Beast Boy woke to the sound of whimpering.
In his groggy, half asleep state, he stumbled from bed and tried to find the source of the noise. It took several seconds for him to realize that his room was in fact, silent.
It was coming from down the hall, from Raven's room.
Sighing, the shapeshifter sat back down on his mattress, resting his elbows on his knees and rubbing the ache from hands that had just remembered the strain he placed them under the day before. They had stopped the H.I.V.E Five from hijacking an armored car laden with jewels, in the heat of battle Gizmo had called to Raven and his words chilled them all.
"Have a great birthday tomorrow, demon."
Beast Boy, according to what Cyborg had told him about it later, lost control and reverted to his human form. He had snarled and dashed Gizmo to the concrete with his gloved fists, knocking the criminal into unconsciousness with a flurry of blows and pivoting to slam a gorilla's worth of knuckles into Mammoth's jaw as he came to intervene.
The green teen had looked for Raven after the other H.I.V.E members had been captured, but she was nowhere to be found.
Now, staring at the wall and unwillingly intruding on her private moment with the darkness that she so rarely allowed to overcome her, Beast Boy hated himself for that slip in control. He should have known that it would solve nothing, he should have gone to her in support, but instead the beastly nature he was so aptly named for was allowed free reign and he had simply brought more pain into the world, rather than helping his friend deal with hers.
His bedside clock read 12:03am, and the birthday girl was in pain, crying while the monster she shared a floor with listened. He could never find sleep again tonight, as much as he wished to give her the privacy she deserved. The same keen senses that led him to the pleas of a lost child now kept him prisoner in the waking world while the girl down the hall fell to pieces.
Raven, curled up in her room, let go a single agony filled gasp.
Beast Boy's door was barely closed by the time he reached her own, a gentle salvo of taps announcing him.
"Rae, can I come in?" He breathed.
"Go. Away." The sorceress replied, her voice was even, deadpan in execution. If she had been speaking to any other Titan it would have sounded perfectly fine, but the pointed ears of her floor-mate found the broken intake of breath, the patter of tear drops on sheets.
"Raven, I can't stop you from feeling like this, but I can help you through it." Beast Boy insisted. "I know you must think I'm an idiot, and after yesterday I can understand why, but even an idiot knows you don't shut people out when you're in pain Rae."
Silence met him in response, such profound quiet that Beast Boy thought she had cast a spell.
"If you don't want to be seen like this, that's fine, but I'm not leaving." He said, sliding down the wall beside her door. "I'll sit out here and talk about the migration habits of blue whales all night if I have to, just so you know I'm here. It might even put you to sleep, though the kind of dreams people have when listening to facts about whales probably get weird. Let's see⦠There's a pod that goes passed Africa during late autu-"
Raven's door slid open, the girl herself stepping out wrapped in her cloak to look down at him, dressed in the boxers and loose white shirt he had worn to bed. "I don't think you're an idiot."
"What?" Beast Boy frowned.
"You said I think you're an idiot." She said uneasily shifting her weight and looking away. "I don't. You were angry that Gizmo brought up what I did and acted on instinct, protecting a friend. That doesn't make you an idiot."
"You didn't do those things Rae." The changeling said softly, rising slowly and stepping closer so that he could look her in the eye. "Trigon killed those people, Trigon did terrible things, but you stopped him. You saved us, all of us."
Raven shook her head, stepping back towards her room. "It never would have happened without me Garfield. If I had never come to earth, never even been born than the world would have been a better place, a happier place."
"Don't say that." Beast Boy whispered, his own eyes watering. "Rae, you've saved so many people, not just after Trigon. You've saved hundreds, maybe thousands of people with the Titans. You've helped tens of thousands stay happy and whole by making sure their kids, their siblings, their parents come home that night. You're the reason the Titans even exist!" He exclaimed, leaning down to peer up at the eyes she kept downcast. "A world without you isn't a world I want to live in. Not now, not ever."
Raven stared at him for a short moment, then a long moment. She stared, and the tears came back, but before Beast Boy could try to calm her again she had closed the small space between them and embraced him, her head buried in his shoulder as he tentatively returned the hug. "Thank you."
When they separated, Raven looked down at Beast Boy's hands with a frown. His gloves were off and for the first time she saw the claws that gleamed at their tips.
Beast Boy hurriedly put them behind him, blushing. "Sorry, did I scratch you?"
Raven shook her head, reaching out and gently tugging his left arm back, so that she could look at the talons in earnest. "Is this why you wear the gloves?"
"Yeah. They were a gift from Mento, or as close as a gift gets with him. I couldn't play with my toys or read my comics without eventually tearing them to shreds. People didn't want to shake my hand in fear that I'd accidentally hurt them. Mento wanted me to be respected, so he gave me the gloves."
Raven frowned, turning his hand over. "Do you like wearing them?"
"It's not about whether I like them, it's about whether I need them." He shrugged. "They're not the most comfortable things but they keep me from hurting the objects and people around me."
Dropping his hand, Raven lent against the wall, the cloak falling away slightly to reveal a long black nightshirt. "I don't want to keep you up Beast Boy, I'm fine now."
"So you'll get some sleep?" He asked worriedly.
Raven hesitated, torn between telling the truth or lying to keep Beast Boy content. "I'm probably going to read, or meditate. If I go to sleep, I'll dream about him again."
Beast Boy pursed his lips for a moment, before taking Raven's arm and stepping into her room. "Please don't freak out, I know it's your room and all, but I can help. Promise."
Raven, overcome by weariness and blinking tiredly, sighed as the shapeshifter directed her to the bed. "Fine, but I don't see what you can do to help me sleep, outside of turning into a whale and making noises."
"No transformations needed. Just, lay down and close your eyes." Insisted the changeling, who blushed and looked away as Raven undid her cloak and slid into the great bed that dominated the right half of her room.
No sooner had she settled than Beast Boy started talking in a deep, rhythmic way. The words made no sense to Raven, but she knew where they were from.
Beast Boy was chanting in Swahili.
His voice was even and constant, soft enough to be relaxing, but loud enough that she could hear him.
"You can't do this all night Garfield." She muttered, looking over to where Beast Boy had sat cross legged, his back and head lent against her wall. "You need to sleep too."
Beast Boy didn't move, his eyes glazed over and his body swaying ever so slightly. He was lost in the words, and in her exhaustion, Raven became lost in them too.
She dreamed of Africa.
To her chagrin, Beast Boy could chant all night. The words had changed somewhere along the way, and in his sleep deprived state it didn't seem to phase Garfield that she had awoken. Shadows enveloped him and she moved the selfless, stupid boy into the bed she had just vacated, sleep overtaking him instantly, yet the words continued faintly. In the few minutes it took Raven to find her clothes for the day he had swapped from Brazilian to English to an odd language that sounded like French, but wasn't.
"It must be some kind of creole." Raven murmured as she phased to the bathroom to prepare for the day.
As she went about her morning routine it shook Raven, just how much she didn't know about a boy that she spent almost every day around. It had never occurred to her that he wore the gloves for a reason, or that he spoke other languages. Somehow, over the course of several years, she had failed to learn almost anything about Beast Boy apart from the basics of his life.
"And now he's asleep in my bed." Raven muttered before the eyes of her reflection flew wide.
He was asleep in her bed.
The mirror cracked.
