Thank you to all the reviewers, very much.
Teen Titans is not mine.
Chapter Nine is...muahahaha...er...yeah...sorry about that...minor burst of insanity...touch of madness...er...okay. I'm quiet now...
-rei, no sleep for 58 hours and counting! Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Winner Takes All
Chapter Nine: "Love is a dream you enter..."
She was falling up.
And it was not cold, but it was not warm either. She wondered if this was Purgatory, as Dante might refer to it and then proceeded to wonder where all the cookie-cutter trees were, where the winding path up the endless mountain lay, and decided this was not Purgatory after all.
It was Hell.
Again, she could not feel but she was not only restricted in her emotions but her physical awareness as well; everything was cut off from her and she could swear the beat of her heart was nothing short of begrudging. It mocked her, keeping her alive enough to not finish the journey, dead enough to not go back.
And she knew she was probably dying, knew that she, Raven Roth, would probably never open her eyes again. Stubborn to a fault though, she gripped life by the frayed edges it presented her with, and clung like a kitten on a new scratch post, flexing her clawed grip to better it, to remind life she was not to be put off so easily.
It wasn't like she was precisely human or even mortal after all.
She did her best to remember the last events: a crumbling building, Slade, her friends, Robin...Robin. Had she gotten them out? Was he going through what she was? Did he survive? Last she had seen, he was out cold...she hoped he was alive, was still there to be the leader...was still the same boy and man she had denied herself even now, even in near-death. Raven Roth hoped that underneath that damnable mask he was still the man Richard Grayson could one day be proud of being without hiding his eyes, without hiding himself.
Maybe she could feel after all. A couple very slight trickles of salty warmth made her aware of tears and she did not bring a hand to stop them. Here she was more alone than anywhere else; there was no one to see, no boy wonder to unknowingly force her to hide them because she feared the warmth in his embrace and the fragility of the emotions within her. So she cried and it was not a sob or a whimper, but it shook her frame and showed every crack in her soul that she had mastered in camouflaging in life. It made her so disparagingly transparent, so intensely tragic and humble, made her what she already was, but everything as afresh and so it might have seemed something completely new to an onlooker, if there was one, but of course there wasn't.
The calm was gone. Here was honesty, sad and indefinite, real and foolishly hopeful.
She blamed or attributed the hope to Robin, the honesty to Red X, the indefinite to every villain like or unalike to Slade, and the sad part she distributed fairly to each part of herself, the storm that would not break until fatality threatened her. She asked herself why she had led herself in circles around her leader, thought back to the days they had been just two and the tower had been so comfortably empty except for the two birds, realizing she would not change the coming of the others for a second regardless of that comfort left behind.
Without them she would never have been able to move forward, to turn back her father, to be stalwart when everything else seemed beyond repair, even if she did it in a seemingly emotionless way.
"Thank you," she could not even hear her voice but she was just barely aware of her lips shaping the whispers.
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"What did she say?" Beast Boy all but leapt up. Robin held up a silencing hand and the changeling calmed noticeably.
"She said..." Robin trailed off because he didn't want to think of how final it had sounded.
"Friend?" Starfire asked, eyed dim and heart heavy as she looked at a sight she knew she would never get used to, never be able to hide from or block out: a friend on the edge and with nothing to be done but pray or hope or something like it. She turned her gaze to the floor when Robin did not answer.
"Robin, man, what did she say?" And maybe it was the big brother in Cyborg that guilt-tripped the brooding Robin to answer them directly.
"She said 'thank you'," Robin's voice was as much of a whisper as Raven's had been and the med lab was too sterile to be comforting, too filled with all the things that when it got down to it, could not save someone from where Raven had gone. The heart monitor was erratic at best and flat lines were off and on which really should not have been possible but they all remembered Raven's heritage and did not question the chance for resuscitation.
Thank you? Is that all Raven? Is this the end of the game? He wanted her to wake up. He wanted an answer in the form of objects flying everywhere and windows breaking into a countless number of shards as he crushed her to him and promised to never let her get away from him again. She had saved him of course, instead of herself, she had saved him, put him first, and for all her words of protest, for all her insistence about it not working, had shown him in her actions how she felt...not that she would remember, even if she did wake up...
"RAVEN!"
The telepath collapsed onto the unconscious Robin's chest, frail looking and deathly, not in paleness or stillness, but deathly in ways unexplained, and that made it more fearsome.
But wait.
She stirred and seemed by tooth and nail to pull herself up off of Robin who in turn, stirred as well.
"Rae?" his throat was dry and his voice cracked. He didn't care. She was looking at him more truly than she ever had, but the truth was frightening; she looked like she was saying something horrible without even opening her mouth before she did...looked like she was saying...
...goodbye?
"I d-don't...I can't...I can't leave without," her eyes became shaded, she began to lose focus and he managed to sit up with some pain and touch her face very, very gently, fearing she might disappear before his very eyes.
"Rae, don't talk like that. Come on, you're immortal," he half-joked, voice thick with something other than dryness, something like despair. He was right, but only partially; they all knew Raven would eventually stop aging, around twenty five or so maybe, and hence, would be immortal...so long as nothing stopped her, no outside force.
"...I'm sorry Richard," his name was quieter than he could have ever imagined and she closed her eyes with a sharp inhale, the loudest sound she'd made in the entire time; it sounded like pain. "I..." her breathing was shallow, quick...broken. Her frame collapsed onto his slightly, but he held her up. "I...guess...we...I guess..." she stopped and Robin thought she might not continue but here it was, what he had asked for, been waiting for, hoping for, pleading and even aiming for: "I guess..." it was a sad smile, "...we really can't pick who we fall for…you know, Richard. I always thought I might...that we...someday..." He shook his head.
"We can and we will," he said fiercely. He had to be fierce. It kept him from being devastated. Her face leaned nearer to his, whether from her inability to keep herself upright or desire to be closer, he did not know.
"No, but that doesn't mean..." a pause. "That doesn't mean..." a beat. "…that doesn't mean I won't love you forever." And her head rested against his in a way that would have been endearing if it were in the back of a movie theater during a matinee, or on a carnival ride at night, or even back in the tower in the home of the common area or the rooftop. She rested against him like a girl alive and in love.
"Raven?" he asked quietly. "Raven?" more urgently he pulled back from her, holding her shoulders gently and watched her head loll forward, eyes closed. "Rae!" It was a shout this time, a cry.
But the girl in his arms did not answer.
And maybe it had only been her own consciousness calling to his, to keep him awake, keep him conscious, because almost as soon as her eyes closed softly, Robin felt himself being forcibly dragged into darkness as he felt something shift, but even the shift could not keep him conscious.
That was all he remembered but it was enough.
She loved him.
And now it seemed like she was dying.
Yet again, you retreat, he thought darkly...despondently. How could she give it and then take it back like that? Did she even know what she was saying? Was she raving? Had she even meant it?
Stupid questions begot stupid answers like: you know the truth so shut up, and what the Hell are you talking about, wake up, of course she meant it, and so on.
Robin massaged his temples with unnecessary pressure. He glanced at the clock. Time was going on 3:30 in the morning and he was the only one left in the med lab.
He removed his mask, something he had only ever down, would only ever do, in her presence. If she died he would die; he knew that much. The titans would break apart for one reason or another and he would visit her, separated by five eternities of afterlife and five feet of newly turned soil. There would never be another Robin the paper, but a darker vigilante by the alias of Nightwing and he would visit her too, forever dissatisfied with her epitaph since no words could do the sorceress any justice that he could see.
If she died...the end would truly come and he did not know how to deal with the end yet. As sleep claimed him, he hoped beyond all other reason that by some twist of miraculous divinity or chance or fortune he would not have to deal with it, hoped she would live and more than that: hoped she would live, and still love him.
It was only after he fell into a dormant state that the familiar glow of healing surrounded the empath but it changed...it warped...it wrapped around her like two great black wings...and she disappeared from the medical bed without a sound, without even meaning to.
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The soul self of a Raven changed into the limp body of the half-repaired girl as she pulled herself to the surface of consciousness.
"What?" With some difficulty she propped herself up on her elbows and was startled when arms helped her to do so and then a back was pressed against hers, offering her support to lean on, as though she was sitting up on her own, even though she wasn't. There was a breath of a pause and then she recognized the rooftop, the music from the nearby club... "And I thought I'd seen the last of you," she tried to force a laugh. It did not come though. The warm back against hers transmitted a shrug.
"Expect the unexpected. Imagine my surprise when you show up unconscious on the roof just as I'm getting ready to go ahead and lift a very precious artifact from the museum on Fifth and Parker," he managed a laugh to replace her absent one.
"I used you," she said and she felt another shrug.
"'Love is a dream you enter...'" he began to quote.
"...though I shake, and shake, and shake you…" she finished softly. Iron and Wine were a quiet sort of music. She never would have guessed X might like their music...
"Yeah well, I knew you were, so don't get all pitying on me. I hate that," X said brusquely and this time she did laugh.
"I think I knew you knew."
"Well, you are an empath," he rolled his eyes like she might and added, "We'd get sick of each other after a while anyway. I can only take so much seriousness you know." Raven arched an eyebrow he could not see but he knew she was doing it.
"I surmised as much," she replied, amused in spite of herself.
"So why are you here? Aren't you supposed to be healing yourself?" X asked, serious now, for all his talk about not wanting to be.
"I don't know. My subconscious brought me here, I guess. I think I felt our engagement was...incomplete. We were distracted in your first departure..." she trailed off. He sighed and she felt it more than heard it as his back heaved slightly.
"I saw you both appear, called to you, but..." he paused.
"That was you?"
She felt him nod and he recounted for her what Robin would not remember—for better or for worse—and what she had not known, when she said nothing else...
The two birds lay still for only a moment before the source of the voice that had shouted Raven's name when the two first teleported into sight came dashing forward.
X.
He had not left when she told him to. Just because he was letting go of that didn't mean he was going to just walk away. Whether anyone chose to acknowledge it, or maybe more importantly, whether or not he himself chose to acknowledge it, he was not a bad person, not even a villain, only a thief with a penchant for things that were not his. A criminal perhaps, but by some standards even on the scale of things that he stole things, he was not quite so bad. So it was that he ran to them, ran to her.
X went to the fallen girl and carefully disentangled her from the equally comatose Robin, who was quickly taken into custody by Starfire who eyed X with continued suspicion. The other titans were no less skeptical of his intentions, it seemed as he gave them a once-over.
"I'll carry her to the tower for you and leave," X said shortly and no one wanted to waste time arguing.
X traveled apart from the other titans, which was odd because it seemed strange to him that they would let their other fallen comrade into his care without a chaperone, but he did not question it. The thief found his alone time with the sorceress, however unconscious she might have been, to be necessary. So, he talked to her like she was awake.
"You and Robin, you're too competitive," X remarked airily, knowing the hypocrisy of his statement and as usual, not really caring. Raven cradled protectively in his arms, he bounded across the rooftops toward the bay where the tower was, glancing down at her still form occasionally—these occasions were of course, when he wasn't bounding. "The more you back away, the more he'll pursue. Too much work for me, gotta say, but suits the boy blunder alright," X continued making one-sided conversation. He reached the edge of the roof of the building nearest the bay and eyed the T Tower with some reserve and paused. He let out a sigh and sat, swinging his legs over the building's edge, dark girl still in his arms. Thoughtfully he swept some stray hair behind her ear. "You're not just sexy, you're beautiful, you know? Not like Starfire, she's pretty and infectious. You're more...mysterious," he paused and grinned behind his mask, "and creepy." Here he wanted her to wake and smack him, but she didn't and after taking a moment to realize she wouldn't, X sighed again. "I hate being thoughtful, takes too much time, you waste a lot of your life thinking, you know Raven. I bet you waste more of your time thinking than anyone else. Maybe you should just live a little, huh?" He let a few more idle minutes go by and reasserting his hold on Raven, stood and brought her the rest of the way to the tower. The other titans—save Robin who was still unconscious—were waiting.
"Where've you been all this time?" Cyborg asked coldly. Starfire glared deeply and Beast Boy had taken a step toward him. X gave a hollow, short laugh.
"Just saying good-bye," he admitted candidly and took a few closing steps toward Beast Boy who received the limp form of Raven with equal care and a sad look that betrayed his deepest worry. "She's alive." That was the last thing X said before sprinting away.
"Thanks," she said thoughtfully and X made a sound that was something like a short and quick exhale of amusement and derision all in one.
"Think they're worried enough about you yet?" X reminded her that none of her friends would know where she had gone or why or how and her eyes widened a little. He must have sensed this because he laughed. She scowled.
"Stop that. They might be looking for me. I have to go," she went to stand and gave a startled cry when her legs would not hold her up.
"Yeah, those probably don't work right now, nice as they are," X said as he turned and she scowled more deeply at him. "What?" he asked innocently, and added, "They are nice legs."
"Be safe, X," she shook her head at him and as she disappeared into her soul self, conscious this time, the thief heard her last words to him for years to come:
"I hope you find someone who will be more than permanently temporary for you. Beyond that, you have me, should you need me. You know where to come looking."
"That I do," he said to the nothing of the night and disappeared from the rooftop less than two seconds later.
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But Raven did not go back to the tower. She returned to the destroyed building and searched the rest of the night and throughout the day into the next night. That made it a night and a day, nearly two nights and a day now that she had gone missing from the tower, but she could not be bothered by that with her task at hand...Her frantic looking was like that of her leader's, she knew, but she could not help it. Slade had almost taken him, gotten away...she had to know if he was buried here to rest or had, as usual, slipped out. As the next evening turned into the small morning hours with winking stars and heedless moonlight, she knelt in the rubble.
There was nothing, no sign of him, no Slade. He had gone again. She cursed and with apprehensions at an all time high, teleported back to the tower, in front of it.
Maybe she should just leave?
No. They deserved better than that.
He deserved better than that. Steeling herself, she entered as silent as she might, which was completely excepting the sweep of her cloak.
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Beast Boy had fallen asleep around 3 in the morning, slung over the side of the couch, exhausted. Starfire had soon followed in reluctant slumber at about 4:15 and Cyborg had crashed at 5, falling asleep in a sitting position at the counter.
Robin had not slept. He thought about going to find her, but to what ends he was not certain because he had no idea where she might have gone. For some reason he had thought she would come here, back home. Of course he had checked for her signal on the scanners but there was nothing and this worried him further, and when he went back to the med lab to try and find any trace of a struggle or anything remotely hostile, he found nothing. The only possible thing he could think of was that Raven had left by choice.
She had gone and not told one of them, no one. Somehow that hurt Robin worse than the injuries he'd sustained in their most recent battle, went far deeper and his gaze was dark. If she did not want to be found, Raven of all people could make sure she wouldn't be, he knew. Still...why did she persist in disappearing from them...from him?
Why?
His thoughts were interrupted as an electrical swish indicated the opening of the front door. He turned tired eyes to empty ones as Raven levitated past him, headed for her room without a word, and he realized with sudden frustration that she had no intentions of speaking to him.
That would not do.
He followed her and almost dared to suspect she didn't register his presence, but as she entered her room she made the door slide shut so quickly, she could have had no other intent than keeping someone out, keeping him out. Tapping in the code to unlock her room from the outside, Robin braced himself for the fury that he expected would be unleashed upon him for not only going into her room, but after a very clear order to stay out.
"Raven, what happened?" he asked. It was a deceptively simple question.
"I locked my door for a reason Robin." She walked to the far corner of her room and crossed her arms, back still facing him. He sighed.
"Just talk to me, Rae," he implored of her and crossed the empty space between them, heedless of whatever volatile feelings were flinging themselves around inside the empath. His hand rested itself on her shoulder. She flinched.
"There's nothing to tell. I didn't keep my emotions in check, nothing more and I teleported from my subconscious." The lie, regardless of the laced truth inside of it, was faulty on so many accounts that it spoke for itself, telling Robin that she was not only upset, but hurt, not only angry, but fearful.
"Stop that," he said and pulled her into his arms, not unlike how he had done before. "Open your mind at least...let me see through your eyes," he used her words.
To his disappointment, her spine still went rigid when he enclosed her. To his combined self-loathing and unsettlement, he caught her scent and felt it permeate him like something better than oxygen. To his surprise, he found his lips pressing themselves against her right temple. She struggled to push him away, but he would not relent.
"Robin, stop. Stop now. I don't need this again," her words were whispers that told of the newly remembered past and the untold future.
"I am not deceiving you," Robin breathed into her ear, his warmth tickling her nape as he lowered his mouth to it. Her involuntary sigh was one of want and refusal all at once.
"How do I know? Just because you can make me feel does not make you any different from Malchior or X, doesn't—" she knew she was babbling but the strangeness of being scared was alien to her and she did not know how to cope with it. Things, words, spilled out of her as though a combination of Timid and Sadness had taken over and she felt like a child with no sense of anything.
For better or for worse, her leader took that pause to interject.
"You've been on defense for so long you forgot how to move forward on the board, Rae," he spoke in those pretty analogies he seemed to have an affinity for and she wanted to interrupt but had nothing to say. So, he continued, "You're not even willing to believe—no, to accept that I am different. That Red X was temporary at best, may be true, I don't know. That Malchior was a bastard and got what he deserves is also true. But I am not either of them," he did his best to keep from shouting now, frustrated and impatient. "Do you even remember what you said to me when you got us out of there? When you saved us?"
She shook her head at him.
"You told me..." he trailed off, uncertain for a moment but then more strongly, "You said, 'that doesn't mean I won't love you forever,' you said that!"
"I..." she could not deny it.
"Rae, just this once let me win," Robin alluded to a game much more frivolous than the one they were playing now, but referred to the one at hand. She ignored him blithely, blinded by some fears now newly come to her from not being able to find the villain in the dust of the building hours before.
"Robin, Slade was using me to get to you, you know that right?" Her voice was even quieter now, if possible.
"I know," he nodded, some of his upset subsiding.
"I can't let this be; I don't want people to be able to use me as a vulnerable point for you, you don't need that burden. And I..." she looked away. "I can't stand the thought of what could happen...to you."
Here was the real reason now. Robin sighed. He knew her feelings as well as if they were his own; for they once had been.
"Rae, as a group we titans risk that every day," Robin said with renewed gentleness and Raven furrowed her brow slightly. It was odd to suppose she had not thought of this before herself. Of course he was right. Still...
"But Robin," she shook her head. "Slade is still out there. I couldn't find him, in the remains of the building, or anywhere, I—" She stopped short as he pushed her firmly against the wall.
"You went looking for him? By yourself! Raven..." his voice was horrified, angered, shocked..."Raven...Raven...Rae..." he repeated her name like a haunted mantra and some fury was there now, with the desire and the vexed pauses and tired heartache, and anger was the match to for the fire of what he said next. "Stupid! You're not stupid but that was stupid! I can't believe you would..." he shook his head in incredulity and kept going, "Never do that again...Rae have you ever considered that what you're trying to protect me from is how I feel every day you're on this team, fighting next to us, next to me?" His grip still pinned her to the wall and his face drew nearer to hers. She closed her eyes.
"I'm sorry," her whisper was sad and her apology was for so much more than going to look after a psychopath villain by herself. Robin felt it through their bond more than he heard it and he was grateful for that. He had noticed its return earlier in the med lab, but hadn't had time to really concentrate before Raven had, yet again, disappeared.
A sigh, a pause...
"You asked how you would know I'm different, even with our bond, even with what we have done for each other and what we've been through. You asked." It was a statement. Raven tried to accept his words and reject his closeness all in one, nodding and moving to push away from him.
"I asked that," she conceded, thinking he wanted her to say it aloud, and let her eyes melt with his with one upward glance. She suspected both of them of not breathing before he said:
"Then let me show you." Without waiting for the yes or no he had tried to be patient for, without giving her the chance to retreat like very other time, without a thought to looking back on what was, he kissed her.
Their lips had met before, passionate, hard and wanting.
But this was even more so. It was the kind of lust that had to spawn from and within love first, the kind of bodily need that cried for another person, but only one other person. Raven's first instinct was to resist; Robin anticipated this and, refusing her order for release, only crushed her to him more until slowly, achingly, his want began to open her own. He had thrown barriers to the ground, caution to the winds and all manner of other clichés that had to do with division out the window, wanting to let his own emotions run rampant, even if Raven could not.
"Robin..."
He felt her first moan and it sent a tremor through his mouth and down his spine, and he wondered what it would be like to hear more. They had managed to tangle themselves up in each other while just standing there and now, yearning to extract more from her lips, to feel more of her against most of him, Robin maneuvered her with ease against the wall.
The bed was off limits. He knew the dangers of it, knew even if he did get her to fall back onto the wide softness of it that the spell would break and she would teleport away, or worse: just walk.
Not now though, not tonight...or this morning, whenever it was. He couldn't care less for the time though as in propping Raven against the wall, he felt her instinctively push against him. His groan was deep and said things that words could not in a moment like that, just letting his lips speak for themselves as they latched onto a sensitive spot of her neck, sucking to a point of making her breath go ragged.
It was a good thing her normal leotard's neckline would cover that area.
Raven couldn't catch her breath, couldn't think, couldn't stop, and she knew that was what Robin wanted. He wanted her to lose control, she could feel it as his one hand laid languid strokes up and down her right side and the other hand let its fingers twist in her disheveled hair. A gasp escaped her as his mouth traveled dangerously lower and she arched into every sensation he elicited from her.
"Robin, stop," her voice was admirably unbroken, even between breathy moans and it shook him out of the fixation he had on claiming her long enough to look up at her.
"Why? I want to know who wins this game." It was a growl from the back of this throat, husky and demanding and he tugged on the hem of her jeans. Again, she wondered where he had learned all this. "We're called the 'teen' titans, Rae. Before I came to Jump I was your average teenage boy and even when I got here I had a lot of time to...learn things in between fighting crime solo," he clicked his tongue at her, amused. When she threw a skeptical glance down at him he shrugged. "Okay, not your average teenage boy and some things are newer learned than others but," he paused and brought his lips to the side of her neck, attending to it in a way that made her head loll back, "Are you complaining?"
He teased her.
"I am not different because of virtues or the hero-spiel alone, Rae. I'm different because I want you and I love you and I will not let this end in a stalemate between me and your forced indifference, your self-imposed distance," he both warned and declared in a single breath. She wondered at his ability to be eloquent and secondly wondered at her ability to hear him coherently through the waves of pleasure he was inciting in her...but some knowledge was so true it couldn't help but be heard in thend.
He loved her.
Such words should have been beyond her registry but she found to her surprise, they made every inch of sense that any other motion did: not much, but enough.
"You're a fool," she replied, meaning every word of her own, but not dissuading his.
"Maybe," he admitted and with more softness than she thought him capable of at that moment, he stopped in his fiery ministrations and traced her jaw very gently. "But I'm your fool, you know."
And she did know. He had been there, all along, from the very beginning. From the day they began this ragtag team to the day they stood on the brink of now, he had been there. Arrogant and sometimes obsessive, handsomely steadfast and hopeful...always so hopeful, he had done everything a person could ever dream or dare to do for a half-demon predisposed to destroy his world. He had accepted her, cared for her, protected her, and yes, yelled at her when she needed it, cautioned her...loved her.
"I don't understand you at all," she finally said and initiated the first move she had in the heated past ten minutes, letting her lips divine themselves on his and seek entrance, which he quickly yielded to her. He barely repressed a heavenward exclamation of 'finally!' as her fingers trailed his body, memorizing the tone of his muscles and the width and breadth of him through tactile means. After that, there was no more protest, because it was she, Raven taking him on this time. In a few painfully necessary words, the tables had been reversed and the amethyst eyes let the blue ones that faced her know what strategy she was onto now: offense.
And while they would go no further than dueling tongues and blind hands that searched for curves and hips, no further than the occasional sharp intake or exhale of breath that sent the other reeling for more, while they each wordlessly agreed to keep the wall as their only prop, bed carefully avoided, it was more than all of that and more than anything else would have been for each of them in that moment. It was what they would chalk up to weeks of sexual and emotional frustration let go, weeks of it that were probably more like years for the latter since emotions ran high all the time, whether or not they allowed them to show.
It was intimate. It was honest. It was game, set, and match, even if that very phrase was the most either of them knew about tennis—irrelevant really, because it was chess they'd been playing when this all started—, even if they had no idea of the trials ahead—or worse, every idea—, even if they would argue forever about who actually won—neither would give into the other on this subject.
For the moment though, the birds were so taken with each other, such thoughts were far from their minds.
They didn't notice the raucous morning argument of tofu or not tofu from way, way down the hall. They didn't notice a glass on Raven's bedside table explode when Robin somehow managed to have her pinned under his arms down on the floor, trying to get even closer to the beautiful empath, if possible. They didn't notice the dawn breaking, aching to meet the light as it streamed through the window and brought both souls into the morning; it was like bringing someone drowning to the surface for air. And while it was the first time their love would face the hours where night could not hide or shield them, could not offer escape, it was by no means, the last.
Robin held Raven. Raven held Robin.
Whatever.
They were beyond all other things, together...
"I," he began, breath uneven and she kissed him fully, cutting his words short before breathing her response into his ear in a way that shivered down his spine. He took that moment to inhale everything that made her scent so appealing, above all that on a primal level, she smelled as though she actually belonged to him, as though she were meant for no one else. He would not allow her to after all. So enraptured with her, he almost missed her words that said what needed to be said, without saying it as others might.
"So do I...forever." Her voice was a prism in reverse, stunning and unexplored. "Forever," she repeated more tenderly than he could ever remember her speaking to anyone.
"Promise?" he didn't mind how childish he sounded, not with her.
"I do," she smiled into their next embrace, a delicate and mysterious and rarity of smiles, an open one.
It was duly noted by Robin as Raven took control, managing to flip him so that he was beneath her and so it was his pleasure being voiced, that that was a more likely promise made by her than if it was made by anyone else.
More? I was going to write some more for this, but I am not sure if I should. Hm. I was thinking along the lines of another chapter or two, or an epilogue, or both. Sigh. Not sure. The epilogue would probably tie up some loose ends for how Starfire reacted in the end/ felt and the result, and/or Red X—but then the epilogue would have to take place years later...er, whatever. I'm thinking too much here.
Review if you have time as always, thank you!
And thank you to everyone who has reviewed with me thus far. I truly appreciate it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: no one has ever really liked my work before I showed up here. This place has really been a fantastically nurturing spot for me and motivated me to continue my usual writings which, although they are not fanfictions, are always similarly styled.
Thank you, very, very much, with all my aspiration-to-be-a-writer's soul,
-Rei