Thank you for waiting for this chapter. I am so sorry it has taken me longer than I would have liked but it was difficult for me to write this chapter, deciding what should be in it and what should wait until later, et cetera
Also just managing to give more depth here and there without going UTTERLY out of character is one of the most abhorrently tricky things to do, ever
:eyes roll I back of head as Rei falls over:
Um yes, anyway I apologize. Hope someone likes this chapter and I hope that even if it isn't your favorite, you stick around for the next one.
For those worried after they read this chapter, well, at the end it should be obvious, but there WILL be more Raven and Robin to come. It's just taking some time in getting back to or beyond where the two birds were before...a rock and a hard place you know.
Such is love , right?
-Rei
p.s. Also, thank you—since both were one-shots and I've nowhere else to thank you therefore—to everyone who reviewed my two attempts at one-shots, even the sad one.
Diclaimer: don't own teen titans
Winner Takes All
Chapter Seven: What Do You Do?
The next outings comprised of sending Johnny Rancid to jail, the Hive members to jail, and someone else who was comparatively less memorable, to jail. These were all easy battles, won with minimal scrapes and bruises, if any, and it would have seemed nothing was awry except for the tense silence that shrouded the titans every time they returned to the tower.
Since that night at the club, Raven had spoken to no one. She did not come out of her room for anything but a mission or assignment or whatever they were calling it these days.
Her tea mug was left untouched for a number of days that was unheard of.
It had the other four in worried states that varied from frantic, to sullen, to angry, to distressed, to other things that finally found themselves in an amalgamated form of each, shared between them. They paced and obsessed over stupid things to distract themselves, argued a lot more and snapped a lot more.
Each wondered what she did in her room, alone and so quiet. So silent.
It did not occur to them for a while that she was not in her room at all. That was an act of grace, if Raven knew of any.
Because she wasn't...in her room, that is.
Every day Raven Roth teleported from the tower to the roof near the club and sat. If anyone had chanced on the roof—not that many people took to hopping roofs, but it wasn't entirely ridiculous to consider the possibility in Jump—it would appear to him or her or them that Raven was meditating. Her lips formed the familiar mantra now and then, but it was more to maintain her patience.
She was waiting after all.
And it was for many days, almost two weeks that she waited, from sun up to well into the night, every day. It was a stroke of luck that Robin had a habit of contacting everyone on their communicators when there was trouble, since as loud as the T Tower's alarm was, she could not hear it from where she spent her days and most of her nights. Because the boy wonder did this, she was never found out, and she was able to wait alone, in peace.
Or what little she could manage.
Raven wasn't certain what made her think X would return, not certain why she came on her own entirely. She had her theories and her suspicions, but put little stock in them, since they were quite possibly well unfounded and clouded by her own emotional involvement.
But Raven was smart, very smart and plenty wise. So, it was with any luck that on the fourteenth night between eleven and midnight that a familiarly distorted voice ran into her ears. She did not even flinch, having been expecting it for so long, even wishing for it, if only to finish what she came to do.
"Hey doll," X had somehow situated himself on the roof at the other side, leaning casually against the ledge. A precarious place for him, Raven noted with no little amount of wryness.
"Care to tell me what you keep kissing me for?" she asked pointedly. Enough was enough. She had discerned that what he stirred in her was strictly primal and while good—very good, Lust snickered and Raven ignored it blithely—not substantial. How could it be? She didn't even know him beyond the mask and the lies and the thievery...and his origin of course.
"I like it," he responded flippantly. Her eyes narrowed.
"Well stop. It's a nuisance and I don't see what possessed you to let me understand who you were without your mask. Why are you even bothering to wear it right now anyway?" She was getting quickly annoyed.
Fourteen days and thirteen nights of waiting did that to a person though, half-demon part aside.
"It's really more for show. A lot of thieves have their faces plastered over millions of wanted sites and signs and ads but how many of them get caught?" He had a point.
"How many thieves have made rather square and complete enemies of the titans?" She threw out a point of her own, splitting his down the middle like a broken arrow.
"I guess that makes me special," he said and grinned behind the X mask.
"Especially obnoxious," Raven corrected him coolly. At that, X stood from his lounging position and approached her. Raven let her legs unfold underneath her from their previous lotus position and took a defensive stance as he neared.
"I have to tell you, sweet Raven, I don't take orders from anyone," and he went to make his actions on her thrice, but she was ready and waiting—of course—this time. Encasing him in black energy, she barely repressed a growl.
"Don't ever call me that," and she flung him to the far side of the roof once more, putting him in his place more or less. X rubbed the back of his head with some amount of regret for his boldness. That hurt, after all.
"What? 'Sweet Raven'? I thought it was a compliment," he half-joked, half-probed her for further information and while it seemed a careless act of curiosity, Raven recognized the question for what it really was: the beginning of more questions.
"You thought wrong. Now leave before I turn you in," she ordered. X could not stop his eyes from widening in surprise.
"What? You're just letting me go? Robin wouldn't like that," he made a tsk-tsk motion with his hand. Raven scowled.
"Well Robin isn't here and as you have yet to do anything notably illegal, I couldn't even if I wanted to," she replied too quickly, wanting to avoid more questions now that she had had her own answered. The interrogation was not to be flipped, but here he was, his skull mask throwing back word for word and she despised him all over again.
"So you don't want to turn me in," X commented airily. She clenched her fists.
"Don't bet on it," she bit out.
"I'm not the betting kind, babe," he replied. "I just take what I want and run with it."
"You're unbelievably sure of yourself."
"I can't help it if I've always been able to do anything I put my mind to," X feigned some kind of innocence.
"Anything you put your mind to?" Raven asked.
"Anything," he nodded arrogantly.
"Then get lost." To her chagrin, he laughed at her. To his surprise, she threw him against another side of the roof, drawing new bruises.
To their knowledge, they were the only ones out that night near the club, but this was not so. An uninvited pair of eyes scrutinized the pair from a neighboring rooftop, silent as the grave and just as fearsome.
The eyes watched the continued dialogue.
"You should warn a guy," X all but scolded.
"You should be so lucky that I didn't throw you off the roof," Raven glared.
"That, might be true, however uncalled for," he said, nearly to himself more than to her. Her emotions flickered out unconsciously and bent a nearby lamppost to a waterslide reminiscent curve.
"Uncalled for!"
"Well, I kiss you because I like it, which infers that I like you, which should really make it alright," X reasoned with impossible simplicity. She grumbled something and then more audibly:
"Such a thing is only alright if it is consensual," she said icily. X seemed to consider something, arms crossed across his chest as he let go a sigh and turned to face her directly—of course, it was hard to tell with that mask on.
"If I was not a thief, if I asked your permission, would you grant me that then?" it was such a human question, so moral and so patient sounding that Raven was thrown for a loop. This was X, Red X—the common, if better, criminal, the stealer of many, many things, the masked young man possibly associated with Slade.
Why feel sympathy for such a man?
She cursed her existence as an empath and plowed on, headlong.
"Why? Considering giving up crime for a fling?" She wanted to sting him, to hurt him for confusing her so much, wanted some kind of exacting revenge. "Like I would believe that anyway," she forced her attitude to exude an unbroken edge.
That accomplished, she found herself biting her tongue with his next words with something along the lines of regret swirling in her ribcage.
"Not everything is so cut and dry, Raven," he said clearly and his voice lost its distortion half-way through the sentence as he removed his mask. "What do you do when all you have known is something that wasn't even your idea in the first place, something created for you and you happen to be good at it, very good at it, what then? What do you do when you're commissioned by high-flying criminals that circuit this little city here and face things worse than death by defying them with no one to protect you because to the heroes of this city, you are only another one of the bad guys? What do you do when you find yourself to be human and wanting human things from someone you think might understand you when you know it's impossible beyond a few fleeting touches and showing your true face only to disappear again?"
They were not elegant words. They were not nice things. They were hard and real and simple and primitive questions that surely philosophers could wrap their long fingered hands around and produce painstakingly logical answers to.
But Raven was wiser than those philosophers and whether she liked it or not, what the now unmasked man asked her clicked in her head like gears that matched just so.
"I don't know," she admitted.
"So, what if?" he asked again and she knew him to be human, more so than herself on so many levels, and she could not begrudge him an answer.
"People are people, beyond all other things. Even half-humans count," she let slip the first smile that was not a sneer at him or biting like winter wind and continued, "Everyone has a chance."
"That is very cryptic," X grumbled, walking closer to her, and this time she did not heave him mentally back to the other side of the roof. His hand did not reach out to frame her face, even if the twitch it made at his side indicated that it wanted to.
"I can only offer cryptic ones, because I am not sure of anything," she was honest in that and found she could understand some of what X seemed to infer he had been going through. They were, however she failed to get her mind around it, somewhat alike.
Minutes passed that added up to nearing a half hour of silence.
"I want to kiss you again," he said, breaking it. She took a step back.
"That would not be right," she warned. He arched a brow.
"So you are together," he stated with some remorse she knew he could hide with the distorting mask and was touched that he did not put it back on to do so. And he did not have to clarify who he meant when he said 'you' and 'together.' She knew.
Oh, how she knew.
"No," she said quietly. "I told him that too was unwise." X let out a soft laugh, not unkind or jeering though this time.
"Not everything in life can be wise or right or good, Raven. You and I are proof of that. Even Robin is proof of that. Don't you get it, sexy?" he brought it up with what he felt to be the best pet-name for her yet, just the right amount of friendliness mixed with forwardness.
"I'm not sexy and yes, I kind of get it, but it's late and I've been on this roof for nearly..." she looked at the moon and took a second to correct herself—ever a stickler for accuracy—and continued, "for a complete two weeks now."
X gave her a curious look.
"You waited that long? How did you even know I'd come here?" he asked and added, "And you are sexy. Beast Boy thinks so. Aqua Lad thinks so. Robin thinks so. I think so. We win. It's man's area of expertise anyway." If she threw him a cynical look after that spiel, he deflected it with a small smirk of his own.
"I guessed," she said shortly, choosing to overlook his compliment and answer his question as if she didn't care.
Raven was very good at lying to herself.
"I'm flattered," he returned to his cocky attitude.
"You really, really shouldn't be. I needed answers. I did what I needed to, to get them, nothing more," she elucidated with clear pauses between clarifying and solid scowling.
Another silence, this one unmeasured as the moon moved slightly overhead, and clouds shielded its light, casting the two on the roof into a shadow within the night concealing them as the blond thief inched toward the empath, hand finally giving into cup her face...
"I am going to kiss you," he said simply, not asking her permission this time, and did so. The previously curved lamppost exploded and Raven gave him points for not laughing into the kiss.
The hidden eyes still watched them as dark bird and night thief entangled themselves.
Why she allowed it was a mixture of reasons, some concerning his earlier confession and others concerning the fact that this felt somehow safer than allowing Robin such accesses to her.
Not that she didn't want Robin. Not that she didn't love Robin.
She did both of those things, and that scared her less for herself as it did for him. What would become of him?
She could scarcely bring herself to imagine.
Robin was so close to her, bonded to her. Should they ever fall apart, she would fall apart not wholly because of the loss but because of the ordeal and he might very well be lost to the darkness she so naturally hailed from. She felt that to be wrong to chance, to risk, that surely he could have a more secured future in finding something with Starfire, as she had told him before, who could heal his darkness instead of accept it.
Sometimes, she reasoned for the millionth time in her head, refusing to let a part of a person live on, after all, was the only way to force a demon out, an inner one like the shadows that plagued Richard Grayson from that fateful day his parents died to this cold night when the girl he loved considered pushing him away forever.
Even though she loved him back, without a doubt.
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Not that he knew for sure, but even a good distance away, on the roof of the tower, Robin felt his heart begin to show cracks and he grew worried without knowing a definite reason as to why, but he felt a certain bond twist, causing him to lift a hand to lay across his chest where a heartbeat pulsed in rapid confusion.
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Back on the roof near the club, Raven thought: the only way to heal Robin, for him to heal himself, is another path. Not one with me.
Never with me.
That thought was bitter as bitter could be and she could not help but wonder briefly if she were tall and lovely, tanned with red hair and green eyes with all the hope of many worlds in her everyday nature, if she were all those things, if she might have had the Robin she denied herself now, as only Raven: petite if shapely, frigid if knowing, dishonestly controlled if reliable.
She knew her more winsome thoughts to be childish but stubbornly, she also thought her ideas concerning the protection of a certain boy wonder were decently founded.
And this is what she told herself as X explored her lips with his, hungrily and curiously, this is what she told herself as her heart protested and Love threw itself off various precipices in Nevermore and Intelligence groaned, hitting her head on things—oddly enough not very intelligent—and Bravery/Courage sulked.
For Raven was hiding.
She was hiding because she was terribly and equally fearful of what might be, and of what might not be, if she chose Robin.
It was for these reasons, however misguided and disillusioned, that she veiled herself in the strange and alluring mess known as Red X and it occurred to her that this was wrong on another level: had he not just shared with her something of real emotions?
Am I only using him? She had the logic to question.
Wisdom said it made sense in a strange way, X having stemmed from Robin's mind alone, but the others shot her such withering stares that even she quieted and subtly retreated into one of the many larger shadows of Raven's mind.
X traced her lips with his finger, wonderingly at her sudden permissive behavior.
"Care to explain why you let me kiss you again?" he copied some of her earlier words and when she shook her head, he found he didn't care and brought his lips down to capture hers again.
And again and again.
"What do you do when you can't allow yourself to love who you want?" She asked, her words breathy from lack of oxygen, laced with the allowance of Lust and other such emotions inside her. Since this seemed the appropriate time to both let X know of her honest feelings—not for him—and to ask a question equally as human and revealing as all of the ones he had asked her earlier, she had broken their primal duel for the query.
"You do what you have to," X said without hesitation and eliminated any other chance for such unguarded dialogue with another meeting of his lips and hers.
X, for all his words, was more aware of Raven's turmoil than she knew and as a result, aware of the now confirmed possibility that she was, however sloppily, redirecting her feelings for Robin toward him, and that therefore, they were not real.
Not for him anyway.
But again, that didn't matter, because a guy like X, a guy like him, lived in moments. It was all he could afford. So he continued to ravish her, both sick with and obsessed with this particular instant in time, not allowing it to come to an end, not wanting it to, because as all moments allude: it could be the last.
The two confused beings became so caught up in each other, more so than several minutes earlier, that they did not notice the new presence that joined them until he spoke.
"I should have guessed."
And it was this deadly whisper that made X and Raven spring apart like two children found stealing the cookies from the cookie jar. Eyes taking in the third member of the rooftop party, Raven's heart fell into her stomach and X retrieved his mask quickly, having turned away as soon as he knew someone else was there.
But through the disguise, newly placed back over his face, X glared darkly.
"So tell me, how long has this little intrigue been going on?" Slade's voice was the most unwelcome it had ever been and Raven, though with some hint of her old fear, was not about to answer him like the old friend he always made a pretense of being.
"That is none of your concern, Slade...but this is!" And she tried to throw him off the roof as she had threatened X earlier with, but found to her horror that nothing happened.
Nothing.
Well, Slade laughed.
But that was worse than nothing.
"You should learn some new techniques," Slade leered and then sprung into an attack. X intervened, sending Slade back the way he came, only to be hit square in the chest with the metal pole the villain wielded. "Shame you chose the wrong side, X. We made a most gratifying team," Slade kicked out and X barely evaded the steel of his boot.
"Azarath, metrion, zinth—" Raven was cut off by a metal hand clamping itself over her mouth. She went to teleport, only to appear on the ground, still with the bot attached to her, rather inconveniently and she cursed into its hold. She tried to slip out of its hold, force her way out even, to no avail and her eyes rolled back into her head as it crushed her, squeezing the ability to breathe away until her body went limp with unconsciousness.
"Raven!" From the rooftop, unconscious could have passed for lifeless and X leapt to get by Slade, showing outward concern for the first time since he could remember.
"We'll meet again," Slade all but promised and X was momentarily blinded as Slade hit him in the chest with something sharp and then threw five flashes of explosive gadgets in his general direction.
There was Slade's laughter...again.
There was silence...again.
And suddenly X could see again, rubbing his eyes furiously as he hurried to take off the mask, knowing more by the stillness of the air than the quiet that he was truly alone. He surveyed and then scoured the area just in case, and finding nothing he could only think of one thing to do.
Even though it might kill him to do it, if it would help save Raven, he had no other choice.
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Robin stood on the roof still, wind whipping around him loudly enough to remind him there was no one there to share the silence with, no comfortable and understanding empath beside him to appreciate the night. He was about to retire to the insides of the tower when he heard a thud behind him. Whirling, he came face to face with a familiar image.
"X!" and he wasted no time in attacking.
"Whoa, boy blunder, cool your jets," X managed to taunt even while gripping his side, dodging Robin's well-aimed blows with difficulty. The sharp sensation he had endured earlier had been Slade, leaving a large gash on his left side and X struggled to keep himself one step ahead of the young hero who was his arch-rival and also the only one he could think of to come to for help.
And he would be the last one to admit he needed help, but there were larger things at stake now than stolen computer chips and questionable artifacts.
There was Raven.
This was what he remembered as Robin sent a powerful roundhouse to X's chest, sending the thief reeling back against the door that led back into the tower and then, not relenting even for a second, threw him bodily back the other way only to skid off the edge of the tower.
Blindly he reached out a hand and managed to barely grasp the edge of the tower.
"Robin!" It was the first time X had used his name in a while and it shocked the boy wonder out of whatever livid stupor he had entered upon the sight of the skull mask. He did not lower his defenses but he halted in his attack and that was enough. X looked up at him, discerningly behind his own mask and let his other hand, previously holding in the lesion, reach up to grab the edge of the building as well. The lack of pressure caused him to flinch though.
This, Robin saw.
"You're injured. Who did that? I have to thank them." Robin quirked a brow as X had the gall to laugh emptily at his comment.
"Slade." The name was an effective ice breaker and it was as if neither boy noticed or cared to notice that one of them was dangling precariously over a bunch of jagged rocks about a hundred feet below.
"Why?" It was if nothing else, a simple question.
"He has Raven." It wasn't an answer, but it was more than that too. X watched Robin's mask expand with the effort of his eyes widening in what he was certain would be shock, anger, worry, and fear all rolled into one great huge mess of his irises.
"You delivered her to him," Robin accused and tried to understand even though his first guess was clearly way off, and he knew it.
"And that's why I'm here tonight. Thought I'd deliver myself on a silver platter while I'm at it," X replied sarcastically and tried to heave himself upward, but the injury had continued to let blood pool out and around his hand that clutched at it and the world heaved around him from the loss.
"You're a thief, a villain," Robin, Hell-bent on finding a reason to incarcerate this guy, anger and frustration from the most recent of events welling up in him as thunder played mute background to his upset.
"I—" X began to retort but his vision was getting unmistakably hazy with blood loss and exertion, and he felt as Robin with an expression as deadly as it was unreadable, watched as his hands slipped off the edge completely.
Again, thank you for reading thus far and hopefully you'll come back for chapter eight. Please review if you have a second!
And I request that no one leaves a comment that only details their hatred of Raven x Robin...because that's mean. I mean, Starfire and Robin fics are allowed, so why not Robin and Raven? It's only fair that there can be both. Please do not leave me 'flames' as to my choice of pairing. They are unkind words, as Starfire might say, and needless.
-rei, a little discouraged