Disclaimer: I do not own any of the DC characters who appear in the animated series Teen Titans (as much as I would LOOOOOOOOVE to own Raven). I do not own any of the quoted material that might appear in here from literature, movies, and songs and such. I do not own the demonic tradition of Goetia, BUT THIS PORTRAYAL OF RAIM IS STRICTLY MINE, BITCHES! I will however make THIS distinction: although many of my elaborations upon Raven's past are based somewhat upon DC comic mythos (I don't tend to enjoy American comics, but when I write anything, I do my research ahead of time), some of the details given may not jibe with specific details presented in the comics or future episodes of Teen Titans. I really couldn't care less. This is my fiction, not DC's! Otherwise, the world is mine. You may kneel, now.

(Special Thanks to: DC, Ani D., Joni M., Stephen K., and T. S. Eliot for providing me with material. Please don't prosecute me! Remember, kiddies; good writers borrow, great writers steal!)

Rating: Unreadable and Slated to Be Taken Care of by The Department of Miniluv, as decreed by the Almighty Federal Communications Commission, subsidiary and loyal bitchslave of The Evil Empire, also known as The Bush Administration (TWO MORE MONTHS! TWO MORE MONTHS!)

The Extent To Which Censorship Will Enter My Writing: is THIS! There will be many "mature themes" regarding morality, religion, sex and sexuality involved in this piece. There will be swearing, cursing, innuendo, and filthy gutter language ad libitum which your cliché grandmother would not likely enjoy hearing from your mouth (trust me, my voice mail message on my cell was "Hey there, bitches, this is Mark…I'm out working the curb at the moment, but leave me a message and I'll be sure to get back to you. Muah!" until my grandma called me up in the middle of a class and got the answering service X . X). There MAY be some scenes of graphic nudity, sex, and/or violence (I really am not decided on how far I want to go with this, yet, although I'm pretty certain that I won't be going into the territory of gore; this isn't a Subaru x Seishirou or Kamui x Fuuma fiction, after all! Therefore, there won't be any decapitation, evisceration, or anything of the like…désolé, 13 to 18 year old male demographic!). If you have problems with such topics being addressed in writing, either stop reading here and now, stop reading when you reach them in the fiction, or skip over them. Otherwise, don't complain! You were warned. Oh, yes, and I'm a rabid X fan, so I'm used to other rabid fans who favor other character pairings than myself flipping out over my choice in character pairings. This is tentatively a Raven x Robin fiction. If that causes you to fly into hysterics, also stop reading here. Raechan is going to be commiserating about how "unfair" it is that Star is so fortunate and blessed with Robin's affection, et cetera, and going all internal-angst-tortured-love-emokid mode. Well, it's not going to be that simple, but you know. That's the Sparknotes version of it.

Otherwise, ENJOY,

Mark

(your supreme sovereign master. mwaugh haugh haugh haugh!)

Raven is having trouble not only keeping her buried emotions in reign, but also problems with her…family. As Robin and Starfire grow closer, Raven begins to resent her heritage increasingly with each passing day; if not for her powers as a demon, expressing the love she feels for Robin, the guilt-ridden jealousy she holds for Star, as well as her hatred for her father, Trigon, would be an easy enough task. Fate, seeming to spite Raven, throws her an even greater dilemma when a half-brother Raven never knew she had decides to pay her a visit.

(SU•PER•HE•RO)

chapitre deux: all the wasted time

"Shut up."

"Well, she is a freak!"

"Shut up, Beast Boy. You're not helping matters here. Just leave her alone for now."

She had heard it all from the other side of her door; it could just have well been the other side of the looking glass or the other side of existence. She was used to the names by now, and she was used to being treated like a charity case. Like an old song that stuck to your synapses, that you really can't stand, that constantly plays in the dark recesses of consciousness and is always ready and willing to surface again in the wrong place at precisely the wrong time, it wasn't new to her. It would make sense for the pain to dull with time, to build up a resistance to it, but as much as she tried to convince herself that it was just life-as-usual, she knew that of all people, she was the only one who could never truly accept her own lies.

As if orchestrated, her incisors sunk into her lower lip and her body sunk to the floor. Her hands closed almost-automatically, thoughtlessly taking on the mantle of fists. Why didn't the suffering ever leave her?

"Raven?"

She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of a response. She almost despised him more than Beast Boy. How dare he! How dare he play ever-the-fucking-superhero with her and swoop down to her rescue! As if she couldn't defend herself…as if she were in need of his aid! Why should she bolster his ego by playing into the role of the grateful damsel-now-saved-from-distress?

"I understand if you'd rather not speak at the moment…so I guess I'll be on my way. If you need to…to talk to someone, though, you know where to find me."

Someone to talk to! Did the Boy Wonder have a PhD now, too? Next thing she knew, she would walk into the operations center and Robin would be sitting there in an armchair next to a long couch upholstered in brown leather. She snorted bitterly in sardonic amusement. But, as she moved toward her bookcase, the urge to unleash her emotions became almost insuppressible. She wanted to do more than idly chat with someone who would listen, though – she wanted to scream. She wanted to toss a chair or two around, like she was white trash cashing in on making an appearance on the Jerry Springer Show. She had grown so weary of just forcing all of these sensations to the bottom of herself and letting them collect dust.

She could tolerate this way of living no longer; her pride might suffer, but she knew that she would ultimately feel more at quiet for it. She opened her own door in search of Robin's. She raised a hand to knock, but hesitated.

What the hell am I doing!

The blood rushed to her face. Her mind was in knots and tangles, and one way or another, she meant to straighten it out. With one last steeling of her resolution, she brought her knuckles against the veneer of his door.

"Come in."

And she did just that.

•••••

An hour or so later, she strode back out of Robin's room. She had told him as much as she felt comfortable divulging. She told him about Azar, about Arella, about life in Azarath, even about Trigon…he already had a muddy sort of grasp of her past, but she had confessed – That's exactly what it was, she mused, a confession – things to him of which she had told no one else before. Once she had started talking, it all just seemed to flow down from her lips like a dammed up reservoir that had been anxiously awaiting the opportunity to cascade freely.

She hadn't told him everything, naturally. She wasn't prepared to bare her most vulnerable moments to another, let alone discuss her feelings – and probably never truly would be – and she had carefully avoided mentioning the prophecy concerning her day of birth, but she could say in all truth that Robin was now the one being in the universe who knew her the best other than herself. And how attentively he had listened! He asked questions appropriately, never prying, and he demonstrated how alertly he was absorbing her story through those inquiries.

The last time she had felt this good…well, actually, she couldn't recall such a time. She even dared to whistle a few show tunes – a passion for musical theatre was what she thought of as one of her embarrassing secrets ("Dark" people aren't supposed to sing 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow', she reasoned) – on her return route to the seclusion of her room. To the melody of "The Time Warp" – it was just a jump to the left, and she was back where she had started. Before long, she had happily buried herself in a novel.

•••••

"–sic do you listen to?"

Felt like a fucking train had collided with her forehead, like her eyelids had been cast in lead. If she had been bludgeoned with sledgehammers, left swollen, covered in motion-impairing bruises, she took firmly to a conviction that it wouldn't have felt very much different from this. As she stirred from the comforting dream, that memory that had been buried by distant months, every joint, extremity, and tendon pained her; even her diaphragm and throat murmured in aching protest as she weakly strove toward a moan.

"Stop being such a drama queen. I know you're conscious, you needn't inform me with unintelligible noises."

That voice released pain's hold over her mind and body. It was the guy – the one who had attacked her! Her eyes contracted, no small measure of that action brought on by terror, but there was animosity, too. Raven expected light – at the very least, a dim light of some darkened room – to flood her retinas, but there was no such response. What the hell was going on!

"What the fuck are you doing!"

She was almost shocked that she had bellowed with such passion. Raven felt the choler burning in her bones and veins. She was brimming with righteous wrath – Just the kind of thing that would have helped Starfire in this instance, but not for me,Raven thought, half in sullen regret, half in jealous resent – and it took her as no surprise when she heard a tumultuous crash of some heavy machinery of some sort. In her anger, her control had slipped and her surrounding environment had suffered for it.

"Oh, you're talking about the blindness? It's a simple trick, really. I'm quite amazed that you yourself haven't devised any similar…tricks."

The man's voice was absolutely infuriating. He could have been chattering on about a game of croquet for all of the – or rather, the absence of – concern that she could discern in his voice. Raven reigned in her rage for the moment, suppressing it all too well, – after all, how many times had she done such things before? It was a trifle, really – waiting patiently for her captor to reveal some weakness. Everyone had flaws, and if you were observant, they usually revealed them quite readily. You just had to let them prattle on a while and know what to look for.

"You see, I just reached out and stopped your optical nerves from moving. Did you know that the eyes are constantly moving? Immobilize them and all ability to visually image quits as well."

She could sense it already.

This asshole is full of himself. He loves to listen to himself talk. There must be some way I can take advantage of that. If I keep him talking, maybe I can telepathically locate him and mount an attack.

"I honestly hadn't thought of that. It's genius in its simplicity. I should try it sometime."

A muffled, bark of a laugh rang out.

"Well, I could teach you a lot of things…"

All Raven needed was to probe his mind a little. It would be difficult without physical contact, but she was certain that with enough focus, she could do it. She had reached out to Robin like this before, so she knew that she was capable of it. She fumbled for his mind remotely and – he was chuckling, again. Why?

"I'm afraid you'll find sneaking into my thoughts quite useless, Raven."

She had hit a wall. He was warding his mind against entry! But how!

"I knew you wouldn't be totally helpless without your sight. You and I are so similar. We're both strong mediums. It's easier for us to telekinetically batter someone when we can see them, but sight failing, we also can telepathically…dowse; seek out specific locations, objects, people…through our minds."

He was smiling, now. She couldn't detect it through her ineffective telepathy, but his tone was telling her everything she needed to know. This was something he had wanted to happen for a very long time; it was a dream realized to him. What was it that he was deriving such pleasure from? Why had he taken her? What did he really want? Relaxing her survival instincts slightly, Raven resigned herself to her current situation. She would wait for the opportunity for escape to present itself, and that unavailing, she was confident that Robin, Cyborg, Star, and Beast Boy would come knocking for her eventually. In the meantime…she had some inquiries that she wanted clarified, and as she didn't think she would be going anywhere anytime soon…

"Who are you? You obviously know who I am, so I don't think it's very polite of you not to introduce yourself."

"Right you are; I forgot my manners. You can call me Raim."

Raven was somewhat taken aback at how quickly his vocal quality had changed. The cruel delight had vanished, replaced by an amiable conversational tone. It was warm…almost…friendly!

Reminding herself of her purpose, she collected herself from brief surprise.

"Raim? I have a few questions, if you'd oblige me and answer them."

No response came following her questions. A moment of stark silence drew itself out, seeming to last for uneasy ages. Raven felt the stirring of fear – What's he doing? – before he assuaged it with his lazy reply.

"Fire away."

She exhaled.

"Your powers and mine…you said that they were alike –"

"Actually, I said that you and I are alike."

Raven nodded off-hand. Semantics, really, but it led into what was truly gnawing at her thoughts.

"Right, right…and right before you brought me here, I thought I heard you call me sister."

"Indeed, I did."

Raven sucked in air through her nose slowly, as she was not completely sure she would want to hear the answer to her next question. Nonetheless, she knew that it must be asked; there was no doubting it, no uncertainty. This question had a…fated quality about it. It would not be denied.

"Who are you to me? All of my life in Azarath and here on Earth, well…my mother and Azar never told me that I had any siblings, and nothing ever caused me to suspect that I might have brothers or sisters."

He snorted. The smugness had returned.

"That's because Azar and Arella were unaware of me. I'm surprised myself that they were so naïve as to believe that my father – excuse me, our father – would so easily give up on his plans for this dimension."

Raven's accelerating heart was horrendously palpable. A putrid sensation took hold of her insides. His tongue unmistakably had betrayed the answer she had been aiming for, but even that was not enough; as much as it daunted her, she wanted direct vindication.

"Answer the question."

She formed a mental image of Raim within her mind…if she could see him at the moment, Raven was almost positive that he would be raising his hands in an empty gesture, half-shrug, half-surrender. Raven was biting down on her lower lip. She must have pierced a blood vessel as a fresh, metallic taste filled her anxiously salivating mouth.

"Alright, alright…you win. You're my half-sister, Raven. You and I… we are both children of Trigon, although we have different human mothers."

Raven choked, felt her throat wring and writhe. She was clenching her jaw, trying to repress any visible response to his answer. Despite all of her efforts, a low whine, air escaping her constricted larynx, absconded from her drawn lips. And for the first time in years, she felt that terrifyingly foreign – and yet entirely too welcome – warmth along the edges of the whites of her eyes. Raim may have been holding her retinas and eyes in suspense, but he certainly hadn't had the prescience of mind to paralyze her tear ducts.

•••••

"Have you found anything yet, Cyborg?"

Cy hadn't known quite what they were dealing with to begin with, and he didn't like the odds involved in trying to locate and combat an unknown enemy. There was no doubt in his mind this was of the utmost urgency when the GPS and comlink lost contact with Raven and Robin, but when Robin had tumbled face-first, soaked to the bone into the operations center in spite Starfire's attempts at aiding him in walking, the situation took on a new dimension of exigency.

"Beast Boy, you should be keeping an eye on Robin with Star. Let me take care of Raven."

With a defeated grunt, Beast Boy resigned himself to the couch.

Cyborg continued to pore over the data. None of it made sense. One moment, Robin and Raven were on the map, the next they weren't. A few minutes later, Robin had reappeared, but there had still been no sign of Raven since her initial vanishing. There – then gone. How did a person simply cease to exist?

"Has there been any sign of Raven, yet?"

Cy started at the sound of Star's voice. He had been so engrossed in the dilemma presented by the GPS data that he'd shut out the world, completely lost in running and rerunning possible scenarios. For the past hour, Star had been intermittently leaving Robin's side in the infirmary to check on Cy's progress in the hunt for Raven and her mysterious captor.

"Sorry, Star. I got nothing. It's almost as if she telepo–"

Hell. HELL!

"Is something the matter, Cyborg?"

That was it! His eyes had widened with what could only be called ecstatic anxiety. The frequency that matched up with the electromagnetic units Raven's own telekinesis produced – everything fell into place in one glaring revelation. Now, if only he could track the frequency of that energy he'd detected earlier…

•••••

SILENCE (not for him) SILENCE (i won't let him do this –!)

SILENCE (NOT FOR HIM!)

He understood too well. Raven was on the verge of tears. When she had been unconscious between the time that he had assaulted her mind and then collapsed his empathic field and the time that she had awakened, he had rifled through her garbled thoughts and memories of her unconscious psyche at will. She had been saving those tears for ten years, now. She hadn't realized it until quite recently, but she had been holding them all back for the sake of one person. Raven didn't want to cry over the emotional turmoil Raim had thrown her into – she wanted to cry for Robin.

He drew in the smoke through his mouth, holding it a while – his means of engineering a form of passive suicide – in his lungs, and then allowed it to meander out of his nostrils in wispy trails. He was trying to decide whether to laugh at Raven, to leave her permanently blind in jealousy and spite, or to comfort her. He hadn't been raised to consider the hearts of others very seriously, but pity often coupled itself with superiority complexes.

Raim inhaled in a calculated manner, and then let fly a sigh of exasperation.

"Raven, I know about…him."

No response came, excluding the whine of a compressing throat. Light laughter ran across his tongue. It wasn't that he really found her misfortune and inability to express herself entertaining – no, it was more that he found the idea of emotional repression silly. That, and laughter was an excellent way of release a bit of the nervous energy that his anger was producing.

She would choose a half-wit…human over her own blood! As if I weren't worth her tears!

He had to mount a strong effort to suppress the bile which that thought had incurred – something he wasn't wholly used to, yet – but with another measured breath, he managed it. Her sightless eyes, a shade deeper than blue, were staring through him, completely unfocused. He returned that aimless gaze with a contemptuous glare of his own. He would appeal to her pathos…

…for now.

"Listen to me, Raven; did you ever consider…"

•••••

"…expressing yourself, your feelings?"

She almost hadn't heard the words that Raim had just spoken. Of course she had considered expressing herself! She had dreamed of it every waking moment of her life! Being open with her thoughts and feelings was the first idea that entered her head upon rising from her bed and the last wish that her conscious mind clung to as she sank back into it at night. Sometimes she meditated upon her own powers and how some people would kill to have the kind of strength that she commanded with such ease. Would they trade their tears in order to read the minds of others, though? Would they foreswear their joy to obtain the simply astounding – she chuckled bitterly – ability to bend a spoon with a thought? Would they vow to never curse in anger for the rest of their natural lives? Even those who would, she thought, would only do so out of a lack of understanding of how truly precious a thing freedom was. Her powers weren't something to envy; they were something to pity. They were a prison. Raven uttered a despairing, mirthless laugh again. It was a miserable thing, but all that mattered to her was that it wasn't a tear.

"Look, Raim, I don't really care who or what you are, but don't even begin to think that I need either your misguided attempts at sympathy or your 'help', as you would probably call it."

He was dismayed. She was almost positive of it. Something she had said had set him off his stride. He had expected her to be too emotionally volatile to muster any sort of stable counter-argument. She wasn't totally aware of how she knew this, but she believed in it, believed in its truth. He had underestimated her training in repression; every action was clarifying his personality to her. He was more than confident in his capacities – he was arrogant to a fault.

"Well, I can see that we've reached an impasse so I take my leave, now. Just don't reject, don't disregard what I've suggested."

"You're letting me go?"

"Raven, we'll meet again –"

The last syllable that rose from his tongue fell upon ears deafened. Light flooded her vision, her dull, vapid pupils contracted aggressively in response. As her palms flew to the sides of her head in the instinctive disarray that her mind had degenerated into and her vocal chords rendered a voiceless screech, an avalanche incalculably more brilliant and pristine than any sight in this dimension or any other she had previously experienced overwhelmed her optical nerves. Retrospectively, she imagined that she could almost feel the bands of fat on her axioms being fried by the intensity of the impulses flooding the paths from her eyes to her occipital and parietal lobes. Searing, primeval light gave way in an excruciatingly slow fashion first to form. Like an old silent picture with too few frames flashing by per second to give the illusion of motion, she could finally actualize the shadow-and-light framework of an abandoned factory. Spasmodic movement began to merge into fluid continuity just as a receding shadow – His power, she knew – engulfed a leering grin. One cocked corner of his mouth just barely gave away predatory incisors. It was a smile that would be eternally branded in her memory, a smile that kept its secrets and tortured myriad unfortunates in their dreams and cryptic thoughts…a true Mona Lisa smile.

Depth began to moderate the outrageous contrast of black and white that was so gaudily offending her threshold for pain, illuminating the delicate umbrages of the abandoned warehouse in which moments ago Raim had her blindly captive. She stood, realizing that she must have sent herself to the floor when that tremendous racket had overcome her. She shook her cloak brusquely, sending motes of dust glittering into beams of dying sunlight that were gradually looking more and more like their blood red dusk-color. She blanched in disgust.

"Ugh. Warehouse…how cliché and nondescript."

As she traced a finger along the edge of her hood, she understood that he must have pulled her hood back from her face when he had transported her here – while she was unconscious. She shuddered, not even wanting to create any images of what Raim could have done to her while she was inert. Turning, she was about to head for an exit –

– only to be plowed down by an annoyingly euphoric, orange-skinned alien girl imbued with supernal strength.

"RAVEN! YOU ARE ALIVE AND UNHARMED!"

She winced reflexively, not really sure whether it was due to being thrown back to the ground, the eardrum-warping squeal of elation, or the mere presence of Starfire. Her sapphire eyes rolled without need of any conscious will.

"You are unharmed, are you not?"

"Once I get the ribs you just crushed patched up, I'm sure I'll be perfectly spiffy."

Taking the hint, Star backed off, but that insufferably relieved and elated smile refused to be dimmed even by Raven's funereal cynicism. She quashed the desire to blatantly scowl at Starfire.

"Raven! You alright?"

She glanced over her left should. Cyborg and Beast Boy were approaching at a somewhat…more relaxed tempo than Star had. Of course, Robin was bringing up the vanguard limping slightly, his right arm in a sling and patches of his cloak, boots, and pants in tatters. Her gaze was immediately drawn in both fascination – You pervert, her internal monologue chastised her – and concern.

"I'm fine, Cy. Let's just go home."

Star blinked, her emerald eyes widening in curious surprise.

"Do you not wish to explain to us that which caused you to appear in this place, Raven?"

Raven refused to indulge Star with a direct reply as she moved past her friends and toward the exit.

"Let's get out of here, fir–"

Raven's thought prematurely aborted at the nauseating crash of living weight hitting a concrete surface. If the clatter hadn't spoken to her clearly enough as to what had just occurred, Starfire's shriek made things crystalline.

"Robin! ROBIN!"

«arigatou gozaimasu for the wonderful reviews! i'm so glad that people enjoy my writing (i get the whole "unique use of words" thing a lot, hmm…) all of your compliments and criticisms are highly valued; this is the final draft (as it exists) of le deuxième chapitre. keep the reviews coming! i'm already working on le troisième chapitre, so be looking for it in a couple of days! also, for previous readers, be sure to go back and read through the whole fiction every time i update. oftentimes, i continue to edit previous chapitres. mark.»

«an added note: more revisions. blah. mark.»