Don't own teen titans or Terry from batman beyond...or batman beyond. Mmm...that's all for disclaiming right?
Okie, some explanation then:
So along with Teen Titans, I had—before the show—an unhealthy obsession with Batman Beyond. Shhh. I know. Some call it disgraceful. Psh. Whatever. I liked it! Anyway, this is the somewhat requested epilogue for or sequel to 'Nothing Better'. I wasn't certain to post it as an 'epilogue' because that would defeat the idea of a one-shot, but thought perhaps a sequel was more in order, no matter how short. Many may not agree with the way I took this, but hopefully it is okay. I needed to write something like this between getting out the next chapters of my other stories, in any case.
If you read all that thank you for your amazing patience! If not, please still read this, if you have time but know you ought to read the prequel first...um, if that's not obvious. Oy.
-rei
Thank you for the reviews for 'Nothing Better'. Here is the equivalent one-shot sequel:
"Happenstance"
Raven Roth brushed strays of violet out of her eyes, shades darker and years deeper than anyone cared to realize. She swung here in the middle of a child's playground, feeling the need to regress outwardly since regressing inwardly was not an option, feeling the need to feel air rush past her in fluid back and forth motions. She swung and dangled, letting her feet drag sloppy circles in the sand. She swung, and thought.
Thought about him: about blue, blue eyes...bluer than blue.
She was so engrossed in her thoughts that when the sky threatened a familiar rain she did not notice in the least. Her attentions busied with the important task of outlining an eye mask in rivulets of the sand with the toe of her high-heeled shoe, she did not even feel the first drop of water as it pattered down onto the crown of her head.
"Perfect," she let slip a sad smile as her foot halted its loose sketch. It was little more than a blob on the surface of things, but a kind-hearted alien girl, cybernetic man and green changeling would have known the truth of the vague lines, just like she did.
"There's no such thing as perfect," a voice said, and she was too soundly aware of him as a soul to be surprised by him as a warm body behind her.
A pause passed that could have been easily taken for two synchronized heartbeats.
"It has been—" she began.
"Long...and long," he finished her sentence, echoing her words from a night on a rainy rooftop some time ago. He had not forgotten.
"Yes," she agreed as though to an invitation to dinner.
It might have been.
"How is he?" blue eyes tried to keep from hoping amethyst ones would meet them again half-way. When the woman on the swing did not even incline her head in his direction, his eyes knew they had failed—hoped, and failed.
"He is as well as can be expected," she replied, closing her eyes even though they remained downcast.
"Rae," it felt so good to say her name in her presence again, instead of to himself over and over as a painful mantra and reminder of all the trouble he had caused her. "Rae," he needed to say it again.
"Raven, please. It's Raven," she corrected in a monotone he would have found achingly familiar if he hadn't been already taken with the feeling of being alienated by her statement in itself.
"I know, but—"
"Raven," she said firmly. He let it go.
"What does," he paused here, unable to suppress the austere coldness that often came with hurt and regret, "What does he call you?" He could not help but ask. What else did he have left to lose anyway? What else indeed? Richard Grayson had lost her a long time ago and nothing could be more scorching than that, bitterer, more endlessly paining to a soul than losing its other half, for that left it beyond all other things, incomplete.
There was nothing worse than knowing you'd never be whole again. The again, at least he knew, wasn't deluded with some false hope. So maybe there was nothing better? His mind played tricks on him, as usual and would have continued to loop around him in the same way that enabled his super-sleuthing skills to crack codes and criminals, but her voice brought all else to a halt with her answer to his question.
"Just Raven," she admitted and he felt some satisfaction in that there was no other man calling the love of his life a name he was forbidden.
"You look well," he finally said after ten minutes of unsettled quiet.
"I've been better," she whispered and her voice was almost wistful.
"When?" he asked with something nearing a rhetorical tone, but not quite.
"It was the first snow fall," she began to recount an event he knew all too well, but he listened anyway, loving it much more from her lips than his own mind that warped it to something beyond repair. "I was angry…no. I was livid. And I thought there could be nothing more agitating than the white fluff. A walking traffic light proceeded to tell me different, teach me and show me different, that in fact while snow was a most incredible agitation for me, he could be the most agitating of all. I recall also that he seemed," she paused wryly here, "rather proud of it."
"Could you blame me?" he fell into an old teasing inflection she knew well.
"I could," she replied carefully, always so careful now. The swing slowed, the creak of chains causing unrest in the otherwise silent surrounding.
"And do you?" It was his turn to be reflective.
"Not only you," she equaled out the blame in her usual flawless nature that Richard remembered well.
"Want to know how I knew you'd be here?" he asked as if he had asked her what her favorite color was.
It was still blue, he was certain.
"It couldn't hurt," she allowed.
"Saw you from across the street," he said simply and she found courage in his simplicity, courage to turn her head and gaze levelly at him as she stood up from the swing and her breath caught.
She marveled.
He was still so achingly beautiful.
She looked away.
"That's," she paused, "Very happenstance," she decided on. He laughed with a lightness he did not feel.
"Some might call it fate," he intoned gently, and there it was. His reason, his motive, whatever one might want to call it, there it was in that one romantic insinuation reminiscent of a million trite movie lines and storybook quotes. Lacking delusion, he did not lack his trademark sense of hope, it seemed.
"Some," she accepted and sighed, her hand holding onto one of the chains that suspended the swing, more for a show of support than real support.
"Are you together?" he asked and his quietness broke her heart. Bitterness she could process, anger, resentment, hurt, betrayal, misunderstanding, all of that she could compute, but not the quiet that wavered around him so softly.
"No," she said, not daring to lie.
He would know. How could he not?
They had a bond after all.
"He is special to you," Richard observed and through no real fault of his own, failed to keep a sliver of jealousy and a sliver of resentment out of it.
"In ways," she confessed.
"Ways," he repeated softly. He wished, for a moment, he could have been soft with her years before, but then pushed such wishes away. Wishing did not change anything, after all. It was only then that he chanced a look down, past her feet, now swinging carelessly back and forth to get a little momentum on the actual swing, and see her scrawl in the sand. "I stopped wearing it a while ago," he alluded to the mask, and Raven swept across the little sketch with her right foot, erasing it without a word. "What is his name again?"
"Terry," she replied and did not mention Terry's acute likeness to the man standing at her side now, did not mention Terry's bluer than blue eyes, fair skin and dark as night hair or his agility or superhero complex. She did not mention any of it, but Richard—no, Robin—knew it all anyway. He had known the night she left who she would run to even if he had done his best to block out anything he might know about him at the time.
"He's younger than us, right?" He said 'us' with such a subtle longing that Raven might have missed it if she did not resonate with that same feeling.
"Not by much by today's standards," she said and hopped off the swing, still nimble as a cat, graceful too—even in heels on sand. "I should go," she began to walk, fearing the warmth in his gaze and the weakness she perceived in her own heart, still there, still wanting, still against all odds and reason, waiting.
"May I see you again?" he asked, and at this question, she slowed, stopped, and turned to face him for the second time. Her eyes drew him in; he could not help but step closer. And in that instant she was the same old Raven, Rae, in the simple gesture of not backing away reflexively.
"If by chance," she began and when his own eyes drew her in too, begged another answer she paused. "Richard, our time is the past. You know that."
"I know," he said. There was another pause.
"I will be at this year's gala held by a Mr. Bruce Wayne in twenty days from now." It was not an invite, but it was an opportunity she graced him with. "I say this knowing that a certain Mr. Richard Grayson tends to slip out of such...glitzy affairs," and there was a tone of old affableness in her words there. Still, he could not steer his mind from another point.
"You're going because he is going?"
"Yes."
"You will be with..."
"Terry," she supplied again and he did not nod but understood as though he had. Raven being Raven, she needed no outward indication.
She felt their bond tighten, like a rope being pulled harshly on both sides, as though the two vying for dominance did so as though his and her life depended on it.
"Until then," he finally spoke and she inclined her head ever so slightly.
"Until then..." she began to walk away again and then glanced over her shoulder thoughtfully, "Robin."
He stood there long after the click of her heels had faded away against the sidewalk and the sun had gone down and the stars were all alight and eventually, he took seat on the same swing she had sat in hours before. And it was only some hour around midnight that the rain that had threatened a lone Raven so much earlier in the day, let itself pour in soft patters on the reminiscent head of a similarly lone Robin.
More explanation: whether or not they really stay apart is kind of up to what you really think is possible for the two birds after the inferred past. It's an open-ended epilogue/sequel I know, so it's a little aggravating but honestly I couldn't write it any other way. I never see Robin or Raven as the type of character with all doors closed—even if they themselves sometimes think they are. In the end with each other I see them to be almost flawed to the point of the ability to forgive—though never forget—and chances are things can change, sometimes they even do.
As for Terry, well, come on. He does bear a resemblance, no? He didn't just come out of the blue. I had him in mind from the start since I've this thing for a person tending to run to or find solace in a similar being to that which they ran from...it's very human and very often the case...
Um, review if you have time...?
Okay, I'm quiet.
-rei