotted with two rows of light fixtures that merged into solid lines within his blurry vision.
"A few miles inland of Rafael's Landing," she said knowingly as if they all should immediately understand her foreboding tone. Gar might have caught on if he wasn't completely consumed by the intensely tender pain.
"You do not mean by..."
"Yeah, by the STAR bunker," Karen finished Kori's sentence when the alien trailed off in apparent shock.
"Motherfucker..." Roy said, "the girl wasn't lying, then."
"Guys," Vic said, his voice sounding suddenly far away from Garfield. "I got a signal."
"From Dick?"
"Raven."
Gar's ears perked, and even though it seemed like electricity rushed through his veins at the sound of her name, his limbs remained heavy. "Rae..."
"Easy Logan," Gar heard Karen say as he continued to struggle, heeding the feel of more hands on his heavy body, and the last thing he remembered before slipping back to the numbing darkness was her telling him again to stay still.
The flavor of raw, dewy earth seeped into Raven's senses as she stood for a still moment, letting her eyes adjust to the sunlight that trickled down from the redwood canopy. Beyond the natural chatter of a waking forest, she heard the static of waves breaking along a nearby shore, which was telling of the taste of brine on her tongue. The morning was crisp between the nicks of her fishnets, but the humidity felt good compared to the dry frost of the portal world from which Raven had just emerged. As all her animated senses mingled at once to ground her to the dimensions of this space and time, Raven could think only of how gorgeously alive Earth was.
She let her eyelids fall again with another great breath of petrichor, savoring the early morning music of this realm until the frantic pinging of phone notifications rang from her coat pocket. Mainly consisting of failed attempts to establish her location, Raven counted six messages from Vic's system and one text message from Kori, requesting that Raven call the Tower as soon as she was safe. The eighth and final notification was a voicemail from Gar, the sight of which brought a strange, nervous smile to her lips. She quickly held her phone to her ear, careful to keep the splintered screen from nicking her skin.
"Hey Rave..." she could tell he smiled as he spoke her name, but still, the distress that hid in his voice made something in Raven's chest clench, "hope you're ok, wherever you are. We uh...we still don't know what was in that drink, but we got the girl who spilled it on you. Turns out she's HIVE and knows things about the Crow, but only wants to talk to you...Told her to get in line, right? Anyway... I know you'll check in when you can, so, I'm not sure what the point of leaving this is, but I think it's making me feel better, kinda. We uh, haha...we should have just stayed in that hallway, huh? Well, see you soon enough, I guess. Ok. Bye."
Smirking, Raven let the hand that held her phone fall to her side, somewhat dazed and a little embarrassed by his message, remembering the heat of his body against hers in the dark.
Fuck, Raven.
She thought of his firm grip on her hips before he ran tantalizing fingers up her waist and to the nape of her neck, all while his breathy voice tickled her skin.
I wanna take my time.
Velvet lips pulled at her ear, igniting a riot beneath her skin that demanded only she be closer to him.
It's your turn to be patient.
Lust is a powerful thing, she thought with minor concern, wishing her portals could take her back in time to that very hallway with him. As she minded the brief fluttering between her legs, Raven decided she'd give about anything to be back in Garfield's grasp, but a phone call will have to do for now.
She gently tapped her thumb against his name on her cracked screen to call his phone but heard the distinct chime of failed service before the phone even reached her ear. She tried sending Kori a text before calling Gar again, but still no service. With the sudden thought that the Titans might be out searching for her right now, Raven wondered if it'd be wiser to draw a portal to the Tower first and return later with her team by her side. After all, the fact remained that she had no idea why Dick's voice led her to this muggy, forgotten corner of the coastal redwood forest.
Above her, a branch abruptly snapped, its echo forcing Raven back into her present body, which met resistance from the wet soil beneath her heels. As she tugged her foot free from the soft ground, Raven looked down at her nightclub attire and seemed to fully remember herself, wondering how last night seemed at once fifteen minutes but also forever ago. From her teachings in Azarath, Raven knew that the lack of measurable time in the kosmoz distorted a traveler's clock, but it was another thing to experience it like this. She understood the superstitions about being lost to the portal world, and it was both a fascinating and troubling truth to learn. But she was not given the proper time to ponder on it further, as her eyelids grew strangely heavy. With a few slow blinks, Raven saw the image of a soggy, rotting door of an old wooden shed sharpen behind her eyelids.
With another blink, that same door was suddenly open, the threshold outlining a dark, deep void of nothingness that called to her. Quickly, the door slammed shut, the vines that ran along its walls quivering from the force. Raven's eyes split open at the strange, delayed echo of that door darting through the woods around her. Her heart racing, she heeded the abrupt eery silence of the forest, no more chatter, no ocean breeze. Raven slowly turned her body around as she scanned the jail of trunks around her, pausing in the direction of the distant swell of cawing birds. It's here.
Almost everything resembling instinct urged Raven to return to the Tower; she was not ready to face this thing alone. The memory of the Crow's paralyzing touch tingled beneath her skin, and for a moment, Raven thought her legs might buckle beneath her.
Her hands illuminated with black energy as they rose to draw a portal to the Tower, and Raven hated how she couldn't keep her fingers from trembling in the process. With a sharp breath, she let her eyelids fall again with determination for home, but the sound of Dick's desperation gave her pause.
"Raven, please..."
This call was different from the others in that it wasn't a distorted imitation from her memory. Instead, it was almost like Dick stood just behind her, begging softly in her ear. Raven swung around to find nothing and no one standing near her, and the awareness made heat rise in her blood. A low, frustrated growl vibrated in her throat, and for the first time since the Crow barged into her life uninvited, Raven didn't feel upset or uncomfortable or afraid. At this point, she was simply angry. She was being played with, and Raven was about finished with this game.
With a stubborn step forward, she marched down an unmarked trail into a dark corner of the woods, following the sound of ugly, cawing birds.