Authors note: Please post comments about this. This is my first fanfic, so no doubt there's plenty of room for improvement.
Also, a little warning, this story is very Raven X Beast Boy focused (clean, don't worry... I don't *do* the other kind.), and does have content that may offend Terra fans. Please bear that in mind before reading.
Rated PG-13 because there will be some action later on, and might be violent.
This fanfic is written when I had just finished watching Betrayal, and prior to waching Fractured and later. and as such, it is based on the current TT universe at that time.... if anything happens after that episode to contradict this fanfic... well... it's just a fanfic guys!
Also, I have tried to keep consistant with the series, but I apologise if there are any mistakes (which I'm sure there are!)... I may have also fabricated a few things... best just to take this story with a pinch of salt ;)
Disclaimer: Well... you know all this, but I better put it anyway... I don't own or have anything to do with Teen Titans, or the characters featured in this story. They are all copyright of DC Comics.
Chapter 1 - Raven's Power
-------------------------
All was not well at Titans Tower. The whole group was in a pretty emotionally crippled state, as they had just learnt a valuble lesson about Trust.
Just 2 weeks ago, Terra, someone who they truely thought was their friend, and one of the few people to truely win the trust of the Titans, sold them out to Slade. They did not know why she did this, they suspected nothing, and always tried their hardest to make her feel welcome within the group and not feel like 'the new girl', and after all the care they took with her, it all got thrown in their face, and they were much the worse for it.
No doubt they will be much less eager to trust total strangers with inexplicably powerful powers in the future.
In retrospect, it all makes sense.... here we had a girl who just appeared out of no-where, and had power even greater than most of the Titans, dispite the fact that she worked alone and had no-one to help her develop her powers.... it seemed so obvious to them now, it was highly foolish of them to not wonder where she got her abilities up to such a level...
However, the villians in Jump City aren't exactly going to wait until the Titans feel better, the Titans had a job to do, and could not let their pains effect the innocent civilians of the city... so they tried to ignore their shattered hearts and pushed on...
Suprisingly enough, this effected Raven pretty badly... but now that we think about it, is it really so suprising? Raven herself seldom opens herself up to anybody, intentionally keeps her feelings and emotions down, and as a result she is not so eager to trust.
So for Raven develop trust for Terra was a significant event. It had shown to her how much she had changed since she joined the Titans. Her whole ideals of surpassing ones own emotions, becoming better than them, so they are no longer needed, soon became challenged when the revelation of actually making friends hit her.
She was overwhelmed with a new feeling of care and compassion for her friends, people who dispite the obvious differences, she felt she could truely relate to and the feeling that other people actually appriciated her company... all such feelings that Raven had not felt since she was a small child, they all hit her like a brick... Raven was changing, and dispite her relatively emotionless exterior, she probably had the deepest and most complex form of 'emotion' of all the Titans, and it became harder and harder for Raven to keep her powers under control.
This of course made the betrayal of Terra hit Raven all the harder. Suddenly she was reminded of why she avoided those feelings in the first place, the lies, the deceit, one of the few people Raven actually began to trust on her own accord, turned out to be lying all along... she hated the pain it caused her inside, it drove her insane, making her break down close to tears... her very perception of people she had grown to trust had been warped.... if Terra, someone she trusted, could do this, could she really trust any other person she trusted? Like the other Titans, her closest friends in the world?
Raven knew deep down that the other Titans would not do such a thing, but she still could not help but let such questions enter her mind...
In one swoop, Terra had destroyed everything it had taken Raven a lifetime to build.
The one person she had an unwavering trust for however was Beast Boy, She could not explain it, she did not even understand it herself, but he was the one person she felt comfortable around, who she could be freely open around... it was always a weird thought when she was left alone with him, she felt her stomach churn out of fear of what she may make happen... her powers were based on emotion, all of the Titans know it... to have an outburst only around Beast Boy would only serve to prove that she actually had feelings for him... so she ended up being all the more cruel to him at times, often putting him down... and it killed her to do this, but it was the only way she could keep her mind level...
Raven, the cynical, seemingly cold and unfeeling goth girl falling head over heels in love with a guy who she should, by all logic, clash with in a big way? That messed with Raven's head, that's for sure... but she did not care, all she cared about was the warm feeling it gave her whenever he spoke to her... hearing his voice alone was enough to comfort her and realise for all the sick, disgusting back-stabbers in the world, there are still people out there worth living for...
Beast Boy proved himself a loyal friend to Raven ever since he stood by her when she was battling Trigon in her mind, she never expected such devotion from anyone until that point, she hadn't even really took any notice of him, but she saw a side to him she'd never seen before, and realised that under his joker exterior was a person with similarly deep feelings to her own... and she could not get that out of her mind.
And this was what made her so angry towards Terra. She could see quite plainly that Beast Boy had a crush on her, and this drove her wild with anger...
... Even after she 'made up' with Terra, she was always sure not to let them get too close, butting in whenever she felt that they were getting close, it was killing her to see Beast Boy getting so attatched to her, but what was killing her even more was that for at least a year prior to this she so badly wanted to confess her feelings to him... so badly wanted to just hold him in her arms, that alone would be enough to make her forget about all her problems...
So for this new girl to just wander along and win him over from the start... it was infuriating.
Raven tried he best to get herself through this, but she had been finding it difficult to keep her emotions under control, and this had not gone un-noticed by the Titans, but could never have guessed the reason for it.
Someone else did know however.
Terra's stay, while brief, was ample time to make sure Slade could see as much of the Titans as he could... hidden cameras were placed around Titans Tower as soon as Terra moved into the place (some which even Starfire missed when she thought she destroyed them when Terra betrayed them... Slade would not create all the cameras conventionally of course, he knew better), Slade could see them all day, every day in the tower for as long as he wanted...
And he took an interest in Raven ever since catching a glimpse of her true power when she battled Dr. Light (You think Slade doesn't have the technology to keep track of them?), and ever since that day, her enormous power fascinated him. Power he didn't even know she has inside her, had had to learn about this energy, he wanted more...
But Slade knew enough about Raven to know that her powers stem from her current emotional state, and the and the key to her powers is her emotion... the only way to push Raven far enough for her to release such energy again would be to upset her to such a level where she cannot keep her energy under control... and we're not talking about physical pain here, we're talking deep emotional pain...
Things were much easier with Robin. He has a tough exterior, but Slade knows that simply threatening to harm his 'dear sweet' Starfire would be enough to bring Robin to his knees. For someone so strong, he was too easy...
But the whole basis of Raven's power is her ability to keep her emotions under control, that's what she does best, what is there in this world that would effect Raven enough to break such ability?
...the hidden cameras were the answer to this. As Slade kept his close eye on Raven, he noticed pretty quickly how differently Raven acted around Beast Boy... at first he just pinned it as irritation... "Understandable" he thought... but he soon realised there was more to it than this, he noticed how Raven looked at Beast Boy when his back was turned, the care and admiration in her eyes, which she would never let Beast Boy himself see... the way she used to stare at him, quickly changing the expression on her face when he noticed, usually accompanying it with sone cynical remark... he could even see what she was writing about him in her diary in her bedroom...
There was no doubt about it, Beast Boy was the one thing that truely had an emotional hold on Raven, the one thing that somehow managed to get so deep into her heart ... Slade was no stranger to emotional pain, he knew full well what Raven was feeling...
Beast Boy was the key to Raven.
Beast Boy was sitting alone in his bedroom. The other Titans thought he was still upset over Terra, but the truth was he has not thought about her in over a week. Beast Boy had been thinking long and hard in his bedroom while he was aloine, letting things sink in and slip into perspective...
For the longest time, he cared so much for Raven...!
See, Beast Boy, dispite all his corney jokes and wit, is actually, like Raven, very much an emotional guy. In fact, also like Raven, he had a major problem keening control of his emotions, and for the longest time, he became a loner who avoided human contact, determined to overcome his emotions and feel like he was his own boss, like he didn't need other people to live a happy life... he wanted, above all, the eliminate the need for him to feel emotion.
Meeting the Titans changed all that. Suddenly he saw the joys of having friends and people who care about you, they helped him overcome his pains, show him that there are people out there worth feeling for, and that it's worth going through the bad, negetive feelings to get to it... he became a new person, but he never did forget his past, and was still full of such pain...
So whenever he looks at Raven, he see's someone who he truely understands, someone who can understand the emotional pain he has suffered, and he understand her pains also, he felt connected to her, whenever he was around her, his heart would beat fast, and he'd become overflowing with such emotion that he's have to wise-crack to cover himself up...
He never thought he had a chance with Raven though, because while he knew Raven was full of emotion, he had no idea they were about him... he always thought that such a beautiful girl was far beyond his reach, and as much as it pained him to do it, he had to try and push on... he did not want to spoil the friendship that the two had developed by opening up his heart to her...
Terra? He thought he loved her... for the first week, his mind was driven wild with all these questions he could not answer.... why did dhe do this? He trusted her with all his heart, and placed so much faith in her... dispite the fact that she kept disappearing away from Titans Tower, and stayed in her room for long periods of time, which even caused the other Titans to wonder what she was up to... but he kept an unwavering trust in her that she was simply busy and that he could rely on her... he really though she was different to other people in the world, that she does understand emotional pain.... and dispite trying so hard for her, she turned against him as if he'd done nothing at all... like all his love and care was worthless, completely meaningless.... and that killed him, he'd pace around the room all day simply because his mind was in such as mess that he had nothing better to do... walking around muttering to himself how she could do this to him... is this really so common? He was not exactly an expert on relationships so he had relatively little experience, but if this was a common occurence in relationships, he wanted none of it, he hated the pain and the feeling that he felt worthless because of the pain...
As time moved on however, Terra slipped further and further from his mind... when he first saw her, he saw a cute little girl who actually found him funny... but his deep thinking over the past week made him realise that they really had little in common... their similarities were skin-deep, and Terra's betrayal showed to him that to do such a terrible thing, she couldn't have been anywhere near as emotional as himself.... she could never truely understand how he feels.... she was a silly schoolgirl crush, and nothing more...
To make things worse, Raven, the one who he essentially began to ignore with the arrival of Terra, began to show real care for him... she tried her hardest to make him feel better and to ease his pain... constantly trying to make sure he knows that the other Titans did care about him, and that he was not so worthless after all... her clearly understood the pain he was going through and wanted to make it all better...and it just served to remind him of how much Raven relies on her feelings also... he realised what a fool he had been for letting a mere cute little blonde get in the way of someone he really did care about... all this time he thought he was in love, when he was really letting some girl cloud his judgement.... he hated himself for this, hated how he let himself think that someone else could really have more in common with him than Raven... he was too scared to admit it, but the fact that he understood Raven so well meant he just adored her...
Suddenly Beast Boy heard a a shuffle in his room, and he awoke suddenly. He had fallen asleep with all the thoughts that had been rattling inside his mind... he really wanted to confess his thoughts to Raven, but with her getting so much closer to him over the past 2 weeks, it just seemed even more was at risk if it all backfired... and thinking such thoughts was very tiring.
He looked around the room and could not see anything... the light was off, so it was difficult to tell if there really was anyone, or anything, in the room, or if his mind was just playing trick on him... he began to worry, ever since Slade attacked Titans Tower, anything seemed possible, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to suspect something was there... but the darkness of the room and the icy cold air just served to make him even more scared, perhaps to the point of even thinking it wasn't even Slade at at all and was perhaps something else... the Titans were hardly short of enemies, and Slade knows this, perhaps other people had become aware of the secrets of Titans Tower, and Slade was letting them do the dirty work? Or perhaps it was deeper still, ever since his trip into Raven's mind, after the scary stuff he saw in there, his mind was open to anything more sinister and dark... that thought alone made Beast Boy begin to sweat... he looked around frantically, when suddenly he thought he saw something near his ruffled pile of clothes in the corner of the room...
He was just about to look there when he heard a loud bang on on his door.. "Crap!" he thought.... it was going on to 2am by now, there was no way the other Titans would still be awake at this hour...
This worried him even more... who could it be? Was is the same thing that was making the noises? Was he really hearing something in the corridor all along?
He decided to swallow his fear and approach the door... after all, what would Raven say is she knew he got so scared over someone being at the door?! ... he slowly approached the door, readyed himself to turn into a vicious beast if it turned out to be a threat to him...
He slowly began to open the door, and suddenly screamed on the top of his voice...
To be continued.
Also, a little warning, this story is very Raven X Beast Boy focused (clean, don't worry... I don't *do* the other kind.), and does have content that may offend Terra fans. Please bear that in mind before reading.
Rated PG-13 because there will be some action later on, and might be violent.
This fanfic is written when I had just finished watching Betrayal, and prior to waching Fractured and later. and as such, it is based on the current TT universe at that time.... if anything happens after that episode to contradict this fanfic... well... it's just a fanfic guys!
Also, I have tried to keep consistant with the series, but I apologise if there are any mistakes (which I'm sure there are!)... I may have also fabricated a few things... best just to take this story with a pinch of salt ;)
Disclaimer: Well... you know all this, but I better put it anyway... I don't own or have anything to do with Teen Titans, or the characters featured in this story. They are all copyright of DC Comics.
Chapter 1 - Raven's Power
-------------------------
All was not well at Titans Tower. The whole group was in a pretty emotionally crippled state, as they had just learnt a valuble lesson about Trust.
Just 2 weeks ago, Terra, someone who they truely thought was their friend, and one of the few people to truely win the trust of the Titans, sold them out to Slade. They did not know why she did this, they suspected nothing, and always tried their hardest to make her feel welcome within the group and not feel like 'the new girl', and after all the care they took with her, it all got thrown in their face, and they were much the worse for it.
No doubt they will be much less eager to trust total strangers with inexplicably powerful powers in the future.
In retrospect, it all makes sense.... here we had a girl who just appeared out of no-where, and had power even greater than most of the Titans, dispite the fact that she worked alone and had no-one to help her develop her powers.... it seemed so obvious to them now, it was highly foolish of them to not wonder where she got her abilities up to such a level...
However, the villians in Jump City aren't exactly going to wait until the Titans feel better, the Titans had a job to do, and could not let their pains effect the innocent civilians of the city... so they tried to ignore their shattered hearts and pushed on...
Suprisingly enough, this effected Raven pretty badly... but now that we think about it, is it really so suprising? Raven herself seldom opens herself up to anybody, intentionally keeps her feelings and emotions down, and as a result she is not so eager to trust.
So for Raven develop trust for Terra was a significant event. It had shown to her how much she had changed since she joined the Titans. Her whole ideals of surpassing ones own emotions, becoming better than them, so they are no longer needed, soon became challenged when the revelation of actually making friends hit her.
She was overwhelmed with a new feeling of care and compassion for her friends, people who dispite the obvious differences, she felt she could truely relate to and the feeling that other people actually appriciated her company... all such feelings that Raven had not felt since she was a small child, they all hit her like a brick... Raven was changing, and dispite her relatively emotionless exterior, she probably had the deepest and most complex form of 'emotion' of all the Titans, and it became harder and harder for Raven to keep her powers under control.
This of course made the betrayal of Terra hit Raven all the harder. Suddenly she was reminded of why she avoided those feelings in the first place, the lies, the deceit, one of the few people Raven actually began to trust on her own accord, turned out to be lying all along... she hated the pain it caused her inside, it drove her insane, making her break down close to tears... her very perception of people she had grown to trust had been warped.... if Terra, someone she trusted, could do this, could she really trust any other person she trusted? Like the other Titans, her closest friends in the world?
Raven knew deep down that the other Titans would not do such a thing, but she still could not help but let such questions enter her mind...
In one swoop, Terra had destroyed everything it had taken Raven a lifetime to build.
The one person she had an unwavering trust for however was Beast Boy, She could not explain it, she did not even understand it herself, but he was the one person she felt comfortable around, who she could be freely open around... it was always a weird thought when she was left alone with him, she felt her stomach churn out of fear of what she may make happen... her powers were based on emotion, all of the Titans know it... to have an outburst only around Beast Boy would only serve to prove that she actually had feelings for him... so she ended up being all the more cruel to him at times, often putting him down... and it killed her to do this, but it was the only way she could keep her mind level...
Raven, the cynical, seemingly cold and unfeeling goth girl falling head over heels in love with a guy who she should, by all logic, clash with in a big way? That messed with Raven's head, that's for sure... but she did not care, all she cared about was the warm feeling it gave her whenever he spoke to her... hearing his voice alone was enough to comfort her and realise for all the sick, disgusting back-stabbers in the world, there are still people out there worth living for...
Beast Boy proved himself a loyal friend to Raven ever since he stood by her when she was battling Trigon in her mind, she never expected such devotion from anyone until that point, she hadn't even really took any notice of him, but she saw a side to him she'd never seen before, and realised that under his joker exterior was a person with similarly deep feelings to her own... and she could not get that out of her mind.
And this was what made her so angry towards Terra. She could see quite plainly that Beast Boy had a crush on her, and this drove her wild with anger...
... Even after she 'made up' with Terra, she was always sure not to let them get too close, butting in whenever she felt that they were getting close, it was killing her to see Beast Boy getting so attatched to her, but what was killing her even more was that for at least a year prior to this she so badly wanted to confess her feelings to him... so badly wanted to just hold him in her arms, that alone would be enough to make her forget about all her problems...
So for this new girl to just wander along and win him over from the start... it was infuriating.
Raven tried he best to get herself through this, but she had been finding it difficult to keep her emotions under control, and this had not gone un-noticed by the Titans, but could never have guessed the reason for it.
Someone else did know however.
Terra's stay, while brief, was ample time to make sure Slade could see as much of the Titans as he could... hidden cameras were placed around Titans Tower as soon as Terra moved into the place (some which even Starfire missed when she thought she destroyed them when Terra betrayed them... Slade would not create all the cameras conventionally of course, he knew better), Slade could see them all day, every day in the tower for as long as he wanted...
And he took an interest in Raven ever since catching a glimpse of her true power when she battled Dr. Light (You think Slade doesn't have the technology to keep track of them?), and ever since that day, her enormous power fascinated him. Power he didn't even know she has inside her, had had to learn about this energy, he wanted more...
But Slade knew enough about Raven to know that her powers stem from her current emotional state, and the and the key to her powers is her emotion... the only way to push Raven far enough for her to release such energy again would be to upset her to such a level where she cannot keep her energy under control... and we're not talking about physical pain here, we're talking deep emotional pain...
Things were much easier with Robin. He has a tough exterior, but Slade knows that simply threatening to harm his 'dear sweet' Starfire would be enough to bring Robin to his knees. For someone so strong, he was too easy...
But the whole basis of Raven's power is her ability to keep her emotions under control, that's what she does best, what is there in this world that would effect Raven enough to break such ability?
...the hidden cameras were the answer to this. As Slade kept his close eye on Raven, he noticed pretty quickly how differently Raven acted around Beast Boy... at first he just pinned it as irritation... "Understandable" he thought... but he soon realised there was more to it than this, he noticed how Raven looked at Beast Boy when his back was turned, the care and admiration in her eyes, which she would never let Beast Boy himself see... the way she used to stare at him, quickly changing the expression on her face when he noticed, usually accompanying it with sone cynical remark... he could even see what she was writing about him in her diary in her bedroom...
There was no doubt about it, Beast Boy was the one thing that truely had an emotional hold on Raven, the one thing that somehow managed to get so deep into her heart ... Slade was no stranger to emotional pain, he knew full well what Raven was feeling...
Beast Boy was the key to Raven.
Beast Boy was sitting alone in his bedroom. The other Titans thought he was still upset over Terra, but the truth was he has not thought about her in over a week. Beast Boy had been thinking long and hard in his bedroom while he was aloine, letting things sink in and slip into perspective...
For the longest time, he cared so much for Raven...!
See, Beast Boy, dispite all his corney jokes and wit, is actually, like Raven, very much an emotional guy. In fact, also like Raven, he had a major problem keening control of his emotions, and for the longest time, he became a loner who avoided human contact, determined to overcome his emotions and feel like he was his own boss, like he didn't need other people to live a happy life... he wanted, above all, the eliminate the need for him to feel emotion.
Meeting the Titans changed all that. Suddenly he saw the joys of having friends and people who care about you, they helped him overcome his pains, show him that there are people out there worth feeling for, and that it's worth going through the bad, negetive feelings to get to it... he became a new person, but he never did forget his past, and was still full of such pain...
So whenever he looks at Raven, he see's someone who he truely understands, someone who can understand the emotional pain he has suffered, and he understand her pains also, he felt connected to her, whenever he was around her, his heart would beat fast, and he'd become overflowing with such emotion that he's have to wise-crack to cover himself up...
He never thought he had a chance with Raven though, because while he knew Raven was full of emotion, he had no idea they were about him... he always thought that such a beautiful girl was far beyond his reach, and as much as it pained him to do it, he had to try and push on... he did not want to spoil the friendship that the two had developed by opening up his heart to her...
Terra? He thought he loved her... for the first week, his mind was driven wild with all these questions he could not answer.... why did dhe do this? He trusted her with all his heart, and placed so much faith in her... dispite the fact that she kept disappearing away from Titans Tower, and stayed in her room for long periods of time, which even caused the other Titans to wonder what she was up to... but he kept an unwavering trust in her that she was simply busy and that he could rely on her... he really though she was different to other people in the world, that she does understand emotional pain.... and dispite trying so hard for her, she turned against him as if he'd done nothing at all... like all his love and care was worthless, completely meaningless.... and that killed him, he'd pace around the room all day simply because his mind was in such as mess that he had nothing better to do... walking around muttering to himself how she could do this to him... is this really so common? He was not exactly an expert on relationships so he had relatively little experience, but if this was a common occurence in relationships, he wanted none of it, he hated the pain and the feeling that he felt worthless because of the pain...
As time moved on however, Terra slipped further and further from his mind... when he first saw her, he saw a cute little girl who actually found him funny... but his deep thinking over the past week made him realise that they really had little in common... their similarities were skin-deep, and Terra's betrayal showed to him that to do such a terrible thing, she couldn't have been anywhere near as emotional as himself.... she could never truely understand how he feels.... she was a silly schoolgirl crush, and nothing more...
To make things worse, Raven, the one who he essentially began to ignore with the arrival of Terra, began to show real care for him... she tried her hardest to make him feel better and to ease his pain... constantly trying to make sure he knows that the other Titans did care about him, and that he was not so worthless after all... her clearly understood the pain he was going through and wanted to make it all better...and it just served to remind him of how much Raven relies on her feelings also... he realised what a fool he had been for letting a mere cute little blonde get in the way of someone he really did care about... all this time he thought he was in love, when he was really letting some girl cloud his judgement.... he hated himself for this, hated how he let himself think that someone else could really have more in common with him than Raven... he was too scared to admit it, but the fact that he understood Raven so well meant he just adored her...
Suddenly Beast Boy heard a a shuffle in his room, and he awoke suddenly. He had fallen asleep with all the thoughts that had been rattling inside his mind... he really wanted to confess his thoughts to Raven, but with her getting so much closer to him over the past 2 weeks, it just seemed even more was at risk if it all backfired... and thinking such thoughts was very tiring.
He looked around the room and could not see anything... the light was off, so it was difficult to tell if there really was anyone, or anything, in the room, or if his mind was just playing trick on him... he began to worry, ever since Slade attacked Titans Tower, anything seemed possible, and it seemed perfectly reasonable to suspect something was there... but the darkness of the room and the icy cold air just served to make him even more scared, perhaps to the point of even thinking it wasn't even Slade at at all and was perhaps something else... the Titans were hardly short of enemies, and Slade knows this, perhaps other people had become aware of the secrets of Titans Tower, and Slade was letting them do the dirty work? Or perhaps it was deeper still, ever since his trip into Raven's mind, after the scary stuff he saw in there, his mind was open to anything more sinister and dark... that thought alone made Beast Boy begin to sweat... he looked around frantically, when suddenly he thought he saw something near his ruffled pile of clothes in the corner of the room...
He was just about to look there when he heard a loud bang on on his door.. "Crap!" he thought.... it was going on to 2am by now, there was no way the other Titans would still be awake at this hour...
This worried him even more... who could it be? Was is the same thing that was making the noises? Was he really hearing something in the corridor all along?
He decided to swallow his fear and approach the door... after all, what would Raven say is she knew he got so scared over someone being at the door?! ... he slowly approached the door, readyed himself to turn into a vicious beast if it turned out to be a threat to him...
He slowly began to open the door, and suddenly screamed on the top of his voice...
To be continued.